On Marriage and Statistics

I was on the subway thinking how I was going to begin this blog. Yes, I always have a subject in mind when I want to write before I write, and this time I need an opening for this blog. So while I was deep in my thoughts, suddenly someone was talking very loudly and very excitedly.

"Ashley f*cked Matt! She f*cked Matt! Now why would she do that? Why did she do that?"

Yes, girl with black and beige striped top with braces. Why would Ashley f*ck Matt? Maybe because she wanted to? Or maybe just because he's attractive? Does that make him f*cktractive (the antonym is fugly)?

Okay, perhaps I shall seek answers to this question, and what better place to find out more about this social bizarro conundrum by watching a movie? Namely, I "procured in a semi-legit fashion with loads of grey areas" the movie School For Scoundrels and proceeded to learn all I could about the human courtship.

I always wanted to watch that movie because there was this one part where Dr. P asks, "How many of you retards own self-help books? That's the first problem. You can't help yourselves because yourselves suck."

So the first lesson on human courtship is if you need help, the last place you should get it from is a self-help book. So apparently this movie did have something to teach. And so the movie went on to teach how to pick up chicks. These are the following gems:

- Be Dangerous. It's cool.
- No Compliments, Ever.
- Always Get The Girl Alone.
- Wherever You Are, The Place Is Lame.
- Relate To Her.
- Lie, Lie And Lie Some More.

Apparently these are the necessary steps to getting a girl. And honestly, it sounds really plausible with sufficient explanation. For example, never compliment a girl, it just means you're out of things to say and you're just a boring person. And the lying part? As Dr. Gregory House would say, all relationships are based on lies, and this is just an excellent way to start a relationship. Dr. P says in the movie, keep on lying until you have something real to offer her. Pretty much, in short if you're such a lame loser, you got to lie your way into a relationship.

Wait, this is starting to sound like the interview process to me.

Anyway, with this in mind, perhaps this sort of explains how one human being becomes attracted to another. But then again, this feels too vague. After all, one can only be so smooth and after that, other factors start to come into play. So I guess I shall refer now to this scholastic article I was reading, entitled: What Makes You Click? Mate Preference and Matching Outcomes in Online Dating by Gunther J. Hitsch, Ali Hortacsu and Dan Ariely.

Basically the methodology is set up an online dating site, collect information and see how people respond to various profiles. Most of the results are based on the first-email premises, meaning that they determined that a person is attracted to another if an email correspondence is sent. So with this in mind, and note that the authors are from University of Chicago and MIT, this isn't just some lame article written by FHM.

This article is awesome in that it gives actual numbers, but everything has to be taken with a pinch of salt. For all I know, they could have just written this based on stereotypes. After all, this article just seems to reinforce a lot of stereotypes.

The first thing that struck me is that based on the data collected, the participants are taller than average, and thinner than average. Now, what does this mean? The average height of all the participants are taller than the average of the locale they were in. The average weight of the participants is less than the average of the local they were in. Hmm... I'm not saying that they're lying, but... whatever you like to infer from that piece of information. Now these data is also split by gender, and while the average men weight deviate from 2-5lb off their population average, the average weight of women deviate from 5lb to 23lb from their population average. *cough*

Again take that with a pinch of salt, after all, these 22,000 participants might be the thinner, taller and more attractive people of the general population and short and fat people don't resort to online dating. Or then again, maybe women understand the concept of weight as, "What's the lightest weight you've ever been since in college?"

Note, there is not yet any statistical brick-brack in here, it's merely pure data. They didn't write the standard deviations for the weight, but if you tell me that women age 50-59 on average weigh 23lb less than the similarly aged populace, I'm gonna say that's at least three standard deviations away from the expected mean. In simple language, that's a 0.03% chance of sampling a random population with that sort of mean. Hmm... highly unlikely.

Damn, I love statistics. But on to the more fun part. Now, I quote, "women who are 'seeking an occasional lover/casual relationship' receive 17% more first contact emails relative to baseline, while men experience a 41% penalty."

Again, I'm not saying that men are looking for casual relationships and women are looking for long term relationships. But if you're a guy, basically, stating that you're looking for a long term relationship, rather than just looking for friends, or lovers, or casual relationship would increase your chances of finding someone.

