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It's worth pointing out that in the end, all the statistics in the world don't matter to the specific case that you are facing.

This isn't a trivial rhetorical flourish; this is actually a profoundly important truth about the world and statistics. You aren't dating/marrying a population... you're dating/marrying a specific member out of that population, and the direction of causality is that the population has the statistical properties it does due to its individual members. Population statistics do not casually drive the attributes of its members.




This is missing the point. The statistical relevance here is about search costs and stochastic error inherent in attribute selection. Advice to "pick the right lottery ticket numbers" is not a proper strategy to playing the lottery. The lottery by construct is npv negative.

The only real-debate is wether or not marriage is a game of chance or one of skill. But distinguishing between the two helps to understand the actual complexity of the situation.




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