Most males are “ugly” at a first glance, without any context to who they are, my guess is because male strangers represent a potential evolutionary threat, both to men and women.
I could be wrong, but Id wager the “familiarity boost” in attractiveness is higher for men than for women. This could be tested by comparing how women would rate their close male friends and relatives and how that compares to rating from strangers.
If true, this may factor into why women rate men less attractive on average, and why men’s self rating is so off.
Something to think about is the medium of comparions: pictures. pictures may just make everyone look “ugly”, because of how impersonal they are. Even if asked to rate purely physically, People would probably rate someone lower from a picture, but a bit higher after just 5-10 minutes of interacting with them. This disparity may reflect in the higher self ratings (because everyone knows themaelves) and the lower stranger ratings (both direct and via comparison to self).
Some additional thoughts:
1. while everyone is naturally ‘delusional’, social media probably makes women more humble due to the constant comparisons.
2. men are probably wired to be over-confident in their appearance because confidence is sexy.
" is because male strangers represent a potential evolutionary threat"
Or more simple: We live in a society where men take less care of their appearance than women. No make up, no skin routine, no touch up (of their eyebrows, nails and such), less fashionable in general, less cosmetic surgery, less toning exercise, etc.
When men approach me on the street to ask me out, try to strike up conversation, tell me I look good, tell me to smile, or say something vulgar, I realize I spend zero time rating their attractiveness and 100% of the time divining how big of a threat they are to me.
I’m sure this contributes at least a little bit, but then again “This suggests that a third of people are actually doing damage to their attractiveness when they try to look hot.”
3: I theorize the “familiarity boost” is probably higher for ugly people. sub-5 strangers probably shift slightly toward a 5 after knowing them for some time. Potentially factoring into the higher delusion gap for ugly people.
Zero knowledge on this but so many factors contribute id say i agree and would like to consider a couple things. if you want genetics, we have one X and one y. y male attractiveness traits have no "double Y " backup, same for X. contributes to larger tails in male genetics (not just attractiveness) if these chromosomes play an outsize role in the trait. not that genes are everything. If you want social standard of attractiveness, I doubt its a "brain state" or judgement, in the same way that you'd say color blue is blue. ie subjective, yet variance in consensus changes depending on some social selection pressure. i heard for example trends in birth control and hard economic times push the male standard toward "provider". I I suspect male standards for beauty skew in other ways, chopping off the left tail and reinforcing the "all or none." Plus men less valued by appearance so I *guess* that an onlooker would probably want to rate a man ugly to get at whether theyre "productive" or not.
Have you tried incorporating variance into the analysis? Imagine someone whose average rating is 5, but who gets voted 0 by half the people and 10 by the other half. That person will get lots of enthusiastic attention, so they're (legitimately) likely to rate themselves higher than a 5.
Yeah, I think that's an important thing to remember for using dating apps. It doesn't matter whether the average person thinks you're a 4 or a 6, you're looking for *one* person who really, really likes you.
Agreed. All due respect to the ladies involved, but the woman rated as most attractive in this survey was surprisingly "mid and inoffensive". I can imagine a subset of people rating the green hair/pixie cut girl much higher (I would), but the "attractive = long, blonde hair" subset of people respondents drags her down.
This taught me that the way I use the 1-10 scale is completely different from how your sample (and thus everyone else?) uses it.
I would be *very* adverse to giving someone a 5 or below - it would feel mean! I would assume that 4 is completely unfuckable, 1 is reserved for burn victims. So the prevalence of 3s completely shocks me! I would probably get a 3 based on your provided pics so what a blackpill.
Agree, I think these ratings are insane. No one even got a 7 or above, that's just stupid. In my mind, I take a stadium of people in line them up from most to least attractive, then split it into deciles and those are your ratings. 10% should be 9s and above, 10% should be 1s and below, and anyone 3 and under is totally unfuckable by anyone. These scales are stupid.
This doesn't make any sense. Attractiveness is distrubuted on a bell curve (like most human traits). If you think that there are just as many 6s as 10s then you have no idea how men usually use the rating system.
