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Comment by Retr0id | Hacker News Reader

> physical attractiveness, assessed when individuals are around 15 years old

This is weird for a bunch of reasons, the most objective being that appearance changes a lot around that age range. Seems like an odd experimental choice.

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I suspect it’s the lamppost effect: the data was here, so they used that rather than a more relevant observation that would have cost a lot more money.

As it’s a health-related database, I suspect it’s a photo taken to control for acne, but that’s just speculation.

But definitely agree that it’s probably skewing the results a lot.

Not sure how late puberty can shift, but that seems like a confounding factor (time of start of puberty compared with time of photo).

Anecdotally, it was at around 15 (maybe a little before) that me and my friends became more interested in physical fitness/doubled down on sports/etc. which led to more female attention. So yeah, maybe a little more of a bake-in period would have been good.

It's only weird if you are conflating physical beauty and sexual attractiveness. And symmetry tends to be a pretty universal physical indicator of beauty and doesn't change much from 15 onward.

Physical beauty is often an attractor of lust, but someone with no sexual hormones or sexual desire could still assess or another's beauty without a sexual component, an asexual person could, someone not sexually attracted to a given gender could still assess physical attractiveness of someone of that gender (a straight woman assessing a girl's beauty), etc.

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