[speakeasy]

I apologize in advance, this post is going to be a bit geeky. I was have a fascinating conversation with a friend in L.A. this morning about an article he stumbled across where a very smart(and most likely nerdy) guy in London was pondering how the Drake Equation can be retooled to figure out one's dating market.

For those that don't know, the Drake Equation is a tentative formula that takes a guess at the number of intelligent life forms in the Milky Way based on probabilities of phenomena that spawn life in lieu of any actual evidence. It's far from perfect and while outcomes can vary radically, the underlying logic makes sense. If you have x number of stars, x of them will be the right type of stars for life, and of that x of them will have planets in the habitable zone, of those, x of those planets will have conditions right for life, and so on where "x" starts at an astronomical number but keeps getting exponentially smaller.

So tying this into women, let's say you are a 35 year old male living in Los Angeles. I won't complicate this by looking at guys who just want to hook up only, let's just focus on guys looking for something serious.

There are about 12,000,000 people in the L.A. metro area. Let's say half are women. So we are now at 6,000,000 options for our 35 year old guy to choose from. Sounds great right? But let's say his dating range for a serious girl is 25-35. Of the city's inhabitants, about 15% of them may be in that range. So now we are down to 900,000 women. Still more than enough to fill out his black book. Now of those women, 1/3rd may be married, 1/3 may have boyfriends and 1/3 are single. Assuming he's not trying to steal a girl away from another man and only focuses on single women, he's now down to 297,000 women. Now let's say he weeds out the plain Janes, fatties, girls of a race he'd never date, etc. For the sake of argument let's say that 1 out of 10 random girls in his age range he's actually attracted to enough to take seriously. Now he's down to 29,700 women. Okay, still not too bad. Now the tricky part is we have no idea how many of these single, attractive, in his age range and available women will actually feel it for him. So let's say 1 in 10 of this pool of women considers him to be her physical type. Now we're down to 2,970 women that are of the appropriate demographic he wants and where there would be mutual physical attraction. But we haven't even started talking personality and actual compatibility. Now let's say he weeds out the women on anti-depressant drugs, the attention shores, drama queens, women that don't share his passions or interest, masculine women, women he doesn't vibe with, etc. Let's assume that of this final pile, 1 in 10 of them are a great match personality-wise. Now he's down to 297 women in the ENTIRE city of 12,000,000. A match under these circumstances would be 0.0025% of the population. For anyone that considers themselves picky, finding the right woman might be a daunting task.

Now obviously these numbers are just speculative. Even a slight adjustment in the percentages at any stage of the filter can alter the final number dramatically. A guy could date women that he's not that physically into for example and find 30% of women attractive rather than 10%. If at the same time it was possible to bring his attractiveness level up so that 30% of his market found him attractive instead of 10%, that would mean a final number of 2,673.

Of course some numbers are hard to plug in, such as how many women in your city would find you attractive, and how many women in your city would have compatible personalities. If you really wanted to dig into your local city's demographics and take notes on how many women you find attractive in your city as a percentage and how many women you talk to that you find yourself compatible with you can probably make some decent estimations.

Just something to ponder!

[El Chinito loco]

Another problem is the time factor. You will never have enough time to sort through that many needles hidden in multiple haystacks. So you'll never be able to optimize your search. I guess facebook or the internet is supposed to eliminate that difficulty but in reality it only inflates the attention given to a small number of "above average" women.

Social proximity is another issue. If you work in some career that doesn't have many women you'll never encounter these women at all. Which means you have to spend an inordinate amount of time gaming.

[svenski7]

Reminds me of How I Met Your Mother where the guy supposedly matches no woman in NYC.

I stopped watching after that episode (the first or second?).

Anyway, this is pretty interesting.

[speakeasy]

(06-15-2014 02:19 AM)El Chinito loco Wrote:  

Another problem is the time factor. You will never have enough time to sort through that many needles hidden in multiple haystacks. So you'll never be able to optimize your search. I guess facebook or the internet is supposed to eliminate that difficulty but in reality it only inflates the attention given to a small number of "above average" women.

Social proximity is another issue. If you work in some career that doesn't have many women you'll never encounter these women at all. Which means you have to spend an inordinate amount of time gaming.

Very good point. With such a small number of ideal matches, you'd have to be very efficient in finding them. Luckily things like living in a walkable area with lots of active young and single people will do much of the work for you. Having a fishbowl or like-minded social network takes even more work out of hunting. Online dating can be very helpful for zeroing in on specific type of women but we all know the problems with the online world versus meeting offline(e.g. SIFs and flakes). Just knowing where the type of girls you like tend to gather is extremely important.

[Eastside]

By the title of this thread the first thing that popped into my head was that it was going to be about (rapper) Drake coming out with a relationship book called "The Drake Equation." Probably would include lots of advice on fame game haha.

Some interesting stuff you brought up though

[RexImperator]

"This American Life" did something like this in a story a few years ago, except it was with a female physicist at Harvard. She wanted to date someone as smart or smarter than herself (and was probably already in her 30's). Bummer that hypergamy...the odds got long quite quickly...