Yes I do understand how they're doing it, and it's stupid. What the point is their stupid system if no one is a 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, or 10? And yet 90% of people eventually pair up with a relatively looks-matched person, so obviously people DO perceive the actual ranking, it just doesn't fit your internet-brain system. And if you went 100 years ago, literally no woman would be above a 4 in this system, so it's stupid. It should reflect actual reality, where if you take 1,000 people, it would not be very hard to get basic consensus on how to line then up from most to least attractive, and you can easily split it into tenths. Most people would prefer to be with someone in the top 10% to the bottom. Always relative to the actual pool, if you want to insist on some objective ranking you can but it doesn't reflect how anyone actually acts in real life, thus making it entirely un-useful as an objective system.
I think people are way too stingy and "average" with their ratings! All of the photos you showed are above-average. They're young, slender, clean-cut, good skin, good hair, everything people like. Especially the woman you said was a "7.1," I'd say she's a straight-up 10, and if she went on a date with me I'd be nervously thinking "there's no way a woman this hot is interested in a guy like me."
If you want to see the real bottom of the scale, get off the internet and go to public places. I went to a big park the other day on a warm day. Lots of old people. They had wrinkles, scars, and age spots. The men were almost all bald. The women's fashion sense was... incomprehensible. Many were using canes, walkers, or wheelchairs.
But you know what? They're still people. Many of them were with a partner. I saw a couple dancing. They still have a sense of sexuality. It's actually a real problem that people in nursing homes are spreading STDs to each other. Now *that's* what someone on the low end of the scale looks like!
I wonder how these numbers are shifted by the proliferation of images of very hot people we're bombarded with every day. I would love to see how this survey would look if it include images of eg. Influencers and facetuned / photoshopped images, images of models in advertising, like those we see constantly.
- A person's attractiveness is determined by more than their face (I *think* this point is uncontroversial)
- Therefore, when considering how hot someone is in real life, a rater will consider the whole of a person (body, dress, facial expression, posture, vibe, etc), while when rating a photo they can only use a small fraction of that information. Call this Wholistic Mode vs. Face Mode rating.
- This feels true of me, and I'm specualting that it's true many others: *any* person will be rated several points higher in Wholistic Mode than in Face Mode.
- When you're asked to rate yourself, you rate yourself in Wholistic Mode by default.
- You asked in the survey that people guess what other people would rate their *photo*, but I kind of doubt most people are very good at modeling that compared to "how would another person looking at me rate me."
- This sort of thing could plausibly explain some fraction of the discrepancy between self and others' ratings
Second, some notes on my internal experience taking the above survey (as a rater only, not a face submitter). The survey failed to capture how I consider a person's attractiveness, in a way that feels consitent with the highest rated woman's photo being a 7.1. If many other people are similar to me in some of these ways, that might be informative?
- To reiterate above, a person's attractiveness is determined by more than their face
- Face alone is a low enough fraction of total attractiveness that rating a face feels kind of fake. Kind of like being asked to rate how "athletic" someone looks by a picture of their shadow.
- "Hot" and "Attractive" are used kind of interchangeably in this post? A face can be attractive even if that attractiveness could be very different from the person's. Asking if a face is "hot" is a type error.
- Even with just a single picture of a face, the person's *expression* in that picture plays a bigger role in their attractiveness than most actual features of their face. Like if could somehow get me to independently rate two pictures of the same person, one smiling and one not, I predict the smile would rate 2 points higher by default.
- You could *maybe* get a signal for the above thought using your existing data by clustering photos into "smiling" and "not smiling" and seeing if there's a noticeable difference? Especially if there are enough submitters who had different expressions in the "best" and "average"
Don't know if any of the above is useful to you, but I'll stop rambling now. In any case, it's always fun to see what data comes out of your surveys!
One thing this post usefully helped me realize is that when I assign a rating to myself, there's an implicit "among people who go for that kind of thing'. If you simply prefix the question with something like "the raters will be randomly drawn from the opposite sex population" I guess I'd expect my number to drop by due to three points, which seems to be more or less what happens - I actually expect this effect is a bit weaker in your sample due to it being relatively homogeneous!
I feel like it should go without saying that you can’t draw conclusions about actual people based on how attractive people rate an animated character...
