Applied statistics

K-I-S-S-I-N-G

In tenth grade, I developed math-related anxiety in the musty, oddly lit room of my Algebra II class. Up until this point, the functions and foiling, the calculations and the coefficients had all made sense. When I checked my work (if I checked my work), the answer gave graceful way to the original number like the unraveling of an expertly tied knot. Yet as October came and we entered another unit, I stared without understanding at the foreign numbers and symbols arranging and rearranging themselves on the dry erase board. Suddenly intellectually impotent, I could no longer reconcile the exponential-ridden formulas with the gracefully effortless arcs of hyperbolas and parabolas before me.

In tenth grade, I also went out on my first date. This also became a new source of anxiety. All of the preconceptions I had about how dates are these sweeping events of intense excitement and crazy happiness and instant attraction ended up not tarnished, but not fully realized either. I was happy, but I couldn’t help but to feel confused as the reality of things refused to fit the pattern I’d expected.

My freshman year of college brought on failures in Calculus and a number of awkward romantic miscommunications, so I rejoined the math-minded world in my sophomore year for a statistics class weighted with worry. Was I doomed to repeat the mistakes of my past like the condemned coefficients of Pascal’s Triangle?

Trouble in Paradise?

I learned a lot in statistics, and I liked statistics because it can be applied to the world around us in practical, understandable ways.

This is my scatted rendition of applied statistics as I expertly combine the two things I am not an expert at: dating and mathematics.

I’ve noticed an exciting trend among my roommates and me this summer: We’ve cumulatively been asked out more in the past three weeks than we have in the past three years. If charted in x-y coordinates, it’d be explosively exponential. I’ve also noticed a disturbing trend: we’re prone to making decisions about people after a short amount of time. We decide what they are to us before fully learning who they are.

In statistics, one of the first tenets you learn is that you cannot trust a study with a sample size of less than thirty. In fact, you shouldn’t really be messing with any studies with sample sizes of less than fifty. We’ll refer to sample size as N from now on.

N > or = 30 (okay)

N > or = 50 (better)

N > or = 50+ (even better)

Let’s consider the following scenario for the rest of this statistics lesson: I meet a boy. We chat and exchange numbers. We text two times back and forth, logging a total of, say, fifteen exchanges of words, most of which are bland, non-committal comments about workdays. We hang out again with friends. We text one more time, neither one of us making any solid effort or plan to see the other again. The End.

I’d say this probably accounts for just under thirty interactions, most of which were everyday exchanges or the weird process of making of plans with someone whose likes and preferences I didn’t know. This definitely does not begin to enter the realm of legitimate statistical analysis. Far too small of an N.

However, for every conversation we had, I had about two conversations about those conversations. What was not explained in the last scenario is how every word, emoticon, and punctuation mark was fair game for ruthless judgement. With so few data points for review, each one, no matter how mundane or commonplace, became grounds for rejection or idolization.

He used an exclamation point? It’s a sign of perfect unity.

He said “okay” instead of “sounds good?” He’s a sexist jerk who will never appreciate me fully and will never help unload the dishwasher.

I’d created an N of a legitimate sample size based off of tangential, unfounded data points, conversations about conversations. Having these conversations is both exciting and frustrating; it’s exciting to have something new and unknown to discuss, but it’s frustrating to be building judgements about someone that I didn’t know, and the whole point of this dating/talking/flirting/whatever is to get to know someone.

I recently had a friend say a guy was “driving her crazy,” because he came to pick up his watch from our house instead of meeting her somewhere or having her drop it off at his house. He was “driving her crazy” for being a commonplace, decent human and doing a commonplace, decent human thing. This contentedness with the superficial, with gently scraping at the veneer without the intent to peel away at our own or the other’s layers, leaves us with no true understanding of the other party as a person, let alone a potential friend or significant other.

But, in my limited experience, I too am guilty of both intentionally and subconsciously eclipsing myself in a way that makes getting to know someone impossible. This seems to be a common behavior among my friends and across my broader generation. It’s easier to spectate than to engage, so I make snap judgements based off of so few interactions, never giving myself a chance to step back and look for patterns.

In a world where most everything we touch is either controlled or analyzed by some algorithm, math may seem that it’s steeped its way into too much of our daily activities to apply another principle to our lives, but I think that this version of applied statistics may be humble enough to be useful for as long as this new upswing in my date-ability continues.

Just please don’t ask me to derive an equation.

These female elephants were running away from a male elephant, so maybe this problem isn’t species-specific. (Run, ladies, run!)