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Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching

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360 pointsjdthedisciple514 comments

People that have used to be fat, and then lost a lot of weight, will know how brutally different people will treat you. Whereas you'd practically be a ghost before weight loss, random people will suddenly look you in your eyes, smile, even start conversations with you.

Some will of course argue that you losing weight will also make you more confident, and thus you become more approachable. I think there's a lot of bias against fat people, against "unattractive" people, etc.

This also shows in the classroom, work, etc.

Of course, actually being conventionally attractive will come with its own perks. People will go out of their way to help you, and to support you. Over time this could very well boost your ego to also become more confident and decisive.

Or as 30 Rock put it, attractive people live in the "bubble".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bubble_(30_Rock)

I feel this as a guy trying to lose weight very seriously this year. On one hand, I can lose weight but I will forever be short unless a miracle occurs lol. I’ve made my peace with being unattractive for the most part, the attempt to lose weight is primarily for health reasons.

I went from being a scrawny guy in my teens, to a chubby/fat gamer in my late teens/early 20s, and then a fit athlete in my mid 20s. While I had envisioned much more interest from the ladies, my biggest surprise was how much nicer, kinder, and helpful random people were. And in a professional setting, co-workers and leaders just treated you more seriously - especially when it came to handing out leadership roles on projects etc.

Also helps to not be a teenager.

He was fat in his 20s and then got fit, not teenager.

I was in the best shape of my life after religiously going to the gym for ~3 years in my late twenties.

Outside of a couple of women asking me for help at the grocery store with some heavy produce, it barely made any difference to how people treated me.

Being fit is just 1 aspect. These days you also have to look like you're a top 20% in a bunch of other categories as well.

> I will forever be short

I'm 6'4" so not freakishly tall, but tall enough that people notice and for it to be a problem.

1. Im ever ones human ladder. About once a month someone will ask me to get something off a high shelf.

2. Shopping sucks. Wookie sized pants, Wookie sized shoes, Wookie sized shirts. It's a pain in the ass, I dont ever have anything trendy, and I pay more if they have it in my size.

3. Cars: There are some cars I just cant drive. For years I could walk into a Volvo dealer and NO ONE would talk to me. Why? Heigh notches at the doors and they just knew on my way in that I was never going to be able to be comfortable. And sports cars: forget it. In my youth a friend of mine got her father's Porsche: not a fun car to even sit in.

4. Little things, like flying, taking a nap on a couch, or laying in any sort of medical "bed" becomes a comedy sketch.

5. There are just a litany of things that arent fun that one would not think of: from wacking my head on every low hanging thing that jumps in front of me, to being "too big" for a lot of activities that I would otherwise enjoy (smaller sail boats as an example).

Would I trade height in for short, and the social stigma it comes with. Nope, you do have it worse in that regard. But the world isnt built for people outside the average...

Sorry, but no you’re not getting sympathy for being tall. Nor should you. Life is noticeably easier for tall men, all things considered.

Sincerely, Fellow Tall Person

Short guys have a vastly easier time getting jacked at least.

I think being conventionally attractive gives you a lot more chance practice socialising and my observation is that, people who use that chance get so good at it, they remain very good at relationships even at old age.

Ive seen the opposite in some people.

I know a ~55ish year old lady who is beautiful, but looks 55. I see her adjusting to her new reality and its painful. I imagine she used to be able to get away with being mean and sarcastic because she was so hot.

Now it just causes office fights. "I wont work with X" is something Ive heard.

The interesting part is that I originally only worked with her on the phone, so I always thought she was mean... Then I saw her in person and everything clicked.

Problem with that story is that you "imagine" her to have history to match your ideas about how people behave, but you do not really know her history.

plenty of mean and sarcastic ugly people around too

Some ugly people are mean because they are ugly and take their frustrations out on the world.

Some pretty people are mean because they can get away with it and never learned that it's often counterproductive in the long term.

This is just some people, others act differently.

They often have "other reasons" people put up with it - even just being the office attack dog you sic on annoying customers will make you a valuable team member.

In my opinion, a lot of ugly people start off by trying to be nice, then gradually become more bitter and cynical the more they have to take shit from other people. At least I feel like that has happened to me, and I'm not even so ugly (imho). The amount of gaslighting I've put up with from everyone over the years has really been infuriating and has led me to a lot of misery in my life, and also turned me away from the things that might have actually made a difference.

This. Childhood experiences are formative, and the peer environment from early years through adulthood is usually brutal. My expectation is that confidence and grace is evenly distributed at birth, but is added to the physically attractive and denied to the unattractive almost immediately. I've always found the physically-unattractive-but-socially-attractive especially interesting because they've succeeded, often along with a very cool peer group.

>My expectation is that confidence and grace is evenly distributed at birth, but is added to the physically attractive and denied to the unattractive almost immediately.

I don't think it would be evenly distributed, but it goes something like that. You can choose to behave confidently up to a point, but people reject such behavior from an ugly person. Ignoring this social feedback can get you into a lot of trouble.

>I've always found the physically-unattractive-but-socially-attractive especially interesting because they've succeeded, often along with a very cool peer group.

Some of these are brutal too. I've known some real busted dudes who got attractive girls to like or marry them somehow. I assume it's often money, connections, and/or encountering the right person who is a sucker for your particular characteristics. Imagine being the ugly brother or nephew of a solid 10 (guy or girl), or being a multi-millionaire. You'd easily get many times more opportunities in all areas of life.

The difference between female/male is also abysmal.

I lost 100 pounds and as amazing as it was that everyone (not just potential mates but literally EVERYONE, even family) no longer thought I was lazy and was just… nicer to me - was honestly kind of depressing. And I was an active fat person! I often did 50+ mile bike rides when I weighed 280.

People aren’t much more sophisticated than our ape brethren at the end of the day.

There’s a decent anime exploring this on Netflix right now. “Lookism” https://m.imdb.com/title/tt22297722/

> Whereas you'd practically be a ghost before weight loss, random people will suddenly look you in your eyes, smile, even start conversations with you.

I watched something like this happen in a friend, but as an outside observer I saw a different explanation: The period when he got into shape involved a lot of changes for the better in his life, including becoming more outgoing, motivated, and disciplined (necessary prerequisites for weight loss in the pre-medication era). He also bought a new wardrobe and replaced his old worn out logo T-shirts and cargo shorts with clothes more appropriate for an adult. He also started paying attention to his grooming and hair style instead of looking like he just woke up.

For a while he tried to explain it all by his weight loss alone, but over time he realized it was an overall change in everything about the way he carried himself and presented himself to the world.

I won’t deny that there is some stigma around being overweight from some people, but I’ve also rarely seen a person change only their weight. Now that GLP-1s are everywhere I do know a few people who slimmed down rapidly without changing anything else and expected things like their dating life to completely change but have been disappointed that little has changed socially for them. They do feel a lot better though!

I have a lot of respect for folks that successfully lose a great deal of weight. If I know someone did that, my estimation of them generally goes up, several notches. I'm no stranger to quitting stuff, but significant weight loss is still terrifying to me. I could benefit from losing 20-30 lbs, myself, and it's not been easy. Success has been ... elusive.

Maybe it's different, these days, with GLP-1 drugs (I have always called it "Gila Lizard Poison" in my head), but it takes serious discipline and grit to lose the weight, and keep it off.

That generally comes from massive personal change; both internal, and external. Quite difficult.

I’ve noticed there’s a similar challenge in keeping bad ideas out of your head.

Weight loss, debt recovery, and other habit changes are just that - changes to habit which are much more difficult if you don't admit that's what you're doing.

This has been discussed from time immemorial and confronting it as it is (that in the case of habits we are more animal than rational) is the beginning of change.

An example is that you can't just "cut it out" you have to replace it with something else.

Losing weight is one of the prime examples of the difference between simple and easy. We've evolved over millions of years to try to gain weight; reversing that is hard.

It's difficult if you think of it as big, but what if you break it down into smaller, manageable steps? Start by being consciously aware of what you eat in a day (or better yet, week); write it down, do some back of the napkin calorie calculations.

Then adjust. Change one habit; could be reducing portion size by a hundred grams, drinking less, switching to black coffee, I don't know what people have for habits.

Same with exercising, don't go all in at once, try going to the gym or for a long walk once a week. It takes six weeks to stop, change or start a habit, so it will take some self-discipline for that period. But if it's small, incremental change instead of a "change your life around" it's a lot more manageable.

Also be aware of the "survivorship bias", the "before / after" posts on social media, the "I changed my life in $period" - these make it look like it was an overnight lifestyle change, but that's not necessarily true, what you see is the end result and if you pay attention you'll notice that usually there's years between the before / after without any breakdown or in-between progress.

> He also bought a new wardrobe and replaced his old worn out logo T-shirts and cargo shorts with clothes more appropriate for an adult.

I think the problem many __men__ have with that is that an "appropriate" wardrobe looks more uniform and less individualized, basically boring.

I don’t think that’s particularly true. There’s a lot you can do with texture, colours and silhouettes, even within items that are “the same”. I do think most men are pretty unimaginative when it comes to dressing themselves though, and most can’t even do basic things like getting trousers hemmed to fit them properly.

Never forget the Australian newscaster who wore the same suit for a year and no one noticed/called him out for it. His broadcasting partner, a woman, had been called out for wearing the same outfit previously. There may be subtle variations available to men, but the simple fact is that many fewer people notice or care.

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-30069564

> There may be subtle variations available to men, but the simple fact is that many fewer people notice or care.

I wouldn’t say that’s the takeaway, even with a simple navy suit you have a lot of options.

What that article does do though is highlight just how low the bar is for men to dress.

While I can kind of see what you are aiming at, a basic button down and clean pants go a long way. Keep it ironed and clean, and you go even further. No need for the anything that looks like a uniform.

I tried going for just a button down and clean pants and was stopped by the police.

Can you elaborate?

Men's fashion is a little boring, but there's a lot you can play with in terms of fabric and accessories within it anyway. Men's wear blogs are kinda interesting

And you can usually tell the difference between a tailored suit and something ill-fitting.

I find that buttoned shirts only work if your belly is flat, so you can wear it in your pants.

With even a tiny bit of belly fat, ime it is better to just wear a t-shirt and not wear it in your pants.

Wear braces under your suit, and shirt garters. The combination keeps your pants and shirt exactly where you want them.

Thanks. It looks uncomfortable though and it seriously makes me wonder if there isn't a better way of keeping a shirt in place.

Shirt garters aren’t uncomfortable. I wear them with suits all the time. The other way to do it is to never lift your arms over your head or bend over at all.

I don't think this is true, but you won't be able to just grab a shirt off the rack and rock it. Look at Penn Jillette when he was larger, as an example. He was always dressed to the nines. He also strategically incorporated vests into his wardrobe too.

Depending on your shape, a simple undershirt might be slimming enough, or adding shirt stays or shirt garters might help. Worst case you will have to get it tailored. A tshirt is obviously cheaper and easier though, but that signals something.

When I was a fair bit heavier though very active, off the rack shirts didn’t really fit me very well. Tall upper body and very broad shoulders from sports didn’t help. These days I seem much closer to just being able to buy stuff. Bought a new blazer last year and it didn’t need any tailoring which never used to be the case. And shirts work well enough.

Tailors can make a button down shirt that will fit your body. You will look fat, but you can look much nicer. It will cost you though.

Only if your idea of personality is expressed through a logo tshirt.

Only if your idea of personality is expressed through a textured fabric

Well yes.

Both of those choices express a lot.

The key point in his change was that he started looking like someone who cared enough to put some minimal effort into dressing himself.

It’s not about being uniform or bland. He went from old worn-out clothes he didn’t care about to wearing clothes that were appropriate for a business casual environment or a casual date. When you start dressing like you care, regardless of how unique and individualized, others notice.

It goes a little deeper than "does not care" though: worn out can also be a symptom of caring a lot. Caring in the way of having a strong desire to identify with the stuff worn, and newly bought stuff just not checking that box. Then any newly procured garb, no matter how carefully selected, perhaps even customized, will feel like being dressed up as someone else. It's like a trap, just not being wired for new clothes. I wonder if there's a connection to childhood dress-up play, as in kids who had good times masquerading as some archetype are less likely later in life to fall into that "that's-not-me" trap regarding new clothes.

I wonder how clean the clothes looked, however. Clothes can be well worn but still appear clean and taken care of. There is a difference between "this is my favorite shirt" and "these are my grubbies I use while cleaning the house".

It's caring about the wrong thing if you're looking to improve your life though. You need to logically reason through norms and expectations and realize you gotta put on the correct costume for the setting, even if you don't identify with it.

Otherwise "Thats not me" will be describing things like "successful career" and "romantic relationships".

I think many men look at clothes like the wrapping paper of a gift. They absolutely don't care what a gift comes wrapped in, it's the content that matters. Choosing wrapping paper or even thinking about it is boring as hell.

So they then project themselves onto women, and are then surprised that expectations are different.

They think they believe that but are probably simultaneously attracted to women in part because of how they dress and style themselves.

A man still strongly emotionally attached to faded, worn out logos from many years ago is probably not an appealing signal to most women looking for a man to date.

Part of what you signal with your wardrobe isn’t just that you care for yourself. You’re signaling to others that you care about how you appear to them. We can’t expect other people to ignore that signal because showing that you care about how other people see you is a proxy signal for caring about other people.

I was going to comment something similar to this. To an extent, dressing and grooming well is a sign of respect you show to other people as well as to yourself. If you can't clear that relatively low bar, don't be surprised when people aren't super excited about what you might add to their lives.

> If you can't clear that relatively low bar, don't be surprised when people aren't super excited about what you might add to their lives.

You mean like that guy giving keynote presentations in a turtleneck and jeans?

Yes, Jobs is kind of an exception to my general point, but I think it's a bad idea to live your life assuming you can be the exception.

I'm also not talking about having a great fashion sense though, and it's okay to prefer a more casual look. Just pay a little attention to how you dress and care for yourself.

Jobs looked put together.

> showing that you care about how other people see you is a proxy signal for caring about other people

How so?

> showing that you care about how other people see you is a proxy signal for caring about other people.

