Live data from Hacker News

Limb lengthening surgery is becoming more popular

buzzfeednews.com

311–320 of 817 posts

Re: Limb lengthening surgery is becoming more popular

#311
I'm a bit over 5'8". I always suspected that online dating was a bit more challenging because of my height. But when I looked at the numbers, I was doing fine at getting dates. The problem was actually that I wasn't confident enough on dates and didn't really know what I wanted, so the dates rarely went anywhere.

I did a lot of personal development work over a period of 10+ years. At some point, dating got a lot easier. I went from being single most of the time to usually in a relationship. I got married at 41, which was a bit late, but we all move at our own pace.

My little sister is married to a guy who is maybe 5'5" (and I think that's generous). She is 5', and is nearly as tall as him in heels. He's nice and treats her well. She dated a bunch of guys over 6', and likes him the best by far.

This is not to say that tall guys don't have an advantage. I'm sure they do. But fortunately there are a lot of things other than height that also make a difference.

Re: Limb lengthening surgery is becoming more popular

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but many remote-first companies eventually hold in-person events. I recently met the folks on my all-remote team for the first time, and it was a little jarring to see the differences between expectation and reality.

Curious: jarring how? I saw an excellent educational video recently from a guy that was, how to put it, dressed almost like a hobo.

Jarring in that some people were taller or shorter than I assumed based on their home office set-up or personality.

Re: Limb lengthening surgery is becoming more popular

#313

Everything we are judged on - appearance, intelligence, earning potential - is a random dice roll of DNA that none of us control. Yet people take credit (pride or shame) for these traits. Pondering this has left me more detached and unimpressed with the human society game and competition... but what else is there? What am "I", if anything, beyond the randomly assigned DNA-based traits?

> Everything we are judged on - appearance, intelligence, earning potential - is a random dice roll of DNA that none of us control.

This is not true, so you don’t have to worry about any conclusions you came to because of it. “Heritable traits” does not mean “genetic traits” and there are quite a lot of things that happen you after you stop being a zygote.

Re: Limb lengthening surgery is becoming more popular

#314
post #219
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. It's complicated. Mate selection is not and should not be institutionalized which means that you are within your rights to discriminate on...anything. Your criteria may be based on "taste", past experiences or downright prejudice. It is inevitable that as you pick a mate, you discriminate. You can't stop that nor should you. We can however openly discuss criteria that are unhealthy, perverted, make no sen…

But one can detect and judge appearance much more quickly (instantly, in most cases) than personality. It seems much more efficient to select those you consider physically attractive first and then date to check for a compatible character, than the other way round. Just like (excepting bisexuals) most of us instantly disqualify 3.5 billion people as potential partners for being the wrong sex, even if they might have…

You're right, but my point is that by slightly relaxing the physical criteria, you get a wider selection of personalities.

For example, it's ridiculous to ask for an exact height. Height is a spectrum. By demanding 6" or taller, you can't seriously justify how somebody that is 5"9 is an absolute deal breaker.

Similarly, if you're not attracted to fat people, you could still consider somebody a little overweight. Weight is not a static quality.

You may be attracted to brunettes, but I would opt to see that as a preference, not a hard requirement.

My point is that "attractive enough" is a better strategy as all of these things are ultimately unimportant if the personality doesn't match.

Re: Limb lengthening surgery is becoming more popular

#315
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Height does appear to be correlated with income[1]. So it’s entirely possible that discrimination has existed and continues to exist. People seem to think that because something is difficult to measure, it isn’t there, but that simply isn’t true. Lookism could also be a big problem, but the causal effects of being unattractive are hard to identify. Imagine trying to assemble a treatment and control group for that. Wh…

The difference here is that height is also correlated with nutrition and by proxy social class. Whatever that study says, eradicating that type of confounding from statistical associations is hard/impossible.

It's not as hard as you think, and the correlation with nutrition and social class is disappearing and even non-existent in many places.

See Japan: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/02/12/national/scienc...

