You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

FrameBenignly comments on The application of the secretary problem to real life dating - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: Elo 29 September 2015 10:28PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (44)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: FrameBenignly 30 September 2015 06:33:43AM 1 point [-]

As someone with experience will know - we probably test and rule out bad partners in a single conversation, where we don't even get so far as a date. Or don't last more than a week. (I. E the experience set is growing through various means).

I consider this number to be much more useful than number of long-terms partners due to sample size. You should be able to evaluate most partners in a lot less than 6 months. I think if it takes more than 3 months to evaluate a relationship's potential for marriage, you're doing something wrong. For my part, I've never been in a relationship with someone I thought I might marry. I've only twice known someone I thought I might marry, and neither of those resulted in a relationship.

Comment author: Elo 30 September 2015 07:25:16AM 1 point [-]

You have raised some interesting alternative problems to applying this solution to real life. I suspect that most people don't think very hard about it; and they like to enjoy relationships/life/existence for the purpose of existing.

Trouble is that it's a lot harder to count; but yes - the candidate space grows when you start thinking that the shorter ones are fair attempts...


now that I think about it a bit harder; as long as you have a determining factor for how frequently you can process trials (i.e. how long a relationship is, or more specifically how many you can have in each year of your trial-time-period), you can still work out the 1/e time-point, and possibly use that for a heuristic of exploration/exploitation time-point...

Comment author: ChristianKl 30 September 2015 11:03:01AM 0 points [-]

You have raised some interesting alternative problems to applying this solution to real life. I suspect that most people don't think very hard about it; and they like to enjoy relationships/life/existence for the purpose of existing.

Apart from enjoyment a relationship also provides for personal growth.

Comment author: Elo 30 September 2015 12:03:43PM 0 points [-]

Yea; I had to skip all the other reasons to have relationships in order to specifically attack the reduced problem of the assumption of:

you plan to have children and you will probably be doing so like billions of humans have done so far in a monogamous relationship while married

There are certainly companionship values for having relationships that are worthwhile doing; but that's not what this post was about.

Comment author: ChristianKl 30 September 2015 01:08:30PM 0 points [-]

I don't think the plan to have children is simply about finding a suitable mate. It's also about developing the skill set of being a good parent and having an enduring relationship that doesn't break apart after a few years.

Comment author: Elo 30 September 2015 07:46:06PM 0 points [-]

I don't disagree with these points.

Can you clarify what you are suggesting by bringing them up?

Comment author: ChristianKl 30 September 2015 08:29:16PM 0 points [-]

I don't see a large extend of skill building in the post but it mainly being about effective ways of evaluating suitable mates.