[Parlay44]

There's a reason it's called settling "down". It means you loosen your restrictions, expand your circle and lower your standards to find Miss Right. Honestly I've come to the conclusion that relationships only work when both people are ready for a serious relationship despite meeting all your other criteria. And unfortunately women these days aren't ready until after they've hit the wall and not in their prime like nature intended.

[rudebwoy]

Or you could go to a Eastern European city for a year and find more suitable matches than the 297 you will find in LA.

What percentage of those girls will bring you breakfast in bed?
What percentage of those girls will wash your dirty underwear and not complain?

[Gorgiass]

Well, there is some good news. According to http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/ne.../downtown/ which deals with one of the demographically older districts, the proportion of 20-35 yo is 29%, which already doubles your total right there, even more so for the rest of the city which is younger. There are states with total populations of 600,000 and you have 600,000 women in your dating age range within a few square miles of you!

And since we're getting geeky... By assuming compatibility with 1/10 of women 3x in a row, you are essentially assuming that there will only be a mutual attraction and compatibility with girls aged 20-35 at the rate of 1 per every 1000 that you approach. I don't think the odds are nearly so bad as that. And with the good game resulting from studying of the material here a guy can almost eliminate that second x.10 entirely!

[Vitriol]

(06-15-2014 05:56 AM)Parlay44 Wrote:  

Honestly I've come to the conclusion that relationships only work when both people are ready for a serious relationship despite meeting all your other criteria. And unfortunately women these days aren't ready until after they've hit the wall and not in their prime like nature intended.

The biggest obstacle these days seems to be the intangibles when we look beyond the numbers.

The increased male attention and competition that most girls are accustomed to likely means that she might not take you very seriously. Even if you start dating/fucking one of these .01% girls you're looking for, the ease of access they have to dick through their social media and phones may make you reluctant to commit because one of these "in their prime" girls has every chance in the world to jump on a new dick as soon as the opportunity arises if she wants to. Surely, if you think she's worthy of commitment, lots of others guys would want that too.

Would you rather be the guy paying the girl's bills, or the guy who meets her on tinder and bangs her out within an hour? I don't think any level of game can totally eliminate or significantly reduce the possibility of infidelity because the greater weight of our current social and cultural norms is just too much for us to make commitment a serious option in the major U.S. cities.

How many guys on this message board alone have stories of banging girls who already have a boyfriend or husband?

[speakeasy]

(06-15-2014 10:29 AM)Gorgiass Wrote:  

Well, there is some good news. According to http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/ne.../downtown/ which deals with one of the demographically older districts, the proportion of 20-35 yo is 29%, which already doubles your total right there, even more so for the rest of the city which is younger. There are states with total populations of 600,000 and you have 600,000 women in your dating age range within a few square miles of you!

And since we're getting geeky... By assuming compatibility with 1/10 of women 3x in a row, you are essentially assuming that there will only be a mutual attraction and compatibility with girls aged 20-35 at the rate of 1 per every 1000 that you approach. I don't think the odds are nearly so bad as that. And with the good game resulting from studying of the material here a guy can almost eliminate that second x.10 entirely!

The last 3 numbers are the hardest to determine as there's no way of looking up the stats to get the real numbers. You just have to use your intuition and make a best guess. How many women do you have to walk past before one makes your head swivel? Even 1 in 10 is likely a very generous estimate. In America anyway. Maybe somewhere like Kiev or Medellin, it's 1 in 3.

I did an experiment on Tinder not long ago where I took a very good looking guy, definitely in the top 5% of men and then right-swiped the first 2,000 women that came up. He had around a 25% match rate. So even for a top guy out there 1 in 4 women responded. And these are women actively looking for dates. So you can imagine for an average guy the number would be far less than 1 in 10. I just chose that number arbitrarily.

As far as personality compatibility goes that's very hard to determine and you can only make your best guess.

Keep in mind though, we're talking about trying to determine how many girls out there in your pool are optimal for you. Most people don't end up with a girlfriend or wife that's optimal, they tend to settle on whatever they can get at a certain point. That's especially true with personality. How many dudes end up with some crazy, annoying girlfriend but stick with her anyway? So if you're only looking for a girlfriend and you loosen your standards you can find way more options, but in this case I'm talking the type of girl where you feel like you hit the jackpot. Any given person may only have a few hundred women like that in a large city.

Now if you're only looking to bang and not get serious with any girl, then the formula is: number of females in your city * percentage of them in your dating age range * percentage of them who are sexually available(i.e. not in relationships or those willing to cheat) * percentage of those that pass your WB threshold * percentage of those who would be attracted to you. In this case the number would be way higher because you've thrown out personality for the most part and most guys will have casual sex with a wider variety of girls(as far age, looks, race) than they would settle down and get serious with.

