> In a meta analysis of the role of attractiveness in criminal sentencing, it was found that unattractive people received 120–305 percent longer sentences than attractive people.
I wonder if this is an evolved phenomenon. Societies where punishment was harsher on the less attractive was faster to remove less fit genes than otherwise and, thus, out competed their adversaries.
Beauty isn't as simple as being born looking a certain way. It can be influenced by health. It can be influenced by social savvy. It can be influenced by socioeconomic class.
To think that it merely reflects your genes vastly oversimplifies it.
(I was once "beautiful." I have a genetic disorder. This is a subject I have thought a lot about over the years.)
"The ladies have as much beauty here as in other places, but bloom and softness are not to be expected among the lower classes, whose faces are exposed to the rudeness of the climate, and whose features are sometimes contracted by want, and sometimes hardened by the blasts. Supreme beauty
is seldom found in cottages or work-shops, even where no real hardships are suffered. To expand the human face to its full perfection, it seems necessary that the mind should co-operate by placidness of content, or consciousness of superiority."
-- Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.
The beauty as symmetry metric is purely genetic, but yes, grooming can add a lot of beauty points. The other metric is also body type preference, which seems more scarcity related - people in food-scarce locations will consider larger bodies attractive, but will change their preferences if they relocate to a different part of the earth.
A symmetric person will likely be considered beautiful in rags (unless they’re malnourished) and a non-symmetric person can be considered beautiful with some grooming, both physical and personality wise. The Queer Eye show made this pretty popular, at least in my circles.
Actually not really, I mean if you're ugly and rich you're just ugly with money. You may get benefits just because you've money. But if you don't show off then there's no way to influence your "perception of beauty"
Beauty has more to do with culture (what do we consider good looking and what not) but there's also an objective beauty that has to do with body proportion for example
Not really, because your beauty strongly depends on hair cut, skin care, clothes you wear, the way you move and so on. How fit you are and how healthy you are. In case of women, the exactly right make up.
The same person can look beautiful and ugly depending on all of that.
> if you're ugly and rich you're just ugly with money
Spending money on the right things can make a large difference. Teeth, skincare, diet, haircut, clothes, time in the gym, quitting a job that would keep you in the sun too long, ...
As an example, check pictures before and after being millionaire of some rock stars, actors, sportsmen, etc and you will see how money can really change the looks.
Take this picture before after of Cristiano Ronaldo, for example:
You have no idea what aesthetic surgery can achieve. They can crush your skull to shambles and give it a completely new shape. If you think trashy when thinking about aesthetic surgery, you've only identified the cheap stuff and seen the addicts and failures.
Ugly rich people either don't care or don't consider the risks worth it.
As a guy, I find that most guys dismiss beauty as luck while chasing girls who have it.
They fail to realize that a sizable percentage of attractive girls don’t roll out of bed a 10. They watch what they eat, they run, work out, pay special attention to clothes, makeup, hair, etc. It adds up to a couple hours each day. In the age of instagram, the bar has only risen higher.
When I see beauty now I think of the effort it takes to stay that way and silently congratulate them.
It's certainly true that beauty is a massive privilege and discriminator but the title is somewhat hyperbolic; it is unlikely to be the greatest (compared to the more obvious ones like race and gender etc) and is certainly talked about, though not as much as it should be.
The title is not saying 'this is the greatest privilege of all, and we don't talk about it'- it's saying 'among the privileges we don't talk about, this is the greatest.'
Still might not be true, but it's less hyperbolic.
The way we evaluate people as beautiful depends on race, they are not independent variable. If people inherently perceive white features as more beautiful or female features as more beautiful, then beauty perception will be impossible to distinguish from those other biases.
You're reading it as "beauty is the greatest privilege, and we never talk about it" but I'm pretty sure it's meant to be read as "out of the privileges we never talk about, beauty is the greatest one". Race and gender are not part of the category "privileges we never talk about".
The effort to assign a total ordering to various "privileges" seems like a fools errand to me. Wouldn't these characteristics differ in magnitude from one individual to the next also? It is almost as if everyone is a unique individual combination of a multitude of characteristics.
One of the first “privileges” I learned about in my life was being tall. Why was it the first? Because short kids and friends I knew would openly lament about being short. Something I could tell they think about constantly, and something I never thought about.
I suspect it’s played a large role in dating and interviewing for jobs, though no one ever openly says “you’re projecting more confidence simply because you’re taller than average”
People are more biased by charisma, beauty, having a skill, being fashionable, being talented, working hard etc etc. The idea that race alone is a deciding factor is minor compared to how attractive you are in general.
While I agree with this overall, this list in the middle of the article was unsourced and presented as "just-so":
> Here is a list of features that are objectively beautiful, and their absence, objectively ugly. Facial and body symmetry; proportional anatomy, height (particularly among men); a full set of straight, white teeth; a full head of hair; clear, evenly-toned, taut, skin; a well-toned physique; proportional features; large eyes.
Of these, the "well-toned physique" is probably historically incorrect[1] - excess weight signified wealth and health for much of human history. Likewise, "a full head of hair" is somewhat gender-specific - super important for women, but many men can rock a bald head pretty well.
Overall, I think beauty ideals are somewhat more flexible than this article assumes. This is especially true for romantic attraction and especially in some communities.
