Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Is there someone out there for you? The Numbers

Most of us at some point will ask ourselves if there's someone out there that's right for us. While there's a lot to consider on the nature of soul mates there's one abstraction that can't be denied and that's the numbers game. What are the odds that someone is out there for you at all let alone "the one".

It's estimated that we're in the neighborhood of 8 billion people and we now have the ability to collect large amounts of all kinds of aggregate data on all kinds of things. For example we've officially passed having more than 2 women for every man on this planet. I'm very interested in knowing why that's happening but that seems to be the current case. In some specific areas that number is amazingly larger more like 16:1 or 32:1. Our first big cut is trying to figure out how many people are in monogamous relationships. We can somewhat safely assume it's greater than half which leaves all those extra women for the remaining men provided we're only looking at hetero relationships. To solve that we cut the collected information of supposed polls that the global population is anywhere from 7 to 12 % homosexual. Keep in mind if more than half the population is in a 2 person relationship then the ratio's only get bigger. The current realistic number is no less than 3 available women per man and likely more in the range of 6 to 1 if we throw in more variables. However as we've learned previously from Occam's razor it's more likely that fewer variables is better or more accurate.

So the sad truth is ladies that men are slim pickings. As for men there are plenty of fish in the sea seems more appropriate than ever. Though to both the clear answer is you won't catch any fish if you're only hunting for the best.  

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