MollieTheMare
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User ID: 875
I always thought one of the paradoxes of climate science was that (1) climate modeling is sound enough to project far into the future and determine magnitude, causality, and predict ecological, social, and economic impacts. And (2) geoengineering would be too dangerous because we don't know what the long term effects will be. That's probably not the exact phrasing of the IPCC or other consensus positions, but I don't think it's unreasonably far off either. Very speculative, but I suspect some of the skepticism of climate activism is that the solution always seems to be more socialism, rather than we would like to spend 0.005% of GDP to spray some calcite into the stratosphere.
MollieTheMare
15d ago
The Fussy Suitor Problem: A Deeper Lesson on Finding Love
Inspired by the Wellness Wednesday post post by @lagrangian, but mostly for Friday Fun, the fussy suitor problem (aka the secretary problem) has more to teach us about love than I initially realized.
The most common formulation of the problem deals with rank of potential suitors. After rejecting r suitors, you select the first suitor after r that is the highest ranking so far. Success is defined as choosing the suitor who would have been the highest ranking among the entire pool of suitors (size n). Most analyses focus on the probability of achieving this definition of success, denoted as P(r), which is straightforward to calculate. The “optimal” strategy converges on setting r = n/e (approximately 37% of n), resulting in a success rate of about 37%.
However, I always found this counterintuitive. Even with optimal play, you end up failing more than half the time.
In her book The Mathematics of Love Hanna Fry suggests, but does not demonstrate, that we can convert n to time, t. She also presents simulations where success is measured by quantile rather than absolute rank. For instance, if you end up with someone in the 95th percentile of compatibility, that might be considered a success. This shifts the optimal point to around 22% of t, with a success rate of 57%.
Still, I found this answer somewhat unsatisfying. It remains unclear how much less suitable it is to settle for the 95th percentile of compatibility. Additionally, I wondered if the calculation depends on the courtship process following a uniform geometric progression in time, although this assumption is common.
@lagrangian pointed out to me that the problem has a maximum expected value for payoff at r = sqrt(n), assuming uniform utility. While a more mathematically rigorous analysis exists, I decided to start by trying to build some intuition through simulation.
In this variant of we consider payoff in utilitons (u) rather than just quantile or rank information. For convenience, I assume there are 256 suitors.
The stopping point based on sqrt(n) grows much more slowly than the n/e case, so I don’t believe this significantly alters any qualitative conclusions. I’m pretty sure using the time domain here depends on the process and rate though.
I define P(miss) as the probability of missing out or accidentally exhausting the suitors, ultimately “settling” for the 256th suitor. In that case you met the one, but passed them up to settle for the last possible persion. Loss is defined as the difference in utility between the suitor selected by stopping at the best suitor encountered after r, and the utility that would have been gained by selecting the actual best suitor. Expected Shortfall (ES) is calculated at the 5th percentile.
I generate suitors from three underlying utility distributions:
- Exponential: Represents scenarios where there are pairings that could significantly improve your life, but most people are unsuitable.
- Normal: Assumes the suitor’s mutual utility is an average of reasonably well-behaved (mathematically) traits.
- Uniform: Chosen because we know the optimal point.
For convenience, I’ve set the means to 0 and the standard deviation to 1. If you believe I should have set the medians of the distributions to 0, subtract log(2) utilitons from the mean(u) exponential result.
Running simulations until convergence with the expected P(r), we obtain the following results:
| gen_dist | r | P(r) | P(miss) | <u> | <loss> | sd_loss | ES_5 | max_loss |
|----------|---------|------|---------|-----|--------|---------|------|----------|
| exp | n/e | 37% | 19% | 2.9 | 2.2 | 2.5 | 7.8 | 14.1 |
| exp | sqrt(n) | 17% | 3% | 3.0 | 2.1 | 1.8 | 6.6 | 14.8 |
|----------|---------|------|---------|-----|--------|---------|------|----------|
| norm | n/e | 37% | 19% | 1.7 | 1.2 | 1.5 | 4.6 | 7.0 |
| norm | sqrt(n) | 18% | 3% | 2.0 | 0.8 | 0.8 | 3.3 | 6.3 |
|----------|---------|------|---------|-----|--------|---------|------|----------|
| unif | n/e | 37% | 19% | 1.1 | 0.6 | 1.0 | 3.2 | 3.5 |
| unif | sqrt(n) | 17% | 3% | 1.5 | 0.2 | 0.5 | 2.1 | 3.5 |
What was most surprising to me is that early stopping (r = sqrt(n)) yields better results for both expected utility and downside risk. Previously, I would have assumed that since the later stopping criterion (r = n/e) is more than twice as likely to select the best suitor, the expected shortfall would be lower. However, the opposite holds true. You are more than 6 times as likely to have to settle in this scenario, so even if suitability is highly skewed as in the exponential case, expected value is still in favor of the r=sqrt(n) case! This is a completely different result than the r=n/e I had long accepted as optimal. The effect is even far more extreme than even the quantile-time based result.