I’ve always felt I’m terrible at selfies. I’m not sure if it’s true that some people’s attractiveness translates to the camera better than others, but if it is true I suspect I may be one of those people who looks better in person. I think I’m reasonably handsome, but when I try to take a picture of myself I look like a dirty pencil eraser trying to smile. It’s also possible I just haven’t gotten the hang of selfies. Depressing if so; I’ve put significant time into it. 😂 Or I guess the third possible explanation is I really do look like that and I have that irrational confidence you mentioned many men seem to have (how dare you suggest that lol). 😝
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is I wonder if the camera thing factors in here? I wonder if there are some people who maybe in person are closer to as attractive as they think they are than the study suggested others perceive them as, but because for whatever reason their hotness didn’t translate to their pictures the data got skewed? Just a random thought.
I’m also inclined to agree with one of your other commenters about men and confidence. We are socialized to present with confidence as it makes us more attractive. For me I’ve taken it a step further and made an effort to internalize a high sense of self-esteem so that it doesn’t feel like an act. It’s true that I feel more attractive than I did as a younger man, though it may well be the case that speaking strictly on a physical level the opposite is the case. Like, it seems unlikely that, all other things being equal, I’m physically hotter at 46 than I was at 26. Yet I definitely think I’m hotter overall, and the results of my dating life suggest others see it that way too.
Why not distinguish between faces and bodies? Some of us are decent looking facially but are in extraordinarily good shape. In real life, people see both.
Men's attraction to women is strongly aesthetic. Besides some particular genres or fetishes, most pretty women are pretty in the same way a cathedral is pretty. Objectively, soul enlighteningly pretty. Women's attraction to men is a lot more nebulous. A lot of women are attracted to strength, popularity, or comedic skill, which you'll obviously never see in a photo. Also since these are photos of faces they don't really show height or musculature, which are also important for men on the dating market.
Idk if it’s just because they are mostly too old for the Snapchat era, but the men seemed to really suck at taking pictures of themselves compared to the women. Like bad angles, lighting, etc.
The most interesting to me is people basically rate from 3 to 6. So it's more like a 4-star system.
This seems wild to me. I'd have been curious if they would ever give a 9 ? Maybe slipping some model photos (but not famous) in the mix to check ?
A few years back I used PhotoFeeler to get a sense of my best pictures fro dating, and also to have a more objective number. I was pleasantly surprised as I thought myself as a 6 and got 7 or even close to 8 on my best photo.
As I'm far from being very attractive, it makes me think people in your survey didn't rate the same way that people on PhotoFeeler did. I'm not sure why though. Do you have a hypothesis ?
Assuming attractiveness follows a bell curve, it’s not really surprising that most fall in the middle. My intuition is that 10’s (which are effectively being called 9’s here) are exceptionally rare, like one in a few thousand. So it’s not surprising such a small sample doesn’t have any.
But it's not a bell curves, because people just match up according to where they fall relatively. Every man or every woman could suddenly become far less attractive and it would make no difference in how people pair up because they're all just going by relative spot in line. So using a bell curve makes no sense. Regardless of how "objectively" attractive they are, 10% of men and women are always going to be more attractive than the other 90%, so they, should be 9s and above. Bc let's be honest, who you can get with is the only reason this even matter at all.
People have always paired up no matter how ugly or attractive they are, they just adjust by the pool available. 100 years ago women were far less attractive and ones considered beauty queens then would be 3s today. Yet they all had no problem finding partners. And even today, the highest marriage rates are the places where people are the ugliest (like Arkansas and Alaska), there's no correlation with attractiveness, people just adjust and match on relative rank according to the pool. People aren't getting together today because entertainment, ease, and comfort sitting home and doing nothing is so much higher than in the past, it's just not as unpleasant to be single.
If by “attractive” you mean something like “their sum total valuation as a human, averaged across all judges” I would pretty much agree with you (although I think there’s way more variation in personal preference than you imply).
Strictly physical attractiveness though? Nah, I think it’s pretty much a bell curve.
