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You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think

scientificamerican.com

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Re: You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think

#71

Post by colomon »

gizmo686 wrote: post #41
bthomas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might just be tired but I don't get this...care to explain?

In a normal distribution, the mean and median are the same value, so only 50% of the data points can be above average. Without this assumption, you are not guaranteed to have only 50% of your data points above average. For example, what percent of the population do you think has an above average number of legs?

Last line is the Best Example Ever of median and mean not agreeing. Did you come up with it yourself?

Re: You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think

#72

Post by saalweachter »

shantanubala wrote: post #4
clarkm wrote: post #2

If you haven't seen the Dove commercial, you should watch it while reading this article from The Last Psychiatrist: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/05/dove.html

Although the article is interesting, I think one of the comments is much more "to the point": What gets me about this ad is that no one understands why the women basically described themselves as trolls and the women they were talking to as goddesses. They're being filmed. They know it, and they know it's being put up somewhere. They don't want to be seen as having an over-inflated ego - they know exactly how it's go…

It was also a commercial. Commercials also magic soap bubbles and talking birds.

Even assuming they did the commercial straight up with "real people", and the sketch artist wasn't in on it, there could have been a huge file-drawer effect of the 200 people/takes where the pictures came out the other way or just the same or just too bland to work in a commercial.

Re: You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think

#73

Post by VLM »

codex wrote: post #8

This effect also holds for one's own estimates that one's startup will not fail.

THANK YOU, this is a "hacker news" site not Marie Claire and we should not be the only people talking about peoples assessments of the beauty of their business plan or the beauty of their source code.

The analogy of women appearing to poorly evaluate their appearance seems to be lost on a population that suffers from the exact same cognitive malfunction WRT business plans and source code. There exist at least some rich business opportunities based on this analogy/observation...

One interesting startup idea is the obvious analogy that "everyone knows" that some programmers and their source, and, some businesspeople and their biz plans, will be 100x more successful/productive than everyone else in the field, YET at the lower level of the bell curve almost everyone agrees anyone can improve whatever it is they've got with a little study, practice, and effort. So where's something like "codeacademy" or "coursera" for style for those of us who want to take a online class in "how not to look/dress like a dork in 2013", or "shoes, what to wear in 2013". The killer problem would be not turning it into a manufacturers or retailers infomercial which would make it smell fairly useless, even if it was actually good advice. Where's the massively collaborative github where we figure out how to dress ourselves stylishly?

Re: You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think

#74

Post by gadders »

Reminds me of a quote I heard recently about Gene Simmons on a radio show (via Jim Wendler).

The radio host was a woman that hated him, hated his attitude towards women and himself. She said to Gene, "I bet you are the kind of guy that walks into a room and thinks every woman wants him."

Gene responded, "Well, if I didn’t think that, no one would."

So yeah, I try and think it :-)

Re: You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think

#75

Post by brazzy »

saalweachter wrote: post #72
shantanubala wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although the article is interesting, I think one of the comments is much more "to the point": What gets me about this ad is that no one understands why the women basically described themselves as trolls and the women they were talking to as goddesses. They're being filmed. They know it, and they know it's being put up somewhere. They don't want to be seen as having an over-inflated ego - they know exactly how it's go…

It was also a commercial . Commercials also magic soap bubbles and talking birds. Even assuming they did the commercial straight up with "real people", and the sketch artist wasn't in on it, there could have been a huge file-drawer effect of the 200 people/takes where the pictures came out the other way or just the same or just too bland to work in a commercial.

> there could have been a huge file-drawer effect

The technical term is "reporting bias".

Re: You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think

#77

Post by nostrademons »

zachlatta wrote: post #63
nostrademons wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a social bias in the commercial. People are socialized not to say negative things about other people, particularly not other people's looks, and particularly not women's looks. The artist was drawing off a verbal description; if people consciously filter out their negative thoughts before expressing them ("If you don't have anything nice to say about someone, don't say anything at all"), then that verbal…

My girlfriend was telling me about Vietnamese culture the other day (her family is Vietnamese). She put particular emphasis on the the vastly different social norms between Vietnam and the Western world. From what she told me, woman are much more forthcoming about their true opinions of another woman's looks in Vietnam and the Eastern world. Similar to how getting a description from someone on the autism spectrum wou…

Interesting...I have a Vietnamese friend that's always complaining about how her mother and her fiancee's mother are always talking about how she's not pretty enough or not pretty enough for her fiancee. Explains a lot.

Re: You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think

#79

Post by mortehu »

mortehu wrote: post #48
Fishkins wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Sure, "beauty" isn't a very robustly-defined term, but the headline is reasonable. The most important point is that people's views of themselves are objectively wrong, because the identify modified images of themselves. Conversely, people can reliably pick the correct image of others. Finally, this depictions differ in that the self-image has characteristics society deems attractive, for our purposes, "be…

> Conversely, people can reliably pick the correct image of others. I wonder if this changes if the photos they see of others are mirrored?

I skimmed the original paper today, and they did indeed perform a follow-up experiment where participants were asked to identify themselves based on mirror images. That follow-up experiment yielded similar results. No follow-up experiment was conducted for identifying mirror images of others, but it seems such an experiment would have been redundant.
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