<p>ahhh…you are all forgetting the “time” factor…</p>
<p>Put into a 3 day meeting with 20 men and 4 average looking women, by the 2nd day the 4 get better looking. By the 3rd day they are hot. If there is a reception after the meeting where liquor is served. by the 3rd night after the 3rd drink any one of them is downright smoking!</p>
<p>ooooohhh children…you will learn!</p>
<p>just because you’re unattractive and smart doesn’t mean everyone is. :)</p>
<p>Just some anecdotal evidence…</p>
<p>Back in junior high, at the National Science Olympiad tournament, my team held a “photo scavenger hunt.” The object? Break into groups and get a picture (one each) of the nerdiest, “most transvestite,” ugliest, and cutest guy at the pre-tournament bbq. Plenty of examples for categories 1, 2, and 3… absolutely zilch for the last one. I’m not going to vouch for the maturity level or considerateness of the game. It was junior high, after all. But make of that what you will.</p>
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<p>What does “most transvestite” even mean?!</p>
<p>^^^
</p>
<p>What I’d make of it is that adolescents find more entertainment in teasing one another than complimenting one another.</p>
<p>^^gadad, unfortunate but true. I’m not proud of this. It’s an embarrassing story, but the first thing I thought of when I read this thread. Luckily none of the people in the pictures ever knew what they were for and the pictures were deleted soon afterwards.</p>
<p>and @EricLee- well… it means you have trouble telling gender by looking (if I remember right… it was four years ago, after all).</p>
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<p>I am often still mistaken for a girl since I have a relatively effeminate complexion and I tie my hair back into a bun. Nevertheless, I actually do not take offense to the remarks and I find the opposing reaction quite humorous once I begin speaking to whoever identified me as such. Perhaps I would win that portion of the contest. ;)</p>
<p>
Yes, picking out a select few makes a clear representation of the attractiveness of the average Harvard student. I have no opinion regarding a correlation between intelligence and beauty, but really?</p>
<p>^^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.</p>
<p>Yale also has a “50 most beautiful” yearly article in their tabloid, I think.</p>
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<p>Wow that’s terrible. The existence of such an article leads me to ask “what happens if I didn’t make the 50?” and if I made the 50, “why am I not higher?”</p>
<p>Of course, this is assuming that Yale students care, which they shouldn’t and probably don’t.</p>
<p>Also, I noticed that most discussion thus far concerned females. Is that because a majority of the forum is male (is it?) or is it just more commonly discussed.</p>
<p>If the majority of the board is in indeed male, then a majority of that majority must be (naturally) less inclined to comment on the attractiveness of other males. Nevertheless, does anyone have anything to say about this?</p>
<p>As my new supporters amassed in one of my threads may attest to, I am entirely arrogant. If you told me that I was ugly, I would find it amusing and brush it off, but I would also not believe it for myself. Challenges to one’s intelligence are less common, but I personally value my intelligence more. Because I’m arrogant, I think I’m smart. However, any statements made by others that question my intelligence will immediately launch me into a spiral in which I explore the validity of that statement.</p>
<p>I hope I didn’t give anyone any ideas.</p>
<p>^
The 50 aren’t ranked in order, and it includes both males and females.</p>
<p>That doesn’t make it any more or less acceptable.</p>
<p>To begin our proof of this axiom of inverse proportionality, we shall make epsilon a small positive number…</p>
<p>
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>
<p>^^Right now the counter-examples cannot be outliers, because they are the only data points we have in this discussion. Everything else, beginning with the OP, is mere assertion.</p>
<p>They key phrase above is “If the correlation is true…” No one has offered the slightest evidence that it is.</p>
<p>The link that was posted had some fantastic insight into this topic especially about the “Velma-Daphne” divide in Scooby-Doo cartoons.</p>
<p>
In other words, it’s time to find some really ugly Harvard chicks and post them!!!
(That was a joke)</p>
<p>From 3/9/09 Psychology Today: “Beautiful people are more intelligent” by Satoshi Kanazawa -</p>
<p>"The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), conducted by a team of researchers at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, is one of the very few social science datasets that take biological and genetic influences on human behavior seriously. As a result, Add Health routinely measures both the intelligence and physical attractiveness of its respondents.</p>
<p>"In the Wave III of Add Health, conducted in 2000-2001, respondents take an IQ test called the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. And then their physical attractiveness is measured objectively by an interviewer, who is unaware of their IQ test scores, on a 5-point scale (1 = Very unattractive, 2 = Unattractive, 3 = About average, 4 = Attractive, and 5 = Very attractive). The data come from a large (n = 15,197) nationally representative sample of young Americans (mean age = 22).</p>
<p>"[T]here is a clear monotonic positive association between physical attractiveness and intelligence. The more physically attractive Add Health respondents are, the more intelligent they are. The mean IQ is 94.2 for those rated “very unattractive,” 94.9 for those rated “unattractive,” 97.1 for those rated “about average,” 100.3 for those rated “attractive,” and 100.7 for those rated “very attractive.” Due partly to the large sample size, the association is highly statistically significant.</p>
<p>"So it appears that the “stereotype” that beautiful people are more intelligent appears to be true empirically, just as virtually all “stereotypes” are. But now the question is: Why? </p>
<p>"There are two possible explanations for the observed positive association between intelligence and physical attractiveness. First, the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey F. Miller suggests that there is a common source of variation between intelligence and physical attractiveness: the genetic quality of the individual which he calls the general fitness factor (the f factor). According to Miller’s theory, those who have better-quality genes are simultaneously physically more attractive (because beauty is an indicator of health and genetic quality, as I explain in an earlier post) and more intelligent, hence the positive association between the two traits.</p>
<p>"This is a very plausible theory, but I have doubts that it explains the association between intelligence and physical attractiveness. If Miller is correct, then the association between intelligence and physical attractiveness should disappear once genetic quality is controlled. At least in the Add Health sample, however, this does not appear to be the case. The positive association between intelligence and physical attractiveness is not at all attenuated when measures of genetic quality are controlled.</p>
<p>"Alternatively, the association between intelligence and physical attractiveness may emerge from the process of assortative mating. If more intelligent men are more desirable to women than less intelligent men, because they achieve higher status, at least in the modern environment, and if physically more attractive women are more desirable to men than physically less attractive women, then there should be assortative mating of intelligent men and beautiful women, and of less intelligent men and less beautiful women. Because both intelligence and physical attractiveness are heritable, such assortative mating should create an extrinsic (non-causal) correlation between intelligence and physical attractiveness in the next generation. Children of intelligent men and attractive women should simultaneously be intelligent and beautiful, and children of less intelligent men and less attractive women should simultaneously be less intelligent and less attractive.</p>
<p>“So which theory is correct? We don’t know yet for sure.”</p>
<p>Why do conversations become so philosophical in CC…</p>