It's a very bad proxy for that—its somewhere between uncorrelated and anti-correlated to thing it is taken as a signal for (at least, if “caring about” is meant as having a positive concern for the feelings of rather than a desire to manipulate to extract value)—though (which makes caring about that signal itself a kind of signal.)

I wish the people who thought that was true would give me money instead of buying a suit.

By the way, in academia dressing like a salesman is often considered a no-no.

For many years in large corporations, pretty much the only acceptable dress was white shirt, tie, dark suit, and dress shoes. We were still wearing something like that at. trade shows into the 1990s before things started loosening up.

(Mildly funny story. One big, probably Unix, show the IBM staff showed in logoed polos and suddenly everyone else is like If IBM doesn’t need suits we sure don’t.)

I started dressing nice at work, reasoning that looking sharp would buy me a few seconds or minutes of grace to allow my social deficiencies to catch up - just in case an executive decided to ask me a question.

Of course, that never happened for months, years until the one day I went in wearing cargo pants and a gothy synth band shirt and was greeted by a delegation of executives from out of town engaging everyone in small talk…

I worked for a downtown firm for a while which loosened up dress code a little bit so I didn’t always wear my jacket in—though cargo pants and rock T would definitely have led to an HR meeting. One day I had to borrow a jacket from someone when I had to go to a nearby studio for a TV interview:-)

I guess it all depends on the type of women you're trying to attract. I'm married and have kids, so old worn out logo t-shirts and cargo shorts sound nice and comfortable to me, in most everyday situations. I'll dress appropriate for the circumstance.

Isn't that the point of "appropriateness"? To define what allows one to be boring and disappear into the wallpaper for those who prefer to live that way.

Those who want to stand out will define what is appropriate for themselves.

PC said logo T-shirt and cargo shorts because they are so un-individual that they have become cliche.

And most women are going to prefer that over the worn out logo Ts.

I mean if you want to go beyond that and have a more distinctive look go for it!

A data point, though my situation is not even about weight: I used to be skinny fat in my mid-twenties until mid-thirties - so basically still kind of slim but some belly fat and not much muscles. Kind of average, unremarkable.

After a breakup I started being more active again, I went bouldering once a week and gradually got into shape and then really athletic after about 2 years when I started going twice a week. My total weight didn't change at all. I dress just as good as before and have the same overall style. Of course most clothes simply look better on me, now that I'm more in shape. Same good job that I still like. I do go out a bit more. But overall I would say I really didn't change anything except getting more attractive from putting on muscles and losing fat.

It made a hell of a difference for dating. Before I felt mostly invisible but since then got approached in bars all the time, which rarely happened before. After some time I got way more confident - but when this stated I sure wasn't yet. Some woman even told me into the face that I lacked confidence after they approached me and realized I don't have the personality and/or confidence matching my appearance. They certainly only approached me because of my appearance.

The people only loosing weight are probably held back by other things. If they changed everything but their weight they likely wouldn't have more success either. I would say I had most things figured out already before and It seems I was held back only by having an average build. Just getting fit absolutely made the difference for me.

Sounds like a body recomp- well done!

Edit: no idea why downvoted but it refers to staying roughly the same weight while building muscle and reducing fat. And having tried it, it’s hard! I stand by my “well done”

Thanks! I really feel I had it easier than most though because of genetics I guess. I see others train much harder for less results. I didn't even change my diet much except shifting to a lot more protein-rich food. I have lots of respect for people loosing a lot weight and having to work way harder than me for it.

If I were to guess I imagine the downvotes are due to the use of an upvote being preferred over (albeit it well intentioned) comments of "well done" in HN threads (in order to keep signal to noise ratio high)

Fair, I mostly was thinking it would be nice to give people who want to try it themselves the term that’s most often used.

It’s hard - you have to eat around maintenance level calories but you also need to make a high percentage of them protein and also keep enough carbs that you don’t bonk if you’re doing any cardio (I like jump rope myself). Just cutting or bulking gives a little more flexibility.

Makes sense and it's a new term for me so thanks for sharing :)

I never understood that. The presence of simple comments loke "Nice!" or "I agree" are really rare anyways, and I don't find it difficult to scroll past them like I would with any other comment whose first few sentences I don't find salient

>After a breakup I started being more active again...

Was it the changes or the breakup itself? Most men don't get "good" at dating until they become a certain amount of jaded. Hence the stereotypical freshly divorced man mopping the floor with the dating pool. The changes sure wouldn't have hurt, but still.

The breakup after years of relationship certainly was a big change in my live. I broke up but I don't think that made me jaded. I get what you mean though, I would say I got a bit more jaded after getting more confidence and that helps now. But that was long after I noticed increasing interest from women.

Is there a stereotype about newly divorced men being really good at dating?

If anything I thought it was the opposite.

Divorced men have an easier time finding dates, yes.

> If anything I thought it was the opposite.

Think of it in another context, who do you think have an easier time getting a job, a guy with 10 years of experience that currently doesn't have a job or a guy that never had a job? It is possible the guy with 10 years of experience got fired for a good reason, but on average most people want the guy with experience.

Men don't evaluate women for the same things, so it can be a bit hard to understand, but it makes perfect sense once you understand it. Rather it is weird that men don't value women with experience the way women do with men.

> Before I felt mostly invisible but since then got approached in bars all the time, which rarely happened before.

Physical attractiveness is extremely relevant in the context of cold approaches in a dating environment. I won’t disagree with you there.

However getting approached at bars is very different than working with someone in an office setting or having your papers graded in a university setting.

Its pretty much all that matters when we reduced dating to a profile pic and a swipe. You don't get to show off confidence or hobbies or way of life 99% of the time. Just a few seconds and a picture. The rest comes later.

>getting approached at bars is very different than working with someone in an office setting or having your papers graded in a university setting.

I wonder if thats changed, too. School is probably similar, but there's an increasing notion of "don't shit where you eat" that makes office romance difficult. I'm sure people will notice, but they may not want to approach otherwise.

> Its pretty much all that matters when we reduced dating to a profile pic and a swipe

You can also list your job, that matters a lot more than your profile picture if you are a man, doctors easily get dates etc.

Sadly, listing "game developer" or "programmer" tends to have the opposite effect. We aren't "prestigous" enough to be carried by our jobs (despite making decent money), and we still get a lot of that old school "nerd" persona to boot.

I'd have better luck pretending to be an artist, despite my modeling skills being barely above "Hello World".

> I won’t deny that there is some stigma around being overweight from some people, but I’ve also rarely seen a person change only their weight.

This feels like it could be a correlation vs causation thing. Its a lot easier to put effort in if you see it getting results. Is it that they suddenly put effort in triggering all this or is it the weighg loss made the investment of putting effort in return results where previously you'd need a much higher level of effort to see results making it only seem worth it after the weight loss?

Or is it the weight loss resulted in higher self confidence giving all sorts of knock on effects.

I think its really hard to tease apart cause and effect here. Would the same changes be possible without the weight loss or have the same results is kind of a hard question to answer.

>For a while he tried to explain it all by his weight loss alone, but over time he realized it was an overall change in everything about the way he carried himself and presented himself to the world.

All of what you're saying is just looks. Clothes, posture, etc. all matter and we all know some exceptions to the rule, but people make clothes look good and not so much the other way around.

>Now that GLP-1s are everywhere I do know a few people who slimmed down rapidly without changing anything else and expected things like their dating life to completely change but have been disappointed that little has changed socially for them.

Not everyone looks better if they slim down. And if you do it the wrong way, or don't update your clothes to not be baggy, or just plain have excessive expectations, it's going to be disappointing. Losing weight just gets you to the baseline of where you might not make people want to look away or find reasons to not like you. If you're short, then you'll still be short after losing weight. If you're ugly in the face, you'll still be ugly, if not more ugly. I know you're talking about men because even overweight women have lots of options. Dating is also nearly impossible for average men now. You shouldn't assume that weight doesn't make a huge difference based on a few examples of guys who can't get dates. Think of it more like not being fat is to make others not immediately blow you off for that one reason.

It’s a lot harder than in the past but I doubt that it’s “nearly impossible.”

It is practically so much harder that I think it qualifies. How many rejections or years of effort do you think one must endure before he can reasonably say it's nearly impossible?

I'm not going to get into how stats are on my side, the dismal outcomes on dating apps are a reflection on the state of the overall market, etc. But these are far worse than most people expect.

I think there are too many variables to really control for well on this one. Obviously someone who does what your friend did is going to have many factors changing how people interact with them and it will accumulate into and even larger total effect.

I lost 100lbs very rapidly. The difference in attention and little social things was noticeable almost immediately. Same style of dress, moderately kept hair, but otherwise decent personal care on both sides of the weight loss.

What is interesting though to me is that I hit my goal weight right around the time some major life events happened and I pretty much was operating at the lowest self confidence levels I ever had in my life. I was less social and much more withdrawn than before.

I still would notice the “second glances” from folks I never got before, and even friendly greetings etc that were a bit weird at first to me.

I don’t think you can really translate these changes into dating success or whatnot without other life changes though. They just Lower the difficulty level - you still need to put the work in.

That reminds me of when I was undiagnosed with hypothyroidism only in reverse. In my late 20s I made an effort to dress better, no jeans or dirty sneakers, hair cut, gel, gym at least three times a week. Then all that started to slide, brain fog, stay at home, just no energy.

It took probably 10 years but finally I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism. I wonder if a lot of overweight people started out like me but were never diagnosed. At diagnosis I wasn't overweight but I have since gained weight just due to my metabolism now. I was always slim all my life now I'm on the low end of overweight.

So yeah weight can be a problem but so can other issues. It's difficult to be yourself when you have hidden weights you don't even realize are dragging you down.

I noticed the same thing after I started dressing smarter.

I find even something as simple as a haircut can have a massive effect.

>Some will of course argue that you losing weight will also make you more confident

Having been one of the people who experienced this (well the inverse, scarily skinny to lean and muscular), the confidence comes entirely from people in your life congratulating you, followed by strangers and new people just having a baseline positive glow towards you.

I don't know who came up with that line, it's repeated a lot, but I am almost certain it came from someone who never experienced the transition and soothed their ego by telling themselves it's all just a state of mind.

Both can be true: A person’s state of mind is affected by people around them.

I used to be fat, currently I'm not. A lot of people who hadn't seen me in a while congratulated me. After that I haven't noticed much difference TBH.

Same here. Afterwards I got more fat again, and again I don't notice a difference in how people threat me.

i think op is a woman.

This is a benefit. Being healthy and fit is objectively great for you. That your peers subtly nudge you in that direction is great. And in contrast, I feel horrible about "body positivity" - making you feel good about an objective problem that's incapacitating and killing you is a huge problem.

The problem with this stance is that the alternative (making people feel bad) will exacerbate the problem by contributing to feelings of hopelessness and ostracism.

The first prerequisite for making difficult changes is a supportive environment - not a judgmental one.

> the alternative (making people feel bad)

The actual alternative is to tell the fat people that they really need to fix their serious health problem!

Politely watching them die before you is maybe comfortable, but pretty messed up.

I’m sure they know, pointing it out doesn’t solve anything.

> Politely watching them die before you is maybe comfortable, but pretty messed up.

I disagree. It’s their choice, and they should be free to do what they want and not be criticized. In fact it’s not comfortable and sometimes I do want to say something but that’s not very kind.

Everyone should be free to do what they want.

This includes criticizing others!

Fair argument, but I don’t think criticizing their weight benefits either party. Unless you’re a super close friend and you do it occasionally as a reminder when they are going off the rails.

My family constantly says I’m on the bigger side - but does it help? Absolutely not. Does it hurt? A little bit, at least. Then they shame you for “going on a diet”, but also asks why you don’t eat. I don’t need others to pile their opinions on top of it.

This comment is Dunning-Kruger. Some overweight people are very unhealthy. Some thin people are very unhealthy. Some overweight people have genetics that prefer to store fat subcutaneously where its not very harmful. Some thin people have genetics which preferentially store fat in and around organs or muscles which is incredibly damaging, leads to chronic inflammation and eventually T2D and atherosclerosis, among others. Lets just say you can't judge a book by its cover and biology is complex. Unless you know a person, keep your mouth shut and your mind open!

There are sedentary thin people who live on doritos and active heavy people who eat salads. There are ALL KINDS!

Over 3 gigabases is a lot of room for genetic diversity, don't you think?

My personal experience was that the shame I'd been made to feel throughout middle school for being overweight fueled the motivation to buckle down and lose weight when I was independent and mature enough to come up with a diet that I could sustain.

Glad to hear you came out alright.

I’ll offer this argument: Society aggressively tells overweight people that it is bad to be overweight, in no uncertain terms, and with significant repercussions. Yet overweight people exist. Hence, the strategy of shaming people until they lose weight does not work in the general or average case.

And others, being made to feel such shame, will sink deeper into things that quickly make them feel better. Like overeating.

The problem with your stance is that it is based on a lie, and if pushed enough will break down catastrophically.

I'm also quite anti "body positivity" as it is usually espoused online, especially in relation to weight, which is by far the main focus of the movement. It feels quite self-destructive, you accept that your weight is unchangeable (even though I would say that in 75% of cases, and probably even more, it definitely isn't), and try to feel "proud" of it, even though there are piles upon piles of quite definitive research which proves that being overweight is horrible for your health, and you essentially start preventing your improvement, by choice this time. You start eating more because now you decide that you actually like being fat, now thinking that that's who you are and always will be, and you should feel proud of yourself (which is quite silly all in itself), and you just end up in a worse state than before. Body positivity will not help you get healthier.