I find the CNN examples tenuous. If the same logic was applied to today's relics in the future, historians might say that 8 foot tall anime women were idealised beauty, in the same way newly discovered buildings tend to be called temples. In reality (from the male perspective) preferences vary massively between individuals.
If Rubens' women are an ideal, why aren't Picasso's?
Perhaps it's here already? We see a lot of posts here on HN denigrating the value of higher education and saying that highly-educated people are gatekeeping.
The objection is not to highly educated people gatekeeping (though they should know better), but that people with a status that helps unlock further wealth are gatekeeping.
> There’s a lot of vitriol aimed at rich people right now, regardless of how they attained their wealth.
Part of the problem is that our current property regime does not distinguish between property acquired through accession [1] and property acquired through extraction.
There is this weird philosophy that all "market transactions" are equally legitimate and that market price is the correct (and only reliable) indicator of economic value. This view ignores the fact that market prices are as much a product of market structure as they are a reflection of people's preferences.
Our current property regime evolved that way for precisely that reason. Distinguishing the two and highlighting it would be a subversive, rather revolutionary act, which would attract a lot of hate.
>There’s a lot of vitriol aimed at rich people right now, regardless of how they attained their wealth. I imagine it’ll soon be transferred to talented people as well.
As a rule, few wealthy people extract 100% of their wealth and few earn 100%.
The wealthy that extract 98% sure try to downplay that part and try to pretend that they're among the miniscule number who earned 90+%.
Most manage to self delude themselves that vitriol against the wealthy IS vitriol against talent. Their egos demand it.
I don't care how you made your money, hoarding it should be looked down on. Greed is bad, we don't need to make things illegal, but I sure as hell am going to think anyone with a privately owned Yacht is a little bit worse of a person than someone reinvesting their money in their community and trying to explore new ideas, or if you are tired and don't want to personally invent stuff or run another business, go find some enthusiastic entrepreneur to support. I am not against rich people having power, I think we should get them to pay their damn taxes and fair share, but beyond part of their money that ought to be allocated by a democratically elected government they can do what they want with their wealth to control the world. But anyone using their money to just show how wealthy they are is going to get serious judgement from me, and I think that is a healthy way to think about rich people.
I think it should be likely obvious from my statement above, I want there to be talented people, and I really don't see a substantial movement to pull down successful people.
What are examples of things people are doing that make you think we are going in this direction?
Hit-men are people too, people don't magically get defenestrated when they speak out against Putin.
This absurdist remark is just to point out that just because people get paid to do a job, it doesn't mean it's a job we as a society want people to have.
Ok, but it's still unfair to assume that yacht builders are as good for society as farmers, simply because both food and yachts are purchased with money.
Consider an industrial farm that only produces almonds at enormous expense to the regional ecology and grossly depletes the topsoil and water table, versus a family-owned yacht builder who builds from sustainable sources.
Nom nom on those roasted almonds and slurp that almond milk, but keep in mind that yacht builder is having less of a negative impact on the planet.
That's a good point, and what I was angling for - we should be allowed to take the ethics of a job into consideration. That the existence of yachts means someone has a job making yachts doesn't automatically make yachts, or their creation, ethical.
> The only absurdist remark here is your comparison of Yacht Builders to Murderers
Yes, that is exactly what I said. I made an absurdist remark ...
But your point is merely valid in a very narrow window of your own morality. I wanted you to reevaluate your perspective and think that perhaps yacht builders, or vulture capitalists, or any number of things that are considered legal, might not be good.
I'm not even trying to say that Yacht building is bad, but a system/society which has yacht builders in it could use a look.
Totally agree, but I believe anyone who has lots of money, and wants to defend they have money because they are smart and successful should realize that merely being a consumer isn't a very impactful way to contribute to society. Using piles of money to just scale up being a consumer to an absurd level is stupid.
I also think I wouldn't shed a year if Rolls Royce went out of business. There are manufacturing, design, welding jobs out there on markets that actually make sense to scale up. Some things in life you can currently buy don't provide enough value to justify them existing at all. They simply exist as a middle finger to everyone with less, propped up by the idiots that but them.
I'm not saying make anything illegal, I'm saying I judge people who support this and would encourage everyone else to do the same.
Conspicuous consumption is _a_ primary driver of an enormous segment of the economy; it effects housing, electronics, textiles, hygiene, beauty products, liquor, and so on and on. Any luxury that can be experienced as an observer is subject to conspicuous consumption.
It's not absurd and stupid to display wealth, it's a function of being a social mammal. Moreover, it does contribute to society by way of employing legions.
When next you flip open your laptop, or publicly use your phone, or dress nicely, or discuss your vacationing, consider your own words about flaunting your wealth.
If all we can ever do is submit to our most basic instincts we will never make progress.
Thinking collectively is what created civilized society and enabled the modern world.
I agree that consumption has created a lot of good in the world, I absolutely believe in capitalism, successful ideas need to triumph over bad ones.
I also understand that many innovations start out as extremely expensive luxury goods that are eventually commoditized. This is an important part of why I don't believe we should make excessive consumption illegal.
I know there will always be people who submit to these urges and buy fancy crap, and sometimes them doing that will help society at large more than it hurts. Some things are just objectively not helpful and are just gratuitous displays of wealth. I am happy to hear otherwise, but I just don't think that Yacht building has trickled down to a bunch of consumer goods that help the world.