All cases yield a positive expectation value. Since we set the mean of the generating distributions to 0, this implies that on average having some dating experience before deciding is beneficial. Don’t expect your first millihookup to turn into a marriage, but also don’t wait forever.
I should probably note for low, but plausible n <= 7, sqrt(n) is larger than n/e, but the whole number of suitors mean the optimal r (+/-1) is still given in the standard tables.
One curious factoid, is that actuaries are an appreciable outlier in terms of having a the lowest likelihood of divorce. Do they possess insights about modeling love that the rest of us don’t? I’d be very interested if anyone has other probabilistic models of relationship success. What do they know that the rest of the life, physical, and social sciences don't? Or is it that they are just more disposed to finding a suitable "good" partner than the one.
I was more referring to statements like (from the IPCC Climate Change 2023 Synthesis Report pp. 101)
Redistributive policies across sectors and regions that shield the poor and vulnerable, social safety nets, equity, inclusion and just transitions, at all scales can enable deeper societal ambitions and resolve trade-offs with sustainable development goals.
I'm not even saying it's wrong, but putting redistributive policies ahead of mechanical interventions is what I would argue could be perceived to be driven by a political agenda. That perception can erode trust in the institutions advocating for those interventions, even if the "Equity and Inclusion" and "Scientific Basis" sections are not logically dependent on each other.
I certainly was not making the argument that general public sector works are always bad. Even for things like highways though, there are clearly different strategies that spread the costs and responsibilities differently. For example, the primarily toll-based privately maintained and operated Autoroutes in France vs the free at the point of use Interstate Highway System in the US.
MollieTheMare
18d ago
It is quite ironic that one of the biggest contributes to CO2 emissions reductions is fossil fuel companies fracking so aggressively they drove the price of natural gas negative at some points. Ultimately substituting NG for coal is probably a net benefit, but I'm pretty sure environmental activists are not happy with the growth of NG as a energy source.
It's been more than 15 years since An Inconvenient Truth came out and the IPPC won their Nobel Peace Prize. In that time it would have been totally possible to replace essentially all electricity production in developed countries with GEN III+ nuclear plants and make substantial progress on Gen IV plants. Instead, without utility scale storage, the focus on growing interment renewables has only entrench NG peaking plants as the dominant on-demand electricity generation source.
MollieTheMare
29d ago
like the fact that crime is overwhelmingly interracial
Wait is this a typo or am I missing something?
In the US context don't most statistics support violent crime being primarily intraracial?
See for example table 6 of the latest FBI Crime in the U.S. or table 13 of U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Victimization, 2021. Excluding the Hispanic origin category, Both show >75% of perpetrators of violent crime being from the same grouping as the victim.
MollieTheMare
29d ago
I wonder if there should be a formal mechanism for preserving top level posts, or other important contextual bits.
On a slightly related note, what is the preferred way to request the mods to check an account for suspicious activity? It seems like there have been an unusually large number of new accounts dropping in, concern trolling/making low effort posts, then ghosting recently. Though brigading or getting linked from somewhere else seems plausible as well.
MollieTheMare
29d ago
Yeah, there are also condensed versions if you search the agent's name, but some of the splicing and commentary might leave a little bit to be desired.
Interestingly, when searching I found several "AI" generated looking articles that seem to have incorrect information about the case. One claimed the agent had settled with the city for $440k, but links to an entirely unrelated case.
Other sources claim the agent was fired from the ATF for his part in the incident. Though, it would be pretty funny if the official policy of the agency was for plain clothes agents to scream "I'm a federal fucking agent!" when confronted by uniformed officers.
MollieTheMare
19d ago
That's more or less what I was gesturing at with 0.005% of GDP.
Though I would prefer they not exhaust the worlds supply of helium to do it. It's a very usefully industrial gas, and basically not renewable. Using hydrogen balloons would be much more "sustainable," though not supper feasible to do at small scale. Using their cost projections you actually get ~0.05% of gross world product per year. I assumed you could get the cost down with economies of scale by using some mix calcite substituting for the sulfur and hydrogen substituting for the helium.
