Hi it’s me your own serial dater...er...data-digger. Earlier we learned how to get great pictures, best length for a first message and exactly what to say in the first message. All that combined with some humor, personal charm and luck should land you at least a few dates. Now that you’re getting ready for a date it’s important to know what you should DO there. Talk, of course. More specifically, ask questions. Everybody loves to talk about themselves. What questions to ask? I’ll tell you, but first…I have a hypothetical question for you.
There are two students - let’s say, Ajay Agarwal and Abdul Zain. They’re equally intelligent and hard working. They are of the same age and study in the same class in the same school. Can you tell me who is more likely to get more personal attention from the teacher in class? Also, can you tell me the reason why? There’s a 50% chance you’d guess the right answer but I bet you have no idea why. It’s Ajay Agarwal who is more likely get personal attention from teachers. It doesn’t make sense, right? There’s no common sense way to come to this conclusion. But there’s a statistical way. How? Two economics professors at Stanford and Caltech got together in 2015 to find out exactly that.
They studied pairs of equally intelligent and skillful students and professionals and looked at their academic scores and professional earnings. The only difference between these people was that of names. It turned out that students with surnames beginning with earlier letters of the alphabet were more likely to get personal attention from the teachers, therefore more likely to succeed academically.
But why am I telling you all this? How will this help you have a successful romantic date? Here’s how. A date must be a light hearted affair full of fun and not too heavy conversation. But you also want to know some serious information. “Is she religious”? “Does he have a police record”? “Is there more on the cards after the cafe/bar”? “Is there any long term potential in this”? How do you keep it light and still get serious info? That’s where big data comes in.
Meet your new friend “secondary inference”. Secondary inference means anything that’s not a common sense conclusion that you can draw from data. If I told you that ice-cream sales peak during summer season, you wouldn’t be surprised. It makes sense to you. But when I told you that the first letter of your surname can affect your academic performance, it was quite surprising. That’s because it’s not immediately obvious and took some statistical digging.
Cool. First some ground rules. If you’re a guy, never mention sex on a date in any way. At all. I know you’re dying to know if anything’s gonna happen later but do NOT bring it up yourself. What you can do is do some secondary inferencing. Ask her whether she likes the taste of beer. Yep you read that right. How do I know this? Allow me to explain. Okcupid asks it’s users hundreds of question to match them with the right people. The questions range from animal preference to politics to religion to hypothetical situations. They’re all user submitted questions. Two of the questions were “Do you like the taste of beer?” and “Would you consider having sex on the first date?”. People of both the genders that answered yes to the first questions were 60% more likely than average to answer yes (80% more likely to answer ‘maybe’) to the second question. Turns out, preference for beer is a strong indicator of adventurousness on the first date!
Another thing you might wanna find out is if you have any long term potential. I have THREE questions for you to determine that.
Do you like horror movies?
Have you ever traveled around another country alone?
Wouldn’t it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?
These questions are from an American website with mostly American users. However, you can change these questions slightly to fit the Indian context.
Let us say..
Do you like “Raaz”?
Have you travelled another state alone?
Wouldn’t it be fun to leave this boring life and live in a jungle?
The interesting thing is yes or no doesn’t matter here. What matters is whether you both have the SAME answer. If you both answer yes/no to these questions you have a high chance of dating long term. How do I know this?
A lot of people close their OkCupid accounts. When they do so they sometimes leave reasons for closing the account. One of the reasons is “I met someone on OkCupid”. Sometimes., they even mention the username of their significant other. OkCupid analysed the answers of 34,260 such users and their significant others. A whopping 32% of these users agreed on ALL 3 of these questions. Check out the comparative performance of three serious questions meant to determine long term potential and our three light hearted questions. The lighthearted ones outperform the other by a wide margin.
Politics can also be an acrimonious subject. But it’s also an important subject. People with opposing political views usually don’t date for too long. So how do you find out your date’s political views without saying anything politically controversial? Simply ask them if they like the people in their life to be simple or complex. Here’s the lowdown - liberals like complex people and conservatives like simple people in general.
Now you know how to ask simple questions to find out some heavy stuff. Don’t forget to keep it fun. Till next time...happy dating.
Piyush Tainguriya
An engineer by education, writer by profession and a stand-up comic by vocation. I'm only half joking though.
January 25, 2018
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