There is variation sure, but if you took a large enough sample of the full spectrum of actual humans, I don't think it would be that hard to get basic consensus as far as who was in the top 10%, next 10% etc. For one thing, these pics only took the most attractive people to begin with because they're all young and not obese. If you included everyone, they would probably all be in the top 30% just right there. Even if you limited it more, I still think it would not be THAT difficult to get basic consensus on just physical traits, at least in deciles.
I get what you say about 10s, but if we assume a bell curve with similar standard deviation and mean as IQ, we get these percentages :
10 : 0.0031%
9 : 0.1318%
8 : 2.14%
7 : 13.59%
So in this sample, there should be several people above 6. Especially because we can assume than the subset of responders is more attractive than average (beauty is helped quite a bit by money, and they're basically all educated).
That’s about what I would expect for 9’s and 10’s at least. Are there not several above 6 in this dataset? I didn’t look at the raw data but I think she mentioned a few.
Data "suggested" that covid vaccine was safe and we all know how that one turned out. You can make data suggest anything you want if you look hard enough
I disagree with the premise. The world is mentally constructed, so in a very real sense beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If something about reality isn’t beautiful, then there is greed, hatred or delusion somewhere. The most attractive people are the wise and the compassionate.
I know because the identification code I gave when submitting my pictures is present in the spreadsheet, so I can look up if I’m in it and what score I got
Most males are “ugly” at a first glance, without any context to who they are, my guess is because male strangers represent a potential evolutionary threat, both to men and women.
I could be wrong, but Id wager the “familiarity boost” in attractiveness is higher for men than for women. This could be tested by comparing how women would rate their close male friends and relatives and how that compares to rating from strangers.
If true, this may factor into why women rate men less attractive on average, and why men’s self rating is so off.
Something to think about is the medium of comparions: pictures. pictures may just make everyone look “ugly”, because of how impersonal they are. Even if asked to rate purely physically, People would probably rate someone lower from a picture, but a bit higher after just 5-10 minutes of interacting with them. This disparity may reflect in the higher self ratings (because everyone knows themaelves) and the lower stranger ratings (both direct and via comparison to self).
Some additional thoughts:
1. while everyone is naturally ‘delusional’, social media probably makes women more humble due to the constant comparisons.
2. men are probably wired to be over-confident in their appearance because confidence is sexy.
" is because male strangers represent a potential evolutionary threat"
Or more simple: We live in a society where men take less care of their appearance than women. No make up, no skin routine, no touch up (of their eyebrows, nails and such), less fashionable in general, less cosmetic surgery, less toning exercise, etc.
Both can be true.
When men approach me on the street to ask me out, try to strike up conversation, tell me I look good, tell me to smile, or say something vulgar, I realize I spend zero time rating their attractiveness and 100% of the time divining how big of a threat they are to me.
I’m sure this contributes at least a little bit, but then again “This suggests that a third of people are actually doing damage to their attractiveness when they try to look hot.”
You’re right, that seems more sensible on second thought.
3: I theorize the “familiarity boost” is probably higher for ugly people. sub-5 strangers probably shift slightly toward a 5 after knowing them for some time. Potentially factoring into the higher delusion gap for ugly people.
Zero knowledge on this but so many factors contribute id say i agree and would like to consider a couple things. if you want genetics, we have one X and one y. y male attractiveness traits have no "double Y " backup, same for X. contributes to larger tails in male genetics (not just attractiveness) if these chromosomes play an outsize role in the trait. not that genes are everything. If you want social standard of attractiveness, I doubt its a "brain state" or judgement, in the same way that you'd say color blue is blue. ie subjective, yet variance in consensus changes depending on some social selection pressure. i heard for example trends in birth control and hard economic times push the male standard toward "provider". I I suspect male standards for beauty skew in other ways, chopping off the left tail and reinforcing the "all or none." Plus men less valued by appearance so I *guess* that an onlooker would probably want to rate a man ugly to get at whether theyre "productive" or not.
Hypergamy is real and social media has only shifted it into hyper drive
Have you tried incorporating variance into the analysis? Imagine someone whose average rating is 5, but who gets voted 0 by half the people and 10 by the other half. That person will get lots of enthusiastic attention, so they're (legitimately) likely to rate themselves higher than a 5.