It's interesting what you suggested is almost the opposite of the scenario @Felagund suggested. I suppose a hopeless romantic would not want to risk the potentially corrosive effect of having knowingly settled. I assume that in practice you would combine some knowledge of the current rate, the steepness of the expected falloff, some pure romantic inclination, and some fear of missing out into some heuristic.
In the scenario where we keep n from above, but keep going if we still haven't found the one I do think is interesting. If we set our benchmark at r=sqrt(n), 83% of the time you find your partner before n/e. Assuming (offset) exponentially distributed utility, the expected utility in this case is about the same as in the case where we assumed halting. I guess this is like the plethora of people who marry someone they meet in college? In about 10% of the cases there you manage to find a partner before the expected window closes, and patients is rewarded with about 50% more utility (4.5 vs 3).
I then assumed some very questionable things to set the next boundaries. First, we can transpose to time as above. Second, that we care about marriage with respect to producing children. Putting geriatric maternal age at 35-40, and assuming you would just offset paternal age so we don't have to deal with an extra set of scenarios, I find a new cutoff of 320/256. I think this sort of accommodates @jeroboam's point. In that case not stopping, but being willing to continue into the danger zone, 1.3% of the runs find the one by "40." Of course expected utility is higher at 5.2, but being willing to push age, but unwilling to settle only picked up a small number of additional "successes."
In the remaining 5% cases you eventually find your soulmate with an expected utility of 6.4. You do have to wait exponentially long though, with a median age equivalent of 67, and a mean of 343!
Setting the high water mark at n/e, but being unwilling to stop is similar in utility. Now you've eliminated the 3 unit of expected utility bucket, and the 4.5 unit utility bucket has 63% weight. Your willingness to go into the (questionably) age equivalent 35-40 bucket also preserves 7% of the trials. By setting your benchmark so late though, 30% of the time you miss the critical window. The higher expected utility, I guess, represents it being totally worth it to find your soul mate, assuming there was no penalty for waiting past geriatric pregnancy age.
@self_made_human don't worry I know these simulations are entirely irrelevant to us denizen of themotte, thus the fun thread and why I included the note on n <= 7, ಥ_ಥ
first grade teacher
Based only on this, aren't the average elementary education majors IQ's 108 based on the old SAT data? The gap between 108 and 120 is still pretty healthy.
120 (80thp)
Am I messing up the IQ quantile conversion, or was there an error up-thread? Using a normal with mean 100, and SD 15 I get:
| IQ | p |
|-------|-------|
| 140 | 0.996 |
| 135 | 0.990 |
| 120 | 0.909 |
| 112.6 | 0.800 |
| 110 | 0.748 |
| 108 | 0.703 |
So a relaxation to a requirement of 120 would only be a 10x wider filter rather than 20x.
MollieTheMare
16d ago
I kind of assumed, based on a vague recollection of OP's claimed achievements, username (as implied major), and desire for a 135+ IQ partner that their (maybe self assessed?) IQ was at least 140. In that if it were "only" 135 it would be unreasonable to set a lower bound at 135.
At 140, the gap to 110 is 30 points, which is the same gap as 100 to 70. Or average to borderline intellectually disabled. I do think it's possible for 140 paired with 110 to work, which is why I put it as conditional on the relationship you expect with your children. Like there is a whole set of life experiences you likely will never be able to share with your children. That's sort of based off of a crude model of averaging parents IQ and assessing a 10 point regression to the mean, (140 + 110) / 2 - 10 = 115. I'd be pretty interested if someone has a less ad-hoc way of calculating this.
It can at least work in fiction though, season 6 episode 9 of House "Ignorance Is Bliss" has an IQ 178 married to an IQ 87.
MollieTheMare
16d ago
- Lower IQ filter down to >120 (80thp) as opposed to ~135(99p).
- Attractive.. okay keep this one, but don't be a k-drama protagonist about this
- Politics - For the most part, drop this.
I do wonder about these filters.
For IQ it depends on how much you value producing high IQ children. I assume it's pretty hard to estimate the distribution for outcomes, but if you were to go down to 110 like @2D3D suggests, it might be unreasonably hard to relate to both your wife and your children... I suppose if you're willing to go down the embryo selection road, but then you would also have to find a partner who would also be into that.