High end fashion and beauty products I think reasonably belong in the same category. I think there are plenty of opportunities for more decentralized markets, local designers, that would be possible if rich people weren't buying so much mindshare and influence. And that's not to say I think the government should regulate everything, some if it just has to be individuals talking about things and changing consumption behavior.
What you're missing is that "them buying fancy crap" is redistribution of wealth. I don't see how it's worse than your suggestions of investing in entrepreneurs; in both situations, something is bought and there is an expectation to extract value from it. On the one hand, they've bought a yacht; on the other hand, they've bought shares in a company.
I do not see what is objectively unhelpful about buying a yacht, or similar. Trades persons are paid, wealth is redistributed, utility and enjoyment is extracted from the product of their labour.
In all luxury consumption there is a redistribution of wealth; and _unlike_ with investment, there is no expectation to extract future wealth from the labour of others after the point of purchase.
In their own way, investors are parasites. They leverage their hoarded wealth to extract value from the labour of others.
but seriously everything you are saying is seething with value judgements.
> should get them to pay their damn taxes and fair share
what constitutes a 'fair share'? Who gets to decide?
it's easy to criticize yachts. Let's say a billionaire did something "you might like" like throw a ton of money into a basic physics project. But what if that basic physics project is looking for superluminal neutrinos? Or maybe you'd criticize that the billionaire just wanted to get their name out, which is, essentially vanity, an obviously negative character trait.
Or we could get into sketchier territory. What if the billionaire spent tons of money in "development" in an "underdeveloped country". Is that bad or good? Who gets to decide?
I mean the ironic thing is that on many metrics, buying a yacht could be the least bad thing of the three things that I have mentioned, at least the likelihood of buying a yacht actively hurting someone else is relatively low.
Absolutely, there are certainly ways to put on a show like you're helping people and not really care.
Finding those people is harder than the Yacht idiots, but that's why we have watchdogs for public charities and can make laws regulating what people can do with a charity.
If people are making investments not as part of a public charity, we have journalists to hopefully keep some high level accountability, but yeah youn can do bad stuff with money in a lot of ways, go figure.
Even people doing lots of good can still be seen on a spectrum, I love a lot of the work Bill Gates is doing around the world, but I think he worked really hard to fight FOSS, and I think the world is worse off in some ways for it.
I'm saying buying crazy expensive luxury goods is never a good thing, it's just a waste of resources to prop up someone's shallow ego.
On taxes this will forever be an evolving discussion. Hopefully with good policies over the next few decades we can even out some of the income and wealth disparities and need a smaller welfare state. When that happens I'm all for tax cuts.
But at this point the capital gains rate is absolutely in need of change. Taxing the rich is really politically popular, across the political spectrum. If someone has to pay %39 on a million dollars of earned income, the "job creators" making billions can pay something closer to that on their income too.
Well the whole taxation thing, IMO is insane. There was a year when I made 30k and paid a higher proportion of my income to taxes than Bernie Sanders. Anyways if it's income disparity you're looking to fix, taxing the rich isn't going to help. You need to stop stealing from the poor, which is what the government does via policies like QE. Taxing the rich is linear, the QE is compounding damage.
> I imagine it’ll soon be transferred to talented people as well.
It is already, and the logic is something like: talent is largely a function of practice and access to education. Having the means and opportunity to practice and be properly educated is a privilege.
You can find _plenty_ of words written regarding the inherent racism, sexism, ableism et al in various hobbies due to unequal access; from GitHub hobby repos to enjoying nature through hiking and camping.
Zero-sum methods (robbing Peter to pay Paul) work doubly to achieve equality: reducing the 'higher' person and boosting the 'lower' person in a single action. Very quick and efficient if equality of outcome is the first priority.
Lifting people up suggests targeted interventions to help individuals. If they face powerful beauty standards, help them find ways to become more beautiful. If there's a hard standardized test, help them find ways to pass it. Justice movements will sometimes engage in these kinds of things, but it's more common in my experience to say that the standards are simply wrong and need to be replaced with more equitable ones.
One example: fit people made fun of because they are fit. The message that everyone is beautiful the way they are and that there's no need for further improvement is detrimental to the society.
There definitely is a line to be careful with, but I do think this is the vast majority of what is happening with most social justice movements today.
Black Lives Matter is not fighting for cops to shoot more white people to equalize the numbers, they are trying to show how it is possible in lots of similar situations to deescalate situations without killing anyone, even with violent offenders if training is good, and officers don't have a bias (explicit or subconscious) against the type of person. It is also very obvious to show that minorities are being over-policed and often harassed for just living their lives.
I think similarly with this issue of the leg up that attractive people have in the world, the only way we can fight it is by acknowledging it exists and trying to actively re-evaluate every decision we make about who we choose to interact with, and how much it is informed by these types of bias. This is not the same as giving the attractive people a -10 on whatever evaluation they are a part of. It is always going to be true that correcting for these types of bias will be inexact, welcome to life, but saying we just shouldn't give a shit about less attractive people is a worse outcome for all of society, and its not like author is asking for infinite effort from everyone to correct this. Talented people exist everywhere, if we don't push those of disadvantaged groups up, only some of them will "pull their bootstraps" hard enough to overcome things on their own. People need to be introspective to correct for their biases, there really isn't a way around that, we are imperfect beings quick to pass judgement.