Yeah, I think that's an important thing to remember for using dating apps. It doesn't matter whether the average person thinks you're a 4 or a 6, you're looking for *one* person who really, really likes you.
Agreed. All due respect to the ladies involved, but the woman rated as most attractive in this survey was surprisingly "mid and inoffensive". I can imagine a subset of people rating the green hair/pixie cut girl much higher (I would), but the "attractive = long, blonde hair" subset of people respondents drags her down.
Oh yeah! Given a self-rating of n, how many partners rate you >n? Could call that "chance", I guess.
Yes that'd be a good chart! Also, plot self-rating - others-rating VS variance.
This taught me that the way I use the 1-10 scale is completely different from how your sample (and thus everyone else?) uses it.
I would be *very* adverse to giving someone a 5 or below - it would feel mean! I would assume that 4 is completely unfuckable, 1 is reserved for burn victims. So the prevalence of 3s completely shocks me! I would probably get a 3 based on your provided pics so what a blackpill.
Agree, I think these ratings are insane. No one even got a 7 or above, that's just stupid. In my mind, I take a stadium of people in line them up from most to least attractive, then split it into deciles and those are your ratings. 10% should be 9s and above, 10% should be 1s and below, and anyone 3 and under is totally unfuckable by anyone. These scales are stupid.
This doesn't make any sense. Attractiveness is distrubuted on a bell curve (like most human traits). If you think that there are just as many 6s as 10s then you have no idea how men usually use the rating system.
Yes I do understand how they're doing it, and it's stupid. What the point is their stupid system if no one is a 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, or 10? And yet 90% of people eventually pair up with a relatively looks-matched person, so obviously people DO perceive the actual ranking, it just doesn't fit your internet-brain system. And if you went 100 years ago, literally no woman would be above a 4 in this system, so it's stupid. It should reflect actual reality, where if you take 1,000 people, it would not be very hard to get basic consensus on how to line then up from most to least attractive, and you can easily split it into tenths. Most people would prefer to be with someone in the top 10% to the bottom. Always relative to the actual pool, if you want to insist on some objective ranking you can but it doesn't reflect how anyone actually acts in real life, thus making it entirely un-useful as an objective system.
I wonder whether priming people with the infamous 4chan attractiveness chart would shift answers up a bit.
I was going to say, I can't be this wrong. I fully learned that *everyone* did this.
I think people are way too stingy and "average" with their ratings! All of the photos you showed are above-average. They're young, slender, clean-cut, good skin, good hair, everything people like. Especially the woman you said was a "7.1," I'd say she's a straight-up 10, and if she went on a date with me I'd be nervously thinking "there's no way a woman this hot is interested in a guy like me."
If you want to see the real bottom of the scale, get off the internet and go to public places. I went to a big park the other day on a warm day. Lots of old people. They had wrinkles, scars, and age spots. The men were almost all bald. The women's fashion sense was... incomprehensible. Many were using canes, walkers, or wheelchairs.
But you know what? They're still people. Many of them were with a partner. I saw a couple dancing. They still have a sense of sexuality. It's actually a real problem that people in nursing homes are spreading STDs to each other. Now *that's* what someone on the low end of the scale looks like!
I wonder how these numbers are shifted by the proliferation of images of very hot people we're bombarded with every day. I would love to see how this survey would look if it include images of eg. Influencers and facetuned / photoshopped images, images of models in advertising, like those we see constantly.
First, a thought
- A person's attractiveness is determined by more than their face (I *think* this point is uncontroversial)
- Therefore, when considering how hot someone is in real life, a rater will consider the whole of a person (body, dress, facial expression, posture, vibe, etc), while when rating a photo they can only use a small fraction of that information. Call this Wholistic Mode vs. Face Mode rating.
- This feels true of me, and I'm specualting that it's true many others: *any* person will be rated several points higher in Wholistic Mode than in Face Mode.
- When you're asked to rate yourself, you rate yourself in Wholistic Mode by default.
- You asked in the survey that people guess what other people would rate their *photo*, but I kind of doubt most people are very good at modeling that compared to "how would another person looking at me rate me."
