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Comment by Splines | Hacker News Reader

When I conceived of this, I wondered how evil it was.

I have to admit, I felt pretty slimy going through this. I like a pretty face as much as the next person, but these people (I assume) didn't send in their picture expecting for it to be run through hotornot. Which brings me to the next point...

But after testing it a bit, I'm pretty confident in saying that pretty people propose great panels!

You're kinda hand-wavey here. What sort of data do you have to back this up? And what exactly do you mean by this? Do you mean that attendees have a more enjoyable time interacting with a more visually pleasing panel, or that attractive people are inherently better at running a panel?

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I know, I know. I feel guilty already. I'm often torn between things I want to do because they seem exciting and controversial, and the effect it will have on people involved. I really hope I don't get any tear stained emails from panelists upset at this little project.

But to answer your question, I'm actually talking about the panels that were recommended to me by the system based on my choices. The best one, which I never would have found otherwise is this one: http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP5380

I'm super-excited!

And not to be too hand-wavey, but what if (I know this sounds crazy) there's actually a reciprocal effect here? What if there's a natural conceptual affinity between people who are attractive to each other? What if I only like the topics I like, because those are the ones the people I find attractive like? Or they like them because I do?

That's an interesting idea. You'd need to do a similar experiment, swapping the topics for faces, and do a scatter plot to see if there's any covariance between topic-interest and attractiveness. I'm inclined to think that there isn't, but it'd be interesting to see the data.

You know, I was actually thinking of this. What SxSW really needs is just a tiny bit of NLP to do a tag cloud for the panels. I think that could be used to perform the kind of experiment you describe.

And I wouldn't bias such a thing by predicting the outcome, but can we agree that the panelists on topics we're interested in will be appealing to us in some way? Maybe not physically all the time, but they will be attractive to us.

I guess all I'm saying is that the inverse is true. Someone's nature, and interests do come through in their appearance (book cover judging rules!), especially in a set of people already pre-selected for common interests like the sxsw crowd.

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