I have a distinct memory of a part of the confirmation hearing of Sonia Sotomayor, she had written about her need to actively review her background when starting a case, to see if she might have prior experiences that would color her judgement. Republicans tried to spin this as, she acknowledged she is biased, obviously she can't be an objective judge. But she defended herself well and asserted it is effectively impossible, to just be objective without this kind of evaluation. Effectively the same argument that people correctly make about the virtual impossibility of just being "race-blind", we all have things we have experienced that color our perceptions of different people, ideas and places, we cannot ignore that fact and just go on asserting we are good objective decision makers with no special effort to account for these things.
In the specific example of police brutality you are right, however BLM organizations are also generally anti magnet school/charter school, which in many poor primarily black neighborhoods is the only good school option for children. Since these schools get to choose (for the most part) who they enroll they tend to take all the more gifted kids/kids with good family environment out of the normal public school. This obviously leads to greater inequality of outcome, which activists try to "correct" by forcing everybody to be in the low quality public schools.
Remember this when people go on and on about "equity". In the grave, all men are equal.
The reason we have low-quality public schools is because education is criminally underfunded and poorly handled, especially in poor areas because of property tax funding.
I don't fully support removing magnet schools, but you can bet that if rich families had to send their kids to the same schools as the poor kids, they'd be lobbying all day for better funding. Apportioning funding per-head from state taxes rather than property taxes would be a good first step.
I think the leftys, who I generally hang around and aggree with get a lot wrong about schools. We spend a lot on schools, other countries that spend a lot less get better outcomes. I mean FFS the richest country in the world with a 85% graduation rate, it's completely insane. Fixing the schools isn't a one-dimensional problem, and I think there are some charters that have good ideas. While they do generally under-serve students with differing abilities, I think that is talked about too much and is used to try to discredit everything they do. There are problems in the schools, absolutely, everyone agrees, and unfortunately aversion to change comes from every level, but unfortunately it's often on different issues/changes. Teachers, parents, students, admins and politicians all have things they balk at that prevents fixing the schools, we need to change a lot of minds or have a huge top down reworking of schools, but unfortunately that runs right into one of the issues people get all worked up about, local control.
> forcing everybody to be in the low quality public schools.
Seems obvious to me that the issue isn't that private or magnet schools are high quality, but rather that public schools are low quality. Basically, the goal is still, bring people up. The "bringing down" in this case is not only temporary, it's only actually "bringing to baseline."
A bunch of rich people and state congresspeople's kids being forced to go to "shitty public schools" sounds like a great way to force the issue.
And the alternative sounds suspiciously like "extract resources from poor communities to feed my rich kid new lacrosse sticks."
Again, if going to a public school is so bad as to be considered "holding a child hostage," the issue isn't the making-rich-kids-go-to-public-schools, it's the public schools.
Leaders of "justice" movements want power. The best way to get power is to make an outside group the enemy and tell your followers their problems are only because of the enemy. Next, you position yourself as having the answer and if your followers will only continue doing what you say then they will be lifted, their problems will subside, and the enemy vanquished. As long as you can keep an enemy front and center and your followers problems never subside your power will continue to grow.
It's a little hard to act like they're being disingenuous when the supposed enemy acts in ways that are completely consistent with being an actual enemy, though. Only when the supposed enemy is not.
You write this in a way that implicitly dismisses the Cause of various social justice movements as indistinguishable from any group with leaders. Are you claiming that there's no difference between Black Lives Matters and Jim Jones' church?
Sure, identifying these inequalities is a step in making things 'more equal' but how does society correct something that is arguably biological in nature (our preference for beauty)?
Masks? A government backed hotornot.com that issues beauty bonus points to improve ugly hiring outcomes?
People who are good with numbers approach financial situations from a position of privilege, surely that's an equality killer? Do we impose Financial acuity tarrifs in addition to standard taxation?
Obviously these are absurd examples but there is a point of diminishing returns and even negative outcomes in the pursuit of TOTAL equality.
I recently discovered it, Akira The Don seems to be the most prolific.
Basically it amounts to taking audio related to self development and layering over electronic beats. I like the format and think it's a really cool way to spread ideas.
Really? I disagree. Those who do not have beauty, end up compensating for it by exceeding in some other trait, and in the end, these other traits, or the ability to exceed in these other traits is the privilege, those not endowed with beauty get. So, it balances, and sometimes to the benefit of those not endowed with beauty.
Do you feel that way about every differential advantage, such as money and family support in childhood, or is there something unique about beauty that causes people to compensate better?
> Those who do not have beauty, end up compensating for it by exceeding in some other trait
Unless you're not intelligent either. Or don't have the socioeconomic advantages of a good education. Or are a poor athlete. And, of course, there are people who are all of these things. Being beautiful does not mean you cannot excel in other traits.
Everyone does not start equal. People's genetics and the circumstances of their birth are causes of inequality. It does not end up balanced.
> Beauty might be the single greatest physical advantage you can have in life.
Oh for God's sake, some people are born without eyes.
> Attractive people might have a hard time coming to terms with all of this. Doing so would require relegating at least part of their achievements to something mostly unearned.
No one deserves anything. The idea falls apart as soon as we even begin to examine it. I could walk into the woods and build a hut out of mud and sticks. Did I "earn" that mud hut, or was I privileged to be born with hands? Does the fact that most people are born with hands matter? If so, how can we quantify how it matters?