But, we also shouldn't forget that the idea of body positivity didn't just pop up out of a vacuum, it's inherently a reaction to the culture. And here I disagree with you, if your peers and society in general just slightly nudges you to be healthy then that'd be okay, but that's not really what happens from my experience. I used to be quite overweight, especially while I was a teenager, and it was tough. People didn't really treat me like a peer, everyone avoided me, and made fun of me constantly for my weight. Random people would tell me how fat I am (by the way, I wasn't even that fat, far from obese). And in the end it fucked me up quite badly, I had no self-respect, no confidence, and I didn't really want to live at that point. I managed to turn it around, I stopped eating properly for days, often just snacking on a package of nuts for an entire day, I would start passing out when standing up, I would exercise so much until I couldn't walk anymore, and in the end it helped! I lost a ton of weight, people stopped tormenting me, and I started to be perceived as quite normal. I even had my first real boyfriend, nobody even looked at me before. But I was still miserable and felt way more unhealthy, at that point I was underweight and eating one portion of rice a day, maybe with some vegetables. No snacks or sweets of any kind. What was essentially bullying did help me to lose weight, but it did not make me healthy. That's just my personal anecdote, I bet there are people who used people making fun of them to start a journey of healthy self-improvement and honestly that's great, but I know most overweight people can't take it well. This is kind of the issue with using shame to get people to improve (though most people who hate on fat people definitely do not have that as their goal), as that shame often messes with your mental health, and makes progress way harder. Many overweight people straight up turn to food to try to feel good, just making the issue way worse. Or they get better in a self-destructive way like me. Ironically I was definitely not healthier when I was underweight, I felt physically awful most of the time, but because I looked quite normal people thought I was more healthy! Weight isn't a perfect metric for health itself, and we shame overweight people disproportionately more than underweight people (especially for women, though I bet for men it's different).

And I think a lot of people who try to follow body positivity have a similar experience to mine (at least I think so, I don't really have proof!). They have endured a ton of meanness for their weight, and often started to hate themselves because of it, and then they turn to body positivity as a sort of "Fuck you!" to the people who made them feel subhuman for their weight. And it's obviously also not productive, it's just a heavy swing in the opposite direction. It's caused directly by the shame society places upon being overweight. It's just the opposite side of the same coin, where I believe both sides suck.

- "Being fat is morally bad!"

- "No, being fat is morally good actually!"

It's kind of tough to find a good solution for this, I think we all agree that we should try to prevent as many people being an unhealthy weight as possible for the good of the people themselves and society as a whole. And I 100% don't think we should encourage people to be and stay obese just because it's easier, but making fun of people who are overweight does not actually help them either. I don't really have a solution for this. I personally try to stay "body neutral" in a way, I try to avoid putting a moral value on unhealthy weight, and I try to view it as any other health issue. But as a society, I think it makes more sense to avoid bullying fat people in the hopes that they take the bullying and turn it into nice and productive improvement, and just make being a healthy weight easier, make healthy food the easiest food to access, put value in sports and walking, and just make it easier to live a healthy life by default.

Sorry if this response kind of turned into a sob story, I thought it was important to try to offer what my own experience was like when I was experiencing the pressure to lose weight, as I know a few people who were or still are overweight who felt similarly, even if it's not universal! :)

I agree with a lot of this. For context, I'm very fat, so I feel a bit more that it's OK to say this, but yeah the body shaming stuff is a very interesting topic.

Obviously, if you feel that your whole life you're being bullied, then it's definitely right to be empowered someway to get someone to stop bullying you that way.

But we seem to have gone way beyond stopping body shaming and to promoting body positivity, which I think is dangerous. We shouldn't be teaching kids that it's OK to be fat and that's just a personal choice and not to change.

The simple fact is that being overweight leads to a lot of health issues. I'm fortunate that my body still tolerates being able to run, but at my BMI that's by no means a guarantee long term. I know that realistically, I need to drop 1/3 of my body weight ASAP and keep it off, or the chances of me living another 20 years is actually quite low.

I know exactly the issues with weight loss and how hard it is. At least 3 times in my life, I've lost 25% of my body weight through dieting, but it's always a constant struggle to keep that off if I ease off even a little bit. Most of the times I've regressed, it's been a combination of factors - an injury so I can't go out running for a few months, maybe winter so it's cold and wet and I'm also avoiding my daily lunchtime walk, and maybe my work is really boring so I'm comfort eating a bit more than I need each day, and suddenly before you even realise it, all the weight has suddenly re-appeared, and each time it's harder than the last to get rid of it and keep it off for good.

But definitely, we want a bit of that stigma to remain. Knowing that I'm fat and that most girls don't even look twice at me, or knowing that the health risks are very real and every day I stay fat, it's doing even more damage to my body... it all sucks in the moment, but it's all helping the motivation that something needs to change. It's not OK to just do nothing.

Yeah I think we agree. Clearly being overweight is not good and should be disencouraged, even apart from your own health, an overweight or obese person in a society just takes more a lot more resources go support, either causing a burden on the person themselves or on the society in which they live in. If that person gets to a healthy weight they can be more productive and require less healthcare support, this is true in almost all cases, and so it's just a win-win if we can get as many people as healthy as possible. This should include not just being "not-overweight", but also being very underweight, being sedentary, having an unhealthy diet, or bad mental health. All of those things if improved cause wins to everyone involved. I'm not 100% on board with the idea to measure people's inherent value by their productivity, but I believe most people tend to enjoy being productive and contributing to their community. There's no downside in decreasing the amount of people who are an unhealthy weight.

I think the issue with stigma is it's so hard to keep in balance, I want people to care of their health, and that'll take knowing that being a healthy weight is in fact good, but doing so in a non damaging way is super hard. In my mind I kind of see smoking at an okay "shame-level" (though you can correct me, maybe I'm straight up wrong on this). Nowadays everyone knows that smoking sucks (let's avoid the whole vape thing for now), it destroys your lungs, and eventually it kills you. But the stigma I saw in relation to smoking just seems more normal and proportional, people generally don't really like being around cigarettes, which is fair, and some people silently judge you, some will tell you to stop smoking, but... there's just not this need to denigrate people for their smoking habit the way it is for being overweight. Now, in the end you'll still feel miserable when you'll start trying to quit/lose weight, but there's nothing really to be done about that, that's just nature.

Honestly I think the underlying cause for this is some of the innate human behavior we still have as a species. We often view being unattractive (which being overweight usually is for most people) as a big moral fault, which gives you a pass to punch down on the person for this transgression. I think we kind of view overweight people in the same lens as someone who did something disgusting, and this might happen completely outside of our conscious comprehension. It then takes conscious effort not to feel that way by default. Honestly this might not be fixable, and maybe there is no way to fix shaming of overweight people on the societal level. All I know is if we help as many people as possible to lose weight, the amount of people shamed will go down that way, too.

> I feel horrible about "body positivity" - making you feel good about an objective problem that's incapacitating and killing you is a huge problem.

It’s also a huge problem when people shame you for being fat. Some of it might be their fault but some of it not. Either way, I think it’s better to accept the body for what it is and work towards improving it and that’s what the “positivity” is. Shaming or judging someone is not a solution, it makes things worse. Yeah it can fuel motivation for some, and be quite detrimental to others - either way it’s nobody else’s business.

> Whereas you'd practically be a ghost before weight loss, random people will suddenly look you in your eyes, smile, even start conversations with you.

All the slim ghosts might think different here.

Having been overweight my entire life until recently, this is accurate. The "it's just your newfound confidence" argument misses the mark completely.

The baseline level of basic respect you receive from strangers such as simply making eye contact, holding doors, or initiating small talk changes almost overnight. It is a very bitter reality to wake up to when you realize you were basically invisible before.

I dress like a hobo so that everyone fucks off and nobody wants anything from me. Sometimes I go somewhere and people walk away, giving me personal space. It's amazing.

Are you sure it's not your username? ;)

Height as a man is also a huge bonus, at least in the cultures to which I’ve been exposed. There are examples I can think of men not being conventionally attractive, but just in the top quintile of height, and receiving special attention in dating and leadership opportunities.

I remember reading some study that (in men) height compared to your peers at 16-19 highly correlates with confidence.

Women maybe? I have lost weight and remained completely invisible to the world.

It is the same with being accompanied by a very beautiful woman.

Without changing at all, the difference of how people treat you when you are accompanied by a very beautiful woman is staggering. People are more nice and polite even dare I say subservient. People low key treat you like you are some sort of important person.

Beauty, and proximity to it, was is and will be a social status symbol.

My pet theory is that it is a term in the objective function to limit the mutation rate; hence the theories that claim that beautiful faces are the "averaged" faces of a race/ethnic group

Among all the other reasons that people have explained that this isn’t exactly correct a probably isn’t entirely attributed to just weight… I’ll make an opposite proposition.

Perhaps we are evolutionarily programmed to avoid people with impulse control issues?

I think there might be something here. I believe people flock to bigger, stronger and healthier people as some sort of evolutionary strategy for survival. If we were in a crisis and had to revert to tribes requiring everyone to pitch in to save humanity would you rather have the person who can resist impulses and keep a strict schedule (fit/healthy) or the person who looks like they lay around eating everything in sight. Using looks alone someone may assume the more healthy and fit person would be better to keep in their circle and thus prioritize being in their good graces.

I understand that it's not that simple, and someone's physical ability has nothing to do with intelligence in the real world. Unfortunately we're all subject to making split second judgements when interacting with strangers and as a result people don't think deeply about how that impacts those they deal with (or don't care).

Nope, it's cultural. If you look at cultures outside of your narrow window (in both time and space), you'll find that the perception of fatness has varied wildly over the millenia.

Over history being fat wasn’t an impulse control issue. It is now.

If we are wired to detect something doesn’t mean it has to be a first order attribute. Isn’t fat now versus fat then.

Gambling, addiction, setting fires, fighting, chronic lying, etc… some of those are first ordered detectable and some maybe aren’t.

If it just was cultural then women wouldn't have evolved abnormally thin waists, they have that since men finds it attractive, there is no other reason to have as thin waists as women has otherwise.

Women in every single culture have much thinner waist hip ratios than the male counterparts, suggesting that men like them thin.

Yes, straight men tend to like when women have wider hips than waists. That doesn't mean that skinniness is attractiveness at a biological level.

We are evolutionarily programmed to like attractive people, which excludes most visibly overweight people.

"Attractive" is something evolved as well though, so that just passes the buck. It's culturally determined as well of course.

> random people will suddenly look you in your eyes, smile, even start conversations with you.

i am not fat, infact very fit, athlectic and in shape. This never happens to me. maybe if you are a woman, this happens.

Alot of discussions from trans people have been very validating of gendered experiences as they get to objectively experience both and see the difference

Do you believe that they get an unadulterated perspective of both experiences? That they would be getting the experience of a woman rather than that of a trans woman?

Apparently some make a distinction regarding whether they pass or not to address this. James Barnes is one person whose written about this

https://www.newsweek.com/trans-man-broken-men-1817169

Thank you for sharing that, that was a valuable read.

That’s a great article but it confuses me how the author shows affinity for so many feminine traits and stereotypically feminine interests, that I wonder what the draw or perceived appeal of living as a man was.

Maybe that’s in a different article.

Well, I imagine gender dysphoria is more than thinking the grass is greener

> I feel safer; I no longer walk around at night clinging to pepper spray

some people report not being talked over in office settings

honestly you could benefit from talking to someone professionally if this is still confusing to you by now. Its not uncommon for this to be confusing, you could just accelerate your understanding by having someone deconstruct why it is still confusing for you

those considered passing, yes

and that of a man as a trans man. there is a lot less fanfare, media, and discernment on this compared to trans women, while being more common than people think

Depends how well they pass and if the other person knew them pre-transition.

It's an interesting philosophical question. Even if a male who makes some effort to disguise himself as female claims that he now experiences life as women may, in a general sense, do so, I don't see how he could possibly know if this is true or not. Being male and not female, he doesn't have this experiential frame of reference to make the comparison.

On the flip side, there's nothing more valuable than being able to walk around as a "fat" and/or "unattractive" person to really hone your filter ...

Once things have "improved", the filter remains and I'd argue those solid friends/colleagues/etc are proven gold.

In my books, there's nothing worse than being rich, beautiful, attractive off the bat as you might never know if those close to you are hangers on or the real deal.

Lots of ""'s here to be respectful that my opinions on the matter may differ from others.

step 1 be attractive

step 2 don't be unattractive

Race and gender also make a difference. People don’t want to say it. But back when dating apps put out more stats I remember this was well known.

When I was on antidepressants I noticed people were much more likely to approach me and start up a conversation. I think so might have been more at ease a confident an also more likely to smile and make eye contact with strangers myself. So I think self confidence and general openness play a big part too.

This is a basic fact of "the human condition" that everyone needs to understand, and accept.

Evolution made us this way for survival reasons, and it's mostly pushing us towards being healthy. And whatever your opinion, it will not change.

I've experienced this personally while losing weight. Some people will argue for the confidence thing, and it's a factor I'm sure, but there's a palpable difference in treatment. Also the trauma/trust issues that come from being seen as 'less than' don't resolve over night, and it takes some time of that palpable change to help build the confidence.

Interacting with anyone is a risk. They might take any form of attention to a level that forces you to set a boundary, or uncomfortably accepting the boundary already being crossed, turning a positive intent into a a net-negative interaction. If you're attracted to someone, there are a lot less boundaries. If you find someone unattractive, a lot of other people probably do to, increasing the risk they're attention starved, and more likely to make it awkward. Most people feel that risk, regardless of their own attractiveness. "Confidence" can help signal they're less likely to make it weird, but it's certainly no guarantee.

Or women vs. men, same.

That is probably true. I remember I felt really bad when my high school teachers were openly flirting with students during class.

But there is another side to the coin. If you are attractive, a lot of the nastier people out there will try to manipulate you and gaslight you just to be closer to you all the time. Some people will be cruel and nasty to you just because they know you will sexually reject them. Some teachers will be mean or passive aggressive towards you because they are attracted to you and they know they can never be with you.

It is actually very dangerous to be attractive but not to have the social skills to handle the way people react to it. Many attractive people grow up with these social skills because they grown up as attractive children and they get used to it, but for some people that suddenly become attractive because they lose weight or another reason it can be very challenging. Similarly for people that are just born introverts and don't have the social skills.

You obviously have never had to deal with a disability. I would swap with a fat person every day. Reading your "complaint" makes me seriously sad, because what you perceive as a problem is just the tip of the iceberg. Its like someone complaining about the lack of icecream while others are being beaten up in brought daylight.

There's always somebody who has it worse. That doesn't mean their troubles don't matter.

I wonder how often it is unintentional or somewhat polite. As a kid I got into this habit of not really looking at obese or disabled people because I didn’t want to seem like I was staring at them like some of my slackjawed peers might. I think to an extent this bleeds over into adult life. Obese or disabled people might think it is malicious but the behavior might really come from good intentions at least to some degree. A boring dystopia sort of situation IMO.

