BBC documentary on "Speed Dating"

The BBC had a documentary on "Speed Dating" yesterday, featuring scientific work on attraction (facial, body, personality), including Karl Grammer. The Speed Dating event itself, held in London, was filmed and provided participants with a dial to indicate how attracted they were to the person across from them. Here are some highlights:

* the skinny "nice guy" Scottish man got a big confidence boost (and attractiveness boost) just by going out on dates, and dressing better.

* negative first impressions were quite hard to recover from

* facial similarity did *not* predict attraction. In fact, the opposite happened: there seemed to be a pattern of symmetry in the masculinity-femininity of faces of attracted pairs. Very masculine-faced men were attracted to very feminine-faced women and vice-versa, and caregiver-faced men were attracted to less feminine female faces (?) and vice versa (?) (I wonder if this would be a case of settling for the attainable).

* body shape: waist-to-hip ratio was the most important predictor of male attraction, whereas the only significant predictor of female attraction was the man's height (despite all the morphing they did in the computer, creating the "perfect man").

* SeductionClub guys got more friend matches, and fewer date matches than average. Their strategy was confrontational, putting the woman down, but this just made them come across as assholes (friendly assholes?). Talk about LJBF!

* the 32-yo woman had been a bitch to all the men, thereby making herself unattractive to them. When her attitude changed, she started seeing opportunities that she would have missed.

* the scientists failed to predict any long-term relationships. But, unlike the BBC, I don't consider this a failure. The problem is that they started out with 20 men and 20 women from the general population (selected for age, it seems), so there *were* no long-term relationships to be predicted. My opinion is that you need more demographic filtering, to give people more things in common. But I love it how the BBC thrives on honest science (or semi-science) and happily reports failure.

computer-formalized math needs multiple representations, just like human mathematicians

I wish I had written this:
Manfred Kerber, Martin Polleti - On the Design of Mathematical Concepts

That foundational systems like first-order logic or set theory can be used to construct large parts of existing mathematics and formal reasoning is one of the deep mathematical insights. Unfortunately it has been used in the field of automated theorem proving as an argument to disregard the need for a diverse variety of representations. While design issues play a major rôle in the formation of mathematical concepts, the theorem proving community has largely neglected them. In this paper we argue that this leads not only to problems at the human computer interaction end, but that it causes severe problems at the core of the systems, namely at their representation and reasoning capabilities.

This is the main reason I don't like the mainstream approach to formalizing mathematics. On a previous post, I compared it to doing everything in assembly-language (even though people at Nijmegen don't mainly use lambda-terms, but more powerful tactics instead).

Kerber has also made slides, where he had made a point about representation with the clever problem of domino-tiling an NxN square missing 2 tiles at opposite corners.