Love Shack

Tonight I went to an event on campus entitled Love Shack, an interdisciplinary faculty discussion on love and lust. The part I found most interesting was a statistical analysis of mate selection. Apparently, there’s a problem in statistics that involves picking the best product off an assembly line, assuming you have to dispose of each product as you reject it, and the solution applies equally well to mate selection. The solution is not to pick any of the first 1/3 of the choices that come along, and instead simply take note of what the best choice is from that sample. (And, critically, in the case of mate selection, one factor in determining the “best choice” is that they’d have you.) Then after that first 1/3, select the next one that comes along that’s as good as or better than your previously identified “best choice.” You heard it here first. I expect to be invited to the wedding when this works for you.