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Comment by kikokikokiko | Hacker News Reader

Far from your Burger King straw men, there's even a very famous study, out of the UK if I'm not mistaken, that confirmed the thesis of black women being the least attractive group across the whole spectrum of major ethnic groups. I mean, there must be one group, out of all, that would score lower than the others ain't there? Reality doesn't have to be politically correct at the end of the day.

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Strangely, There doesn't have to be just one with a lower score than the others.

One of the weirdest things about being human is that our preferences are neither rational nor consistent. The classic example in behavioural economics is with ice-cream flavors. If I prefer chocolate to strawberry and strawberry to vanilla, it doesn't follow that I prefer chocolate to vanilla. The preferences aren't transitive, and there doesn't exist a total preferences order.

Thats a very interesting point that I've never considered. Where can I read more about that? Is there a study you can link me to?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11483173/ is one such study.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/preferences/#Tra has an overview, note especially the paragraph about pair-wise comparisons.

But economists assume that preferences have a total order otherwise there wouldn't be a utility curve.

Economists assume a utility curve in the same way that physicists assume spherical cows. They are a useful abstraction which help explain many things, but don't reflect reality completely.

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/BehavioralEconomics.html

Source or it wont be discussed.

But aside from that, and the inherent assumption that beauty standards are universal and biological which is a pretty big assumption.

A slight societal preference does not lead to the conclusions people drew from the article.

To give an example, taller men have a higher chance of being promoted. Fortune 500 CEOs are disproportionately tall compared to the general population. As a society we still promote meritocracy, and working hard. Not telling people who are 5'4 to just give up and be unemployed cause they will never be the CEO of Ford Motor company.

> To give an example, taller men have a higher chance of being promoted. Fortune 500 CEOs are disproportionately tall compared to the general population. As a society we still promote meritocracy, and working hard. Not telling people who are 5'4 to just give up and be unemployed cause they will never be the CEO of Ford Motor company.

Now you're moving the goalposts, which shows you knew your original claim was wrong. "It didn't happen, and if it did they deserved it" indeed.

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