Presh from Mind Your Decisions has this exquisite game theory post explaining how you maximize your chances of finding your true love by dumping the first 37% of people you date:

For the sake of this discussion, I define true love as the best person who is willing to date you. Even if that's not exactly true, I'm wiling to live with that definition. Because if you think your true love is someone that won't date you, well, I'm not sure any advice can help you.

So for all you reasonable romantics, I offer this hope: if you follow this advice, you'll maximize your chance of finding true love. The advice will give most people about a 37% chance of finding true love.

What I want to know is how I figure out my total number of people to date ahead of time? Just so you don't think this is a ridiculous use of game theory, he goes on to argue that as a general principle you shouldn't settle too early.

Bryan Caplan, author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, exposes some myths about voters in the Washington Post:

1. People vote their self-interest.

In fact, there is only the tiniest correlation between income and party. The country is not divided into two camps: the poor, who vote Democrat, and the rich, who vote Republican. If you consider your own experiences, this is hardly surprising: Are your rich friends really Republicans and your poor friends Democrats?

Self-interest is also a bad predictor of views about specific issues. Yes, the elderly heavily support Social Security and Medicare, but so does almost everyone else. The old bumper sticker says, "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament," but men are actually slightly more pro-choice than women. And so on. Pollsters have found a few exceptions where self-interest really matters, such as smoking restrictions, which smokers obviously tend to oppose. But overall, where voters stand has little to do with where they sit.

Tyler Cowen has a piece on how the idea of micro-credit has been hyped (Hat-tip: Megan McArdle):

The piece attempts to redress many myths of micro-credit. For instance it is often claimed that micro-credit doesn't involve collateral, but that isn't quite true. The borrowing is done in small groups, and if you don't pay your share the neighbors come and take away your TV set. In reality micro-credit takes the collateral-seizing function away from the bank and puts it in the hands of our neighbors, thereby increasing loan repayment rates.

Tangled Bank #96 is up at Aardvarchaeology.

The NYTimes interviews Scott Page, who explains why diverse organization are more effective (Hat-tip: Jonah) :

Q. In your book you posit that organizations made up of different types of people are more productive than homogenous ones. Why do you say that?

A. Because diverse groups of people bring to organizations more and different ways of seeing a problem and, thus, faster/better ways of solving it.

People from different backgrounds have varying ways of looking at problems, what I call "tools." The sum of these tools is far more powerful in organizations with diversity than in ones where everyone has gone to the same schools, been trained in the same mold and thinks in almost identical ways.

The problems we face in the world are very complicated. Any one of us can get stuck. If we're in an organization where everyone thinks in the same way, everyone will get stuck in the same place.

While this would appear to advocate for affirmative action -- he argues that race and gender are often good proxies for ways of thinking, I think that it more advocates for diversity of thought and approach. How you would create that at an institution through recruitment is another matter.

Read the whole thing.