Attractive—where does 1 in 3 here conditional on 25-34 and high IQ place them on absolute attractiveness? I would assume given youth, iq, and contentiousness the person would be well above average in attractiveness to start with. Even if only from the correlated likely socioeconomic advantages they enjoyed growing up. I mean, how many ugly people do you see walking around the campus of say Stanford?
For politics a 1 in 2 filter would be compatible, but not necessarily exactly aligned? Given how niche the politics of someone who posts regularly on the Mott probably are, I suppose it would be hard to filter any more generously without admitting intolerable incompatibility.
MollieTheMare
1mo ago
If you want a very powerful, but very crusty, option that will probably not have the problem of turning into an advertising platform. GnuCash has the capability of "properly" doing bookkeeping with full double-entry accounting. It's probably overkill for personal budget tracking, and comes with the expected jank of a raw GNU project, but there is a reason GAAP exists.
Why arccos? Like ignoring diffuse horizontal irradiance, .......
The insolation is just proportional to the incident cross-section, or sin(90° - ϕ) = cos(ϕ), where ϕ is the latitude.
you can check for yourself though. The instantaneous insolation is given by
Q = S_0 * (d_bar / d)^2 * (sin ϕ sin δ + cos ϕ cos δ cos h)
In your case S_0, d_bar, and d are constant (the solar constant, mean distance, actual distance)
δ is the declination angle, 0 in your case, so sin δ -> 0, cos δ -> 1.
The hour angle h, or deviation from local solar noon you can consider for h = 0, since you can scale to the max if everyone has a 12 hour day. Or cos h -> 1
giving Q ∝ cos ϕ.
Edit: I see @JhanicManifold already answered and got the same thing. Obviously I mean like cos of degrees latitude and he was working in cos of radians and converting the degrees with the factor of 1/90 * pi/2
MollieTheMare
1mo ago
He talks about this topic a bit here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LKyniPMgQ94&t=2410s
Talks about noticing "Willpower and generics take you really far — at least."
My interpretation is he is at least libertarian leaning. There are strong Kolmogorov complicity vibes whenever he butts up against a topic that would get you hard core canceled. I suspect because his business is primarily selling his apps and programs/books and getting canceled would probably hurt that.
MollieTheMare
1mo ago
confounded by the super heavyweights with enormous fat mass
Not just that, but if you look at the methodology they do not control for any confounders. Particularity the fact that countries that focus on Olympic weightlifting typically do so because it's relatively inexpensive to have a program compared to other sports. Look at any of the medals tables and you see a bunch of North Korea, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Belarus, etc. None of which are famed for longevity of the population. That lifespan chart is absolutely useless without controlling for confounders, unless you think equestrian and sailing has some magical protective powers other than being a sign of affluence.
They also fail to quantify the likely effect of steroid use, which is absolutely rampant in top level weightlifting. "...in the past decade, more than 600 lifters have tested positive." This is particularity relevant because the steroids used are chosen for their ability to avoid doping control and make the athletes stronger not for safety
Also agree, you should probably not take training advise from someone who does not understand the difference between general strength training for health, weightlifting the sport, and bodybuilding.
MollieTheMare
1mo ago
That previous discussion does look pretty much right to me.
For bands, traditional offerings are gold or silver alloys: few people are allergic to the common ones, and they have a wide array of possible coloration.
For traditional, hard to beat gold for inertness in terms of resistance to tarnish and allergen potential. Also has the pros of being easy(ish) to resize and easy(ish) to cut off in an emergency.
For non-traditional bands I would add tungsten as an option. Its density does make the ring feel "special" though it can also be a con if the the weight is bothersome to you. Tungsten is also pretty good on inertness. You should probably be able to shatter a tungsten ring in an emergency, but that assumes the person removing the ring recognizes that's the right approach. Personally, I go for a silicone band in situations where a band might be expected but I might be doing light stuff with my hands. In the shop or any other place where there is any risk of a degloving injury absolutely no jewelry. Have a dedicated place to place your ring in the shop so it doesn't get lost.
MollieTheMare
8mo ago
The old just mayo packaging, before they were forced to changed, is by far the most egregious I've seen. It literally has a picture of an egg on the front with no 'egg free' disclaimer. I guess the claim was the plant superimposed on the egg was supposed to indicate that the egg was replaced by pea protein? I very much doubt the average consumer interpenetrated it that way, the name and illustration was much more suggestive of "only contains egg and neutral plant oil emulsion."