At the end of the day, none of this makes any sense, and we need to come up with notions of "success" (socially speaking) and "property rights" (legally speaking) that are based on something else.
We never talk about it? Seems for a long time it's all we talked about. You don't have to go very far online without running into somebody ranting about the privileges that beauty brings, and people with that privilege talking about how it's not a silver bullet to life's problems and brings with it it's own challenges.
Fat shaming, thin shaming, thigh gaps, Chads and Stacys, my head hurts just thinking about it all.
It depends, we have the dumb blond stereotype and I know of developers who are attractive and have a harder time interviewing because they get perceived as dumber. It could be that there's an unconscious bias of hiring someone that looks like a stereotypical movie hacker (long hair, beard, wearing old tech swag, etc). This is of course changing slowly after Apple made a push on cleaning up the image of all the higher ups to have them be part of the presentations and now all companies seem to hire PR consultants that work the appearance of their clients. You sort of see this aesthetic trickle down with time.
There are only two ways to fix what he had. First is a hair transplant, he would be around NW6 now so it was a lot of grafts. Second way is a hair system (rebranded toupee), you can't really tell if someone is wearing one if it's good, you can have exposed hairline, modern hair styles etc.
There is probably an interesting article to be written about how the pursuit of superficial qualities harms deep qualities. E.g. rock bands of the 70s tended to be quite ugly, but they made great music, while bands today look very good, but make terrible music.
Amusingly, Sir Ive is an example of both: back when he was a goofy mustachioed designer he came up with beautiful designs like the iMac, and then when he spent time at the gym and getting fancy T-shirts he produced … a bunch of metal-and-glass rectangles, and disaster of an HQ.
Imma have to disagree with you hard on the first paragraph haha. Rock became oversaturated and stagnated as a genre, I'm not sure the clothes had much to do with it.
Depends how you quantify privilege. I've seen a few convincing arguments that, for men at least, height is a better predictor of success than intelligence.
Note that most (all except one?) of the studies on attractiveness in sentencing were using mock juries or similar (unlike the race based statistic which uses real data).
In the single study that was based on real data there was no control for income. The impact of that should be obvious to all: richer people are generally better groomed in court and have better representation.
> On the unofficial but universally-understood 10-point scale of looks, I’ve heard people call themselves a five, but never a one or a two. You might tell a friend “you’re a 10” but when was the last time you told someone you respect “you’re ugly.” In the world of euphemisms, “average” is the new below average and “ugly” is a taboo term reserved mostly for high school bullies or kids playing in sandboxes — or whatever it is five year olds do now.
Or maybe it's because beauty, just like most other traits in nature, follows the normal distribution, so most of us are around 5, and very few are really ugly (or astonishingly beautiful).
Although this is a real phenomenon, individuals do possess the ability to improve their looks. With maybe a couple exceptions, nearly everyone can become very attractive if they take care of themselves, dress well, and lead a healthy lifestyle.
I am inclined to agree with you, but as a counterpoint consider that if you're an African-American woman, the cost of adhering to U.S.A beauty standards is high, several hundreds of dollars a month. This is not an exceptional but a considerable minority that can't become 'very attractive' without heavy expense, and can't easily lead a healthy lifestyle when they are priced out of everywhere but places that are food deserts.
As a counterpoint, you have facial scarring, skin conditions, gross asymmetry, bad proportions, bad teeth, nerve damage from Bell's palsy or the like, pigmentation problems, and so on to more or less obliterate the "nearly everyone" bit.
I guess I should have been more specific, how about 95%+ of the population? I just more often than not hear this line of thinking from people who definitely could look better but choose not to put in the effort to do so. In general I do agree its a problem, but its one people have actual agency over.
> nearly everyone can become very attractive if they take care of themselves, dress well, and lead a healthy lifestyle.
You're going to have to define very attractive. No amount of healthy lifestyle will make your breasts bigger. No amount of dressing well will make your face less ugly (short of putting a curtain in front of it).
There are hard limits to what you can do as an individual without surgery. Even with surgery, you still will run into a wall.
Yeah of course those things are out of control. My point is that the things you can control have a huge impact. Maybe you can never be a 10/10 because of some specific flaw, but you could likely be at least an 8. Also flaws tend to be seen more as quirks in more "attractive" people.
In one episode some man who was supposed to be super attractive to everyone had no idea he was so bad at everything. He passed through life because everyone let him off the hook for his beauty.
In another episode a beautiful assistant started at the studio and charmed everyone into getting her way. When Liv confronted her about it she replies that if it's fair for Liv to use the brains her genetics gave Liv than it was fair to her to use the beauty genetics gave her.
I recently went on a first date with a woman that was certifiably gorgeous and wound up having one of the most fascinating conversations on this topic.
She discussed her prior career in the military, where she spent 8 years and ultimately got pushed out by a high-ranking officer (also female) in her division for very political reasons. It wasn't just a superficial rant, she described an incredibly detailed pattern of abuse and obstruction by some of her COs.
My main takeaway was that attractive people tend to get more attention. Much of it is probably good attention, but this isn't always the case. A few days after that date, I heard about Vanessa Guillén, an Army soldier murdered by a CO after suffering from persistent sexual harassment by him[0].
