That makes about as much sense as suggesting you could take me, a PHP developer, off the project I'm on now, throw me onto a team developing embedded OSes for medical devices, and have me just pick right up and be fully productive on day 1.
It also presupposes that as long as there is even one important hard problem out there, we should simply ignore all the less-important problems and throw all our resources at the most important one, which is also both unrealistic and fairly unhelpful.
It was strange, every so often I would have a day where people were noticeably warmer on average. They would laugh at my jokes, they would help carry a conversation, they would let me have the stage in a group discussion without pushing in -- it was amazing. This only happened every so often, and I chalked it up to luck and chance and some days just being better than others. On one of these good days, I was busy regaling my enraptured audience with a tale about a covey of quail we were raising when I got an itch on my head. I lifted my hat to scratch and a wave of revulsion washed over people's faces. Instantly, they lost interest, glanced away, and looked generally uncomfortable. Someone even coughed. I stumbled but kept going, however it was clear that the story was now unwelcome so I abortively wrapped it up. I made a few attempts to restart conversation but got the "good day" responses were gone, I got only the typical lukewarm responses. I went to the restroom to look for something on my head that might have caused the reaction, but it took me some time staring in the mirror and searching until I found the culprit.
Peoples' enthusiasm didn't return until the next day, when I ran the test again, this time intentionally, but with the same result. It was reproducible. "Good days" happened when I covered my thinning hairline. To be clear, these people included both men and women and they had known me for years. On a conscious level, they knew exactly what I looked like and that I was balding. On a subconscious level, though, they treated me very differently depending on whether or not they had recently seen my hairline at its worst. Once I started paying attention, I realized that this behavior was universal, and a bit of introspection revealed that the exact same instincts were active in my own mind.
Appearances matter! Incidentally, I've found that women tend to be much more understanding as they often have had similar A/B experiences with makeup, while men will often just chalk my observations up to confidence, reversing cause and effect.
Wigs boost me into a tier of attractiveness far beyond what I was able to achieve with a hat coverup and, later, with shaving. On one hand wigs yield far better results than people realize, but on the other they demand upkeep, disclosure, and the social stigma is severe if you "get caught." I don't use them because hair systems (wig + glue -- the good ones) get nasty quickly from my workout routine, so I prefer to just go shaved. When you start losing hair, all of your compensating options have steep tradeoffs.
From then on Jeff experiences loss of a client, being ignored by wait staff, and is made to experience the status Larry tried to tell him about.
I think there are a lot of physical things that people judge us over: body type, height, weird quirks like an eye problem or a big mole. Attractiveness of the face is very important in how we're treated.
I feel like we'll hyper focus on whatever our weakness is compared to the norm, and it turns into the center of the world for us. The most important is the attitude and vibe you put on. There are inspirational figures in government, industry and entertainment that buck the trend and use whatever personality traits to overcome the physical. I can point to any number of ugly people who are treated as if they weren't.
Because demand for popular things can drive research into important things.
Because there's no reason not to.
I'm pretty sure that the Sun will destroy the Earth before we get cold fusion, because the latter is literally impossible.
>be directed towards say, solving
Basic science is a thing. Hair is part of skin, and understanding how hair works is part of understanding how skin works. Both existing treatments for baldness (finasteride and minoxidil) were originally treatments for other conditions repurposed for hair loss. Bald men face a higher risk of skin cancer as well, which is hardly trivial:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijc.30395
>Being bald has not stopped me
So the funny thing about the baldness discussion is that we always talk about treating male-pattern baldness as a thing that primarily affects men's experience of life. But, in practice, women often choose to date men with hair in preference to men who are bald. By revealed preferences, we infer that women experience some kind of perceptual pleasure related to having a partner with hair. This is very rarely considered a meaningful endpoint.
Point is that progress always seems hopelessly stalled for what feels like forever and then one day the clouds open up, and the sun shines through. That's how it goes.
and this would also help women who suffer from alopecia, it must be much worse for them as they can't use anti-androgens like propecia for men.
- It seems easy compared to other medical problems
- There's a ton of money on the line for whoever solves it
- It still hasn't been solved
These things together don't inspire a lot of confidence in people who say we are close to curing aging, cancer, mental illness, chronic pain, etc. It almost feels like we are living before the dawn of medical science.
The only thing I hated about losing hair was the transition period where you're uncertain about whether it's really happening, at what rate, and what to do about it; but, once that decision is made - it's nothing but relief and I'm at peace with the size-1 permastubble. As a bonus, one tiny frown and no one talks to you, so that's an unexpected benefit.
Even if a 'cure' comes out, I wouldn't touch it because vanity is a young man's game. But if we gain some deeper medical or biological understanding from this, all the better.