Monday, April 27, 2015

"Sex and the Pareto Principle"

What I started noticing in high school is that everyone hung out with certain groups; jocks with jocks, partiers with partiers, etc. I was in the party group, and we ended with seeing the party girls. So years later when I found out about Pareto's Rule, I realized it wasn't "universal" but had to be applied group by group. The girls in my group despised athletes as stupid jocks, for example. I also saw that in college.

You can't apply Pareto's Rule universally to all men and women, when it comes to sex and romance, without taking other things into account. You can't compare Sean Connery to, say, Richard Simmons, without taking certain variables into account.

I also found the truly promiscuous girls, who were a very small minority, saw the promiscuous guys. I knew most of these girls in high school because they were included in the party girls.

When I owed a taxi I finally encountered groupies who went after athletes and rock stars. I found the vast majority of them were unattractive and were mental cases. It wasn't a case of going after "Alphas" but trying to attach themselves to someone rich and famous so they could convince themselves they had some worth.

Because of my experience in life, I have never taken seriously Roissy, Krauser, Roosh, Vox Day, "The Rational Male," etc. I once told Roissy, "I have more experience than you" and he thew a fit...as I predicted he would.

This article is again from Susan Walsh at Hooking Up Smart. There are many graphs so I'm going to post the first few paragraphs and then post a link.


Do 20% of the men get 80% of the women? I’ve come across this claim repeatedly, though the application of the 80/20 rule varies. Sometimes it’s stated that 20% of the men get 80% of the sex, which is actually a very different claim.

I felt the need to understand exactly what the data says, if anything, in support of the Pareto Principle as it applies to the distributution of sex. Are we talking about 80% of all women? Sexually active women? Women in their 20s, when they are at their peak of fertility and beauty? Or, as in Hollenhund’s version, is it just a question of the frequency of sex, even with one partner? In that case, how to incorporate the male preference for sexual variety?

Read the rest HERE.

11 comments:

Mindstorm said...

It's best represented by power law graph:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

Unknown said...

I only have a basic understanding of statistics and that was never taught in my Intro to Statistics class.

Mindstorm said...

I'm an autodidact on many topics, including this one. I became interested in this type of relation when I wanted to picture to myself how the consumption of alcohol is distributed in the general population.

Mindstorm said...

That led me to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweedie_distribution#Other_applications
and in turn allowed me to understand the Pareto distribution better than before.

So, was anything mentioned in your class about the Poisson distribution and its 'boundary' special cases?

Unknown said...

You gotta make things concrete instead of abstract! And the consumption of alcohol certainly is concrete.

Unknown said...

Tweedle and Poisson? Not a word.

Mindstorm said...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution#Applications - is that concrete enough for you?

Notice that the Gaussian distribution (popular name is Bell curve) is the continuous equivalent to one case of Poisson distribution (which is discrete, mind). Similarly, the discrete Tweedie distribution is in the same relation to a specific case of power law distribution, which is also continuous.

Come on, you can observe it yourself, if you like:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/Statistics.html
In case you don't know, there is even a Chrome extension with Wolfram Alpha functionality.

Mindstorm said...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_curve#Properties - the graph on the right here is quite interesting, don't you agree?

Now, what is your guess about how 'the sex distribution' graph would look like, if represented in the same way? Would it look differently in countries with different marriage systems and mores regarding sexuality? :)

Mindstorm said...

To simplify matters, concentrate on lifetime PiV sex numbers among heterosexual men who lived longer than, say, 60 years.

Retrenched said...

No offense Bob, but... it's 2015. Mr. Reagan isn't president anymore. Things have changed a lot since you were a young man.

Unknown said...

No, they haven't. Read Jesus and St. Paul, Aristotle and Aquinas, Augustine and Marcus Aurelius, and you'll see the problems that exist today existed thousands of years ago. What do you think kills society after society? The same things.