So once again let's look at L.A.'s 6 million women. Let's say now just bang and not get serious, your age range widens from 18-45(if you don't mind cougars). Let's say that's now 50% of the population in that range. So now we're at 3 million women. Now let's say a third of them are sexually available and not tied up in marriage or a relationship. So now we're at 1 million. Now let's say 1 in 4 random girls pass your WB threshold. Now we're at 250,000. Now let's say you are attractive to 1 in 10 of those women you WB. Now we're at 25,000. So that would mean if these numbers are fairly accurate, there would be ~25,000 possible lays in a city of 12 million for a guy, or 2.5% of the female population.

[party1981]

A similar thought I've had about women and math:

The day I was born, how many females were born in the same city? Very roughly speaking, that's the same number of women I can reject each day and still keep an even pace.

As one example, let's suppose there are 20 females born in the same city where I was born. 32 years later (I'm 32), I reject all 10 who are still single. Will I run out of women? No, the next day another 20 females were born. I can reject all of the single ones from that day too. Next day, same thing. The point is, because there are so many women out there, because so many people are born each day, you can constantly reject tons of women, and you will never run out of them.

It never quite feels like this, because you only see a tiny fraction of these women in your life. But if you run through the math in your head, they're out there, waiting for you, and you shouldn't be afraid to next them.

[speakeasy]

(06-15-2014 03:37 PM)party1981 Wrote:  

A similar thought I've had about women and math:

The day I was born, how many females were born in the same city? Very roughly speaking, that's the same number of women I can reject each day and still keep an even pace.

As one example, let's suppose there are 20 females born in the same city where I was born. 32 years later (I'm 32), I reject all 10 who are still single. Will I run out of women? No, the next day another 20 females were born. I can reject all of the single ones from that day too. Next day, same thing. The point is, because there are so many women out there, because so many people are born each day, you can constantly reject tons of women, and you will never run out of them.

It never quite feels like this, because you only see a tiny fraction of these women in your life. But if you run through the math in your head, they're out there, waiting for you, and you shouldn't be afraid to next them.

But are you factoring in all the other men competing for them? Ratios at prime ages(in the USA) skew heavily in women's favor.

[anonymous123]

Long before I discovered the "Manosphere", I had this theory that 5% of guys get 95% of all the pussy. I was just sure of this concept. I thought I was one of the very few that felt this way (seriously, for probably 20 years). I stumbled across this site about 7 or 8 months ago, only to discover that this is a well established theory and that there are others out there that believe this to be true.

If you are going to apply the "Drake equation" as if hunting for pussy is like searching for extraterrestrial life, let's make sure to adjust for the 5/95 rule. Some life forms simply have a better space ship.

[CJ_W]

Interesting, but you forget some main cruxes of all of this:

1)in a big city like L.A. people come and go all the time, meaning really, he has a MUCH large pool of women to pull from than the population of L.A.

2) Take a look at the sig. Even IF he's not the kind of guy to not want to steal another man's women. . .Women aren't going to tell him if they want him that badly. (happened to me MANY times)

SO, pretty much, in a large international city, Men have an unlimited pool of women. It's up to the man to master the "pussy delivery system"

[speakeasy]

(06-16-2014 02:43 AM)CJ_W Wrote:  

(06-15-2014 02:12 AM)speakeasy Wrote:  

Interesting, but you forget some main cruxes of all of this:

1)in a big city like L.A. people come and go all the time, meaning really, he has a MUCH large pool of women to pull from than the population of L.A.

The amount of people coming and going doesn't mean anything if it's about the same amount of new arrivals as people leaving. Every woman that leaves a city is one less in your pool and every woman that comes is one more in the pool. All that matters is how many potential females of your preferred demographic and traits are in your vicinity at any given time.

Quote:

SO, pretty much, in a large international city, Men have an unlimited pool of women. It's up to the man to master the "pussy delivery system"

Yes and no. If we're talking about just lays, then you are right. Even with those rough hypothethical numbers I plugged in just above, that leaves you with 25,000 potential lays in a city of 12 million. That means you could date one new woman every single day for the next 68 years without a repeat woman.

However, if you're talking about a woman to get serious with who is close to a "perfect" match, the pool is substantially less than that, though that of course varies widely depending on your own personal standards and attractiveness.

[germanico]

Tynan (Herbal on Neils Strauss The Game) did this a couple of years back on his blog.

Adding his many gay ass requirements ("She has to be vegetarian, she has to be into yoga, she has to have X thing") he ended up with 4 possible matches in the entire US of A.

Fuck that, heres the only criteria you need:

She makes my dick hard?

Yes: tap that.

No: move along.

[party1981]

(06-16-2014 04:00 AM)germanico Wrote:  

Tynan (Herbal on Neils Strauss The Game) did this a couple of years back on his blog.

Adding his many gay ass requirements ("She has to be vegetarian, she has to be into yoga, she has to have X thing") he ended up with 4 possible matches in the entire US of A.

Fuck that, heres the only criteria you need:

She makes my dick hard?

Yes: tap that.

No: move along.

Amen