- This sort of thing could plausibly explain some fraction of the discrepancy between self and others' ratings
Second, some notes on my internal experience taking the above survey (as a rater only, not a face submitter). The survey failed to capture how I consider a person's attractiveness, in a way that feels consitent with the highest rated woman's photo being a 7.1. If many other people are similar to me in some of these ways, that might be informative?
- To reiterate above, a person's attractiveness is determined by more than their face
- Face alone is a low enough fraction of total attractiveness that rating a face feels kind of fake. Kind of like being asked to rate how "athletic" someone looks by a picture of their shadow.
- "Hot" and "Attractive" are used kind of interchangeably in this post? A face can be attractive even if that attractiveness could be very different from the person's. Asking if a face is "hot" is a type error.
- Even with just a single picture of a face, the person's *expression* in that picture plays a bigger role in their attractiveness than most actual features of their face. Like if could somehow get me to independently rate two pictures of the same person, one smiling and one not, I predict the smile would rate 2 points higher by default.
- You could *maybe* get a signal for the above thought using your existing data by clustering photos into "smiling" and "not smiling" and seeing if there's a noticeable difference? Especially if there are enough submitters who had different expressions in the "best" and "average"
Don't know if any of the above is useful to you, but I'll stop rambling now. In any case, it's always fun to see what data comes out of your surveys!
One thing this post usefully helped me realize is that when I assign a rating to myself, there's an implicit "among people who go for that kind of thing'. If you simply prefix the question with something like "the raters will be randomly drawn from the opposite sex population" I guess I'd expect my number to drop by due to three points, which seems to be more or less what happens - I actually expect this effect is a bit weaker in your sample due to it being relatively homogeneous!
How is that girl just a 7.1 ? lol
It's an aggregated metric. It also aggregates the responses from men who didn't find her appealing.
I doubt you'll find any woman that appeals to 75%+ men. Even if we're looking at fictional characters designed to have maximally broad appeal to sell skins, the top statistically desirable female character Ahri only had 74% of men picking her as "attractive" in a survey of League of Legends players. (https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1ekt91q/who_is_the_most_attractive_woman_in_league_of/)
I feel like it should go without saying that you can’t draw conclusions about actual people based on how attractive people rate an animated character...
This is awesome! Thanks for sharing.
I’ve always felt I’m terrible at selfies. I’m not sure if it’s true that some people’s attractiveness translates to the camera better than others, but if it is true I suspect I may be one of those people who looks better in person. I think I’m reasonably handsome, but when I try to take a picture of myself I look like a dirty pencil eraser trying to smile. It’s also possible I just haven’t gotten the hang of selfies. Depressing if so; I’ve put significant time into it. 😂 Or I guess the third possible explanation is I really do look like that and I have that irrational confidence you mentioned many men seem to have (how dare you suggest that lol). 😝
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is I wonder if the camera thing factors in here? I wonder if there are some people who maybe in person are closer to as attractive as they think they are than the study suggested others perceive them as, but because for whatever reason their hotness didn’t translate to their pictures the data got skewed? Just a random thought.
I’m also inclined to agree with one of your other commenters about men and confidence. We are socialized to present with confidence as it makes us more attractive. For me I’ve taken it a step further and made an effort to internalize a high sense of self-esteem so that it doesn’t feel like an act. It’s true that I feel more attractive than I did as a younger man, though it may well be the case that speaking strictly on a physical level the opposite is the case. Like, it seems unlikely that, all other things being equal, I’m physically hotter at 46 than I was at 26. Yet I definitely think I’m hotter overall, and the results of my dating life suggest others see it that way too.
Camera lenses distort your features - especially phone cameras . I think the most accurate lens is something like a 50mm lens. Not sure though…
The lens and ,more importantly , the distance from the subject being photographed.
Why not distinguish between faces and bodies? Some of us are decent looking facially but are in extraordinarily good shape. In real life, people see both.
Plus: What about posture? How people move? As far as I'm concerned, those are a significant part of attractiveness.
