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Love for Confounders

A DATE on Saint Valentine’s Day will be great if you have one. But even if you don’t, you will not be alone. Perhaps you will even be in an “exalted” company. With all their number-crunching statistics, medical scientists find it difficult to form relationships.

A scientist himself, D. J. Williams wrote in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (2004): “It’s undoubtedly true that a statistically significant proportion of medical science nerds have difficulty forming intimate relationships.”

“Many of us are more comfortable pursuing intimate relationship with our computers than with a fellow human being. We busily collect and analyze complex data for mind-numbing research reports and journal articles, but can’t seem to figure out the fundamentals of love,” he added.

The reason apparently for this disconnect with love or romance is that their world revolves on the quantitative. And the language of love is, by nature, qualitative. So Williams ventured to study this phenomenon though a language of love that medical scientists understand, revolving on such words as variable, problem, face validity, confidence interval, interrater reliability, predictive validity, path analysis, outlier, error, etc. And he had to contend with the fact that most medical scientists have serious concern if their “next-to-nonexistent personal lives may be far less painful” when they personally don’t have to face potential partners that can turn out to be a “dreaded outlier.”

Here’s what Williams found. “Too much variance between you and your partner is usually undesirable, as is too little,” he noted. He added that “a critical evaluation of self (an accounting of first-order differences, i.e. the real problem is you) is effective in correcting such serially correlated error (i.e. never learning from your mistakes) and forms the basis for a much more accurate prediction of potential relationship satisfaction.”

Finally, Williams observed that “no hardcore medical researcher wants to feel smothered—though many have no empirical idea of what this emotion entails. If the potential mate demonstrates too few degrees of freedom, quickly retreat. Make up a three-quarter truth, if necessary, such as saying that you can’t ‘do’ a relationship because you must spend 23 hours of every day in your lab. Conversely, if the degrees of freedom are too many you run the risk of a confounder entering the relationship.”

After reading the report, I no longer wonder why medical research geeks have problems with having intimate relationships. One lesson though: Enjoy your jobs but don’t take it so seriously as to lose that chance of finding love. Happy Saint Valentine’s Day!


This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 9 February 2011.
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