Also true of people who used to be young and then became old. And trans people also have a lot to say about this.

The thing that interests me is how eager people are to find rationalizations explaining how this effect doesn't exist

> People will go out of their way to help you, and to support you. Over time this could very well boost your ego to also become more confident and decisive.

This was my first thought about why the move to online works for men but not women. When I was attractive, people intuitively thought I was competent as well. I could speak with authority on topics not knowing more than the average and people would believe me.

Fo women this might sometimes even be the other way around - more beauty is associated with less intelligence.

Based on how we evolved attractiveness is still one of if not the most important traits you can have in life.

Its sad, but it is what it is. And why its sad? Because this uneven treatment is sometimes cause of big evil in the world.

I don’t know how widely this observation has been made, but relatedly it is very hard to be a very attractive person. I’m very much glad to be average.

I’ve known a few very attractive people close up, and their lives are difficult. One example: you are presented with so many partners it can be very difficult to choose, and hard to discern who actually likes you as a person vs is just attracted to you. How can you pick a partner who is going to be a good match and faithful? And when you’re in a relationship, it’s harder to stay faithful when other people are throwing themselves at you and you suffer FOMO.

I could go on, but you get my point.

The HN submission title (EDIT: The title is “ Attractive students no longer receive better results as classes moved online ” as I write this, in case it gets updated) isn’t from the paper and isn’t entirely accurate. The paper actually found that male students who scored higher in the beauty ratings continued to get higher grades as well:

> On the contrary, for male students, there was still a significant beauty premium even after the introduction of online teaching.

So the submission title’s claim that attractive students no longer receive better results when teachers can see their face isn’t true. The result was only detected for female students.

The fact that there is a discrepancy doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in the results. When you can only find a significant change after you start subdividing the group into different sub-groups it’s getting a little too close to p-hacking for my comfort. That’s not to say there isn’t a gender effect here, but the fact that males rating high on the beauty scores also got higher grades should suggest that this isn’t as simple as teachers biasing their grades based on what the students looked like.

Perhaps there is a stronger causal relationship between attractiveness in males and intelligence/academic performance than in women.

That seems like a pretty reasonable subdivision to me. Culturally there are differences in what it means to be attractive as a male or female, so it follows that the effects could be different.

> Culturally

Surely you mean biologically

My first job during and out of college back in 2003, we were entirely remote. We hired exclusively over the phone which resulted in a mix of people that were completely diverse in their backgrounds and at the same time truly qualified to do the work.

The company went on to grow quite successfully until it was acquired 6 years later. I feel that zoom and video conferencing allows some of that "appearance" factor back in. Based on my experience though, if I had my way, job interviews would be exclusively audio only.

Audio interviews are currently broken. People can use AI and many will do. Not necessarily for speech generation but to know what to say.

For research studies, we slowly revert to on premise physical interviews at work. If we want the ChatGPT answers, we don’t need another human in the loop.

HR loves video interviews for precisely this reason. They understand their role in the company to use their social expertise to suss out bad vibes, and it turns into something like Mean Girls.

I think most 'attractive' people put effort into their appearances, which might appeal to management types who evaluate work performance. Also, imo the best way to get a management position in my experience isn't to work hard, or be knowledgeable, but to be the least objectionable pick.

This varies with country/company, with Euros usually being appearance focused, but in US companies, it's dudes in crumpled T-shirts all the way to the top (in engineering).

Seriously, it's so entertaining to sit in on an important meeting with a US vendor which looks like a college dorm party with an impeccably dressed guy or lady (from sales and/or management) who sticks out like a sore thumb.

Best way to get a manager position is to be a few inches taller than everybody else. It doesn't make a lick of sense, but pay attention to how often the boss is taller than everybody else on the team. Not always, but far more often than random chance can account for.

(Incidentally, the best boss I ever had was barely 5 feet.)

IIRC CEOs have a very high average height, and height can account for a very large portion of the female vs male management disparity.

I think the full factoid is that CEOs who were promoted to the job are taller than average, but founders are average or slightly below.

Zuck is like 5’11”, Satya Nadella is a giant.

> and height can account for a very large portion of the female vs male management disparity.

Actually it accounts for more than the difference, controlled for height men are discriminated against for leadership positions since there are barely any short male leaders and there are plenty of tall female leaders.

This reminds me that SkyMall (RIP) always had those advertisements for height increasing shoes.

Now that I think of it, the inflight magazines still have those ...

Amusingly enough the best CEO and best salesman I ever knew (two different people) were below average height.

It could be that height says nothing about competence as a CEO, or it could be that the people who attain CEO and succeed despite height bias need to have an exceptionally strong mix of merit/will/effort.

I've heard the latter theory at least a couple times about US Navy SEALs.

The first time, it was a retired SEAL I knew (well over 6', and a brick wall) who one day out of the blue said something like, "You shouldn't feel bad about being short. The best SEAL I knew was a short guy, and he could kick my ass."

Later, I heard a similar anecdote in a speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxBQLFLei70&t=440s

As famously quoted by Darth Vader: https://youtu.be/6A0rwG39Jzkt=349

I've heard a number of times that you want to be worried about the guy who looks out of place because he's there through pure grit, skill, and determination.

Reminds me of Mike Vining in his dress shirt: https://primegazette.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/mike-vin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Vining

I've heard that special forces guys tend to be smaller, but I'm not sure that's true. It seems like there could be a few tactical advantages to being shorter, less likely to bump your head maybe, but who knows.

Spec ops tend to be more averaged sized, with denser builds (as opposed to bulkier muscle mass)(1). Although, quick caveat, take a look at old photos of Vietnam War era special forces vs modern late GWOT; the difference in average muscle mass is rather stark.

Historically, military selection emphasized calisthenics and load carrying capacity (body armor/weapons/rucks) + endurance. Although modern assessments have somewhat shifted towards weightlifting components, calisthenics/rucking are still a major focus. There is generally a disadvantage with height, where longer limb length creates more leverage to overcome, which is a disadvantage in both calisthenics and moving external weight around.

Average size is ~5’10” @ 180lbs at selection

(1) https://sofprepcoach.com/special-forces-selection-body-compo...

I've heard the expression "gazelle build" used there. Think more long distance runner than weight lifter. Long legs, short back. Strong sure but even more than that, high endurance.

Putin and DeSantis all wear them

Cool observation, might be more to it than I would like to admit. Interestingly, most of the CEOs of the biggest tech companies are not particularly tall (with the notable exception of Musk and late Steve Jobs) were exceptionally tall.

I wonder if this reflects on organizational culture, with firms being led by 'alpha males' being more authoritarian, and prone to these personality cults, where the boss has this aura of ineffable leader.

I have worked at these places, and there's no wonder nerds hate these. Since nerds tend to be on the less assertive, more thoughtful side (even if physically speaking they wouldn't need to be), and they're the only ones who can figure out hard problems, the ones behaving assertively, as well as being invested in politics and status games tend to come out on top.

Which makes technical work be seen as an inherently 'low status' thing, where the 'beta' works and the 'alpha' swoops in to claim the prize. This attitude alienates nerds, as they feel rightly exploited and unrewarded, and they move on to somewhere else, and suddenly these domineering people find themselves without anyone competent to do the actual work.

Which usually sets these orgs on a path to slow decline, which can go on forever. I feel like most orgs are like this.

Considering many orgs understand this on a deep level, they try to prevent technical folks being sidelined, by oversized egos, which, while good in intent, often lead to these same alphas use these new tools they're given, and hide behind doublespeak, and process, democratic gerrymandering, shutting down nerds complaining about tech debt by accusing them of 'not being team players' or quietly turning the less invested, but politically savvy members of the team against the nerd arguing for a good solution, by accusing him of going against group consensus to feed his own ego.

Makes sense that the best boss would be shorter since they have to be better to compensate for the bias against them

I think this only applies to men?

That is far less common outside of tech. Even within tech, I did throw on a blazer and tie when I interviewed for my last job. Totally unnecessary but any company for which that’s actually a problem it’s a red flag. I did start dressing down a bit for most of the developer-oriented conferences I attend for the reason you say.

> if I had my way, job interviews would be exclusively audio only.

The problem just shifts. People with attractive voices would then have an advantage.

At least voice coaching / training is relatively accessible? A lot easier than some physical features imo.

And you could argue having a clear easy to understand voice is a job skill for most positions, I think.

Indeed, but more tractable for a person to address.

> if I had my way, job interviews would be exclusively audio only.

Unfortunately, cheating is becoming rampant in remote interviews, especially for early career roles right now. I think companies are moving toward having final interview rounds in person because it’s such an effective tactic to discourage interview cheating.

Forget cheating, we get entirely fake people applying for our positions.

we get real people who are likely fronts for other people.

can't prove where or what -- could be lazy devs in Alabama, or North Koreans -- but it's happened enough that it's notable

Someone needs to right a novel about an LLM that gets hired through phone interviews, becomes a star employee, and rises through the ranks to CEO , always coming up with excuses to not show up in person.

Like a 21st century Office Space.

Add in a remote only office romance to give it a romcom vibe.

Screens were voice calls for a long time. I’m a big fan of what’s normally the day of interviews be in person even if you take AI cheating out of the picture. I realize not everyone agrees. Zoom interviewing is mostly a COVID outcome.

I think screens will continue to be phone or videoconference.

When candidates know the final interview will be in person they give up on cheating. No point in wasting time on cheating through the screens if you’re just going to bomb in person without ChatGPT showing the answers.

Though I have heard some stories of candidates desperately trying every excuse they can think of to avoid coming on site for the final interview (Getting COVID is the first-line excuse 90% of the time). When you explain you can delay and reschedule they give up.

Hadn’t even thought of that angle. But you also get a more human connection in an in-person interview much less going out for a meal. And I know there’s going to be a contingent on here who says they don’t have time for that of thing. <shrug> Plenty of fish in the sea.

You can just tell the person the final interview will be in person, then don't bother to do it.

If one can cheat in an interview, then I am not certain the interviewers are asking the appropriate and necessary questions.

> job interviews would be exclusively audio only.

Have fun. If you do it in volume, you'll get scammed pretty badly. Both by luck of the draw, and scammers actively targeting you.

> job interviews would be exclusively audio only.

Have fun. If you do it in volume, you'll get scammed pretty badly. Both by luck of the draw, and scammers who will actively target you.

The best hiring advice is this: Take half of the resumes you receive and just throw them in the trash. You don't want to hire unlucky people!

Napoleon: "I know he's a good general, but is he lucky?"

Best comment of the day :-DDDD

An alternative story could be that the women’s presented appearance online may have changed more than men’s and that real appearance changes could weaken the correlation between the paper’s stored photo-based beauty score and what instructors actually saw live. Maybe woman changed grooming effort more than men, or the effects of fashion trends that explicitly drove the woman towards less attractive styles etc.

if that mismatch increased more for women than men, the estimated “beauty premium” for women could fall even without any change in teachers’ discriminatory behavior. The paper just assumes the attractiveness stayed constant during the period, but seems to have had no data to verify this.

very important observation indeed, if that wasn't accounted for it means much less to me

aren't online curses a lot text only which inherently is harder to communicate

Attractive females might also have different behavior in remote teaching. Attractiveness directly affects how people behave and feel. This might also be different for males vs. females.

I'm sure that attractiveness does play a role for grades, it's just not nearly as simple as the paper puts it.

There are a lot of potential explanations, which is why these kinds of studies are unfortunately not that helpful and often cause questionable media coverage.

I remember this study! It caused huge controversy in Sweden.

The phd student who conducted it trawled through students' Facebook pages and took their profile photos (without consent). Then he had a jury of 74 teenagers rate the photos on a scale from 1 to 10. Then he tried to correlate beauty with grades for distance or in-class education. De-anonymizing the data was trivial so everyone could pretty much see how the jury had rated each profile photo. And research data is public.

It was a seriously weak study with questionable methodology and a too low effect-size to draw any conclusions anyway. So no reason to get alarmed if you are ugly. :)

Wow - this is about the level of a grade-school science project.

> When education is in-person, attractive students receive higher grades in non-quantitative subjects, in which teachers tend to interact more with students compared to quantitative courses.

I wonder how much of this is less about attraction and more about social skills. Granted, higher attraction affords more opportunity to develop those skills, but I have met plenty of charming people who were not conventionally attractive.

Who is your parents play a larger role than attractiveness.

A larger role for grading University students? Certainly not where I studied in central Europe. In which country do university tutors know the parents of their students?

They're trying to say that if you're born to (successful/married/privileged/whatever you want) parents, that will have more of an effect on your outcomes than your attractiveness.

But that's orthogonal to the question. It's probably true that Zuck's kids will do better than mine (though that also depends on how you measure things) but that doesn't change whether they'd do better if they looked better.

School doesn't start at university, and social reproduction is not a myth. Look at the cohorts of top universities/programs.

Good point. Good looking people may have different social skills. Some may have horrible social skills; others may be great. That whole focus on looks is very strange.

Or maybe it's harder to justify a higher grade on objective tasks like math/physics/...

It's very sad people on this site still fall for this rhetoric.

Attractive people have advantage even without the social skills. We have all observed it. Don't cope.

In many instances, attractiveness is tantamount to having social skills. It's not even a matter of developing a more sophisticated skillset; attractive people (and all the people who are subject to affinity bias) are just given the benefit-of-the-doubt more, and more consistently. This is where advice like, "Be yourself," and, "Don't fear rejection," and the idea that, "the only thing stopping someone from connection is their willingness to dare to try," come from: people whose attractiveness has preempted the requirement to really change or consider how they approach interactions.

> Granted, higher attraction affords more opportunity to develop those skills

I think this is largely a distraction from the direct effect. For any level of social skill, good-looking people at that level are perceived much more positively than others at the same level.

The question of the causal effect between physical attractiveness and social skill is interesting, though. There are plausible stories both ways, imo: your version, and the contrary one saying that pretty people coast on their looks and the rest of us have to try harder to be interesting or appealing in other ways.

(It's also hard to fully separate the skills from the looks, because the same behaviours that work for a good-looking person might backfire terribly for someone at the other end of the scale. Do we say those two people are equally socially skilled, or the pretty person is more skilled because they chose a strategy that works in their context and the other person didn't?)