Now on to more interesting stuff, women prefer men who are tall, about 6'3 to 6'4, while men prefer women between 5'3 to 5'8. Any taller than that, women start to suffer a penalty and their hits become less. And yes, weight does play a significant role. There apparently is an optimum body-mass-index for people to find attractive, and so, to quickly summarise, the optimal BMI for men is 27. This means that a man is slightly overweight according to the BMI scale, but again this could mean that women want a chunkier, muscular guy. For women, the optimal BMI is 17! Seventeen! This is borderline aneroxic. And remember recently in Milan, there was a law passed that women with BMI less than 18 cannot be allowed on the catwalk. So that's basically what a BMI of 17 means! So chicks kinda really have it a bit more difficult than guys.

As for professionwise, for men, there is a strong preference for lawyers, followed by firefighters, then military, then finally those in the medical profession (hint: this definite does not mean nurses). So, pretty much, a man in uniform is better off than a doctor in scrubs. I wonder where does the UPS guy stand then?

For women, it's a bit tougher. Men don't really care what profession you're in, as long as you're hot, and strangely all women in different professions get less responses than women who are college students. Hmm... again, somehow, I am reminded by a certain commercial of a certain DVD of a certain Girls Gone Wild. I wonder if that has anything to do with this.

Okay, here comes the most interesting part. The part of attractiveness. Basically the guys who did this study are economists, and they'd like to measure things in terms of money. So how do you measure attractiveness in terms of money? With all things held constant, they tried to see what level of income a guy must have to compensate for his poor looks to get as much response from a good looking guy.

Here, on a scale of 1 to 10, if you're ranked 1, to get the same kind of attractiveness as a guy ranked 10, you must earn $186,000 more annual income than him.

What does this mean? Granted that stud is earning say $60,000 a year, an ugly guy must earn $246,000 a year to garner that same sort of attractiveness that he has. So in short, money does really make a man more attracive. Yes, you women are gold-diggers! We have empirical evidence! Okay, I mean, I need to make approximately $186,000 a year so that I'd be more attractive than that homeless guy sitting on the corner of my block so that I'd be more attractive to a chick. See? If you think that that is unfair, and that I've mistakenly stereotyped girls, look, I'm just saying, it's the data that's speaking. Money does make a guy look more attractive.

However, for women it's all different. It's not possible for a woman to earn more money to compensate for her less-than-average looks. The data shows that it's not feasible, that income has no effect on making a woman receive more first email contacts. It just doesn't work. And I sort of feel sad for women because there's nothing they can do short of plastic surgery to make them more attractive. But then again, who wants to work hard, go through 8 years of college, graduate with PhD and slave away for the rest of their lives just to muster enough money to attract that hot chick, when a simple $5k boob job would do to attract a guy?

But finally, the article comes to the study on ethnicity, and okay, the pool is divided into Caucasians, African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians. There's a preference for heterogeneity. Meaning, that if you're Caucasian, you'll definitely prefer Caucasians, and ONLY with a significant rise in income would a woman overlook the ethnicity of a man that she will date him.

Okay, now this makes all women seem like gold-diggers, but we'd like to measure everything in terms of income because that is a number that we all can understand, rather than some arbitrary measure of "good-looking" or "average-looking".

To show some of the numbers, when given a choice between two similar men, one Caucasian and one Hispanic, the Caucasian woman would prefer the Caucasian man, unless the Hispanic man earns about $77,000 more in annual income than the Caucasian man. Now, these are just averages. Now to point out the outrageous discrepencies which I feel are a grave injustice to Asian males. White women, clearly prefer Asian guys least, as an Asian man has to earn about $247,000 MORE than their Caucasian counterpart in annual income before she would be indifferent.

That means that I have to be like in the top 10% of income earners, to even date a white chick. And don't even get me started on dating an Asian chick. Look, as cute as they are, the numbers show something even more devastating. While white women prefer white men, and black women prefer black men and Hispanic women prefer Hispanic men, the only sole oddity is that Asian women prefer white men ABOVE Asian men!

Oh the betrayal! The heartache. Even back home, I don't even have a homeground advantage in asking an Asian chick out! What the hell? She'd rather date some scruffy white dude over me???

Asian women would date a similar white guy, who earns $24k less in annual income than a similar Asian guy. So... apparently, I must be missing something here. I feel that it's kinda ridiculous. And I guess that's the way the cards have been dealt. So totaling up my expected annual income, to compensate for my height, weight, looks and ethnicity, to date a white chick, I must earn about $596,000 more annually than a good looking white dude. $596,000 annually???!?! That's the price of being born how I look, that's the price of genetics. Wow, I'm appalled. So, this means I need to earn about $619,000 a year, so that a white chick would prefer me over a McDonald's drive-thru employee. Yes! That's what this means! Wow, the difference is appalling.

