What's the Best Question to ask on the First Date?

[xoxoxoBruce]

The Guardian suggests...

What's the best question to ask on a first date? Many forests have been felled for books dissecting this question, but a few years back the dating website OKCupid.com made a startling intervention.

If you want to know the chances of a first encounter ending in sex, its analysts said, the question to ask is, "Do you like the taste of beer?" If you're concerned with long-term compatibility, the question is, "Do you like horror movies?"

When registering, OKCupid users answer hundreds of seemingly innocuous queries – the one about beer, it transpires, is most strongly correlated with positive views of first-date sex. Liking or disliking horror films, meanwhile, is a better predictor of a lasting relationship than beliefs about God.

We could invent theories to explain this: maybe people who score highly on "sensation-seeking", as psychologists call it, enjoy both casual sex and cheap ways to get drunk? But the point about Big Data is that you don't need theories. The correlations are there, whether or not they seem to make sense.

I would have said, ask what you want to know about them. No wonder I struck out so often.