> I heard about Vanessa Guillén, an Army soldier murdered by a CO
The other soldier mentioned in that article was the same rank, not a commanding officer (CO). In no way diminishes the seriousness of the apparent murder, of course.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadI wonder if this is an evolved phenomenon. Societies where punishment was harsher on the less attractive was faster to remove less fit genes than otherwise and, thus, out competed their adversaries.
(Obviously abhorrent on a human level, though.)
To think that it merely reflects your genes vastly oversimplifies it.
(I was once "beautiful." I have a genetic disorder. This is a subject I have thought a lot about over the years.)
-- Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.
A symmetric person will likely be considered beautiful in rags (unless they’re malnourished) and a non-symmetric person can be considered beautiful with some grooming, both physical and personality wise. The Queer Eye show made this pretty popular, at least in my circles.
Beauty has more to do with culture (what do we consider good looking and what not) but there's also an objective beauty that has to do with body proportion for example
https://www.nature.com/articles/526S16a.pdf
The same person can look beautiful and ugly depending on all of that.
I thought it was implicit that we're talking about natural beauty without make up perhaps.
And no, beauty does not depends the clothes you wear for example (makeup, yes I second that if is very thick can change the way a person look)
Spending money on the right things can make a large difference. Teeth, skincare, diet, haircut, clothes, time in the gym, quitting a job that would keep you in the sun too long, ...
But if I should judge based on the speed of which they reply, they definitely didn't even open it
And to give you another example both Sergey Brin and Larry Page are definitely not good looking yet they've enough money to change their appearance.
Take this picture before after of Cristiano Ronaldo, for example:
https://elbocon.pe/resizer/0hZVESd2S5BEAOwYYdT6_FUcIEE=/980x...
https://www.besoccer.com/new/the-20-ugliest-footballers-in-t...
https://www.goal.com/en-us/news/has-cristiano-ronaldo-had-pl...
https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/sydney-confi...
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls054789830/
That's not really fair. He was like 16/17 on that first picture.
Ugly rich people either don't care or don't consider the risks worth it.
Audrey Hepburn, in her early sixties (just before her death) was stunningly beautiful. She was merely "cute" when she was in her twenties.
They fail to realize that a sizable percentage of attractive girls don’t roll out of bed a 10. They watch what they eat, they run, work out, pay special attention to clothes, makeup, hair, etc. It adds up to a couple hours each day. In the age of instagram, the bar has only risen higher.
When I see beauty now I think of the effort it takes to stay that way and silently congratulate them.
Still might not be true, but it's less hyperbolic.
I suspect it’s played a large role in dating and interviewing for jobs, though no one ever openly says “you’re projecting more confidence simply because you’re taller than average”
Many women make it clear on dating sites that they won't consider anyone below a certain height, or at least taller than they are.
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
> Here is a list of features that are objectively beautiful, and their absence, objectively ugly. Facial and body symmetry; proportional anatomy, height (particularly among men); a full set of straight, white teeth; a full head of hair; clear, evenly-toned, taut, skin; a well-toned physique; proportional features; large eyes.
Of these, the "well-toned physique" is probably historically incorrect[1] - excess weight signified wealth and health for much of human history. Likewise, "a full head of hair" is somewhat gender-specific - super important for women, but many men can rock a bald head pretty well.
Overall, I think beauty ideals are somewhat more flexible than this article assumes. This is especially true for romantic attraction and especially in some communities.
[1] Searching for this yields a lot of spam, best I found after a few minutes: https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/07/health/body-image-history-of-...
If Rubens' women are an ideal, why aren't Picasso's?
I have noticed this trend though, of reacting to justice movements by claiming it'll tear down people. Why do you believe this?
I imagine it’ll soon be transferred to talented people as well.
Soon we’ll be right where the story predicted, everyone wears handicaps to make themselves equal.
Part of the problem is that our current property regime does not distinguish between property acquired through accession [1] and property acquired through extraction.
There is this weird philosophy that all "market transactions" are equally legitimate and that market price is the correct (and only reliable) indicator of economic value. This view ignores the fact that market prices are as much a product of market structure as they are a reflection of people's preferences.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accession_(property_law)
As a rule, few wealthy people extract 100% of their wealth and few earn 100%.
The wealthy that extract 98% sure try to downplay that part and try to pretend that they're among the miniscule number who earned 90+%.
Most manage to self delude themselves that vitriol against the wealthy IS vitriol against talent. Their egos demand it.
I think it should be likely obvious from my statement above, I want there to be talented people, and I really don't see a substantial movement to pull down successful people.
What are examples of things people are doing that make you think we are going in this direction?
This absurdist remark is just to point out that just because people get paid to do a job, it doesn't mean it's a job we as a society want people to have.
The only absurdist remark here is your comparison of Yacht Builders to Murderers.
Nom nom on those roasted almonds and slurp that almond milk, but keep in mind that yacht builder is having less of a negative impact on the planet.
Yes, that is exactly what I said. I made an absurdist remark ...
But your point is merely valid in a very narrow window of your own morality. I wanted you to reevaluate your perspective and think that perhaps yacht builders, or vulture capitalists, or any number of things that are considered legal, might not be good.
I'm not even trying to say that Yacht building is bad, but a system/society which has yacht builders in it could use a look.