Men's attraction to women is strongly aesthetic. Besides some particular genres or fetishes, most pretty women are pretty in the same way a cathedral is pretty. Objectively, soul enlighteningly pretty. Women's attraction to men is a lot more nebulous. A lot of women are attracted to strength, popularity, or comedic skill, which you'll obviously never see in a photo. Also since these are photos of faces they don't really show height or musculature, which are also important for men on the dating market.
Idk if it’s just because they are mostly too old for the Snapchat era, but the men seemed to really suck at taking pictures of themselves compared to the women. Like bad angles, lighting, etc.
The most interesting to me is people basically rate from 3 to 6. So it's more like a 4-star system.
This seems wild to me. I'd have been curious if they would ever give a 9 ? Maybe slipping some model photos (but not famous) in the mix to check ?
A few years back I used PhotoFeeler to get a sense of my best pictures fro dating, and also to have a more objective number. I was pleasantly surprised as I thought myself as a 6 and got 7 or even close to 8 on my best photo.
As I'm far from being very attractive, it makes me think people in your survey didn't rate the same way that people on PhotoFeeler did. I'm not sure why though. Do you have a hypothesis ?
Assuming attractiveness follows a bell curve, it’s not really surprising that most fall in the middle. My intuition is that 10’s (which are effectively being called 9’s here) are exceptionally rare, like one in a few thousand. So it’s not surprising such a small sample doesn’t have any.
But it's not a bell curves, because people just match up according to where they fall relatively. Every man or every woman could suddenly become far less attractive and it would make no difference in how people pair up because they're all just going by relative spot in line. So using a bell curve makes no sense. Regardless of how "objectively" attractive they are, 10% of men and women are always going to be more attractive than the other 90%, so they, should be 9s and above. Bc let's be honest, who you can get with is the only reason this even matter at all.
That's just notl true. If everyone became objectively less attractive people would pair up less. In fact that's already happening.
People have always paired up no matter how ugly or attractive they are, they just adjust by the pool available. 100 years ago women were far less attractive and ones considered beauty queens then would be 3s today. Yet they all had no problem finding partners. And even today, the highest marriage rates are the places where people are the ugliest (like Arkansas and Alaska), there's no correlation with attractiveness, people just adjust and match on relative rank according to the pool. People aren't getting together today because entertainment, ease, and comfort sitting home and doing nothing is so much higher than in the past, it's just not as unpleasant to be single.
If by “attractive” you mean something like “their sum total valuation as a human, averaged across all judges” I would pretty much agree with you (although I think there’s way more variation in personal preference than you imply).
Strictly physical attractiveness though? Nah, I think it’s pretty much a bell curve.
There is variation sure, but if you took a large enough sample of the full spectrum of actual humans, I don't think it would be that hard to get basic consensus as far as who was in the top 10%, next 10% etc. For one thing, these pics only took the most attractive people to begin with because they're all young and not obese. If you included everyone, they would probably all be in the top 30% just right there. Even if you limited it more, I still think it would not be THAT difficult to get basic consensus on just physical traits, at least in deciles.
I get what you say about 10s, but if we assume a bell curve with similar standard deviation and mean as IQ, we get these percentages :
10 : 0.0031%
9 : 0.1318%
8 : 2.14%
7 : 13.59%
So in this sample, there should be several people above 6. Especially because we can assume than the subset of responders is more attractive than average (beauty is helped quite a bit by money, and they're basically all educated).
That’s about what I would expect for 9’s and 10’s at least. Are there not several above 6 in this dataset? I didn’t look at the raw data but I think she mentioned a few.
Data "suggested" that covid vaccine was safe and we all know how that one turned out. You can make data suggest anything you want if you look hard enough
I disagree with the premise. The world is mentally constructed, so in a very real sense beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If something about reality isn’t beautiful, then there is greed, hatred or delusion somewhere. The most attractive people are the wise and the compassionate.
We speak the same language.
No people of color. Check.
if you read the blog post, ~27% did not identify as white
That’s not true, I’m in the dataset, and one of the ones she kept in the final scoring
How do you know? Was your photo by any chance taken on a boat?
I know because the identification code I gave when submitting my pictures is present in the spreadsheet, so I can look up if I’m in it and what score I got
This is the rationalist community.