HurryDate and the Theory of Interest-Context Expecti

July 2002

Last night, I went on my first Speed Date. Speed dating is an organized evening event where you sequentially meet 25 people of the opposite sex within your age range. After spending three minutes talking to each of them, you (discreetly) circle either yes or no on your card next to their number. At the end of the evening, you submit your card and a few days later you are notified by e-mail of any two-way matches. A two-way match is when you have circled yes and the other person has circled yes for you.  You receive no information about people for whom you did not circle yes.

The particular speed date on which I went last night was organized by HurryDate. It took place in the Bier Market in downtown Toronto in a back room of the bar.  My impressions:

• The sampling of people is remarkably ordinary. More extroverted than average, more yuppie than average.  Beyond that, I couldn't discern any other particular weighting of characteristics
• The entire thing is very loud. Cacophonous, in fact. 50 people chatting away at full speed in a small space. It would be difficult for ESL or hearing-impaired people with the level of background chatter.
• Asking the question "What do you do?" produces remarkably little useful information on the person.
• Three minutes is more than enough in most cases to determine that you're not interested in the person. You might think that you couldn't run out of things to talk about within two minutes and 30 seconds, but you'd be wrong.

My experience: Out of the 25 people, I checked one "yes", and then put in a second "yes" for good measure. My one "yes" was to one of the organizers of the event, who joined at the last second to take the place of a woman who was a no-show.  She was clever and observant and pretty. I have no idea whether she checked yes for me, but I guess I will know within two days (matches are e-mailed within three days)! There were a lot of other fun people, but I simply had no interest in getting to know them further.

My silliest intercourse:

Me: Ask me something interesting...
She: Okay... um... if you were a piece of furniture, what would you be?
(awkward pause)
Me: (amusedly and dismissively) I have no idea. (changes topic)

The verdict: Fun. Exhausting. Worth doing again sometime, but would be more fun with a friend. Maybe check out 25dates next time.

The theory: back in early 2001 I worked out a theory for the expected number of people that you will meet in whom you're interested within a given context. Contexts are things like church, hurrydate, friends of friends, dancing, gym, work, etc.

Note to reader: The following is best read with a very dry sense of humor

What I created is a formula that calculates what is known in mathematics as the expectus. In this case, it is the average number of people in whom you are interested whom you will meet in a given context.

Where:

E_i is the expectus.

n is the number of people in the context of the appropriate demographic (in my case, women, age 24-32)

p_i is the probability that I will be interested in a given person within the context

p_d is the probability that I will have a discussion that is sufficient to determine whether I'm interested in them

For example, at a concert, n is quite high, p_i is nominal, but p_d is exceptionally low.  What percentage of people at a concert do you actually having meaningful discussion with, right?

Here's my rough analysis for a few familiar contexts:

Travelling seems to have a bizarrely high E_i and I have no idea why. Take Chile, for instance.

Some contexts benefit from repeatability.  For example, each time I go on a Hurrydate, the expectus is 0.2, where as church and work are more fixed communities, where the probabilities collapse into realities.

This analysis is also handy when making new friends in a new city.  I did some similar pragmatic thinking when I was getting to know people in Chile. Where do you make friends in another culture? Church, it seems, is the best option in most cases. And actually, the friendships that I found were most often initially based on attraction, so the analysis isn’t really all that different.

Postscript:

La chica for whom I checked "yes" (the organizer) said "no", and my "maybe yes" said "yes". Will I write? Probably not. Here is the email:

Comments:

My cousin had this to say:

By the way, you should not have wasted your vote on the lady that worked for the dating company. Of course, she couldn't vote yes to any of the people there, that would be a conflict of interest - besides, it would be like fishing off the company pier. To play with their minds, and to see how your theory would work, you should have said yes to everyone there. That way, you would have had an accurate sample. This way, it looks like you scored 50%. (If you eliminate the company woman, you scored 100%.) Stud.