Thank you for attending my TED Talk, now feel free to spend that research money on curing cancer instead of studying obvious things humans knew for hundreds of years.
Yes, attractive people generally have an easier time in life, we all know that, this is surprising to nobody, but at the same time, it probably doesn’t affect every field equally. Being attractive probably matters an awful lot in the modeling industry, but probably matters less in the tech support industry. This doesn’t mean that it matters 100% in modeling or 0% in tech support.
Also, I mean, how much money is spent on truly useless stuff? I spent multiple years working for the marketing tech team of a company. Wall Street traders contribute a lot less to the world than medical researchers but get paid an order of magnitude more. It’s hardly like this is the low hanging fruit in fund-reallocation.
This is a false dichotomy. We can and indeed should study medicine and psychology, among countless other subjects. The author of the article isn't a medical researcher and wouldn't be able to cure cancer regardless of whether he received research money for that. Moreover, the article gives no indication that it was funded by any grants. Professors publish articles as part of their regular jobs. Unless you're proposing that universities abolish all departments except medical research?
I'd guess that it's probably cheaper to prevent cancer than to cure cancer. One way to help prevent cancer is to successfully sue and/or prosecute companies who introduce cancer-causing substances into the air, water, food, and other parts of our environment. Thus, I'd say that the factors resulting in courtroom success are relevant to the fight against cancer.
Doesn’t follow, and I’m sure you’re not proposing that funds/time/attention spent in one place can be double spent in another. It’s reasonable to criticize a waste of resources since there’s always a real opportunity cost
I don't believe it's a waste of resources.
> there’s always a real opportunity cost
Pitting cancer research vs. psychology research is a false dichotomy. (And again, the article author didn't appear to receive any extra funding for this research aside from his regular professorial salary.) Society spends vast sums of money on a vast number of things. If you want to talk about a waste of resources, I could list a million things that are worse than this research, not just worse as in less useful, but worse as in actively harmful to society.
The thing that comes to mind is the “manufactured ewaste” that people buy on AliExpress and Wish.com and Temu. The products on there are enticingly cheap, but are often so crappy that they rarely even get a single use, and end up in a landfill.
Plastic waste is bad, but I am even more concerned with potential problems with lithium batteries piling up in landfills, not even considering the potential ethical issues with mining the resources for the battery.
It’s one thing to me if the device you are actually using was made with dubious labor, it’s another if it’s a device that will immediately become waste.
I get that as a process science and the pursuit of knowledge require us to prove some “obvious“ things because hey, it might not be as obvious as you think and you might learn something. But with that attitude how do you even want to establish the boundaries or the agenda of what we ought to research?
I don't have an example off the top of my head. This isn't an issue that I track or have a particular concern with.
> But with that attitude how do you even want to establish the boundaries or the agenda of what we ought to research?
I would generally leave those judgments to the academic community, who I don't consider infallible by any means but do consider significantly less fallible in their judgments of the value of academic work than, say, anonymous commenters on Hacker News.
Some Youtube personalities have been able to succeed despite not being very physically attractive, e.g. Sabine Hossenfelder (sp.), or not even showing their face at all (e.g. Perun) They are just know WTH they are talking about and present it in relatable/funny way.
If skill and attractiveness are unrelated but there’s a filter process at some point that only lets people through if they’re hot OR talented, you’ll see a negative relationship between skill and attractiveness after the filter.
the prosecutor example is interesting because it suggests that either thats not happening
The halo effect exists because it’s a somewhat valid heuristic.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexy_son_hypothesis.
>The first measure introduced an objective counterpart to human ratings by employing a machine learning algorithm developed by Megvii (Face++ Beauty Score).
Apparently obfuscating a subjective variable makes it objective in soft science research.
I lose interest immediately after that.
That and the % of poor and minority men in prison.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work