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Comment by istjohn | Hacker News Reader

> There’s no good reason to believe that someone extremely attractive would be a great conversationalist, or that someone extremely intelligent would be emotionally intelligent, etcetera.

I actually disagree. At the extremes, sure. The top athlete is unlikely to be the top scholar or conversationalist. But I believe health, beauty, EQ and IQ are all correlated. These traits all likely have some shared genetic components. And a great, healthy childhood will augment all these traits to some extent.

Also, beautiful people are less likely to experience social isolation or estrangement, which would otherwise hurt EQ and health in general.

From another angle, experiences that leave emotional scars will often have physical manifestations, and vice versa.

That said, we may subconsciously assume a higher correlation than exists between these traits, so directionally the author may be correct.

None of this is fair or desirable, by the way.

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One thing that's clear is that there are some underlying traits that manifest in many different domains, such as language skills. A friend I knew was extremely good at languages (fluent in 10+), and also excelling at math and programming. Traditionally, these fields are considered different but they are more similar than we give them credit for. All are heavily symbolic, relational and contextual domains.

To complicate things more, you can become great at math and programming by having e.g. a visually oriented mind. My friend didn't seem to have much of that though, which suggests you can excel in a domain using different underlying skills or traits. Totally armchairing of course.

The in-spirit premise of the proposal (fundamental traits are mostly roll-of-the-dice) is still compatible with your response.

Like the author, I've been burnt by assuming that traits overlap way more than the opposite - eg if someone is good at X intellectual thing they're good at Y too. So many times I've gone "how can such a smart person not get this simple thing?".

As we get older, we have more and more influence over the state of our minds and bodies. Being attractive is strongly correlated to being healthy. Take a look at the Olympic athletes - they're all attractive. Fitness and attractiveness correlate. You can decide to get fit -- or not. You can decide to eat healthy -- or not. This has a big influence on attractiveness, and the state of your mind.

Evolution ensures that being sexually attractive is very closely tied to being healthy: we all want procreate with people who appear to be the most capable of producing offspring that can themselves reproduce.

Exactly.

I find sometimes it mixes a matrix of desirable and undesirable (but useful in limited contexts) traits together as a way of selling the bad (but useful) stuff enough. So, I don't necessarily entirely buy this argument, though it in principle makes sense, It's definitely a bit more nuanced in practice.

There is some overlap between fitness & attractiveness, though there is also some cultural context to consider. For example, consider a panel of female shotput athletes to be rated on an attractiveness scale by a representative sample of straight men of different ages from around the world. How would they fare contrasted with a similar panel of female gymnasts?

My guess is that healthy people have a greater probability to also be considered attractive. On the flip side, there is likely a much smaller probability of 'attractive' people being objectively healthy, with the numbers changing from place to place and time period.

Female shotput athletes are extreme outliers.

Outliers in what way? Outliers in terms of healthiness and fitness? Are they more or less healthy than the gymnasts? Even if they are outliers, it's an illustrative example - gymnasts are extreme outliers as well even among athletes, so why isn't that an issue? I would suggest that while the lens of evaluating physical attractiveness in most of the western world currently largely aligns with physical fitness, this is a relatively recent development and far from universal. Even a few generations ago I would suspect that the majority of current female Olympic level athletes would have been graded far lower on the attractiveness scale than we currently might.

> Outliers in what way?

I've never met one in real life. Anyway you want to look at it, such levels of muscle development is highly unusual. I doubt it's healthy either.

> I would suggest that while the lens of evaluating physical attractiveness in most of the western world currently largely aligns with physical fitness, this is a relatively recent development and far from universal.

I don't believe that. I don't really have a choice as to what I find attractive. I don't believe you do, either.

For example, I am never going to find "heroin chic" attractive, no matter how much the fashion industry pushes it. Some women like bald men, some don't, and there's nothing anyone can do to change that.

> such levels of muscle development is highly unusual. I doubt it's healthy either.

I think that holds true for almost all female athletes, does it not? Every female Summer Olympic level athlete I can think of has very visible musculature far in excess of what you might see in otherwise 'attractive' women. In terms of ultimate health outcomes, I am not sure. I doubt any top level athlete fares well health wise long term.

> I don't really have a choice as to what I find attractive. I don't believe you do, either.

I think we're coming at this differently - you're referring to what you might find attractive, and I'm trying to consider an attractiveness grading scale. For example, as a gay man, I find both male shotput athletes as well as male gymnasts very attractive, but can at the same time appreciate that on my attempt at an objective attractiveness scale I might grade them differently - and other gay men might grade them very differently. Similarly, I feel absolutely no attraction to female athletes and can still consider them objectively attractive.

There's a point of diminishing returns. Once you're past a certain level of fitness, more doesn't add much.

Yeah I was unconvinced by this one. It seems to me any individual lucky enough to be born with good genes and raised in a nurturing environment is likely to score well in a number of health, intelligence and "well roundedness" dimensions.

No guarantees of course, and caveats about exceptions to the rule, yes no doubt. But those positive traits shouldn't be dismissed as entirely unrelated to one another!

> "beautiful people are less likely to experience social isolation or estrangement,"

(probably true)

> "... which would otherwise hurt EQ"

I draw the opposite conclusion; suffering is one of the surest paths to empathy and compassion for others.

Interestingly enough I googled and found: https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-scientific-funda...

Though I wouldn't call a mean IQ of 104.23 a genius I guess your hunch seems to have some evidence (sort of surprising to me).

Fascinating. Attractive children were found to have an average of 12.4 more IQ points than unattractive children. He suggests beauty and IQ are correlated to the same extent that educational attainment and IQ are.

I think I had read about this or similar research long ago, but that's a bigger effect size than I would've guessed. I wonder if the results could be replicated.