There's an increase in low birth rate babies (not due to malnutrition), probably due to increased survivability of smaller more frail babies. The fact that they grow up and lead healthy lives means that their society is indeed selecting for the survivability of smaller people.

Re: Limb lengthening surgery is becoming more popular

#316
post #134

"a 2006 study on online dating found that a man who is 5'6'' needs an additional $175,000 to be as desirable as a man who is approximately 6' tall and only makes $62,500 a year." I guess I appreciate the brutal honesty. Wealth and height. And not to forget social status, as one woman in the linked article explained how she broke up with a short guy because of what others (might) think of it. Not a word is wasted on a…

>The female version is equally disturbing but different. I've never met or talked to a man that finds fake boobs, duck lips, botox, fake bums, fake tans, an inch of makeup in any remote way attractive, or a "selector". So the depressing reality is that women largely do this in a competition towards other women, and this perverted rat race knows many victims. I find everything on that list extremely unattractive, minu…

I was referring to excessive makeup, the "inch thick" type. Where the result in no way even resembles human skin anymore.

To each their own though. I do like elegant makeup, it can definitely amplify natural beauty.

Re: Limb lengthening surgery is becoming more popular

#317

For folks in this thread making statements such as, "I don't see how one can dictate to others what they should find attractive," the negative social stigmas towards men of short stature go far beyond physical attraction. (There's absolutely nothing wrong with women finding taller men attractive.) https://twitter.com/heightismxposed Swap "short guy" for "Jew" in the quotations from those twits that have nothing to do…

Yeah ngl I wish people would move on from denigrating people on factors like appearance, poverty, disability, etc. and more on things like being inauthentic, unempathetic, manipulative, etc.

That would require the persons in question to self-reflect. It’s not often a process that people who denigrate others generally engage with.

Re: Limb lengthening surgery is becoming more popular

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes, but he was short, so who cares what he says? (/s, obviously) Incidentally, A. T. Great is maybe evidence that this is a modern fixation, not something that's always been with us. It's fairly clear that he was unusually short, but there's little indication that anyone thought much of it; by contrast, the idea that Napoleon (who wasn't even short!) was short was a propaganda point for the UK.

He was Alexander. That is why no one cared.

Caesar was Caesar, but he was supposedly pretty sensitive about his (lack of) hair, and contemporary historians (ancient Roman historians were a bit closer to gossip columnists than modern historians) went on about it a lot. You don't really seem to get the same thing for Alexander.

Re: Limb lengthening surgery is becoming more popular

#319

For folks in this thread making statements such as, "I don't see how one can dictate to others what they should find attractive," the negative social stigmas towards men of short stature go far beyond physical attraction. (There's absolutely nothing wrong with women finding taller men attractive.) https://twitter.com/heightismxposed Swap "short guy" for "Jew" in the quotations from those twits that have nothing to do…

If women aren't morally compelled to find short men attractive, why are they morally compelled to not feel negatively about them in general? I don't see how anyone is morally obligated to feel any way about any other human.

It's just really weird to me that some people get angry about being short (understandably so) but instead of just admitting that, they turn to some kind of universalist morality as a way of shifting the burden to others

Re: Limb lengthening surgery is becoming more popular

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically this means that in modern dating, if you are short, you are very likely to die alone and this trend will only get worse in the future. I'm 5'6, and after almost 15 years of dating sites to modern dating apps, I have indeed accepted that yes, I will very likely die alone. My therapist has even half-seriously suggested I try lying about my height, and qualms aside, from the studies I've read, any plausible-…

Plenty of women don't care about that. Just stop using apps like Tinder, they attract the worst of the worst, by what I see, especially in the US. Even if you were above 6', you wouldn't want to date a woman obsessed with height. In my group of friends, the shorter ones (around 1,73m) are the most successful ones.

> the shorter ones (around 1,73m)

Ahem, that's almost exactly the average height for a male in the US.

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

Post reply on HN