I also think I wouldn't shed a year if Rolls Royce went out of business. There are manufacturing, design, welding jobs out there on markets that actually make sense to scale up. Some things in life you can currently buy don't provide enough value to justify them existing at all. They simply exist as a middle finger to everyone with less, propped up by the idiots that but them.
I'm not saying make anything illegal, I'm saying I judge people who support this and would encourage everyone else to do the same.
It's not absurd and stupid to display wealth, it's a function of being a social mammal. Moreover, it does contribute to society by way of employing legions.
When next you flip open your laptop, or publicly use your phone, or dress nicely, or discuss your vacationing, consider your own words about flaunting your wealth.
Thinking collectively is what created civilized society and enabled the modern world.
I agree that consumption has created a lot of good in the world, I absolutely believe in capitalism, successful ideas need to triumph over bad ones.
I also understand that many innovations start out as extremely expensive luxury goods that are eventually commoditized. This is an important part of why I don't believe we should make excessive consumption illegal.
I know there will always be people who submit to these urges and buy fancy crap, and sometimes them doing that will help society at large more than it hurts. Some things are just objectively not helpful and are just gratuitous displays of wealth. I am happy to hear otherwise, but I just don't think that Yacht building has trickled down to a bunch of consumer goods that help the world.
High end fashion and beauty products I think reasonably belong in the same category. I think there are plenty of opportunities for more decentralized markets, local designers, that would be possible if rich people weren't buying so much mindshare and influence. And that's not to say I think the government should regulate everything, some if it just has to be individuals talking about things and changing consumption behavior.
I do not see what is objectively unhelpful about buying a yacht, or similar. Trades persons are paid, wealth is redistributed, utility and enjoyment is extracted from the product of their labour.
In all luxury consumption there is a redistribution of wealth; and _unlike_ with investment, there is no expectation to extract future wealth from the labour of others after the point of purchase.
In their own way, investors are parasites. They leverage their hoarded wealth to extract value from the labour of others.
> should get them to pay their damn taxes and fair share
what constitutes a 'fair share'? Who gets to decide?
it's easy to criticize yachts. Let's say a billionaire did something "you might like" like throw a ton of money into a basic physics project. But what if that basic physics project is looking for superluminal neutrinos? Or maybe you'd criticize that the billionaire just wanted to get their name out, which is, essentially vanity, an obviously negative character trait.
Or we could get into sketchier territory. What if the billionaire spent tons of money in "development" in an "underdeveloped country". Is that bad or good? Who gets to decide?
I mean the ironic thing is that on many metrics, buying a yacht could be the least bad thing of the three things that I have mentioned, at least the likelihood of buying a yacht actively hurting someone else is relatively low.
Finding those people is harder than the Yacht idiots, but that's why we have watchdogs for public charities and can make laws regulating what people can do with a charity.
If people are making investments not as part of a public charity, we have journalists to hopefully keep some high level accountability, but yeah youn can do bad stuff with money in a lot of ways, go figure.
Even people doing lots of good can still be seen on a spectrum, I love a lot of the work Bill Gates is doing around the world, but I think he worked really hard to fight FOSS, and I think the world is worse off in some ways for it.
I'm saying buying crazy expensive luxury goods is never a good thing, it's just a waste of resources to prop up someone's shallow ego.
But at this point the capital gains rate is absolutely in need of change. Taxing the rich is really politically popular, across the political spectrum. If someone has to pay %39 on a million dollars of earned income, the "job creators" making billions can pay something closer to that on their income too.
It is already, and the logic is something like: talent is largely a function of practice and access to education. Having the means and opportunity to practice and be properly educated is a privilege.
You can find _plenty_ of words written regarding the inherent racism, sexism, ableism et al in various hobbies due to unequal access; from GitHub hobby repos to enjoying nature through hiking and camping.
Black Lives Matter is not fighting for cops to shoot more white people to equalize the numbers, they are trying to show how it is possible in lots of similar situations to deescalate situations without killing anyone, even with violent offenders if training is good, and officers don't have a bias (explicit or subconscious) against the type of person. It is also very obvious to show that minorities are being over-policed and often harassed for just living their lives.
I think similarly with this issue of the leg up that attractive people have in the world, the only way we can fight it is by acknowledging it exists and trying to actively re-evaluate every decision we make about who we choose to interact with, and how much it is informed by these types of bias. This is not the same as giving the attractive people a -10 on whatever evaluation they are a part of. It is always going to be true that correcting for these types of bias will be inexact, welcome to life, but saying we just shouldn't give a shit about less attractive people is a worse outcome for all of society, and its not like author is asking for infinite effort from everyone to correct this. Talented people exist everywhere, if we don't push those of disadvantaged groups up, only some of them will "pull their bootstraps" hard enough to overcome things on their own. People need to be introspective to correct for their biases, there really isn't a way around that, we are imperfect beings quick to pass judgement.
I have a distinct memory of a part of the confirmation hearing of Sonia Sotomayor, she had written about her need to actively review her background when starting a case, to see if she might have prior experiences that would color her judgement. Republicans tried to spin this as, she acknowledged she is biased, obviously she can't be an objective judge. But she defended herself well and asserted it is effectively impossible, to just be objective without this kind of evaluation. Effectively the same argument that people correctly make about the virtual impossibility of just being "race-blind", we all have things we have experienced that color our perceptions of different people, ideas and places, we cannot ignore that fact and just go on asserting we are good objective decision makers with no special effort to account for these things.