> the same behaviours that work for a good-looking person might backfire terribly for someone at the other end of the scale.

This was summed up well in the "Hello, Human Resources?" cartoon[1]

1: https://www.threads.com/@smiling__sisyphus/post/DN56r2hkRXs/...

And attractive girls social skills go away when classes move online but other students' don't?

It is because on zoom no one would participate in the in class discussions really. Everyone seemingly checking out. In class some people are seemingly compelled to engage.

But the boys still get better scores for being attractive. And the unattractive students don't do worse.

The simplest explanation is often the right one.

Then why would it change between in person and remote environments?

I think being charming is conventionally attractive. The teddy bear stereotype exists for a reason.

I remember in college there were always small groups of students chatting with professors after class or going to office hours. Many profs would drop pretty big hints about upcoming exams. I guess it was a mix of enjoying the attention, pitying weaker students, and wanting to reward "participation". Always felt a bit unfair to me.

While engineering school was hard, I did think quite a bit of it was pure participation testing.

I used to think this was wrong, until I got into engineering.. Sure there is the rare math problem, but most of the difficult part was: "Are you willing to fly to mexico and be awake at 3am when the parts are made?"

I might be downplaying though... I did calc 1 at a job.

It's always said that a lot of success and opportunities are attributed to being in the right place at the right time (aka "luck"), but in a lot of cases, those folks had the tenacity to be in the right place ALL the time; when opportunities arise, they typically go to whoever's present and available.

Chatting with professors after class or attending office hours might be a grift, but it's not necessarily unfair. Specific circumstances aside, anybody can do it to get some leverage.

What's the old saying? So much of success is up to luck, but you can make your own luck?

Woody Allen said 80% of success is showing up.

What's unfair about office hours? At least at my school they were posted in advance and available to any student at no charge.

It's not the office hours themselves that felt unfair, but the way some students got privileged hints about upcoming exams.

how often did you actually go to these hours?

put another way, they showed up and asked questions and got info -- and you didn't. that's not privilege, that's effort

I'm not talking about getting more in-depth explanations or clarifications about class material, I'm talking about: "If I were you, I would really focus on that exercise on page 47 (wink wink). Also, just skip chapter 4 (wink wink)". This creates a scenario where a student with genuine subject mastery can actually be outscored by someone who simply got the hints.

To answer your question, I don't recall ever going to "office hours", as I was generally a top student with minimal effort and an autodidact, but I learned about it through friends. Having parents who are both professors also gave me a front-row seat to how common this was.

Every professor has their own style, most of the ones I had were very open that office hours were a pretty great way to get help/more targeted hints on what to study. This isn’t in my opinion, a problem. Their goal is to educate you as best as possible in theory, via classes, homework, and office hours. Students who take the time and effort to attend office hours clearly want to at least pretend to be putting in extra effort, so why wouldn’t they out more effort into helping them learn? I doubt that they are directly giving away test answers.

In an astrophysics class I had in college , the professor called on a student to solve a problem, he got it wrong, and the professor said "if you would come to my office hours you would know how to solve this" - the students response was something along the lines of "sorry, my parents are crackheads so I need to work two jobs to pay for school"

Plot twist - the student's dad was the professor.

I think once they start having homework in kindergarten "doing all the class work during class" is a goal that won't be reached.

With all empathy that sucks and is not fair - but should office hours be removed because one student could not attend?

Many of the professors I have worked with that I respect have different methods for helping these students- for example sending them an email after class, offering explicit direct help & advice. Or connecting them with a better job, or a research position.

No, office hours shouldn't be removed. Perhaps professors should just not reward people who come to office hours beyond the extra instruction that is given. Eg no special knowledge communicated solely in office hours("this question is going to be on the test next week"), and no special treatment ("this student got the wrong answer but I know from office hours they're trying really hard so I'll give them some extra points")

Fully agree, a hint should be at most about which subjects to focus on - and ideally that’s something they said in class too.

The problem with targeted exam hints on what to study is that it can create situations where a student who understood the material better overall and put in more effort studying all the material equally, scores lower than someone who simply happened to get hints from the professor. If your actual goal is to educate, you shouldn't give exam hints, and especially not one-on-one.

For sure - I think my definition of an exam hint is more like, study these subjects or “yes, data structures of some kind will be tested, but don’t worry about sorting algorithms.”

Not specific hints or answers, that’s obvious favoritism

For many profs the goal is to spend as little as possible time with students, so that they can spend more time with their research career, than lectures for students or hours after the lectures. For that they employ students, who have passed the exams. Teaching is merely a necessary annoyance to them.

IMO the really good ones want to do both, teach undergrads and get them enthusiastic about their research, win win. This what happened to me, with FPGAs & the LHC of all things, and is hugely responsible for where I ended up in my career!

> I guess it was a mix of enjoying the attention, pitying weaker students, and wanting to reward "participation".

It probably wasn't intentional, just 'I have x minutes a day with the students to teach them the day's lesson. I have more than x minutes worth of content to convey. If you willingly spend more time with me, you may get information that was lower in importance and was missed during the day's classes.'

I don't see a problem with that and is not what I had in mind with "pretty big hints". See my other reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493450

One thing I like about China's education system is the Gaokao entrance exams for universities. It doesn't matter if you're rich, poor, ugly, or beautiful. All it matters is how you score. It's as meritocratic as education can be.

And a side note from me as a Pole - online I see many Americans speaking about how cruel Gaokao is, but... It's America that's outlier. I had the same style of exam in Poland to get to uni, and it's the same in the entire EU, and rest of the world. So I have no idea why Gaokao is singled out.

We have the SAT and ACT, and those are objective. The wealthy still pass disproportionately due to better tutoring specifically oriented to those tests. It’s Goodhart’s law.

That's fair, but... What's the alternative? Obviously someone's going to have better academic performance if you have tutors, there's no way around. Still, if you have good academic performance - you have it.

American system feels more unfair when you're given points for extracurriculars like playing instruments or sports, like that's not going to hold poorer children even more (also how's that related to academic performance at all? Unis should not care about unrelated things)

Universities in the US and other countries are not the same, and comparing them is not really fruitful.

US universities do care about extracurriculars and GPA and other things because they aren’t optimizing for raw academic performance, they’re optimizing for various other things like an interesting student body (that attracts donors, professors, and future students), real-world networks, and so on.

In other words an extra four years of day care before those students have to function independently as adults.

No, that’s not even remotely close to what I wrote, at any level. In fact, it’s closer to the opposite, because selecting purely based on an abstract exam has nothing to do with being a real-world adult, whereas extracurriculars, internships, etc. do to some level.

Camus life is not good preparation for post campus life, unless Google and Facebook are still modeling their work environments to imitate campus life.

Pure lottery for all slots? Seems that it would be fairest possible alternative. Anything else being less fair.

The university will argue that a well-rounded student body improves the experience for everybody. IE, a college that's 100% "nerds" won't be as good as college that's 80% "nerds", 10% "smart jocks", and 10% "band geeks" (or whatever other categories you want).

I probably agree with that, but also acknowledge there's no good way to make that completely objective.

> I probably agree with that, but also acknowledge there's no good way to make that completely objective.

Even worse, rich kids have far more means to engage in extracurriculars than poor kids.

In Europe, university is treated as education for adults, not your entire life. Most universities are not campus resorts like in the US, but just buildings in the city itself, students live a normal life in the city, they rent a apartment or live in a dorm, take public transit to get to places, do sport at a sport place independent of the university, etc. You can live a well rounded life that way. The university is there so you learn your specialization. Of course people make friends there, but it doesn't have to be your entire life, and the university administrators job is not to meddle with people's social lives to make them "interesting", but to allow learning.

Our oldest unis are generally "downtown" or similar - Harvard, Princeton, UVA (sort of - Charlottesville is a really small city), etc. Though most do still have their own dormitory housing, at least for underclassmen.

The large campus-style uni is fairly recent creation - many came out of the land grant system during/after the Civil War. And even as newer unis have been created, they've followed that general design (even though they aren't land grant institutions).

All of those universities you mention still immerse students in the university setting round the clock, though.

This just means US universities are for networking and partying as much as they are for learning.

Good schools for everyone

One important thing is whether the tutoring is making better students, or just gaming the test.

And after graduation they can grind leetcode, and after that they can practice social cues to get in the management class. It's gamed tests all the way down.

For people who choose that career path. Still, somewhere somebody is doing some work.

The uggos I guess

Are those independent?

That's tricky. I think it depends on what kind of gaming and what kind of test.

Wouldnt wealthy people on average be better educated and potentially more intelligent than the poorest group?

I would expect wealthy to always be well represented.

> potentially more intelligent than the poorest group

It's easy to think this but its not true. There is just a ton of privilege involved in life. There are groups in India who purely tutor slum kids to the top IITs(the JEE exams in India are very hard).

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_30

Sorry I’m not familiar with Indian culture and power structures.

They said "on average". Selecting 30 of the most talented from the poorest group does not contradict that.

On average more educated? Yes. More intelligent? Nah I see no data. Given the same access to resources I expect the kid from a poor family and a kid from a rich family to perform similarly.

I do not. Where do unintelligent people exist in your society?

And at a certain point the argument about equal access is entirely hypothetical. For example can’t redo early childhood. So if that impacts your ability then it’s been impacted.

> Where do unintelligent people exist in your society?

Everywhere? Both in rich and poor households.

> For example can’t redo early childhood. So if that impacts your ability then it’s been impacted.

Ah I thought the argument was more about genes(aka born smart) and not something like nutrition.

I think a good thought experiment is Formula 1. Most top F1 racers come from super rich backgrounds. Does that mean that more money == better driver? Its mostly a accessibility problem.

Which premise do you disagree with?

1. Financial and career success are correlated with good test skills.

2. Good test skills are strongly influenced by genetics or early childhood.

If you agree with both then you expect some correlation between wealth and test performance.

I disagree that being born to rich parents == you have better genetics.

It's mostly privilege. And just being born in America is one of the biggest privileges wrt career and wealth.

Well I’ll be charitable and interpret == as correlation as we are talking about averages.

From your conclusion you’re telling me wealth is completely random or the capabilities of children is completely random. Neither of those holds up to any scrutiny.

I don’t know what being born in the US has to do with the conversation.

better educated I get, but more intelligent? That doesn't track.

Yeah it'd be very slight, but things like stress and nutrition can affect your memory in the long term which is a part of intelligence.

Assuming that’s true, wouldn’t that mean you are less capable?

Yes. There as difference between unfair and unreal; someone who is malnourished when growing up will forever likely be weaker than someone who received a proper sequence of meals.

We should perhaps recognize that and try to compensate for it, and it's not a value judgement on the person so afflicted, but pretending it doesn't exist just confuses matters.

If the difference is real I don’t think the test is the place to compensate as its function is to select people who will succeed in that area.

That's been the entire fight over the last 20+ years, does the test identify anything real and if so, what should be done with it (equality of outcomes vs equality of opportunity, e.g.).

Yes, very unintelligent people tend to not do well financially.

The problem seems to be that intelligence is not entirely heritable; that just because unintelligent people fail to do well financially doesn't mean that their children are doomed to the same fate.

Not entirely heritable? Or has no genetic correlation?

> just because unintelligent people fail to do well financially doesn't mean that their children are doomed to the same fate.

Correct, my statement is about expectation of averages. Not a claim that we should exclude an individual because of who their parents are.

> Not entirely heritable? Or has no genetic correlation?

My understanding is that there is some genetic correlation but it's not a certainty; smart/rich parents can have dumbass kids and vice versa.

It's hard to quantify because a direct "IQ" measurement is fraught with issues and trying to measure by "success" has its own issues. If you've not met a lawyer/doctor/PhD that you'd put in the "dumbass" category, you probably haven't met many.

Agreed. All children of smart people are not smart. All financially successful people are not smart.

Because they want to say that China is bad. When, as you say, US is the outlier in inventing strange ways to admit kids to college. I'm from Brazil and the entrance is exam is similar to China, there is a single exam and the note is used to determine which college you can go.

I don’t really find it strange, if anything a slavish obsession to test scores strikes me as strange. School is just an artificial institution like any other, it’s not as if getting good grades is equivalent real-world success or “true” intelligence.

The US also has the best universities in the world, by and large, (even if the regular education system is lacking), so I am pretty skeptical of the idea that raw test scores as the sole criterion would lead to better outcomes.

Raw test scores are a good idea in many countries because it reduces scope for corruption + gives even the poorest kids a chance. Though I would argue there needs to be multiple chances a year and not just 1.

China IS bad though.

Why glaze China so much when you can be impressed by the west instead.

All these zoomers grow up on a China propaganda app.

How is China bad? Their education system did take them from absolute poverty to #2 superpower in a few decades.

Oh, no it is very impressive.

I mean from a moral and "care about me" perspective.

Yes Trump bad but USA has done more for EU than China.

Wow! So advanced! Does the rest of the world do the same with jobs (a single exam to determine if you get hired to any company), or does it invent strange ways to interview and hire applicants well?

Its basically anything that sticks by saying "China Bad, USA Good".

The US has plenty of exams, starting in early primary school. All states have Standards of Learning (SOL) exams every few years on the main subjects. Then, starting in high school, you have a combination of Advanced Placement (AP) subject exams (college level, often granting college credit) or International Baccalaureate (IB) exams, Scholastic Aptitude (SAT) or American College Test (ACT), SAT2 subject exams, and probably a few I've forgotten.

The SAT or ACT are technically the only ones "required" for college, but most of the elite schools expect AP or IB (which tends to give the students a year or two of calculus, a fourth year of foreign language, and some deeper dives into other sciences or social studies).

But, because it's split across so many tests, there's no single "score poorly and your life is ruined" exam.

IB may become important for US college admissions over time, but that's more aspirational so far.

True, I only listed it because, at least where I live, high schools often do one program or the other. If it's an IB school, you end up taking the APs on your own (ie, there isn't a class focused on that content, though the IB curriculum should, in theory, end up covering the same stuff, at least for the major subjects).

I don't know how this exam is in China and Poland, but from what I've seen about the south Korean one it is much harsher on the students than the french one, even in my time

I am currently living in Japan, and it seems that they follow the American style exams. I don't know if it is a result of the post-war occupation, or it was already like that before WW2.