I guess this also means I should not get my hopes up of finding a girlfriend, and in short, even if I were the last guy on this planet, I guess I still need to be earning at least a six-digit salary with any hopes of getting laid.

I've basically summarised the interesting parts of this study, and there are also other more technical things, like for the binary logit regression, the R-squared statistics for looks for women is about 0.30, while for looks for men is about 0.18. If you have no clue what R-squared means, just ignore this, but take away that looks is a better determinant of whether someone will contact you online, rather than your income or career. In fact, those are really marginal in this analysis. So you got to be good-looking to survive in life.

I was reading another economics junk book, you know those like Freakonomics and they sort of came to the conclusion that taller people seem to make more people than shorter people. They came to the conclusion that for every inch taller that you are, you earn approximately $1,000 more in annual salary. So apparently there might be some correlation here, after all, someone once told me, if you can pick up a chick at a bar, you can ace an interview. The same skills and factors might be called into consideration here, and I don't really doubt it, that attractiveness counts in looking for a partner or a job.

So that's a lot to take into, I mean, look, succeeding in life kinda depends a lot on your physical attributes, and I'm sorry that if you don't have any, like me, you better be earning hella a lot of money.

My Promiscuous Responsibility

Since the publication of Freakonomics, economists have (finally) found a way to pay off their hefty student loans and turn their degrees into profit. And so with this as the preface to my story, I began by wandering around Barnes & Noble, poking around the Economics section, but I chanced upon a book entitled: "More Sex Means Safer Sex".

This book piqued my interests, not because there was the word "Sex" in the title, or even that it was repeated twice in the title, but because this book seemed way out of place, and thus I picked it up and perused it to hopefully glean some information as to why this book seemed to be in the wrong place.

The first chapter in this book had this one statement which I'm paraphrasing because I can't remember jack sh*t. Some economist said that if we have 2.25 more sexual partners, we could possible eradicate AIDS.

"Holy sh*t!" Mr Smarmy Snake-in-my-pants yells. "I need to tell my wife and six girlfriends about this so that I can have a nine-hole golf course!"

Okay, ahem, hang on a minute Mr Smarmy Snake-in-my-pants. The "we" that the economist refers to are the non-promiscuous people, i.e. the geeks, nerds, losers and me, of the species homo can't-get-laidicus.

So let me get this straight. If I go out right there now, and find two chicks, have a threesome regularly, then on the off-day, get together with three of my buddies and have an orgy with another chick, I'm doing my part to make the world a safer place from AIDS?

Somehow, it doesn't seem to work that way for me, so I continue reading the book, hoping that it will shed some rationality upon this matter. The scenario continues something like this, but the names and details have been changed.

John always plays World Of WarCraft. He plays as a level 67 Night Elf/Rogue and often plays straight till 5am in the morning. However, on this one odd day, he gets up and goes to a bar and have a drink. Right across the bar, sits this chick named Melinda, and she catches sight of John and smiles at him. John's heart skips a beat and he is now faced with the biggest choice of his life, since choosing to play as a Night Elf/Rogue. He either has to go over there and make small talk with Melinda, or go home and quest through the Outlands. John's manhood crumbles and he goes home and clicks away on his computer.

Suddenly, in walks Javier, alpha-male extraordinaire, baller, player and HIV carrier. Within two seconds, he spots dejected Melinda across the bar, and quickly moves in for the kill. With his suave words and convincing smile, he quickly manages to convince Melinda that she'll prevent global warming by going back home with Javier, having sex with him and doing anything he wants for the rest of the night. The next morning, Melinda has HIV, and doesn't realise it until full-blown AIDS hits her three years later.

Now if John did his manly duty and threw back a shot of tequila and salvaged enough of his manhood to turn away from World Of WarCraft to walk up to Melinda and chat her up, he would have saved her from the clutches of Javier. Okay, this doesn't make any sense, as Javier could so own John's ass on the dancefloor, but common sense also states that any competition is still competition anyway. Even if it is from a level 67 Night Elf/Rogue.

So this sounds like a very plausible explanation for how me having 2.25 more sexual partners could potentially save the world from AIDS, but I think this explanation has two serious flaws in that.

The first flaw is that there is some sort of inherent assumption that there are a finite amount of Javiers and an infinite amount of Johns. The problem with any guy is that once he has 2.25 sexual partners, why wouldn't he want more? Why stop at 2.25? Why not 3.67? Or 7.22? Inadvertantly, a John would become a Javier, and hence we would need infinitely more Johns than Javiers for this to vaguely work.

