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Comment by qwerta | Hacker News Reader

I have great advice howto improve your health and productivity tenfold: DO NOT GET MARRIED! EVER! :-)

* Married men are more productive (Or at least earn more): http://econ.ucdenver.edu/public/laura/Class/korenmanneumark....

* married men live longer : http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletters/Harvard_Mens_Healt...

Correction: married men must earn more & non-divorced men live longer :-)

Sorry, which study did you cite for this correction? Or are you just proposing a potential confounding variable?

I didn't read these but the headlines don't surprise me at all. Men who are most productive in their jobs possess characteristics that would seem to make them better "catches" and are more likely to be married. Likewise, men who will live longer are often in better shape and more attractive making them more likely to get married. Nothing about "being married" causes either of these things in my opinion.

My first wife really didn't provide any benefit and cost a lot, but the second one has been really beneficial for years. Always someone to come home to who helps with the bills, cooking, laundry, not having to waste time going out to clubs or using Tinder because I'm well taken care of at home, etc.. She even got an investor to say yes to funding a startup me and friends are doing recently by talking the investor's native language.

You make it sound like a business arrangement, in which your wife has to provide some 'benefit' or else its not worth it. I can't imagine marrying someone with that type of a relationship.

This sentiment is common in the brogrammer culture. But from my married perspective, this is only really true if you are a selfish person. Modern individualism has largely morphed into selfishness.

Marriage and love are two very different things. Marriage is a bit like a sticker that you can stick on anything; if you have the thing, you don't need the sticker. So I would say you're correct, maybe even when it comes to relationships. Which, by the way, can also greatly motivate and round out a person (relationships I mean). Productivity isn't everything, we also need things are productive for. That can be being happy alone, but also being happy together.

Both of those things could be improved by marrying the right person.

survivorship bias much

;)

It's worth pointing out that in the end, all the statistics in the world don't matter to the specific case that you are facing.

This isn't a trivial rhetorical flourish; this is actually a profoundly important truth about the world and statistics. You aren't dating/marrying a population... you're dating/marrying a specific member out of that population, and the direction of causality is that the population has the statistical properties it does due to its individual members. Population statistics do not casually drive the attributes of its members.

This is missing the point. The statistical relevance here is about search costs and stochastic error inherent in attribute selection. Advice to "pick the right lottery ticket numbers" is not a proper strategy to playing the lottery. The lottery by construct is npv negative.

The only real-debate is wether or not marriage is a game of chance or one of skill. But distinguishing between the two helps to understand the actual complexity of the situation.

I'd say, by meeting and partnering with the right person.

IMHO, marriage is just a millennia-old artifact concept where you inform and/or conform with your superior (church, state or whatever) on whom you're going to live with.

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