Back home in Spain we follow the same style of a single national-level exam that you mentioned though.

>and it's the same in the entire EU

That's not true.

Yeah, I definitely didn't do any kind of entrance exam to get into University so unless there have been more recent changes to it it's not needed for all subjects. And its also not needed if you can just filter out bad students via normal exams in the first semesters.

Everyone has a tendency to support the system they went through. I've done it numerous times for standardized tests and I went through them. I think the information value of a person who was certified capable by system X recommending system X is probably low.

After all, if you flipped the script and the US used standardized tests and you were then told that China uses a committee of experts that will certify incoming applicants' stated political positions, race, and cultural background in order to "craft a class" (as an admissions officer calls it in SAT Wars) with a carve-out for the children of those who have already attended, you would be informed of the need for meritocracy, the tendency towards nepotism, and the obvious racial biases that will affect individuals in such a system.

Likewise, you would doubtless be informed that the East's more holistic look at the total student is a superior form of student selection since it is driven by a Confucian focus on the gestalt human rather than on the reductive metrics of the West.

What is interesting to me is to hear from those who have succeeded in some system but nonetheless wish it were different.

There's millions of Chinese diaspora who went through relatively zero-sum gaokao and have their kids go through western systems. IMO general consensus will will tell you centralized test will produce superior results but it's so tough / high stakes they won't want to put their kids through it. Many of them are also gaokao flunkies who had alternate pathways in era where with more easy/shady opportunities that are now gated behind actual gaokao performance, and they know statistically their kids can't hack it. So course they want system to be different in the same way US system is different - some nebulous holistic system, aka one where there's ample opportunities for their money to corrupt/capture. TBH last 1000s of years of Chinese history is interrogation of monied merchant class trying to capture (more) merited scholar class, the lessons learned (repeatedly) is venturing away from standardized/merit is just opening up to deregulated corruption.

Your single exam performance doesn't forever assign you to a class of people, you still have an opportunity to redo the exam next year or to be successful even without a degree. That's not possible in China nor Korea. Even in Germany flunking a class might ban you from ever retaking it at any other German university.

Don’t wealthier families hire tutors to prepare their children?

That’s what happens in the US with the SAT/ACT.

I think you’d need free, universal SAT tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.

merit doesn't mean equal wealth spending to obtain a result. And it's not black and white.

Someone rich spending a lot of money to obtain tutoring doesn't necessarily make their score higher, and there's also diminishing returns. Someone poor who do not afford private tutoring can also receive good score due to their natural talent and/or hard work in self-teaching/practicing.

> universal SAT tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.

and that is now called school isnt it? Everybody gets at least some minimal standard of schooling.

The fact is, meritocratic is meant to describe the opposite of nepotistic (or sometimes hereditary/aristocratic). Under a nepotistic system, no matter what you do, you cannot succeed without becoming the in-group somehow.

> Someone rich spending a lot of money to obtain tutoring doesn't necessarily make their score higher, and there's also diminishing returns. Someone poor who do not afford private tutoring can also receive good score due to their natural talent and/or hard work in self-teaching/practicing.

If these are outliers it isn't really meritocratic. If there 100 desired spots that are allocated by the exam, and 1000 students, and wealth (tutors/extra time etc) moves the needle enough to make a meaningful difference, it's basically nepotistic just the in-group is who's parents can afford it. Depending on where you are this can compound each generation.

That it tends to become a caste system with extra steps (which steps provide a defense of the system as “fair”) is one of the chief criticisms of meritocracy (and criticism of the idea is where we got the term itself)

So as a society do we want to have people performing tasks based on demonstrated aptitude to perform those tasks, or to have people performing tasks based on achieving certain social and political outcomes?

The entire point of any such system is the latter thing anyway, regardless of how you go about it. I mean the higher-level point, like “why do we have any system at all?”

> regardless of how you go about it

i very much beg to differ. A poor but high aptitude student today is able to escape the "caste" they're born into. Under a true nepotistic system, this cannot happen no matter how much aptitude he/she possesses.

> If these are outliers it isn't really meritocratic.

Merit is about demonstrated ability, not how much effort, time, or money was put into getting the ability.

As long as you convert money into ability and ability into results, that's merit. Nepotism is when you convert money directly into results, buying a score.

Tutoring can provide some advantage to the richer, but at least in my anecdotal experience I have never seen the advantage provided by tutors being able to match what really motivated poorer students could achieve by self study, at least not in the countries where in the past there was good access to public libraries, or today there may exist cheap Internet access.

In the US at least most schools take into account both test scores and social economic factors.

Someone rich spending a lot of money to obtain tutoring will make their score higher if they have any kind of aptitude. Likewise if they have easy access to books, extra study resources, a quiet space for study, no family distractions or challenges, and so on.

Poor people typically have none of those extra resources. Some poor people with extreme talent will be able to overcome the challenges of relative poverty, but others with equal talent won't.

It's extremely hard to create a true meritocratic system, and Gaokao certainly isn't it.

So wouldn't it then be fairest to punish kids with high income or high wealth parents? Say set median household income. If parents make double this the score is automatically halved. If they make half it is doubled. Same on gross wealth. More wealth there is bigger the cut.

This would mean that says Musk's kids would need to get sufficiently higher scores than children of someone with no wealth.

If you had that system, and I was Elon Musk's kids, I would feel entirely justified in paying half the taxes society expects me to pay. Let's see if that logic works both ways.

This would just result in admitting students who weren’t prepared to handle the material.

It’s still meritocratic in the sense of picking the people most capable of performing well in a higher academic setting.

It’s unfair. But nonetheless true that students who were better able to prepare due to superior resources are nonetheless better prepared.

I think the point is that some start with an advantage when it comes to earning merit because by luck of birth they were born to parents with a lot of wealth.

I don't think you can have a truly meritocratic system unless everyone starts on a level playing field with the same access to resources. That is not a system that exists anywhere on this planet.

To achieve that you need to implement some kind of Harrison Bergeron system.

> a truly meritocratic system

only if you twist what you mean by meritocracy to mean equality.

Why don't you apply that exact same argument but to sports and athletics? People born with superior genes do perform better (ala, tall people in basketball).

Merit doesn't mean everyone starts at the same spot. Merit means your outcome is determined by how good you are at it - no matter how you get to become that good.

It could still be more fair than no standardized testing

Take it to it's logical conclusion. Free universal choice of schools rather than being tethered to your home address.

China has made for-profit extracurricular tutoring illegal since 2021. [1] Of course there can be under the table operations and discussion to be had about regionally biased gaokao difficulty, but I think it's worth recognizing gaokao being a real chance for upward class mobility, hence why it is so competitive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Reduction_Policy

Oh so that explains it!

Starting in 2020 when I was a new professor, I was contacted by a company that works with Chinese families to tutor their students directly. I would be paid $400 an hour to teach them online remotely.

Originally I thought it was because of COVID lockdowns and that may be part of it.

But the opportunities have continued since then. I stopped doing it as my career has become more involved but I still get solicitations from time to time, so it must be because of what you say.

At the very least, it's complicated. I went to an appallingly bad, fundamentalist religious high school (not my choice) that didn't offer extracurriculars, honors classes (never mind AP!) etc. and if I hadn't been able to do exceedingly well on standardized tests I could not have gotten in to the colleges I did. My parents did not pay for any test prep. I did learn and practice on my own though, which is how I know that evolution does not, in fact, teach that you can grow wings if you want them badly enough.

Well nothing is truly meritocratic - even with free tutoring, kids will still have different genetics, different home environments, different upbringings etc..

Colleges in the US that removed standardized testing from their applications, in the pursuit of trying to be more meritocratic, found that fewer students from underrepresented backgrounds got in, not more. In hindsight (and to some in foresight) this makes sense because now schools leaned more heavily on grades and extracurriculars, both of which can be gamed by wealthy families far more easily than a standardized test.

To me grades sound like easiest thing to tutor for. Especially if homework is involved. Even basic editing and feedback before submissions could make absolutely massive difference.

You are confusing meritocracy with egalitarianism.

> Well nothing is truly meritocratic

How do you figure? Many things in life are meritocratic. Apply for a job welding, they'll ask you to weld some coupons. If you can do it, you get the job, if you can't then you can't. If your father was a welder or a banker makes no difference, merit is about being able to do the work, not whether life was fair to get you to that skill level.

Khan Academy was free and used to obtain 99th percentile SAT scores. Academic resources for success are abundantly available, but they require discipline, time, and effort.

> Khan Academy was free and used to obtain 99th percentile SAT scores.

Is it not free anymore?

Tutors barely move exam scores, particularly if they're only hired for test prep. You can crush tests without cramming, tutors or any of that if you just pay attention in class and do all optional homework.

you can also make a lot of money buy selling things for more than you bought them for, and lose weight by simply eating less. You can feel better by sleeping more, and going to the gym every day. You can get ahead in your career by becoming great friends with your boss and your boss' boss.

It turns out that often it being easy to describe in broad strokes how to do something doesn't make it easy to do in practise.

Paying attention in class might be a legitimate issue requiring medication for some people, but otherwise it, and doing optional assignments, are a choice.

> Paying attention in class might be a legitimate issue requiring medication for some people

Considering I would be classified as a member of this group, let me ask:

> but otherwise it, and doing optional assignments, are a choice

If attention is a choice, then how reliably can you control your attention based your choice?

For the sake of analogy, is being able to control one's attention like controlling one's breathe? As in, one can consciously be aware of and control their breathing to some degree, but without a conscious choice, breathing will still operate in the background. Or is attention something like a voluntary muscle movement which requires explicit intention?

I am asking because I have/had little to no control over my ability to focus. Thus, I am curious what it is like for others.

do you truly in your heart of hearts believe that people simply have the choice to pay attention or not, and simply not? as easy as flipping a switch?

and that despite that they choose not to?

Yeah grades are mostly about grit.

The actual problem is that we are not blank slates, and wealthy parents tend to be wealthy because they are more intelligent, and likewise give birth to predisposed-to-be-intelligent babies.

I always find it slightly ironic how mother nature gets so much reverence from ostensibly communal types, despite her being the most shamelessly power hungry entity ever conceived.

This take is bafflingly unscientific. You are spewing pure unadulterated ideology here - a particularly ugly one too.

Yes, behavioral genetics is the climate science of the left. If there are PhDs and university departments studying it, I'm not gonna be someone who sticks there head in the sand for the sake of their flavor of political identity.

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What studies support your critiques?

The amount of effort I’m willing to dedicate to counter wild Social Darwinism is very low. Please just do the bare minimum and go to Wikipedia.

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No, I used it as a euphemism for “fascist”, which is a somewhat stronger descriptor than simply “wrong”.

The notion that the deeply oppressive status quo is somehow fair and just is one of the worst post-hoc rationalizations that purportedly smart people can fall into. Open your eyes.

> wealthy parents tend to be wealthy because they are more intelligent

Not "more intelligent", just "unusual in some way". People can be wealthier than average for all sorts of reasons unrelated to intelligence (as defined by IQ). Here's a sampling of them:

Being social and good at sales. Most successful real estate agents I've met don't strike me as particularly brilliant.

Working a boring job, living modestly, and investing in index funds for 20 years.

Winning the lottery (either literally, or by accidentally buying something cheaply that turned out to be worth a lot)

Marrying rich and divorcing.

Inheriting wealth.

Being a successful athlete or entertainer.

Intelligence correlates highly with not having anti-social behaviors.

So a lot of the time, it's not "being smart" that carries you to wealth, its avoiding the "disastrously stupid things" that stops you from being poor.

> Intelligence correlates highly with not having anti-social behaviors.

If we're talking about IQ, then there isn't strong evidence for this.

Looking at all the horrible and macabre weapons of warfare, destruction, and death that humans have created, I find it hard to believe those instruments were imagined, engineered, and developed by unintelligent individuals.

They weren't. Intelligent people can be anti-social too, and usually with terrifying large scale outcomes.

But thankfully, most crime in the aggregate is done by unintelligent people.

If a child shows some sort of exceptional proclivity for academics, then I strongly believe there needs to be an examination for empathy and pro-social behaviors prior to being enrolled in some sort of advanced program.

> most crime in the aggregate is done by unintelligent people.

That is a tough one. For I believe there is more to reality than what data can currently capture. While I do agree that most violent crime is carried out by unintelligent people, there is an untold amount of crimes being committed by individuals that are average to beyond intelligent. So, I would argue the unintelligent ones get caught more frequently and that skews the perception that they commit more crime.

> If a child shows some sort of exceptional proclivity for academics, then I strongly believe there needs to be an examination for empathy and pro-social behaviors prior to being enrolled in some sort of advanced program.

Luckily that is no longer needed, as in capitalism such a person can provide good value to society just via greed. He shouldn't be a leader, but a greedy engineer isn't an issue.

A lot of those correlate with intelligence and “grit.”

Being good at selling to people absolutely requires intelligence. So do many entertainment fields, and athletic achievement more than you might expect.

Investing consistently in an index fund over 20 years requires a bit of intelligence and a lot of grit.

I defined intelligence up-front as IQ points. IQ isn't perfect but it's the best single measure of raw cognitive ability we have.

Grit is basically conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is not correlated to intelligence. [1] This is why the stereotype of the dim but methodical plodder exists.

Sales ability is obviously a thing, since there are successful and unsuccessful people. But being able to connect with people (EQ) is crucial to be good at sales. Likeable people make more sales than unlikeable people. Being likeable is orthogonal to IQ.

I'm not denigrating successful entertainers' and athletes' cognitive abilities. They are brilliant in their fields. That's not the necessarily same thing as IQ. I'd expect the IQ distribution among that population be the same as the general population. That means some of them are high-IQ individuals in addition to being world-class singers or swimmers or actors, but most are average IQ.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10416...

> and athletic achievement more than you might expect.

Yeah, it flies in the face of Hollywood's jock/nerd dichotomy, but in my experience there's an awful lot of correlation between honors students and athletic participation. I think the root of it might be good genetics and early life nutrition contributing heavily to both.

> wealthy parents tend to be wealthy because they are more intelligent, and likewise give birth to predisposed-to-be-intelligent babies

What the actual.... This is on HN? How low have we sunk here?

> Don’t wealthier families hire tutors to prepare their children?

