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Comment by rejschaap | Hacker News Reader

I always find it funny that being tall is seen as positive. There is actually a lot to say for being short. Cars and houses could be smaller, we'd need less food. Is there really anything a 4 foot person can't do as opposed to a 6 foot person? We just need a frame to carry our brains around. Of course there is some tail-end of the distribution stuff like professional basketball and sumo wrestling. And there is the fact that we didn't optimize the world for small people. But I think there is good case for smaller people.

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The article is discussing taller populations, not individuals. Within populations being tall tends to be a proxy metric for general prosperity, so of course it's a positive.

Aside from that there seem to be intrinsic advantages to being tall. Taller people have bigger bodyparts, including bigger brains, and there's a correlation between larger craniums and higher intelligence[1].

This doesn't seem to be a very thoroughly studied subject though, but it really should be. If there's anything we could be doing to increase the average intelligence of human species that's going to pay dividends down the road.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence

"Within populations being tall tends to be a proxy metric for general prosperity"

Which is something I object to. In the past obesity and skin color were also linked to propserity. In some countries they still are. We shouldn't accept such nonsense.

Obesity is strongly linked to prosperity, globally. That isn't nonsense.

You object to consistently having plentiful nutrition from infancy on the scale of nations over large time spans being strongly linked to prosperity? That's essentially what the tall = positive statement is about.

Few things are as well established as strong correlations for prosperity. You might as well say "I reject reality and substitute my own".

I do reject your concept of realitiy and I do think everybody is substituting their own.

Other than that I think being tall is great, but being small is better. Our nutrition has improved quite a lot through the years. And I hope it will continue to do so. I say let's start with cutting all growth hormones from our meat and milk and see where that brings us.

The world is hardly optimized for tall people, as anyone tall who's been on an economy class flight would notice.

Of course the last thing to be optimized for tall people is something like airline seats where there's significant pressure to optimize costs.

Try going to The Netherlands sometime. You'll find that all sorts of everyday objects are optimized for tall people, including the height of counters, urinals, toilets etc.

Well, the cost matrix is asymmetric. A world that caters for tall people is inconvenient, at worst, for short people; a world where spaces are made for short or medium people is unbearable or unlivable for tall people. The best is to get away from one-size-fits-all, which is why multiple urinals are often installed at different heights.

Except for airline seats. Because tall people now form an opportunity to extract a premium. You can get an economy seat and suffer, or get an economy seat 'plus' that is the same exact seat located at the emergency exit (meaning leg room and freezing cold from the door).

You used to be able to just book early and select those seats, but the airlines figured out that people who are tall, want to significantly lower the risk of thrombosis in the legs, and travel with at least some measure of comfort, really want those seats. So now you pay extra with a lot of airlines (looking at you KLM).

Being able to traverse busy areas quickly is a benefit though.

Considering tall people earn more on average, it's pretty reasonable to expect them to pay more for certain services for which they have a preference.

> You'll find that all sorts of everyday objects are optimized for tall people

Cool, I should move there (6'6"). Then again if enough people did so their average height would increase even further.

> Is there really anything a 4 foot person can't do as opposed to a 6 foot person?

Excite women.

women strongly prefer taller men, that's a very strong argument for me -_-

and taller men earn more money

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/1218787...

"A survey of the Fortune 500 conducted in 2005 revealed that the average CEO is 6 feet tall; over 90pc of CEOs are above average height; and only 3pc of CEOs are under 5’7”."

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