I never understood the basis of the p value system or its scale.

Statistical analysis was one area of math I never found interesting enough to apply myself at

.05 is essentially zero, from what I gather, with a +/- 5% error

So was is the signifigance of a .01 or a .001

Oh no! You mean driving a Porsche doesn't compensate for a small penis? Damn...

@lujlp: lower p-values mean even more certainty.

A p

This can be (and too often is) deliberately abused. If you are desperate for a result, but don't really have one - just try 20 different measures, and one of them will probably come through for you.

Want to show that IQ is driven by environment? Take a small sample (so that results won't average out much), look at 20 totally different environmental factors, and sheer coincidence will give you a correlation with one of them. Voila, you have a publishable result for some squishy social science journal.

p

Darned special characters - trying again...

Oh no! You mean driving a Porsche doesn't compensate for a small penis? Damn...

@lujlp: lower p-values mean even more certainty.

A p < 0.05 means that there is a 1-in-20 chance of getting the result just through coincidence. This is sort of the minimum you can possible accept - and even then, 1 time in 20, you results don't mean what you think they do.

This can be (and too often is) deliberately abused. If you are desperate for a result, but don't really have one - just try 20 different measures, and one of them will probably come through for you.

Want to show that IQ is driven by environment? Take a small sample (so that results won't average out much), look at 20 totally different environmental factors, and sheer coincidence will give you a correlation with one of them. Voila, you have a publishable result for some squishy social science journal.

p < 0.01 means that there is 1 chance in 100 that your results are just coincidence. P < 0.001 means 1 chance in 1000.

Is this study based on stated preference or revealed preference? Because who tells a stranger they select a mate based on penis size?

So a study on penis sizes is more statistically accurate than a study on global warming?

Oh No!

Bob, it would be more accurate. There are fewer variables to take into account, and it's easy to take measurements and record the data.

Also, it isn't a field where chaos theory has an iron grip on things.

Wait...phrasing? are we still doing that?

Back to the matter at hand...phrasing? a younger woman of my acquaintance let me know that she'd never had less than a 10" weiner. Knowing what I know about statistics, and that the average US length is much less than that, I figured she was pulling on my...chain.

Or is that something women (and gay men???) and fishermen share? the inflation of size, as it were.

"You mean driving a Porsche doesn't compensate for a small penis?"

Oh man, I am screwed. Or not screwed, as the case may be.

And I always thought it was odd that there were all these Smurfs but only one Smurfette. I'll bet she walked funny.

Is this another one of those "Women don't care about looks, a sense of humor is more important" tropes? Right. That's why women are shoving that Brad DeCaprio / Leonard Pitt guy aside to get to Gilbert Gottfried.

"You mean driving a Porsche doesn't compensate for a small penis?"

Wait a minute! My wife drives a Porsche. What's she compensating for?

"Wait a minute! My wife drives a Porsche. What's she compensating for?"

Yeah. I would expect someone with no penis at all to be driving a Maserati.

"Geoffrey Miller presented research on penis size Thursday morning, and here's the part you really care about:"

Any more than a mouthful is wasted.

These studies never reveal the information I'm most interested in, like whether the women who consider penis size important are worth dating.

seems a bit esoteric to me...

we don't walk around naked, so the size thing is only Mr. Chesterfield... keeping them satisfied. As much as that works.

Except foreplay, all the other things are external, and you can find them out fully clothed. Also? The car is a signal for wealth, so why is it on it's own?
Unless you are lucky enough to find someone who likes to drive...

:Shrug:

If you can't even get your foot in the door with a person, it doesn't matter how big your schlong is. If the average woman thinks 80% of men are below average [unscientific OK Cupid: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dating/ ] What does it mean? Are they not good enough, and so it takes some convincing?
Are guys not rich enough to be that ugly?

PLUS successfully dating long enough to put Mr. Happy to work in the first place...

Seems like this measure is a hindsight, rather than leading predictor...
"you can do so much better than him!"
'yeah, he's always broke, and... kinda small.'