Effect of tutoring is greatly overstated.

As a university tutor, I agree. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

Tutoring companies don't want you to know that though, so they push these articles saying rich people only get better scores thanks to tutoring.

Of course candidates that study more have an advantage. But that doesn't make it non-meritocratic. That'd be like saying a marathon isn't meritocratic because some people spend more time training and conditioning.

Sure, but tutoring involves learning and improving the skills at hand. Meritocracy doesn't mean equal opportunity, it means candidates are evaluated equally without regard to superficial characteristics like appearance. A meritocratic test will award higher scores to test takers that can read and analyze passages faster and solve math problems more reliability. Whether those test takers possess that ability innately, or built up that ability through loads of studying doesn't alter the fact that it's a meritocratic test.

Of course candidates that study more have an advantage. But that doesn't make it non-meritocratic. That'd be like saying a marathon isn't meritocratic because some people spend more time training.

I don't know this specific exam, but most of these can be gamed in the sense of learning to the test. So depending on what training resources someone has available (e.g. rich parents who can afford tutors), I'd consider them only partially meritocratic.

China also bans test tutoring as a commercial service. Without a doubt people will still be able to find tutors if they're sufficiently capable, but the scale of this problem should be vastly altered by that action.

If this is the case, then why doesn’t everyone get the top a score? The answer is, of course, that it’s not so simple, and you can’t just learn to the test.

That’s just like with sports: anyone can learn how to train himself, and anyone can improve with training, but in the end, some people will end up faster, and some people will end up slower.

My point was exactly that the chances are NOT the same for everyone. A kid from an affluent family might have both better tutoring as well as fewer troubles in life that could deter from learning.

But of course, in addition to that, there is always also a genetic component, as in sports.

The question is what you're measuring. You can have a test that gives you whatever distribution of scores you like. But is the thing it measures competency in the subjects it tests, general intellectual ability, familiarity with the test format, etc.? The worst negative outcome is usually subordination of learning itself to preparing for the exam, which can happen even when the gatekeeping function of an exam still works perfectly.

All scientific research on this topic points to the conclusion that standardized test results are the single best predictor of subsequent academic performance. Some studies suggest that using GPA in addition to test results improves the prediction accuracy, but the marginal increase is very small, and it increases variance.

Everyone is well familiar with the downsides of standardized tests, but so far, nobody has proposed any alternative that better. Learning to the test is not great, but what’s the alternative? It’s not like anyone knows how to teach things that results in more actual knowledge and skills being attained despite lower test results.

> All scientific research on this topic points to the conclusion that standardized test results are the single best predictor of subsequent academic performance.

And academic performance is measured how? With standardized tests?

Obviously, yes. This is not circular: it is by no means tautological that people who did well on test X will do well on a completely different test Y that tests different knowledge and skills. The fact fact that it does gives strong evidence to the value of using these tests for admission.

It depends on what skills are necessary to succeed at test X and Y. While the subject matter or details thereof might differ, it's possible that things like "knowing how to learn to the test (i.e. cramming)" or "reading between the lines of what the teacher/professor says is relevant" belongs to these skills. And these can absolutely be transferred between test X and Y.

So the question is, how much do these tests actually test skills in the subject matter and how much do they test "meta skills"?

The research shows that the tests are predictive almost precisely to the extent they test “meta skills”. We can even measure how much individual questions test meta skills vs specific skills. You can learn about this by searching for the terms “factor analysis” and “g-loading”.

Then what’s a better, unbiased method of assessing students?

The main problem I raised with the Gaokao isn't that it's biased, but that it has negative effects on the way education is conducted prior to university.

It's not difficult to find first-hand accounts of this; go browse social media posts by teachers in mainland China if you're curious.

There are similar problems of "teaching to the test" in other contexts, too.

I'm not categorically opposed to standardized testing and I never said I was.

Ok so what’s your alternative proposal?

Can you learn to the test without actually learning the material?

Without learning the material? Unlikely. Without understanding the material? More likely.

Feynman made such an observation while in Brazil:

https://enlightenedidiot.net/random/feynman-on-brazilian-edu...

Ok that’s a very good criticism.

My take away is the assessment method must force the student to actually apply understanding and application of the material, and not simply look y regurgitate it.

Thank you.

What you are describing, or the lack thereof, is how the majority of my public education in a Southern US state felt. Ironically, my county had the highest test scores in the state too. Then again, perhaps that isn't ironic after all...

>is the Gaokao entrance exams for universities.

The road to hell is built on good intentions.

Oh honey

Having worked in with Chinese people, they always say it's meaningless.

How many folks from China have you met that haven't passed/been to university?

I strongly disagree. I've gone through a similar education system and it's soul crushing to not perform well in those singular events that define your career and identity.

Chinese education is also extremely constrained by the practice of "teaching to the test" to the point that the Gaokao indirectly stands in the way of innovation and reform in education. Schools doing interesting things to improve the quality of education are historically not very competitive on the Gaokao anyway (e.g., some unusual rural schools where students historically have bad prospects anyway and parents are overburdened or indifferent) or explicitly trying to carve something out outside the college track (e.g., private tech/entrepreneurship schools created by big tech companies).

There may be some good things about the Gaokao but having spoken to some (Chinese) teachers in China, it's also a limiting factor for education prior to university in a lot of ways, limiting the freedom of teachers and driving up risk aversion in parents.

(It's also effectively graded on a regional curve, which might be a good thing but isn't meritocratic in the straightforward way you suggest.)

Or (some) western education is too unconstrained and have strayed from purpose.

Scope of gaokao = teaching the test is just teaching everything a well rounded student should know. it's not sats where you can cram a few test tactic sessions and get a few 100 extra points. At the end of the day, gaokao is there to beat knowledge floor/foundation into kids, and one would argue knowledge floor is very deep if you want to generate most bodies that can transition into technical tertiary. Like... if one want human capita pool to be launchpad for innovation, you don't make calculus optional to athletics or other extra curricular.

IMO useful perspective is PRC diaspora, who readily acknowledges they don't want their kids going through gaokao not because it's ineffective but because it's tough, and half the reason they immigrate is because their statistically mediocre kids can't hack it under gaokao, but with some east asian education rigour/pressure will still be top 5% students under western education.

There are those who argue that the entire high school curriculum in the USA is formed and molded by College Board changes to the SAT (and similarly to the ACT).

It makes sense, if the SAT starts asking you do calculate epicycles, schools are going to add Ptolemy to the study, or look worse than those that did.

So what are aspects of being well educated not reflected in the Gaokao? How could those aspects be assessed as objectively and unbiased as possible?

Taiwan and Korea have even "fairer" systems. In China different provinces got different test problems. Especially students from Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin get completely different ones. In Taiwan/Korea everyone takes the exact same test.

However I've never met anyone from these countries who have a high opinion of their systems. Personally I do think our standardized exams cause massive 'overfitting' issue (borrowed from machine learning). The exam is not as brutal as Korean one though.

YMMV.

The problem is the high stress generated by the one-shot approach. There has to be a balance between the objectivity of a single test and practical concerns (like choking because you were sick or got bad sleep the night before).

Ultimately, the only "fair" outcome is an abundance of opportunity. The vast majority of people are worth something to their community and society. And even then, as long as there's enough food and shelter to go around, no one should have to justify their mere existence.

The systems may not be held in high regard, but their education systems produce workers responsible for great innovation, productivity and economic growth.

As the other user posted, practicing for tests are extremely important. I grew up middle class, got an average score on my tests (but I did really well in math)

My wife, upper middle class, took entire weeks of courses and scored higher than me on everything. But I am better than her at math for sure.

Attraction matters and it matters a lot. This isn't news, a lot of people just don't like to acknowledge it.

I think there is an expectation that it should not matter, and there is a reality that it does matter, and there is lots of discussion because the expectations and the reality do not match.

Why is there an expectation that it should not matter? Is it just childrens shows? In many countries you have to put a headshot on your resume, that seems very overt that attractiveness / looks does matter. In the west there is a large idealism over practicality sometimes.

Because we figured out that grading and selecting based on merit is better for society than grading based on subjective biases. I don't know what you mean by "practicality" here.

Where do you _have_ to put a headshot in a resume?

I wouldn't place much stock in small studies like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

I wouldn't either. The difference for female and males reeks of the law of small numbers.

It's comment catnip for HN though.

Even if the data is truly representative and unbiased, we should also not believe conclusions that draw so heavily on interpreting correlation. One could just as well conclude that male intelligence and beauty go hand in hand. Or that men have a better relationship with the teacher. Or that the effect of female beauty fades with distance. Or that COVID had an effect on make-up style. The confounds are endless.

The most interesting results is that the title is true only for females - for males the beauty premium persisted!

Male beauty is so powerful it can be transmitted over TCP/IP?

This feels like a Zoolander quote.

Male beauty is mostly being fit, and being fit leads to better outcomes even without biased teachers. Female beauty doesn't correlate to real world performance in the same way, as women that are a bit thinner than optimal health gets rated as the most beautiful.

Absolutely vital insight, yes. Male beauty is arduously acquired, which necessarily means it correlates with other virtues such as great work ethic, persistence, not quitting easily, etc.

I'm rather surprised not to see a single mention of the Halo effect in the article or ensuing comments. This is a relatively well-known phenomenon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

Science headlines are awful, but why must we suffer such vague abstracts. How about:

"We rated 307 Swedish industrial design students by facial attractiveness and after controlling for socieconomic factors found that males with attractive faces retained a statistically significant grade advantage before and during COVID remote learning whereas females with attractive faces lost their pre-pandemic grade advantage. The beauty premium is only visible in qualitative subjects, not quantitative ones. We don't quantify the extent of the beauty premium in this report."

This got a lot of headlines in local press when it was released (2022). The author was a PhD student, but also at the time teaching one of the 6 classes included in the study. https://www.sydsvenskan.se/lund/studenter-hojer-rosten-mot-s...

Our society has a lot of pretty privilege (and tall privilege for male identifying humans). Taking steps to address this is welcome.

Why though?

Maybe the advantages are natural and our species is selecting for it.

Because we know better.

There's a word for that. Hubris.

"Advantages" are often to the individual's benefit, but the species' detriment.

I dunno...Wolves are pretty much endangered anywhere, but the cute and friendly ones became dogs and are everywhere.

Cats spread all over the world from the desert because of advantages.

Advantages mean you survive and procreate.

So ever-more vulture capitalists and lawyers, and ever-fewer actual honest workers?

Nature really doesn't give a crap whether or not others of yours species dominate you, nor how you feel about it.

Have a genetic legacy -- That's the only way you win. Or don't and be crying about it.

Maybe we’ll be happier overall if we select for other things.

I wonder why the beauty premium remained for males after the switch to online but not in females?

Perhaps some other (hidden) premium that only shows in males, like a confidence premium?

The article says:

Why is beauty a productivity-enhancing attribute for males in non-quantitative subjects? Generally, it is difficult to disentangle the reasons behind why beauty improves productivity (Hamermesh and Parker, 2005). However, relative to other students, attractive men are more successful in peer influence, and are more persistent, a personality trait positively linked to academic outcomes (Dion and Stein, 1978, Alan et al., 2019). In addition, attractive individuals are more socially skilled, have more open social networks, and are more popular vis-à-vis physically unattractive peers (Feingold, 1992). Importantly, possession of these traits is significantly linked to creativity (Soda et al., 2021). In our setting, the tasks faced by students in non-quantitative subjects, for instance in marketing and supply chain management, are likely to be seen as more ”creative”, and significantly contrast the more traditional book-reading and problem-solving in mathematics and physics courses, the latter presumably perceived as more monotonous. Together with the large use of group assignments in non-quantitative courses, these theoretical results imply that socially skilled individuals are likely to have a comparative advantage in non-quantitative subjects.

I guess even attractive males have to work hard.

One gender still has to approach, the other gender still waits to be approached.

Because its a small study with a biased population.

It's easy. For women the core of their power anthropologically lies with beauty. They are judged by it and the core of their power stems from it. That is why there is a beauty industry that centers around women and none for men. That is why women "care" about beauty much more than men. They know that beauty = power.

Women rely on beauty for success much more than men. It is not just in terms of "grades". Even in engineering jobs you can see it, a beautiful woman can get armies of male engineers to "help" her. I literally saw one female engineer get 2 male engineers to spend 3 weeks on a project for her just by virtue of the fact she's a woman.

And she's not even aware of this. Like she thinks people are just "nice". But men are not conditioned to ask other men for this kind of help and we can't expect 2 idiots to spend weeks on a "favor" for someone else.

We live in a world that tries to deny this reality with "gender equality" but these cultural ideas fly in the face of millions of years of biological evolution.

Now that being said. We very much expect that the grades of women should go down when not in person to a degree MUCH MUCH more than men. That is completely is expected. The question now is, why was there even a correlation of better grades and beauty among men in the first place? Why did that correlation exist when men do not rely on beauty? That is the anomaly here.

I think part of the answer is clear. Beautiful men do not rely on beauty for success. They never did hence why when you removed it as a factor the success rate did not change. What's going on I suspect is even more controversial: Beauty correlates with intelligence. This is not an insane notion. We already know that height correlates with intelligence, but it is likely beauty does too.

Edit: I looked it up, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

And it looks like my guess was true. This is indeed what's going on.

> That is why there is a beauty industry that centers around women and none for men.

Oh us men also have a beauty industry - or, I should rather say, an attractiveness industry. We just get sold different, and arguably far more pricier, things... luxury watches and cars, tailor-made suits and shoes, grooming, gym memberships.

And similar to how women got anorexia through unhealthy beauty standards for decades, that comes back to bite us men this time with "looksmaxxers" [1]...

> Clavicular attributes his looks to, among other things, taking testosterone from the age of 14 and smashing his jawbone with a hammer to supposedly reshape his lower face - neither of which is recommended by health professionals.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx28z4zypkno

No. These aren't beauty. It's status symbols. They are symbols of power, capability and utility. Men are judged by raw power and capability. The industry for beauty for men is more of a way for men to advertise raw capability. It is not "beauty" for "beauties" sake.

The beauty industry for women is more superficial. Make up for example serves nothing for status and everything for youth and beauty.

