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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

I think it's reverse causality.

If you're incredibly talented and have enormous success for most of your life then you probably have gotten away with being an asshole time and time again. What are you going to do, fire Michael Jordan because he's mean? You're going to kick Ellen off your TV channel because she's rude to her people? Over time they get reinforcement that being an asshole is acceptable for them. And it's so convenient to be a jerk.

Later on when someone asks about it, well, that was my secret to success of course. You have to be an asshole to get ahead. To heck with that!

Successful people being assholes is a sign of their weakness, not their strength.

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Related: That's why I think physically attractive people often (but not always) have worse personalities. They can get away with more.

Studies show this too[0]:

> When the defendant was attractive, there was a shift in judgments toward acquittal, but when the defendant was unattractive, there was no such shift. As a result, mock juries were more likely to acquit the attractive defendant than the unattractive defendant.

If people are more likely to acquit attractive defendants in criminal trials, they're certainly going to let more social "crimes" pass.

[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/009385489001700...

I find it amusing how often attractive women get two words that sound similar, mixed up. Things like, “for all intensive purposes” or others — I think you know what I mean.

My hypothesis is that no one wants to correct them, the way they would someone they don’t fear retribution from. Their friends might fear being ostracized for implying they’re stupid. Their suitors might fear pushing them away for the same reason. They just say it wrong for years while everyone nods and smiles.

I’ve made a habit of noting them in meetings and then privately informing them after. Have heard replies like, “Wait, really!? That’s so embarrassing, I’ve been saying that wrong for YEARS.”

Constantly getting a pass cuts both ways. It’s also harder to stand on their own, since they grow so accustomed to people constantly offering help, and free stuff.

Well pointed and a great example how society cannot be unbiased. We all have our own biases and might not even want to even acknowledge them because that jab at who we are.

Why are you pulling women aside after meetings to tell them how to speak properly? Just leave them be

Pulling women aside to correct them is mildly sexist and patronizing, but pulling people aside to correct them privately is generally a polite thing to do.

> how often attractive women get two words that sound similar, mixed up.

> I’ve made a habit of noting them in meetings and then privately informing them after.

You have an unhealthy bias and condescension is not a solution.

I don’t just do it for women, I just made a comment about how it feels more frequent with attractive women, shared my observation, and attempted to explain why I think that might be the case. There is a difference.

I don’t believe it’s condescending to recognize a error, and offer assistance. We all make mistakes. It’s literally the first thing I ask every new manager to do for me if they observe something less than ideal in an interaction.

I'm picturing a notepad with the names of the attractive women in your office and a tally for each kind of gaffe next to their name with a subnote describing the gaffe.

It's not a very flattering picture.

I think the opposite, in average attractive people tend to have better personalities because they have received a great feedback their whole life and this allows them to take more social risks, be more outgoing, practice more. If you know or talk to an attractive young woman you will notice that from her POV the world is usually filled with nice people who smile a lot and have 0 problems in accommodating her. Sure, some may be reasonably fed-up with all the unwanted attention, but all of them prefer that to the alternative.

It's entirely possible it's both. It could be that attractive people are able to get away with more, and if this is applied towards getting away with bad behavior it will reinforce that, and if it's applied towards being comfortable and getting along with people, it will reinforce that. Predisposition and circumstance probably has a lot to do with it.

> If you know or talk to an attractive young woman you will notice that from her POV the world is usually filled with nice people who smile a lot and have 0 problems in accommodating her.

Sometimes people that live this are oblivious that others do not live this, and that in itself may be seen as, and may be being an asshole. "I don't know why you get speeding tickets, you must just be being mean to the police officer. I'm just nice to the officer and they always let me go, so it must be something you're doing..."

This is why the best path is to be pretty average-looking into your 20s (so you receive middle-of-the-road treatment and are neither beaten down nor coddled) and then just blossom (so you can enjoy the benefits of being attractive but know what exists outside of them).

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