Because the scenario goes on to say that if John instead hooked up with Melinda for the night, then Melinda is saved from AIDS. And if John hooked up with some disease-infested hooker, then John goes home and safely dies from AIDS without further spreading it to anyone else. Sounds cruel, right? But that's life and death. And thus because of this, we would need infinitely more Johns than Javiers.

But this isn't such a bad problem. In fact, there might be infinitely more Johns than Javiers. A typical line I heard in a bar is, "Jenny, let's leave this bar. Its full of creepy losers." Yes, this technically goes to show that empirically, there might be a lot more Johns than Javiers, almost infinitely more.

Overheard at a bar:
A: Let's leave this bar. It's full of creepy losers.
B: What about that cute guy over there reading "More Sex is Safer Sex"?
A: No thanks, he's definitely a loser.
B: But he's reading a book.
A: He's reading a book about sex, he's definitely a creepy perv loser.

So basically the moral of the story is, don't read a book at a bar. And that you can't please any woman. And that there might be infinitely more Johns than Javiers.

The second problem is that there is this great moral conundrum, when a monogamous person with altruistic intentions of saving a problem has to choose between remaining monogamous to his girlfriend, or whether to go out to Hooters and grab some 1.25 ass.

Okay, this scenario is highly unlikely, because the odds of an altruistic male is about 1 in 100,000 and the odds of finding a male who believes in monogamy is 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. So this makes the chances of finding such a person almost infinitely small, and pretty much the world would be saved by the rest of the male human population who don't believe in monogamy anyway.

So in conclusion, perhaps there is something to this solution of the AIDS problem. Just by having more sex, we can make this world a better place to live. Think about this and extrapolate to not just HIV, but also chlamydia, gonorrhea, HPV, spyhilis, genital herpes, bacterial vaginosis, pelvic inflammatory disease and trichomoniasis. Isn't it worth it? Just by having 2.25 more sexual partners, we can make this world a better place. It's my promiscuous responsibility to do so, so please call me at 669-7273963.

And no, it's not my actual phone number, it's a code. But please, let me know if you're in.

A Dirty Feeling

And so another chapter comes to a close, and I think that today is an apt day to make my final post about college. I am graduating.

For those who don't know, I'm a major in Actuarial Science and Finance, with outstanding quantitative skills, well-versed in MS Office Suite, particularly I can make Excel dance if I want to, I have a strong statistical background, well-suited for quantitative analysis and algorithmic trading, and I have plenty of experience working in teams and I am able to communicate my ideas effectively and currently unemployed and would gladly accept any offers right now to whore myself to the next employer who is willing to hire me for sub-par sweatshop-like wages. Currently, my only job offers come from three friends, two of them asking me to be their little Asian bitch, and the third one is a gay marriage proposal. I shall not elaborate. So now, you have a great opportunity to hire me for little more than subsistent wages, a highly-skilled and well-credentialed professional. What better bargain could you get?

Somehow, I am more than disillusioned by my entire experience here in my university. The fun times were mostly had outside of the university, mostly were things that I could have done, had I been in any other university. Though I must admit, going to Vegas from Singapore might have posed a problem.

Maybe it's an inherent business school problem, but there's really no such thing as community building within a business school. I quote a friend, "I had people burn me by giving me the wrong answers to a question just because they wanted to do better than me." Wow, somewhere along the line, could you actually imagine this happening to you back in elementary school?

I guess this brings me to my point, business school changes you in ways that any ethical person wouldn't like. The change is subtle at first and suddenly, one day, it hits you when you do something that you wouldn't normally do, and when you start being more business-like. It all starts with the competitive streak. I'm pretty sure I brought that with me to business school, so business schools do not create a competitive streak in people. But it sort of goes to show that competitive people go to a business school.

I must detract for a moment, unlike business schools at a community college, or a typical college in the movies, where you see frat guys drinking their brains out and never attending class, and then graduating with a degree in business administration, that isn't really what business school is about. At a business school, sometimes it becomes really cutthroat. After all, there are only so many jobs and internships to go around.

But it's seedy business. First you start doing your best. Then you realize that doing your best isn't enough, and you cease to share your knowledge. There's pretty much hardly a thing as collaboration in a business school. Let's just protect my own ideas and let me get credit for what I do. Whoever said there's no 'I' in team, surely didn't know how to spell 'me'. Because that's basically what's it all about. Me, me, me and me. Then suddenly you start lying, and you become more of a dick, and you start delegating responsibility and blame, and congrats, you graduate with an MBA.