Now there are things like expensive jewelry... but this stuff doesn't help women in terms of attractiveness. That is not to say that women don't wear symbols of power...Jewelry is more of a status symbol for women advertising their status to other women: "Look at what my man got me, look at the power and status of a man that is in love with my beauty."

That is not to say beauty doesn't help men. But it does to a much lesser degree than women. Also your citation is a news article documenting a phenomenon. You need numbers to answer the question: Is this phenomenon an anomaly?? Or is it common place?

I think the answer is obvious, I mean the stuff I talk about here isn't anything new. It's just hard to talk about it because our culture has conditioned us to look away from the truth and more at artificial ideals of equality and balance. Men and women in reality are not equal. And this inequality doesn't necessarily "balance" out like yin and yang.

The problem is that once people become aware how the society actually functions because of our biology, the social contract will collapse.

First, it's very unlikely all people will become aware of it. Our culture has made it taboo to even think in this direction.

Second, nothing will change. People will still behave based off of their instincts and underlying biology. Awareness of the underlying biology doesn't change anything. Men are very much always attracted to young women with nice curves even though they are well aware that this attraction is just an irrational biological instinct. Awareness does not change behavior, therefore, society will not collapse.

Not necessarily. IMO the current demographic collapse can be mostly explained by people asking themselves whether they want children rather than just blindly putting penis into vagina.

No part of population growth was addiction to sex. Even people who didn’t want children would have children simply by wanting to fuck. That changed with birth control.

People still blindly put penises into vaginas and now more than ever women are blindly letting in more and more penises when in the past they were much more guarded.

> No part of population growth was addiction to sex.

Bold claim.

I mean that generally. We have sex for pleasure and for many it’s hard to abstain forever. I’m not referring to sex addiction as a chronic disease.

Yes. And sex results in babies. I cannot link to any resources backing that claim so you'll have to just trust me here.

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> Eliminate the side effect via birth control and people can now have sex for pleasure with no side effects.

And that's not a bad thing. People used to have babies even if they were nowhere near ready for it by age, emotionally, financially or in terms of housing. Particularly teen pregnancies have a massive cost on society and reinforce generational poverty.

If governments would actually want more children, they'd lower the working hours so that both parents can stay employed while being actually able to raise their children adequately (no, handing off your kids at 7 in the morning and getting them back at 6 in the evening, only to have maybe an hour of actual time with them before they have to sleep is not raising children adequately), they'd provide families with housing, they'd provide mothers with affordable healthcare instead of five figures worth of hospital bills in the US, they'd provide both parents with parental leave instead of forcing them to juggle work and adjusting to care for a toddler...

Young people everywhere see how unimportant they are to society and are resisting to fall into the same trap their parents did.

> And she's not even aware of this. Like she thinks people are just "nice".

Social graces require that she play it off as people being "nice", but I guarantee you she knows precisely what's going on. Women aren't stupid.

She may have even deliberately cultivated this relationship, but that's not something a rando internet person like I can determine.

You're right. Many women know what's going on. But many actually don't.

A lot of women live in this contradictory state where they know subconsciously but consciously they don't know at the same time. To help illustrate... It's the same type of human contradiction many software engineers face with AI, unable to admit that it's in the process replacing a skillset that upheld their identity. It's a form of lying to oneself... convincingly.

I would say off the seat of my pants if I were to give you very very estimated numbers.... like 45% know explicitly what they are doing, than 35% live in this contradictory state I described above, and a good 20% have no clue.

>She may have even deliberately cultivated this relationship

Oh many women do this. But they don't necessarily know that these relationships only exist because they are beautiful and that they are women. Again... many know... but not all know.

>Women aren't stupid.

This isn't true. Many women are really stupid. Many women are smart too.

> For women the core of their power anthropologically lies with beauty

Physical attractiveness is a social asset, and it's a more useful asset for a woman because men are affected by how women look more than the other way around - that's all fair enough ... but "the core of their power anthropologically lies with beauty" is a bizarre framing.

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What I find interesting about comments like this is how revelatory they are of the worldview of the people writing them. It's always interesting to see which facts about the primal human experience are left out when this kind of thing is discussed.

For example, I'm betting you're a male who likes women who's between the age of 20 and 45 and likely doesn't have children (I'm pretty sure on male between 20 and 45, but children could go either way).

Consider the assumptions present in: "Of course this also begs the question of what happens to a woman when she gets old and ugly? Where does she get her power from? She gets it from her man."

The assumption there being the only reason a man would protect a woman is because she's pretty and she's having sex with them, likely because the sexual relationship is the main way you're looking at women at this point in your life. Even if we assume women can only derive power from male proximity in nature, there's an obvious alternative answer to where she would derive power from: Her sons and grandsons. If she lives through her childbearing years, a woman in nature is far more likely to live to old age than her male mate: She has better resistance to famine, a better immune system, and if we assume the rigid gender role evo-psych of men = hunters and women = gatherers, she also engages in far less physically risky activities. Even if 'her man' is alive, the odds of him being crippled or simply unable to protect her from younger, fitter men are high. A 35 year old son or 18 year old grandson is far more valuable for protection, and far more stable: a man is always her son/grandson, whereas if we're assuming the red pillish evo-psych is true, 'her man' probably has wandering eyes and would like a younger woman and therefore should not be counted on to stick around once she dares to have wrinkles and saggy breasts. Additionally, a man who doesn't protect his mother is failing at one of the basic tests of belonging to a human tribe: Basic reciprocity. If a man won't give to the one person who took care of him when she gained nothing/he was at his most vulnerable, then how can his fellow hunters (who he's less attached to) trust that he'll reciprocate when they help him? This assumption also outright dismisses the bonds between say, a brother and a sister. Do you think most men wouldn't protect their sisters because they're not sex objects?

Older women are also far more able to keep contributing to the tribe than older men if we adhere to this strictly gendered idea of primitive humans. They can care for children while women in their prime gather, they can rear children whose mothers have died (and this is common due to the fatality rate of childbirth), they can take care of the sick, etc. A man who can't keep up with his male duties is far less useful - a man who is over 60 and has 60-80% of the speed and strength of his fellows, or a bad limb, or sensory impairments, is far less able to hunt than a woman over 60 is to caretake. They're more likely to live longer and therefore a better repository of historical knowledge.

Idk, I just always find it interesting which physiological and psychological aspects of humanity are ignored or unmentioned whenever someone is making some kind of argument about primal gender roles.

Bro you made many assumptions. First women today have plenty of power. A lot of times more so than men. I only refer to prehistoric times.

Men primarily drived survival in prehistoric times. Without a man a women could not survive. That doesn’t mean she couldn’t contribute it means she was not the primary driver. Women contribute a lot, but that contribution is in the end supplementary because it is not critical for survival and this definitely shapes evolved behavior. It means for survival a man is required for her, this is asymmetric for a man and you can see this in how women and men select mates. Men select based off of superficial markers for fertility. Women select more on practical markers for capability. This is because a women’s survival is dependent on the man’s capability while a man’s survival is not as much dependent on this.

Additionally please don’t make the argument personal. If you disagree attack the argument don’t attack or make assumptions about my character. Thank you.

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Nah, it is bizarre.

> You need to think of things from this perspective rather than the perspective of what's "taboo". It's only bizarre because society has conditioned you to look away from the cold hard truth.

Haha good lord. Of course you have access to the cold hard truth that I'm too foolish to see! Your fixation on "power" (whatever that means) is incredibly reductive, and I expect your knowledge of human behaviour is rather limited

You’re the one being reductive. Power is an incredibly broad term that encompasses many dimensions that different across species and gender. You irreducibly assumed the singular most negative interpretation of my usage of the word and you deliberately attacked my character personally.

Please keep the debate impersonal. If you disagree and believe my arguments are without merit please attack the arguments rather than my character. Thank you.

A "good voice" could become more important. I could see people doing speech and voice training. Also things like lighting, mic and camera setup, and background. Everyone is a streamer now.

When you complain about having to interact with AI when applying for a job, remember that AI could be the most fair and unbiased recruiter...as long as companies want to...

AI has exactly the biases of its training data.

I was attractive and had a horrible personality (college sperg). Long flowing hair, rakish funk, striking. Like bees to honey.

A couple things here:

1. This should have a 2022 tag

2. This is ripe "red pill" fodder and many of the comments here are "red pill" coded.

I was wondering about the year. Are schools still doing online course work and exams now? I would think ai concerns would drive even more in person oral test / notebook testing stuff?

Only recently learned about the 'red pill' thing by watching the 'manosphere' documentary by Louis Theroux. For others unaware how it relates to the above comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manosphere.

The documentary was an interesting if somewhat unsettling thing to watch.

You gotta be careful about Louis Theroux. I watched one of his old documentaries (late 90s IIRC) about South Africa with a guy who is a Afrikaner that I speak to semi-regularly on the internet. He said that while the people that Louis presented did exist, they were considered loons by the rest of the community.

Most of the documentarians from the BBC even some of the better ones like Adam Curtis, tend to distort things.

The "Red Pill" thing was stolen by these guys back in ~2018 from smaller political communities online that used it to just mean "I've been sold on an idea" usually people who were agorists / libertarians / ancaps.

Thanks for the heads up. For the most part he interviews people with hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers on social media. So not random nobodies, and at least some of the names I’d at least heard of (like the Tate brothers).

But as with anything, being a bit skeptic is a good thing.

I've not watched that particular documentary you've watch (and probably won't), but after re-watching some of the older docs knowing what I do now a few years ago, There were definitely sometimes when he misleading the audience.

The most infamous one he did was The Jimmy Saville Weird Weekends. I am 90% certain that Louis knew he was Paedophile at the time. He even made sure to include a scene where one Jimmy's friends visited. The guy looked like a old stereotype of a paedophile. My friends and I burst out laughing while watching it. It was almost like it was something from Brass Eye.

The Tate Brothers are just conmen and are criminals. I am from the UK and met people like Andrew Tate IRL. You can find them in every pub back in the late 90s/early 2000s.

As for the other manosphere guys. I am familiar with many of these guys, as they typically do the rounds at some point on the podcast circuit on YouTube and various other sites. I like listening to long streams as I am frequently driving from one end of the country to another. I used to listen the dumpster fire stuff like Legion of Skanks, Drunken Peasants, The CuntStream etc. A lot of these dudes used to turn up on these sorts of shows, which were basically someone streaming Google Hangouts while they got drunk and high.

A lot of the the Manosphere guys are normally involved with other grifters such as Laura Loomer, Nick Fuentes etc. and have a lot of cross over with loads of niche Z-tier E-celeb sub-cultures such as "The Dabbleverse" and "Da Sektur".

For the uninitiated like me:

The manosphere has its own distinct jargon.[31] A central tenet of the manosphere is the concept of the red pill, a metaphor borrowed from the film The Matrix. It concerns awakening men to the supposed reality that men are the oppressed gender in a society dominated by feminism

( From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manosphere#Jargon, I landed there from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_(disambiguation) )

They stole it from other groups online that simply used it to mean "I can see through the bullshit now". It got nothing particularly to do with the manosphere and the grifters in it.

> 2. This is ripe "red pill" fodder

So what? We should act like attractiveness is not a huge privilege because of that? As with other privileges, I think it's important that we are aware of that.

Almost all of the people in the Manosphere are grifters (moreoever almost any influencer online). If there was a study that said the complete opposite of what the study found, they would twist it to suit their agenda also.

Outside of social media these people effectively have very little if any influence and aren't worth worrying about.

I guess it all depends on your perspective, I found the findings to be anti-red pill. Women with attractive faces lost their grade advantage in remote learning and men with attractive faces did not.

It suggests to me that good-looking men are socially valued for several reasons that are robust to distance education, but good-looking women are socially valued for their bodies if they are in proximity, the same way we value objects. Very limiting and frustrating.

If anyone in the red pill camp is looking to reexamine their perspectives in good-faith, "You Just Don't Understand: Men and Women in Conversation" (Tannen) is a good start.

Hi, sorry, what's a 'red pill'? Don't really keep up with the slang, sorry..

Its use here is a decade or more old. Originally referring to a movie over two decades old. The short version, seeing the world as it is instead of how it's fed to you.

Once it’s all AI learning we’ll be set.

It is hard to believe research like this means anything while research in real science fields tends to be so nuanced and hard to make conclusions about.

This only serves as a tool for people who are trying to find a basis for their beliefs.

People underestimate how specific the genetic pools are that relate to high intelligence

meaning what exactly ?

Can confirm!

In the past they would stare in pure awe at my guaranteed impeccable looks.

Now they ask me damned question to calculate the speed of fluids in different pipes through the Bernoulli's principle. And ChatGPT only helps so much here ...

Also, I think there must be a pretty big difference between female and male, because even if a male student is attract, if I am a male teacher and interested in females, would I wish to prioritize on looks, if the underlying grading is instead done on e. g. testing knowledge and skills? Why would looks even factor in here? Such a system would be flawed from the get go.

As an attractive person myself that studied engineering in several countries of Europe and some years in the US I don't believe there are many opportunities for you to take advantage of your attractiveness. Most examinations were in written form.

I have huge doubts about the study. In cinema, theatre, sure, you need physical presence, but engineering... I don't believe Von Newman would have needed presence to impress other people.

Another very important thing is that there are very important differences between sexes. The most physically attractive man in the world without the proper attitude and without leadership and success is nobody.

I am what is called a sigma male. I was never interested in power, dominating others, being the boss. Women prefer ugly and short people if they are leaders to tall and beautiful man that are not social.

In fact, if you get uglier as you age but get more successful, you will receive way more attention. If you command a group of people, run a company or are a big boss, women will get in love.

Also, if you are tall and beautiful, men will get envious of you.

Billy Bob Thornton dating Angelina Jolie is the quintessential example of this. He had presence and charisma but was very average lookswise. Claviculars head would explode if he saw a picture of them together.

Dont...Always stay below the Hot/Crazy line...

https://youtu.be/pInk1rV2VEg

I'm not sure what or why you use AI for this text (translation?) but even in foreign language universities, it is "von Neumann" - wouldn't be translated as your AI did.

> The most physically attractive man in the world without the proper attitude and without leadership and success is nobody.

Tell that to the "hot felon". Because of his mug shot from stealing cars got a modeling deal and married a billionaire heiress

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