What percentage of the population do you think is datable?
For the purpose of the poll don’t consider people that you would likey never meet. For example people in Boston if you live in Miami.
I would say for most people you cut it in half right away, unless you are bi. Then , when you fator in age you are down even more. Only then do you get to the ugly factor. I think 5% is probably too high. Have ya been to the Motor Vehicle Bureau? Its a leper colony there.
Hmm.
If I were single, given what I’d be looking for in a man?
3%.
So how do you explain all these people getting together?
Alcohol?
You mean the overall population in an area, MOTAS in your area, MOTAS of your age group, or MOTAS that are truly single?
I’d say that of heterosexual single women in my age group (Generation X - Atari subcategory), maybe 10% are datable. Those that aren’t datable, IMHO, have a greater physical presence than me (my PC way of saying they’re f*t, as to not incur the wrath of the SDMB offenderati), have more than one kid (or, in some cases, even have grandchildren!), are uneducated and/or lead a lifestyle quite different than mine (i.e. they’re biker chicks, very religious, very conservative/gluegey, too blue collar, etc), or have the personality of a piece of sheetrock.
Were I to find myself suddenly single, in my current circle of friends and acquaintances, there are no women I would seriously consider dating.
Given that my personal belief is that you find your best dates among the group of people with common interests (i.e., the people you normally hang out with), this would mean, for me, zero percent.
It took me 37 years to meet the woman that made me want to get married. I’d never met a single (no pun intended) one before that, or since. I guess you could say I’m picky, although not to the point of neurosis. If I were to suddenly become single, I’d be staying that way until the end. Trying to find somebody marriageable after the age of 45? Forget it! I couldn’t handle somebody else’s baggage or the possibility of their uncivilized children and ex-husband and all of that. Ugh!
So I put all my effort into being such a good husband that it won’t be necessary for me to have to find another mate from the 5 or so percent of women who might be available to me out of the population.
Define “date”.
I don’t do marriage, so the percent I’d marry is 0%.
People I’d find sexually attractive enough to hang out with at least once over dinner if they asked? If we assume they handle the transit tasks, so I don’t have to cross out the ones living in Outer Mongolia and so on, umm, 30% maybe. That’s what’s left after crossing off the males, the young children, and others who don’t have the looks. If we eliminate the ones I couldn’t legally or practically have as sex partners, it probably drops to 15%.
Enough to really go between the sheets with? Somewhat less, I guess, but I never know what I’ll do with any given person until and unless the opportunity presents itself. And even then it’s all in the presentation.
At 5%, you must be wired differently than me. Of the females between 12 and 90, easily over 2/3 look quite yummy.
In Indianapolis? Maybe 3%
Somewhere else where the men are more attractive and interesting (I always imagine that to be California) and I’ll say maybe 5%. 
I hate to approach this from an analytical perscpective, but I’m guessing the percentage of “datable” people is probably roughly equal to the percentile you fall into yourself. For example, if you are (or perceive yourself to be) in the top 3%, of your gendered population in desirability, you probably consider somewhere around the top 3% of your target gender to be datable.
Seems to make sense…until you introduce the “alcohol wildcard”.
Take away men and you’re at 50%.
Take away women over 18 or under 13 and I’m already at 5%.
And that’s without even applying the “no fat chicks” rule.
Do you mean the “sell-by date” or the “use-by date?” Or is it carbon-dating?
My wife says I’d better say “0%”, but she still lets me look. 
Let me try to figure this out for myself.
Start with 100 people:
Remove the men - down to roughly 50%
Remove the lesbians - Down to 47%
Remove the non-college graduates - Down to 16%
Remove those with the lower 75% of looks - Down to 4%
Remove those not within -5 years and plus 3 years of my age (31) - 0.5%
Remove the estimated 75% with a personality not suited to mine - 0.125%
Of course, some of these criteria my not be independent so the result will not be exact. On the other hand, I could probably come up with all kinds of elimination criteria such as those with a drug addiction etc.
That means that roughly 1 person in 1000 randomly selected people are datable to me. That still leaves about 3000 in the greater Boston area so it would take me a long time to cycle through them all if I wasn’t married and could locate them all.
I also wanted to say that these estimates are not as bleak as they seem. People do not associate randomly. For instance, if I re-enrolled in graduate school at a reputable university, the odds of meeting those datable people would shoot way up. Other ways of greatly increasing the odds are to find the spots where people are in your age range, educational level, and have similar interests (e.g. a ciche bar, a book club, or a concert).
Come to think of it, that means that there should be around 13 datable females in my town alone. I think I’ll take a real slow drive through downtown in a minute and see if I can spot one of them.
Let’s see…
All people: 100%.
Remove the men, 50% (more or less) remaining from the total people.
Remove the lesbians: 47% remaining.
Remove the smokers from the remaining women: 40% remaining.
Remove the women not in the age group I as a 41-year-old can get away with dating: 8% remaining.
Remove the married or otherwise occupied ones: 3% remaining.
Remove the politically, philosophically or religiously incompatible: 0.05% remaining.
Remove the ones whose personality does not mesh with mine (and vice versa): 0.005% remaining.
Remove the unattractive-to-me ones: 0.0025% remaining.
Remove the ones who are not attracted to me: 0.0001% remaining from the total people.
Well, I’ve always thought that the chance of someone being romantically compatible with me is about one in a million. So that means there should be around six thousand of them in the world…
<glances around Toronto for one of the estimated four compatibles in the area…>
I would date 100% of all dateable girls. (leave me alone I am being optimistic in here)
Okay, using real data:
I’m a straight male (and obviously geeky enough to do this!)
I’d prefer to only consider people living in my area, since I’m not a big fan of long-distance relationships.
I live in the DC metro area. According to the 2000 census, there were 4,923,153 in this area. Of those, 2,525,807 (51.3%) are female. I’d prefer to date someone relatively close to my age, say 25-34. Looking at the census data here , there are 403,407 women (8.2% of total population) that fit the bill.
Unlike some people, I don’t consider married people to be “dateable”. No time to track down the age distribution by maritial status, but I’ll say that 50% of women are married (thus 50% never married, widowed, or divorced) in my acceptable age range. That may actually be a bit high for this area. This drops the number to about 200,000 or 4%.
And then there are all those other factors to consider that I don’t know how to quantitate. I’d say 1 in 4 that made it this far would be “dateable” (e.g. worth seeing how thing go on a first date) in my estimation, which is ~1% or ~20,000 women.
I like the way you think.
Gay male here, obviously geeky enough to do this. I’m going to think positive. 5% datable, huh? Let’s see. Just in San Francisco, not even counting the other 6 million people in the Bay Area.
San Francisco population – 750,000
Tourists, visitors on any given day – 750,000
Total 1.5 million.
50% men – 750,000
Under – 30yo, maybe 33% – 250,000
500,000 men over 30yo on any given day.
Gay in San Francisco – maybe 20%
That leaves 50,000 gay men over 30yo.
5% datable of 50,000 gay men over 30yo is 2,500 men.
Sounds good to me.
No, that’s not PC, that’s even worse.
If you really want to avoid the “offenderati,” just replace “fat” (and leave off the asterisk—give me a freakin’ break) and simply say, “people whom I do not find attractive.” How hard is that? Isn’t that better than feeling compelled to bring up the “fat” people (which, I noticed, you often do), since you realize that you might inspire some ire because of it?