But it's kinda that feeling I have right now. Forget all that talk about hiring the best and the brightest. It's all fluff, because if anyone bothered to read a company's annual report, they all say the same thing, "Our greatest assets are our employees, because they are the best and the brightest." Okay, if every company hires the best and the brightest, where are the second best and the second brightest? Or the worst and the dullest? There is no best or brightest anywhere out there. To be part of the business world, you need to pass a simple 'airport test'.

The 'airport test' basically is a test that goes like this: If I were stuck in an airport, would I mind being stuck at an airport with this guy?

That's all there is. I feel that's all there is. I had interviewers tell me, your qualifications are no different from other candidates. Pfft.

But I just want to say how dirty I feel coming out of business school. It's worse than coming out of a strip club. Yup, I know.

I feel somehow that I've compromised on my ethics and my soul. I probably need to do some charity work for the next three years in the malaria infested jungles of Africa to redeem a portion of my soul. One thing I've noticed weirdly about a change in me is that my MBTI personality type has changed. I was kinda certain I was an INTP (Introvert, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving) but the latest test which I took two months back revealed instead I was an INTJ (Introvert, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging). Now there might not be much of an difference between the two, but between perceiving and judging, there's kinda a personality switch I feel. One is more in the background, and the other one is more directive. J's tend to put their ideas into action, doing less meandering in the theoretical world. More of the, "Let's do it." rather than "That's interesting." reaction to things. And the business world tends to appreciate J's more than P's.

It's a whole slew of things that have made me feel that I have changed. I like myself less than I did three years ago. And part of the reason is I question: what have I accomplished these past three years?

But then again, it's not entirely my fault, after all, I am also a product of my environment. For instance, I don't believe that I have been treated fairly by my university. The housing issue is one thing. The fact that they have a flawed recruiting process is another. The academic curve is another. The inexperienced faculty is another. The lack of quality education is another. I mean, I could list a lot more, but nowhere have I felt challenged, enriched or enlightened. And from my conversations with some of my friends who know me, much of my learning is done out of class, most of my interesting posts aren't regarding school.

I did voice this out to my school's dean. After all she encouraged feedback. My friend was really cynical that I wouldn't get a reply which just goes to show what students who don't fawn at her feet think about her. She did reply, and basically she said this: "I'm sorry you had a disappointing experience here but you've already paid us and you're graduating, so I wouldn't give a shit about you anymore." Okay, maybe those weren't her exact words, but it certainly sounded like a very sarcastic, "Boohoo. Too bad, so sad." and that's about what I get for USD150,000. Granted, I also get a piece of paper that is suppose to get me a job, but hey, I am still unemployed.

I have a good mind to take that piece of paper, roll up an eighth of weed in it and smoke it, which basically is about the only thing it is good for right now.

I've come out from this whole process wiser, but none the better. Sometimes I just feel frustrated by the double standards things are. I am disappointed at some of the choices that these employers make. Congrats to them, you've found someone you'll like to work with. But then again, when you request a drug test, and these people, yes there are a lot of these people, somehow manage to fake the results, does it mean you've made the right choice? I mean, I've heard so many conversations in the halls about drinking some weird crap so that drugs will be masked in the urine test, so that they can get their cushy Morgan Stanley internship. Wow... what does it mean? Does it mean you won't hire potheads, but make an exception for potheads who are smart enough to beat the system?

I don't know. Maybe it's a deep regretful feeling in me that I've talked like them, walked like them, acted like them and drank like them. And I don't get to be like them with a cushy job and all. So maybe I've compromised on who I am, tried to be who I'm not, and maybe it's time to call it quits. After all, how low must I sink before I realize that no matter what I do, that I'll never be a part of the White Gentleman's Club. Wait, you probably know it by another name, the White Anglo Saxon Protestants. Whatever you call it.

So it has come down to this, I'm about to call it quits. This is a world that doesn't want me, and doesn't want me around, only my money. So maybe I have to prepare for certain eventualities. But I'm not keeping my hopes up.

I had an insensitive professor who said something along the lines of, "You know, it's really hard for us white people to get a job because we aren't a minority." That's about as racist as it comes. Can someone say 'nappy-headed ho'?

So what's there to not feel dirty about? Being corrupted to the core, doing things I wouldn't normally do, and picking fights because of malice and superiority complex. I've stopped thinking about other people's feelings a long time already. I've only been looking out for number one, and I guess I have killed a mockingbird. It's not that hard, just go to business school.