effort普特英语听力：剩男剩女爱情三大定律

2021年1月21日发(作者：sheltered)

普特英语听力：剩男剩女爱情三大定律



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Today I want to talk to you about the mathematics of love.
Now, I think that we can all agree that mathematicians are
famously excellent at finding love. But it's not just because
of our dashing personalities, superior conversational skills
and excellent pencil cases. It's also because we've actually
done an awful lot of work into the maths of how to find the
perfect partner.



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Now, in my favorite paper on the subject, which is
entitled,
Peter Backus tries to rate his chances of finding love. Now,
Peter's not a very greedy man. Of all of the available women
in the U.K., all Peter's looking for is somebody who lives
near him, somebody in the right age range, somebody with a
university degree, somebody he's likely to get on well with,
somebody who's likely to be attractive, somebody who's likely
to find him attractive. (Laughter) And comes up with an
estimate of 26 women in the whole of the UK. It's not looking
very good, is it Peter? Now, just to put that into
perspective, that's about 400 times fewer than the best
estimates of how many intelligent extraterrestrial life forms
there are. And it also gives Peter a 1 in 285,000 chance of
bumping into any one of these special ladies on a given night
out. I'd like to think that's why mathematicians don't really
bother going on nights out anymore.



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The thing is that I personally don't subscribe to such a
pessimistic view. Because I know, just as well as all of you
do, that love doesn't really work like that. Human emotion
isn't neatly ordered and rational and easily predictable. But
I also know that that doesn't mean that mathematics hasn't
got something that it can offer us because, love, as with
most of life, is full of patterns and mathematics is,
ultimately, all about the study of patterns. Patterns from
predicting the weather to the fluctuations in the stock
market, to the movement of the planets or the growth of
cities. And if we're being honest, none of those things are
exactly neatly ordered and easily predictable, either.
Because I believe that mathematics is so powerful that it has
the potential to offer us a new way of looking at almost
anything. Even something as mysterious as love. And so, to
try to persuade you of how totally amazing, excellent and
relevant mathematics is, I want to give you my top three
mathematically verifiable tips for love.



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Okay, so Top Tip #1
：
How to win at online dating. So my
favorite online dating website is OkCupid, not least because
it was started by a group of mathematicians. Now, because
they're mathematicians, they have been collecting data on
everybody who uses their site for almost a decade. And
they've been trying to search for patterns in the way that we
talk about ourselves and the way that we interact with each
other on an online dating website. And they've come up with
some seriously interesting findings. But my particular
favorite is that it turns out that on an online dating
website, how attractive you are does not dictate how popular


you are, and actually, having people think that you're ugly
can work to your advantage. Let me show you how this works.
In a thankfully voluntary section of OkCupid, you are allowed
to rate how attractive you think people are on a scale
between 1 and 5. Now, if we compare this score, the average
score, to how many messages a selection of people receive,
you can begin to get a sense of how attractiveness links to
popularity on an online dating website.



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This is the graph that the OkCupid guys have come up with.
And the important thing to notice is that it's not totally
true that the more attractive you are, the more messages you
get. But the question arises then of what is it about people
up here who are so much more popular than people down here,
even though they have the same score of attractiveness? And
the reason why is that it's not just straightforward looks
that are important. So let me try to illustrate their
findings with an example. So if you take someone like Portia
de Rossi, for example, everybody agrees that Portia de Rossi
is a very beautiful woman. Nobody thinks that she's ugly, but
she's not a supermodel, either. If you compare Portia de
Rossi to someone like Sarah Jessica Parker, now, a lot of
people, myself included, I should say, think that Sarah
Jessica Parker is seriously fabulous and possibly one of the
most beautiful creatures to have ever have walked on the face
of the Earth. But some other people, i.e., most of the
Internet, seem to think that she looks a bit like a horse.
(Laughter) Now, I think that if you ask people how attractive
they thought Sarah Jessica Parker or Portia de Rossi were,
and you ask them to give them a score between 1 and 5, I


reckon that they'd average out to have roughly the same score.
But the way that people would vote would be very different.
So Portia's scores would all be clustered around the 4
because everybody agrees that she's very beautiful, whereas
Sarah Jessica Parker completely divides opinion. There'd be a
huge spread in her scores. And actually it's this spread that
counts. It's this spread that makes you more popular on an
online Internet dating website. So what that means then is
that if some people think that you're attractive, you're
actually better off having some other people think that
you're a massive minger. That's much better than everybody
just thinking that you're the cute girl next door.



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Now, I think this begins makes a bit more sense when you
think in terms of the people who are sending these messages.
So let's say that you think somebody's attractive, but you
suspect that other people won't necessarily be that
interested. That means there's less competition for you and
it's an extra incentive for you to get in touch. Whereas
compare that to if you think somebody is attractive but you
suspect that everybody is going to think they're attractive.
Well, why would you bother humiliating yourself, let's be
honest? Here's where the really interesting part comes.
Because when people choose the pictures that they use on an
online dating website, they often try to minimize the things
that they think some people will find unattractive. The
classic example is people who are, perhaps, a little bit
overweight deliberately choosing a very cropped photo, or
bald men, for example, deliberately choosing pictures where
they're wearing hats. But actually this is the opposite of


what you should do if you want to be successful. You should
really, instead, play up to whatever it is that makes you
different, even if you think that some people will find it
unattractive. Because the people who fancy you are just going
to fancy you anyway, and the unimportant losers who don't,
well, they only play up to your advantage.



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Okay, Top Tip #2
：
How to pick the perfect partner. So
let's imagine then that you're a roaring success on the
dating scene. But the question arises of how do you then
convert that success into longer-term happiness and in
particular, how do you decide when is the right time to
settle down? Now generally, it's not advisable to just cash
in and marry the first person who comes along and shows you
any interest at all. But, equally, you don't really want to
leave it too long if you want to maximize your chance of
long-term happiness. As my favorite author, Jane Austen, puts
it,
feel or inspire affection again.
Jane. What do you know about love?



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So the question is then, how do you know when is the
right time to settle down given all the people that you can
date in your lifetime? Thankfully, there's a rather delicious
bit of mathematics that we can use to help us out here,
called optimal stopping theory. So let's imagine then, that
you start dating when you're 15 and ideally, you'd like to be
married by the time that you're 35. And there's a number of
people that you could potentially date across your lifetime,