They've got a weird skew on the more/less significant scale. I'm not going to lie, size matters to me, and I wish DH was bigger. But, he's not, and the rest makes me not pine for bigger. I'm not laying there during sex mentally bitching, and I'm not out looking to hook up with bigger ones. I've been with bigger ones, and I'm not married to them. So, I'd say I gel with their research pretty well. Hubby is smart, kind, funny, (short, and when we first met, poor), a hard worker, loves kids, loves ME (I've never gone a day, in over 12 years together, without him telling me he loves me or I'm gorgeous), loves travel, and is a good cook.

I remember thinking he was well put together, clothing and otherwise, when we met. But I was with someone, and he was in town visiting friends (one of whom was dating my roommate), so that's as far as it went for almost 2 years, though he popped in town periodically. Then he moved up, and my relationship ended, and he had the balls to literally throw me over his shoulder and haul me to the bedroom one night when I was (again) pretty much daring him to (though in a way that could be laughed off). He doesn't lack in balls. I think that's what I love most. Men that can't be bothered to ask a girl out (or, take a willing girl to the bedroom) are not for me. Is a rejection really THAT devastating to you? That's not manly.

What I am really interested in is if this study is one involving self-reporting of preferences or if it is based upon demonstration of preferences involving tangible relationships.

Studies of this kind usually involve self reporting of preferences, which tends to be extremely weak in terms of predicting real life behavior.

In addition, the results presented in the slide that is depicted fails to accurately account for what I believe actually occurs when it comes to partner preferences.

For each feature that spans a continuum of values (as opposed the ones that are discrete like eye color) people tend to have thresholds that determine what is acceptable.

What I mean by this is that women tend to have a height preference below which they would not consider being in a relationship with someone, they also tend to have a penis size preference below which they would not consider being in a relationship with someone.

If this description of mating preferences is true then what exactly is the meaning that one trait is "significantly more important" than another?

I think there is an unstated assumption in the presented study that the man already meets the minimum requirements for all traits before considering which traits are important relative to one another.

My personal experience squares with this.

Women I've been with have always valued the fact that my penis enjoys foreign travel (favorite place) and has good taste in clothes (its favorite designer: Vera Wang, naturellement) much more than its size.

Lujp:In statistics, "p" is the probability that a statistical correlation occurred just by chance. Researchers often accept p less than 0.05 as a valid relationship, but that merely means that the probability it is just random chance is 5%, or one in 20. The abuse mentioned by a_random_guy is when someone throws a lot of different series of measurements into a computer and has it search for possible correlations - just seven factors will give you 21 correlations to calculate, so you'll probably find a pair of factors related at p 0.05 just by chance.

All a p 0.05 relationship should be is a guide to further research. To find out if these two factors are really related, you need to repeat the experiment with a much larger sample; maybe you get p less than .001 so there is a 99.9% chance it's a real relationship, or maybe the new sample shows there is no relationship. But understand that most of these research projects are done just to give graduate students something for their thesis, or to increase their professors' publication count. The money to do one big experiment is usually lacking, but there must always be money for many small projects or the whole academic world would collapse...

And IQ is a poor example. We already know that there are environmental influences - malnutrition will stunt it, too much exposure to alcohol in the womb will stunt it, etc. Probably it is also stunted by an environment lacking intellectual stimulation in childhood, but that's one of the things that can't be measured within the scope of a PHD thesis. Everyone except a dogmatic leftist also knows there are genetic influences. The question is _how much_ genetic influence there is, but that is much more difficult to measure. In addition, if IQ goes like height, the correct answer is probably "100% genetic unless environmental factors stunt it", which means that what you'll measure will vary according to the population you measure - in Africa or in American second generation welfare families it's probably mostly environmental, but in prosperous ideal families it could be entirely genetic.

To Conan:

GOOD male looks, IMO, don't dazzle women nearly as often as the women get older (not counting those movie stars one never gets to meet). A man who is distinctly unattractive even when smiling, however, is usually going to be a turn-off - at least at first. Not to mention that any man who is obese is not likely to be that good in bed - and IS likely to die relatively young.

And regarding a sense of humor...well, there's humor and humor. I don't care for most comedians these days, and even clean puns annoy me in the same way that knock-knock jokes annoy most adults. (I love the old-time comedians and humorists - and one of my favorite, dazzling people ever was once called "the wittiest man alive.")

But humorless people who refuse to admit ever making a mistake while expecting OTHER people to laugh at themselves and their mistakes are also a turnoff.

@I R A - The metric system can be confusing for some people.