Everybody like the idea of effecting change, and not only because they can use “effect” as a verb. Teachers exhort their students to go effect change. Politicians call upon countrymen to effect change. I think, on its own, that this is terrible advice. Why? Bad effects. (Note the parallelism - you can’t get that ish in a Bush SotU speech.)

Not to go all Burkean on you - Long live the Whigs! - but if we have two arguments, one for maintaining the status quo and one for change, that seem more or less the same in their benefits, we ought stick with the status quo.  The effect of the change is only an expected effect, while the status quo is a known quantity; given our natural risk aversion, Burke’s argument is borderline tautological.  I think history, particularly that of the Twentieth Century, bears this out.

We count those who got women the vote, ended colonialism, and fought for civil rights among those in favor of change.  These are all good things (though I must note that the 19th Amendment was soon followed by the 21st, and thus women’s suffrage appears to have pushed us gentlemen back towards the pub).  Often forgotten, however, is that communists, fascists, jihadists and the rest were also agents of radical change.  If we tally up the utility on each side of the ledger, it wouldn’t suprise me if we’d been better off rejecting all radical changes proposed during the 20th century.  If anything, young people in particular err on the side of “change, change, change!”  The call to effect change needs to be tempered by the call to preserve what is worthy.

But…but…surely we need someone to argue for change?  Surely some changes, like the granting of civil rights, are worthy even if initially unpopular?  Every new idea needs to build from one early, crazy believer into conventional wisdom, does it not?  But given the wild uncertainty of what these changes bring, how can we bring ourselves to support any of them?

And that is exactly the point.  The calls for willy-nilly change that one often hears proferred to young people mean nothing without some advice on how to interpret the good and worthy changes from the evil and ineffective ones.  Don’t kill all the activists, then: just the mindless ones.

Another entry in the “Why do I bother with New York Times?” series: So a lady in a certain state (Hint: it’s my least favorite state and it rhymes with Blue Cork) sued under Title IX because cheerleaders weren’t at her daughter’s basketball games.  Now, neither her daughter nor the team wanted the cheerleaders at the game, so I’m not really sure why the mom thought this was a good idea in the first place, but in any case the fact that she won the complaint seems to me the result of a total misunderstanding of what the cheerleaders do.  Now, the entire article (and the reason for the suit, it appears) is premised on the idea that cheerleaders are there to support the team, whereas I contend that the cheerleaders are there to, I don’t know, lead the fans in the eponymous cheers.  So the fact that the status quo, where cheerleaders go to games with big crowds (football, men’s bball, and some playoff games for the other sports) strikes me as perfectly reasonable and not against the spirit of Title IX at all.

Unsurpisingly, some of these small-town cheerleading squads in NY have been decimated as everyone drops out on hearing that they no longer go to away games (since they’re home cheering for the girls) and that they have to cheer crowdless, empty fieldhouses.

ANOTHER NEW YEAR IN THE BANK; I spent it out in Oregon and saw a bunch of the old crew.  The number of beards attached to members of that crew seems to be growing at quite a clip.  The week off definitely wasn’t a bad thing.

A few people back home asked me, “Kev, you’re such a debonair gentlemanly type, how come you’re not dating anyone these days?”  (Well, I’m paraphrasing about the debonair bit.  It’s more like, “Cure, you should wear T-shirts aside from the ones you get for free at various events, and how come you’re not seeing anyone?”)  Well, this sounds like a mathematical problem to me, so I hope you’ll spare me the exposition.

First, I’m really only interested in girls that are intelligent, interesting, virtuous and attractive.  I don’t think it’s too much to ask that I’d rather date a girl who is smarter than, say, 70% of the girls my age out there.  After all, I have three separate pieces of art involving math jokes on my wall, and I think I’d start crying if I was dating someone who said things like, “So, this Winston Churchill, who was he again?”   ‘Interesting’ is interesting because it’s more personal than the other criteria; I would say, at a bare minimum, that the girl and I ought to share at least a couple hobbies.  If she didn’t like travel, I’m not sure how fare we could go.
And yes, that pun was intentional.

So say top 20% of my interestingness scale.  Virtuous is the real killer, because I don’t really have a high opinion of the morals of most people.  I don’t mean that people now or people here live lives that I don’t really approve of; I mean that people throughout history and across the world have done so.  Now most of this lack of virtue is fine if we’re to be friends - I’m not one to impose my beliefs - but I don’t really think it makes sense to date someone who, say, is unfaithful or intemperate or overly covetous, etc.  I’ll say top 15% here is the minimum, and even that’s a stretch.

Attractiveness really is the least important.  Obviously, ceteris paribus, I would prefer a girl I find more attractive.  But I wouldn’t count out anyone who is, say, in the top half looks-wise among girls my age.

So here’s the question: what are the odds that a girl I meet fits these criteria?  This is really a very basic statistics question, and I’m quite sure than something like 99.999% of high school grads and a not substantially smaller proportion of college grads have no idea what the answer is.  I think this is not a good thing.

First, if intelligence, virtue, attractiveness and interestingness are uncorrelated, we can use that E(WXYZ)=E(W)E(X)E(Y)E(Z) = .3*.2*.5*.15 = .0045, which means that 1 in 222 girls I meet are worth dating.  Ouch!  Luckily, it’s not that bad, since some of these criteria are positively correlated.  Let’s assume that attractiveness is not correlated with the other measures.  I’ll say that half of interesting girls are smart, half of virtuous girls are interesting (this might be a poor assumption!), and half of smart girls are interesting, with the converse also true for each pair.  Let’s just work through this.  We first dump the 50% unattractive girls, then dump the 85% of these that are not virtuous.  This leaves us with .5*.15 = 7.5% of girls that are both virtuous and attractive.  Once here, we know half of these girls are interesting, which gives us 3.75% of girls that are virtuous, interesting and attractive.  Now we want the smart ones from this group: I made it easy, since both half of interesting and half of attractive girls are smart, so we can just divide by 2 again here.  This gives us 1.875% of girls, or 1 in 53 girls worth looking at.

In any case, being very generous in what types of girls I’m interested in, and making very generous correlation assumptions, I’m still only interested in dating 1 in 53 girls I meet.  Given that many of those 1 in 53 are either dating someone else or not interested in me (yes, I know, but I’ve been told that this can happen), the odds aren’t too favorable!

(A final note: Go see Children of Men, the new Juaron film; he did Y Tu Mama Tambien and the new Harry Potter.  It’s quite good, though it’s no Gattaca as far as “plausible sci-fi drama” goes.)