I should be done publishing TED talk notes in the next few weeks. Nowadays I listen to TED talks in podcast format and I’m usually doing something else, like running, and can’t take notes.
Anyhow here’s the complete collection.
This week we have Hannah Fry on the mathematics of love.
Hannah Fry: The Mathematics of Love
- math is the study of patterns
- OkCupid was started by mathematicians; they have data for more than a decade
- how attractive you are doesn’t dictate how popular you are on OkC
- what matters is the spread of scores: ideally you want some people to LOVE you and some to HATE you
- also, if everyone thinks another person is attractive, they often won’t try to contact
- let’s say you start dating at 15 and want to be married at 35, what’s your optimal mate selection strategy?
- the math tells us we should ONLY date for first-third of that span (about 6-7 years), then pick the next person that comes along who is better than everyone you’ve seen before
- there are actually wild fish, other animals that follow this strategy
- 1/2 of American marriages end in divorce
- the best predictor of divorce: how positive or negative partners were in discussions
- math could predict divorce at 90% accuracy
- particularly dangerous are the “spirals of negativity”
- successful relationships have really LOW negativity threshold (which means, they tend to bring up even little things that bother them, though this finding may be counterintuitive)
- these low negativity threshhold couples don’t let things slide, they continually try to repair their relationship