nice intelligent girl looks for equally nice intelligent guy

[guest]

hey there.. i've got the feeling that merely going out isn't enough to find someone to be with --mainly because it's really hard to actually initiate something-- so i thought i just might try it here. easy-going and intelligent are the main criteria, the rest will sort itself out later. youve_got_mail36@yahoo.de

[DACrowe]

Whilst I'm fairly well caught up on the literature on intelligence testing, how do you propose measuring niceness? I assume you don't mean strict equality when you talk about 'equally nice', but how wide are your error bars (if that's not a personal question)?

[donpablo]

how wide are your error bars?

Tea meets keyboard, screen, desk

[maxray]

Whilst I'm fairly well caught up on the literature on intelligence testing, how do you propose measuring niceness? I assume you don't mean strict equality when you talk about 'equally nice', but how wide are your error bars (if that's not a personal question)?

I think that measuring niceness can be pretty interesting.
We can go the easiest way and count the average number of nice things done daily, but that will require defining "nice", and that's even harder.
Or we can just make people do some irrelevant tests with a lot of horrible personal questions that you have to answer in your own words. Thus the people with the lowest amount of swear words will get the highest niceness score.

[4AD]

well I think I'm nice and intelligent and I'm certainly male..

[DACrowe]

We can go the easiest way and count the average number of nice things done daily, but that will require defining "nice", and that's even harder.

That's one obstacle, but it isn't insurmountable. We could define niceness perhaps in terms of a (foreseeable) positive imbalance in your actions between the utility you gain (or lose) and the utility someone else gains. If we could define utility. One problem is timeframe. If I got a day without doing anything especially nice, am I not a nice person? What if I did a really nice thing yesterday. Yet it seems fair to say that someone whose gone a year without doing anything nice probably isn't nice (or maybe not; if Superman saves the world does he get to chill out for the next few years?)

Or we can just make people do some irrelevant tests with a lot of horrible personal questions that you have to answer in your own words. Thus the people with the lowest amount of swear words will get the highest niceness score.

That doesn't adequately control for 'wet blanket syndrome' or alternatively the Stanley Millgram folks who will politely answer horrible questions but just as politely torture people on the request of an experimenter. Torture isn't nice.

well I think ...

Pfffff! Call that a valid metric! We're trying to do serious science here!

[Ru]

Surely... Being at the University of St Andrews, a certain degree of 'intelligence' is assumed. Or is that expecting too much?

[maxray]

That's one obstacle, but it isn't insurmountable. We could define niceness perhaps in terms of a (foreseeable) positive imbalance in your actions between the utility you gain (or lose) and the utility someone else gains. If we could define utility. One problem is timeframe. If I got a day without doing anything especially nice, am I not a nice person? What if I did a really nice thing yesterday. Yet it seems fair to say that someone whose gone a year without doing anything nice probably isn't nice (or maybe not; if Superman saves the world does he get to chill out for the next few years?)

That doesn't adequately control for 'wet blanket syndrome' or alternatively the Stanley Millgram folks who will politely answer horrible questions but just as politely torture people on the request of an experimenter. Torture isn't nice.

We can actually define niceness as a combination of politeness and negative douchebaggery. I mean, torturers can be nice in everyday life, can't they?
If we want to be incredibly lazy, we can just define that if a person is not completely horrible, they are nice.