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Comment by klipt | Hacker News Reader

Given how height conveys many advantages, including higher pay* thanks to people's biases of taller = leader, I wonder how long it will be before people start genetically modifying their unborn children to be taller.

* https://www.payscale.com/career-news/2016/03/theres-a-new-ty...

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For being so advanced, humans still fall for the most reptilian stereotypes like this. Taken to extremes in books like "Of Mice and Men" where the short, frail guy is an untrustable genius while the tall, dumb guy has some sort of superhuman strength. I would love to know where that started because it's still a thing.

I would think it’s innate. Being tall usually means physically more powerful, so it seems like an inherent advantage for mating.

It might be natural or innate. Even young children associate taller with good and shorter with bad. I forget where but there was a documentary where children were asked to associate qualities to stick figures. The children gave the taller stick figures the positive qualities and the shorter stick figures the negative qualities.

We know that adults definitely associate positive qualities with height. We know voters associate positive traits to taller candidate. And females do as well - assign more positive traits to the taller male.

I’m very curious to know about growth hormone usage those days. Thirty years ago it could lead to contamination with bad disease due to the fact that hormones were taken from corpses, but now that it’s not the case anymore, i tend to think they’re massively used.

As predicted by Invader Zim: https://zim.fandom.com/wiki/Almighty_Tallest

During early years of human development it is actually possible to effect and increase height by physical excercise, more specifically aerobic excercise.

Does anyone besides pop psychologists actually believe that?

Yes. For example, most people that have ever seen any of the relevant statistics.

Yeah, I believe it. It may be slight, and depend quite a bit on the individual, but I believe it for the same reason I believe attractive people have advantages (and height is an attribute in attractiveness for many), including getting paid more, which is to say for a plethora of small reasons that make sense to me and all add up to the same conclusion.

Increased confidence in dealing with others, including negotiating pay. Increased physical capability. Favoratism. Any number of other things.

On the flip side, why wouldn't being more attractive provide benefits? Because people strive to always be rational and know their own biases so they can be fair? That's hardly how I see most people acting on a day to day basis. Because less attractive people will try to punish attractive people? Also not something I see often (or at all, really).

People have studied this. The effect is IIRC each inch of height for a man (within the sampled range) confers a 1-2% increase in income, after adjusting for other easily measured factors (race, education, hours worked, etc.)

To give a sense of scale, a 5'4" man faces a larger "height gap" than the adjusted gender gap for women.

This doesn't necessarily mean what you think it would mean. As always the problem with social sciences is that correlation != causation. For instance taller people also have higher IQs. [1] Its for reasons like this that I think we're rather more likely to recreate Frankenstein than Gattaca.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence

Although it's entirely possible that height and/or attractiveness as an advantageous cultural norm also explains this. If height is seen as attractive, and beauty leads to more opportunities in education (more accessible peer tutoring partners, better study group interaction, more likely to get help from a teacher, etc).

But yes, teasing out the actual causes for anything like that seems impossibly hard (without breaking ethical guidelines), thus we have a lot of conjecture.

There have been numerous studies showing how even extremely subtle things can influence people's perception. If you specifically asked someone "would you be willing to pay more for a good if you see unrelated expensive goods in the background?" Most people would say of course not. And yet studies show that the average person actually would be willing to pay more. I'd be shocked if something as blatantly obvious as height would have no impact on someone's perceived authority. Anecdotally, I can say that I find it much more natural to act as a leader around people who are shorter than me.

I would pay $25,000 for a proven-safe generic modification that made my son top 20% in height (excluding the absurd, above say 6’5”) or my daughter top 20% in “ideal figure.” Looks help people a lot in life.

What happens when more than 20% of population has achieved maximum healthy height?

I belive we're hardwired to find certain traits attractive no matter how many people have them. If you move to a country where every man is tall and has a square jaw you probably won't stop finding that attractive, but you'll take that as a given and start looking for other traits.

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