sTATISTICS

“We shall need a great number of mathematicians of ability” because “there will probably be a great deal of work of this kind to be done”

—Alan Turing, 1946, (AMT/C/32, p19) and Proposed Electronic Calculator (AMT/B/1, p18, §6)

Alan Turing did not create the first computer. He didnt invent any computer. But he can lay credit to inventing the field of study we now call Computer Science (or CompSci to us graduates who grafted at Uni to get our collective heads round this stuff)

With remarkable prescience, he speculated that we will need a lot of decent mathematicians to program all these computers that he foresaw running, well, pretty much everything. Whether we have these mathematical wunderkids in industrial quantities is moot - and out of the scope of this article. What I want to write about today is that branch of mathematics that allows us to tease out fact from fiction. I am, of course, talking about Statistics.

Now before you get up and leave, let me just stop you, now Im sure you did a bit of statistics at school and thought this is boring AF. Thats ok, we all did. Hopefully, Ill bring it to life today by studying something interesting - my dating disasters! Or my journey through daygame - however you want to frame it. In the process we will literally walk through the Scientific Method and increase, by just a little bit, our understanding of the observable Universe. Also, known colloquially as 'doing science'.

Noice! Lets crack on.....

Experiment1: Lets examine 'hotness'

Referring back to the scientific method we know that the first step is to observe some phenomenon. In this instance Im interested in exploring the relationship between a womans beauty and my abilty to get a number from her. Is there a link? Is there a strong link? Is it fairly weak? We'll do some science to see.

So next step is to propose a theory...

Theory: I think beautiful women and more discriminating in the dating space and are therefore less likely to divulge their contact details.

This leads us to propose a testable statement, a hypothesis

Hypothesis: More beautiful women will not give out their contact details to me as readily as women of lesser physical beauty.

And the converse:

Null Hypothesis: There is no correlation between a womans beauty and her willingness to furnish me with her contact details.

To date Ive done 899 approaches over 3 countries over 2 years. This dataset we will mine for information. What is information anyway? How does it differ from data? Data is just the raw material. Information has context. For instance...

8,3,5,3,10,9,6

this is data. If I tell you that they are shoe sizes then we have information

I performed some rudimentary analysis of the data and sliced and diced it in spark to get it into a format I can use for this experiment. After pre-processing it looked like this..

Method, data and interpretation

From this raw data we can use 2 metrics - hotness (hb column) and number close to approach ratio (N:A column) to see whats going on here.

As an aside, whenever we have bivariate, numerical data we can use a scatterplot to tease out the relationship between 2 variables. Every scatterplot has

1. form (a linear or non-linear relationship)

2. direction (positive, negative or no correlation)

3. strength (is the relationship strong, moderate, or weak?)

4. outliers (data that does not fit on the trend line)

So lets take a look at the plot

Conclusions

So against our criteria the plot shows a negative, linear, fairly weak correlation between beauty and contact-ability for me. And that last bit is important. I dont think it is reasonable to extrapolate our findings to the whole PUA community as a whole. These data are just my experience of daygame, and thats important.

We can also add that the data quality is a bit sketchy. Although i know that the data points are accurate - i took meticulous readings during my sessions, it is reasonable to say the data is incomplete. Many sets for which i number closed i did not rate for hotness so a lot of the data have lost that link.

However, I do think the analysis is valid. 129 approaches is a small dataset but its not nothing. We can accept the hypothesis - Women, for me at least, show a reticence to divulge their contact details in proportion to their perceived beauty.

You may argue - so what? This is fairly well known, surely? Well Id argue yes and no. The existing red pill received wisdom is subjective. What weve done here is a rigorous analysis of the data and arrived at an objective conclusion. Instead of asserting a link - just stating it as fact on the basis of conjecture. We can reasonably argue that a link does in fact exist - supported by evidence. This is the nature of critical thinking. We have examined the subject matter and can have confidence in our new-found knowledge. I, for one, take comfort in that.

Also, note the outlier - half of all HB9s I approached I number closed! Get in! : D

I hope you've found this interesting. Next time we'll be answering that perennial dating question - do blondes have more fun? : )