Lifesim and Girlsim, answering the big questions of life

A few days ago I discovered cadCAD while researching token engineering, and in a fit of sudden creativity, I coded up two simulations to life’s questions that had been subtly bothering me.

I know I’ll get a lot of flak from people about the dating simulator, even from dating coaches I took advice from, where making a simulation is “thinking too much” to them. But being able to put hard numbers on my expectations is the biggest thing I never knew I was missing.

What is it?

It’s a framework to make testing simulations of complex systems easier.

Or more specifically: you write your actors and strategies and environmental conditions. cadCAD turns this into a pandas.DataFrame and runs the simulation a number of times for you, letting you switch easily between simulation strategies.

Lifesim

Lifesim 2 – a job search situation simulator


Your bank account balance over 3 years, assuming you keep living expenses at 1800EUR and you look for 3 jobs per month between jobs

Suppose the following:
* You’re looking for a job.
* Your monthly expenses are 1800EUR.
* You have a 20% chance of getting a job once you’ve applied for it (IRL this means personal contact, not sending your resume somewhere)
* Most jobs pay around 3000EUR +- 2000EUR.
* Each month, a job has a 10% chance of firing you.
* You can afford to make 2-3 personal connections per month that lead to jobs.
* Your minimum criteria: job must pay at least your monthly living expenses.

What will your bank account look like in 3 years?

To play with the numbers, set up Jupyter notebook and the Python virtual environment with requirements.txt.

Takeaways

To guarantee that your balance will be positive in 3 years, you must look for jobs which pay 2 * monthly living expenses, and you must meet 2-3 people who can provide such jobs per month.

Girlsim

Suppose you’re a 5. How many girls should you ask out per day, and how choosy can you be, to have a satisfactory dating life?

Girlsim – how choosy can you afford to be?

No, there won't be a picture of a hot girl here
If you’re an ‘8’ who only dates ‘7s and up’, here’s your dating history over 30 lifetimes, assuming you’ve asked out 1000 girls (each colour is a different lifetime)

Critical assumptions

  • By definition, most girls are 5 in hotness. Sorry if I burst any princess bubbles.
  • Women of hotness x prefer hotness x+1 (some prefer less actually, but that’s another discussion).
  • Even if you move to a city where you find most girls hot, after a few months you will grow accustomed.
  • You meet an 8 just about as frequently as other people meet their 8s. That is, it doesn’t matter what an 8 actually looks like.
  • Chemistry is modeled by secret Chemistry numbers. If they match up (around 5-10% chance, or 1-2/20), you have chemistry.

Defining Success

Personally, “the feeling of sexual abundance” is important, i.e. you’re not desperate to cling on to her because she’s the only girl who’ll like you back in a long long time.

There are 2 ways of defining this. Pick one.

  1. 1000 girls is 1 year of asking out 3 girls a day. At least 1 girl a month is a reasonable expectation.

  2. The hotness distribution of girls who accepted you must look like a normal distribution, not discrete.

Takeaways

  1. Don’t be choosy. If you’re a 5 who only dates 7s, you’ll spend most of your time being desperate/insecure in a relationship, or lonely.
  2. Even if you do end up becoming a ‘9’ through hard work and upgrading your wardrobe, you’ll still mostly date 5s and 6s. Why? simple, there are more of them around.
  3. Improving your looks really makes a big difference, but it is no guarantee that you will end up with a hot girl. But it’s okay. There are many dimensions to women other than ‘hotness’.

Life Lessons from Dancing

There’s a big gulf between knowing and doing.
I spent a lot of time thinking of how to think so that I could generate moves. That helped to a certain extent, but I just kept thinking fruitlessly instead of just going out there and making mistakes.

Mistakes are great improvisation opportunities – and they make it more fun to dance with beginners (as long as they follow the basics). You can always alter the tension in the embrace/grip, and this changes the character of the dance and makes new things possible.

It’s not good enough to be good.
You need to be socially connected.
Going to a milonga, salsa party or any kind of partner dance social? The good dancers are usually too busy talking and dancing with other people for you to muscle into the situation in a smooth way.

Same with dating and (probably) making money too. Cold approach is not something you should use all the time, but an additional skill in your pocket that you pull out when the time is right (or if you have no other choice).

What do women want? Probably not what you think they want.
It’s easy to think that women want to see your fancy moves, your cars, your riches. No doubt this catches attention – but catching someone’s attention is just getting your foot in the door.

Many women also mistake attention for attraction, the classic example? Women who wear stockings in winter. Have they got our attention? Yes. Are we attracted? Maybe… but she’s obviously got issues. Similarly, if a leader looks great when dancing, but actually isn’t fun to dance with, or leads moves roughly for the follower, she won’t speak well of him afterwards.

Think of your fancy moves, clothing, watches, cars as the candy wrapper. In the end, the chocolate still needs to taste at least as good as the others, if not better.

What’s the chocolate in dance? It’s the feeling of understanding someone at a level where no words are needed. See Cory Henry and Yoran Vroom at 3:53. Telepathic understanding. Emotional sync.

Maybe that’s why women use so many words and emojis with each other, and obsess over how every part of their behaviour comes across. It’s all about establishing emotional harmony (this implies fitting in).

Appearance and reality, just like attention and attraction, are quite disconnected.
Germany is a strange country – a restaurant’s decor correlates directly with its food quality, whereas in Asia, you purposely go to shabby looking stalls by the side of the road to get great chicken rice that’s just as good as fancy restaurants.

For Germans, eating out is a social occasion, and the food is just one part of it. The atmosphere of course contributes to the occasion, and any restaurateur who neglects that is probably similarly sloppy in other aspects.

This is a classic correlation != causation example that only happened because of a particular mindset towards eating.

Apparently, I appear confident and know what I’m doing.
Or rather, women get insecure about their own abilities too and you have to constantly reassure them that yes, I did intend to lead that move.

I heard some women are like that with their looks.

Again, appearance and reality are two very different things. Sometimes they are connected. Beware this mental shortcut.

As you decide for a particular style, you will alienate people.
Dress normal and everybody will think nothing of you.
Dress preppy and some people will think you’re posing.
Dress goth and most people will think you’re “weird”.
Dress outdoorsy and you won’t stand out to the preppy people.