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March 29, 2010, 12:25am
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^^The OP didn’t say anything about what the “average” Harvard person looks like. What he said was that intelligence and beauty are inversely proportional, meaning that as one goes up the other other must go down and vice versa. </p>
<p>I offer these not as examples of the average Harvard coed but as counter-examples that likely disprove the inverse proportionality (unless we have reason to believe that these women are all stupid). Other counter-examples would also be pictures of people who are both stupid and unattractive, again contrary to the asserted inverse proportionality. There are probably plenty of those people around too but not very many at Harvard.
If the correlation is true, then making counterexamples proves nothing. There are always outliers and thinking that a few counterexamples make a difference would be wrong.</p>