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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2448 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 20, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've done a relatively exhaustive analysis on male pattern baldness (I have a vested interest). I'm extremely relieved to find out that despite the reflection of the OR lights off dad's head being dazzling, I likely have lower than average odds of going bald.

Relevant factors:

  1. 50% of men lose some hair by 50.
  2. Dad's saving a lot of money on haircuts.
  3. Maternal grandpa has a respectable head of hair past 95. If I'm slightly thinning when I'm crossing my 80s, I can live with that.
  4. Only 1/3rd of my paternal uncles are bald, all of them older than my dad.
  5. I'm teetering dangerously close to 30, without losing anything off the top. That pretty much rules out early onset AO.

I can breathe a little easier, without having to worry so much about turning 30 and finding out that I've lost my hair, alongside my well-founded belief that you immediately develop arthritis and an inability to drink liquor like you used to. The jungles of Norwood seem less daunting, and worst comes to worse, it's time for minoxidil or a trip to Turkey. Going bald might even be good for career progression, just look at Scott!

(I was immensely annoyed by the fact that while stats on the probability of your dad being bald if you're balding are well established at around 80%, the odds of becoming bald with a bald dad are much harder to find. And MBP is annoyingly polygenic to boot.)

Edit:

Here's the final post

You have P(dad is bald | son is balding). If you can find P(bald) and P(born to a bald dad) - assuming the latter doesn’t impact the sex ratio - you could use Bayes’ Theorem instead of searching for P(son is balding | dad is bald).

I figured it out, but with the caveat that this only works in ideal circumstances which are very much not true.

Here's the link to the full post. I'm reasonably confident about the maths.

Awesome! It warms my smooth pate to see Bayes in the wild.

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