MollieTheMare
7mo ago
MollieTheMare
5mo ago
I think I would propose Camp Fire as the, at lease progressive leaning, equivalent.
Notable alumni:
- Senator Elizabeth Warren (D Mass.)
- Senator Amy Klobuchar (D Minn.)
- Senator Dianne Feinstein (D Calif.)
- Gov. Kate Brown (D Oregon.)
A few left or progressive leaning celebrities and semi-notables in there as well. A couple of (R)'s too, to be fair.
MollieTheMare
1yr ago
Your own post contradicts your claims.
I was more or less going to post this. "Not actually that hard" is incompatible with obsessively tracking micro-nutrients. That is way beyond what an average person is willing to do. Eating without any nutritional deficiencies as a vegan requires a wall of text to keep track possible sources of nutrients you actively have to seek out. Eating without any nutritional deficiencies as an omnivore requires have a palate more refined than a five year old.
It also seems like claims of being "successful athletically" on a vegan diet are primary made by participants in endurance sports. While I can appreciate those sports, this is somewhat outside of the average mental picture for athleticism. Outside of the niche of endurance sports most people think of power, muscularity, or strength when they think of athleticism. A vegan diet is also pretty clearly not optimal, even for endurance sports. I don't follow marathon closely enough to know if this has changed since
But you know, there’s a also a reason no vegan runner has qualified for the Olympic marathon trials. Not the Olympics. The trials.
It's clearly possible to sustain life as a vegan, but success athletically has to be defined before you claim to have proven that possible to be successful athletically on a vegan diet.
MollieTheMare
9mo ago
Not only does the warm air from the Mediterranean make Europe warmer, but the Great Plains and Midwest regularly have the continental polar air masse push south and bring sustained below 0°F temperatures. Many parts of the Middle of the US are consistently colder than coastal Canada. The mean minimum annual temperature in Sioux Falls is -19.2°F (-28.4°C), the mean minimum annual temperature in Belgrade is 14.7°F (-9°C). From personal experience, there is a big difference between -19.2°F and 14.7°F.
MollieTheMare
6mo ago
The study you are thinking of is probably this one. I would highly recommend against interpenetrating this as all the benefits of strength training with just some side effects.
(1) They measured fat-free mass not muscle mass. Steroids like Tren make you uptake water in the muscles, you get "fullness" in the form of water when taking anabolics, but the study wasn't long enough to measure real substantial muscle growth. This also explains the cross-sectional area measurement. The water thing is just like a turbo version of what happens with creatine.
(2) The strength increase in the training non-steriod group was greater than the steroid only group. The additional strength in the steroid group is probably largely attributable to two factors
- Slight increase in neural drive from steroids, this is nothing compared to long term strength training.
- Better leverages from being bigger. Your muscles are class 3 levers, just being bigger means you can lift more weight. Getting stronger in this way is not necessarily good for you, you can achieve the same thing by getting supper fat.
This study does come up all the time, but it was wayyyy to short to conclude that you will gain more actual muscle not training on gear than resistant training. If you talk to any experienced bodybuilder who is open about steroids they all think training is still important. If you don't stimulate your body for specific muscle protein synthesis all you will do is end up looking freakish and ogre like, not jacked and fit looking.
The side-effects are also no joke, even if you don't care about potentially nuking your nuts, Tren in particular can absolutely make your mood terrible.
Finally, I have to say I'm skeptical you've tried enough actual resistance training to dismiss it as a better primary option. Six months is barely long enough to try one training method. Can you really say you've given your full effort to trying: traditional bro split style stuff, calisthenics, pure strength training, crossift style stuff, and circuit training? I saw below you are already talking about training twice a week. Starting strength can be done in three 60 minute sessions a week (if you can superset your warmups for upcoming exercises between working sets). Is that really too much to ask? If you eat enough the gains will be obvious. You could easily put 100 pounds on a novice squat in 6 months. Faster progress than that, aided by steroids, is enough to tear tendons off the bone.
MollieTheMare
6mo ago
I mean, it’s bird watching. I associate this hobby with innoffensive old people who stayed Episcopalian after it started using gay pride vestments, read the New York Times, and retired from their teaching job a few years ago thinking they should move to be with their grandkids but just don’t think it’s the right time.
This is a disturbingly precise description of one of the bird watching hobbyists I know. Makes you wonder.
It's the "official" builtin board style forum of (like the 3rd cousin?) of themotte. I think the relationship is roughly like:
Obviously the full history is a bit more complicated and there is a bunch of cross mixing between the branches.
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