Diving in the Shallow End

on February 14, 2024

Three Six Mafia

Most guys my age have "the chat". The one with your college buddies that only exists to share memes, argue, bully, and occasionally announce that you got a promotion or had a kid. I am like most guys.

Recently the discussion switched to the Three Six Rule . The idea that, to be date-able, a guy must be a 6 in 3 categories:

6 figure income

6 feet tall

6 inch pecker

I'm pretty far from 6 feet. You can make any other assumptions you wish. However, I'm happily married. What's the deal? Was my wife ignorant of the rule; did she take pity on me? Or perhaps it's possible to compensate for poor performance in one area with exceptionalism in another. If so, what is the conversion rate and is there an opportunity for arbitrage?

These are the important questions of our day.

The Approach

Back in your very first stats class you probably talked about the heights of third-graders, and someone drew a pretty bell curve. Distribution of heights is like bell curve 101, and bell curves are incredibly useful. With just two numbers, a mean (μ) and standard deviation (σ), you can describe an entire population and run all types of analysis.

Where I live in the USA being 6' or great is actually pretty rare. 91% of all adult men are below this height. However, older people tend to shrink with age and are far less likely to be in the dating pool. Especially for a connoisseur of the Three 6 Rule. Let's only look at American males between the ages of 20 and 30.

Height Distribution of Males aged 20-30

$$\mu = 70"$$<br>$$\sigma = 3"$$

A height of 6' is roughly at the 75th percentile. Hold up, percentile? We're not talking about SAT scores you nerd. We're drastically eliminating men from the dating pool based on three arbitrary numbers. Let's subtract it from 1 and call it an "Exclusivity Score".

Much better. By eliminating guys under 6' we have removed 75% of the population from the dating pool and are left with the top quartile of most exclusive men. In a room of 100 fellas, 75 aren't even worth talking to.

Now what about pecker size? Fortunately, this also follows a pretty standard bell curve and there's public data so I don't have to do my own research. A 6" wiener is even rarer than being 6' tall. The average erect penis length is 5.166" with a std dev of 0.654".

Erect Penis Length Distribution

$$\mu = 5.166"$$<br>$$\sigma = 0.654"$$

Do the math, carry the 1, and a 6" pecker puts you right at the 90th percentile for an Exclusivity Score of 10%.

In that same room, we've eliminated 90 of them for having the pedestrian member of a mere mortal. The 10 guys left are the cream of the crop.

Getting Too Big for Our Britches

Here is where we starting getting a little dumb. I've got a room of 100 potential dating partners. 25 of them meet my height criteria while 10 of them have exclusive enough peckers. What are the odds that somebody is in both groups?

To combine the odds of two independent actions, you just multiply them. The odds of rolling a die and getting a 5 are 1/6. The odds are doing it a second time are also 1/6. So the odds of rolling 5 two times in a row are:

$$\frac{1}{6} * \frac{1}{6} = \frac{1}{36} = 2.778\%$$

What if the actions aren't independent? If I take a deck of cards and draw one randomly, there is a 1 in 2 chance it is red. If I keep that card, what are the odds the next card I draw is also red? It's not 1 in 2. The deck now has 51 cards, 26 black cards and 25 red cards. On my second turn, the odds of drawing a red card are 25 in 51. Just slightly worse than 50/50. The odds of the second action are dependent upon the first action. The odds of drawing two red cards in a row are:

$$\frac{1}{2} * \frac{25}{51} = \frac{25}{102} = 24.51\% $$

Height and pecker length seem to be correlated, but there isn't a lot of great data out there. But generally speaking, a taller person is more likely to have a longer pecker. Since we can't model this relationship with a high degree of confidence, and because this exercise is incredibly low stakes, we're going to ignore it. While there appears to be some dependent relationship between height and pecker, I'm going to treat them as two independent events.

So back to these two groups of 25 and 10 guys. Since we're treating them as independent characteristics we can just multiply the odds to arrive at our Blended Exclusivity Score .

$$\frac{1}{4} * \frac{1}{10} = \frac{1}{40} = 2.5\%$$

Now we're talking! The Three 6 rule is really starting to shine in it's ability to enforce exclusivity. In a room full of 100 random guys, you may find two or three that can meet our criteria so far.

Let's Talk About Money

Humans have gotten bigger over time. However, I've yet to see height or pecker size in any CPI basket-of-goods when measuring inflation. Neither party's economy policy is to blame for the rising cost of peckers in the grocery store that is destroying the middle class. The heights of American men...