Jandila comments on Polyhacking - Less Wrong

75 Post author: Alicorn 28 August 2011 08:35AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 28 August 2011 06:45:13PM *  9 points [-]

Polyamory, especially the "open mesh" kind, dissolves the question of whether there exists a better match, or (most of) the fear of losing a partner to someone better. It's no longer necessary to consider whether this match outranks alternatives you haven't yet encountered, for both of you. It's sufficient to consider whether it works in itself.

If the hypergamy hypothesis is correct this isn't so at all.

Also consider these stats from the CDC:

Percent of all women 15-44 years of age who have had three or more male partners in the last 12 months, 2002: 6.8%

Percent of all men 15-44 years of age who have had three or more female partners in the last 12 months, 2002: 10.4%”

“Median number of female sexual partners in lifetime, for men 25-44 years of age, 2002: 6.7 Percent of men 25-44 years of age who have had 15 or more female sexual partners, 2002: 29.2%

Median number of male sexual partners in lifetime, for women 25-44 years of age, 2002: 3.8 Percent of women 25-44 years of age who have had 15 or more male sexual partners, 2002: 11.4%

Comment author: wnoise 28 August 2011 06:57:38PM *  4 points [-]

Something's wrong with those numbers. Medians of integer-valued quantities are always integers or half-integers.

EDIT: I've taken a look at the report, and it doesn't say anything about how they calculate medians, so I don't know how they're fudging their numbers to get these out.

EDIT 2: I should also say "good job for looking at the research and getting numbers", even if I'd like these researchers to be more transparent as to what they're actually reporting.

Comment author: satt 29 August 2011 04:09:33AM 1 point [-]

An uninformed guess: those medians are presumably based on survey data, so they might've been adjusted using the survey's sampling weights.

Comment author: wnoise 29 August 2011 05:50:32AM *  3 points [-]

It's almost certainly true, perhaps doing a weighted average of the medians of subgroups. However, any method that does that is not producing a median. A good way of doing that adjustment might give "cooked" numbers for the various options, but the point where 50% are below and 50% are above would still almost certainly be an integer. And if it is actually balanced (highly unlikely with so many data points), so that any number greater than X and less than X+1 divides the population in two, then the convention is to report X + 1/2. There is no information about the median that anything past the decimal point can actually convey.

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