Remember this when people go on and on about "equity". In the grave, all men are equal.
I don't fully support removing magnet schools, but you can bet that if rich families had to send their kids to the same schools as the poor kids, they'd be lobbying all day for better funding. Apportioning funding per-head from state taxes rather than property taxes would be a good first step.
Seems obvious to me that the issue isn't that private or magnet schools are high quality, but rather that public schools are low quality. Basically, the goal is still, bring people up. The "bringing down" in this case is not only temporary, it's only actually "bringing to baseline."
A bunch of rich people and state congresspeople's kids being forced to go to "shitty public schools" sounds like a great way to force the issue.
This sounds suspiciously close to "hold other peoples' children hostage until they give me what I want"
Again, if going to a public school is so bad as to be considered "holding a child hostage," the issue isn't the making-rich-kids-go-to-public-schools, it's the public schools.
it's the oldest playbook in humanity.
Masks? A government backed hotornot.com that issues beauty bonus points to improve ugly hiring outcomes?
People who are good with numbers approach financial situations from a position of privilege, surely that's an equality killer? Do we impose Financial acuity tarrifs in addition to standard taxation?
Obviously these are absurd examples but there is a point of diminishing returns and even negative outcomes in the pursuit of TOTAL equality.
Here’s a good meaningwave playlist with the full story - https://open.spotify.com/album/1zG8gwbkJIZU8Ki3fQqIUE?si=a0L...
Basically it amounts to taking audio related to self development and layering over electronic beats. I like the format and think it's a really cool way to spread ideas.
So what do you think the definition of 'privilege' is?
Unless you're not intelligent either. Or don't have the socioeconomic advantages of a good education. Or are a poor athlete. And, of course, there are people who are all of these things. Being beautiful does not mean you cannot excel in other traits.
Everyone does not start equal. People's genetics and the circumstances of their birth are causes of inequality. It does not end up balanced.
Oh for God's sake, some people are born without eyes.
> Attractive people might have a hard time coming to terms with all of this. Doing so would require relegating at least part of their achievements to something mostly unearned.
No one deserves anything. The idea falls apart as soon as we even begin to examine it. I could walk into the woods and build a hut out of mud and sticks. Did I "earn" that mud hut, or was I privileged to be born with hands? Does the fact that most people are born with hands matter? If so, how can we quantify how it matters?
At the end of the day, none of this makes any sense, and we need to come up with notions of "success" (socially speaking) and "property rights" (legally speaking) that are based on something else.
[0] Book: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691158174/be...
[1] Daily show: https://econ.video/2017/11/27/the-daily-show-ugly-people-dis...
Fat shaming, thin shaming, thigh gaps, Chads and Stacys, my head hurts just thinking about it all.
Everything old is new again.
1) Jonny Ive http://www.edibleapple.com/2010/04/14/back-when-jonathan-ive...
2) Thiel and Musk (check Thiel's teeth) https://i.insider.com/5dc349153afd375c04352664?width=1136&fo...
3) Bezos https://i.insider.com/596ccf31abc1c828528b4c9a?width=1136&fo...
Guess money fixes beauty :)
Amusingly, Sir Ive is an example of both: back when he was a goofy mustachioed designer he came up with beautiful designs like the iMac, and then when he spent time at the gym and getting fancy T-shirts he produced … a bunch of metal-and-glass rectangles, and disaster of an HQ.
You see this discussion everywhere from The Guardian to Incel forums. You see activists going on about “beauty standards.”
This is often discussed.
In the single study that was based on real data there was no control for income. The impact of that should be obvious to all: richer people are generally better groomed in court and have better representation.
Or maybe it's because beauty, just like most other traits in nature, follows the normal distribution, so most of us are around 5, and very few are really ugly (or astonishingly beautiful).
You're going to have to define very attractive. No amount of healthy lifestyle will make your breasts bigger. No amount of dressing well will make your face less ugly (short of putting a curtain in front of it).
There are hard limits to what you can do as an individual without surgery. Even with surgery, you still will run into a wall.
In one episode some man who was supposed to be super attractive to everyone had no idea he was so bad at everything. He passed through life because everyone let him off the hook for his beauty.
In another episode a beautiful assistant started at the studio and charmed everyone into getting her way. When Liv confronted her about it she replies that if it's fair for Liv to use the brains her genetics gave Liv than it was fair to her to use the beauty genetics gave her.
The bit with the blonde was delicious.
She discussed her prior career in the military, where she spent 8 years and ultimately got pushed out by a high-ranking officer (also female) in her division for very political reasons. It wasn't just a superficial rant, she described an incredibly detailed pattern of abuse and obstruction by some of her COs.
My main takeaway was that attractive people tend to get more attention. Much of it is probably good attention, but this isn't always the case. A few days after that date, I heard about Vanessa Guillén, an Army soldier murdered by a CO after suffering from persistent sexual harassment by him[0].
0: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/06/fort-hood-soldier-va...
The other soldier mentioned in that article was the same rank, not a commanding officer (CO). In no way diminishes the seriousness of the apparent murder, of course.
Well, wait a few years. I was surprised so many times recently with ridiculous initiatives, and I'm sure it can get way worse than that.