They can be correlated, true, or it can simply be evidence that IQ testing has implicit bias on average.

I don't know how IQ is tested these days, but I think historically it was a 1:1 or teacher:classroom sort of assessment.

Ravens Matrices

I would be critical of that article (and others) by any "Evolutionary Psychologist" (the author is one).

Many do not consider "Evolutionary Psychology" as a proper Science (i subscribe to this camp) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_evolutionary_psyc...

Critics argue that many hypotheses put forward to explain the adaptive nature of human behavioural traits are "just-so stories"; neat adaptive explanations for the evolution of given traits that do not rest on any evidence beyond their own internal logic. They allege that evolutionary psychology can predict many, or even all, behaviours for a given situation, including contradictory ones. Therefore, many human behaviours will always fit some hypotheses. Noam Chomsky argued:

"You find that people cooperate, you say, 'Yeah, that contributes to their genes' perpetuating.' You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that's obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else's. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it."

As an example the same author has an article on the "Truthiness" of "Stereotypes" : https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-funda.... Applying it to "Blonde Bimbos", the Stereotype says "Blond Bimbos are dumb", while the other explanation says "Beautiful people (Blonde Bimbos are a subset) are more Intelligent" which is a direct contradiction!

Also, beautiful people are less likely to experience social isolation or estrangement, which would otherwise hurt EQ and health in general.

Are you basing this on the fact that beautiful people are all so normal and well-balanced?

All else being equal, people prefer to associate with their more attractive peers. It's an ugly fact, but true.

It isn't exactly damning evidence to refute your claim, but some beautiful people find it very hard to get dates because their looks are intimidating. For example - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10411887/Playboy-... (possibly NSFW images if you work in a convent or something).

I mean, cry me a river if you're a Playboy model who can't get a date, but it is plausible.

A separate issue is that while I agree on the correlatii of talents and ability/circumstances to nuture it, extreme performance also requires practice - a finite resource.

> a great, healthy childhood will augment all these

I would put it that poor developmental conditions (from gestation on) prevent realization of genetic potential, rather than great ones "augment", because it just has to be adequate. A so-called "hygiene factor". Nutrition, stability - that sort of thing.

> But I believe health, beauty, EQ and IQ are all correlated. These traits all likely have some shared genetic components.

Surely you do not mean that a single gene influences all of this?

that would be ridiculous and it’s a fair interpretation of the grandparent comment, but there’s actually a coherent theory of “mutational load”, which basically says that

1. almost all mutations are bad

2. mutations come together (like if you’re born near chernobyl you’ll have a ton of mutations all over the place, also maybe if your parents are older or if they’re smokers and things like that)

Mutations that make you less attractive could be completely different from mutations that make you less intelligent, but if mutations tend to come in packs then having a lot of mutations in sections of the genome related to attractiveness probably means you have lots of mutations in the sections related to intelligence.

Also, I think there are plenty of mutations that do negatively affect all four areas. For example: Down syndrome, Williams syndrome, Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome. (The "beauty" is subjective, of course, but I expect people's sense of "beauty" to be optimized towards "avoiding potential mates with genetic defects".) I knew about the first two; I learned about the third by clicking on a few entries in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Syndromes_with_cranio... .

I expect there are plenty more mutations that have a mild negative effect in all areas, but are sufficiently mild that they haven't been identified as "disorders".

I imagine that certain genes can effect two or more of those areas. For example, I would be quite surprised if there isn't a gene that effects both IQ and EQ. But no, I don't think there is some single "god gene" that entirely determines these outcomes.

To be clear, I have no special knowledge or expertise in genetics or biology. This is all speculation on my part.

>Surely you do not mean that a single gene influences all of this?

don't forget Epigenetics! The whole dogmatic way of genotype influencing phenotype view really need to readdressed. There are many other factors influencing what our trait.

This reminds me of the statistic that men are on average taller than women. This is actually a useful heuristic for making policy at a mass scale.

It is worse than useless as a way of estimating the height of someone you just met. The actual experience should completely invalidate any priors, which are trivially insignificant at the individual level.

> Also, beautiful people are less likely to experience social isolation or estrangement, which would otherwise hurt EQ and health in general.

Physical attractiveness fades and people who used it as a tool or built egos around it often become miserable.

I'd like to believe that there is some kind of counter-balancing drawback to beauty like you suggest. Life would be more fair. But I think the cruel truth is that people continue to enjoy advantages from the headstart they got from their youthful beauty long after their beauty has faded. Advantages like self-confidence, career advancements, and social networks don't vanish the instance beauty fades.

Also, I don't think beautiful people are particularly likely to be narcicists or sociopaths or otherwise consciously rely on their beauty as a tool. I think most beautiful people are oblivious to the advantages they enjoy. Things are just a bit easier for them. Steve Yegge tells how he was catapulted into leadership at Amazon shortly after losing over 50 pounds.

I believe white privilege works in much the same way. It's difficult to see that you're playing on easy mode when you've never played on hard mode.

There are some awful looking guys, who nevertheless achieved quite a lot despite their lack of beauty. Naturally, some selection bias might be at play here ( as in -- you don't hear from the ones that did not make it about how they persevered and failed ).

There is no doubt about the advantages. Beyond the already present research, I have my own little anecdote of a friend, who was not great with computers and yet is now IT manager at a major corporation.

As for the white privilege, I can only say that I don't know. I come from a very white country. As you can guess, given the invariable laws of human nature, since nearly everyone was white, another other had to be found. I don't know what it is about humans that forces us to immediately label everything and self-segregate.

It doesn't fade nearly as quickly as you, in particular, would like to think. If you have good facial symmetry, straight teeth, good skin, all your hair, etc, this will continue to yield benefits literally throughout life, assuming you don't catastrophically fail to maintain it.

The same is true for athletic ability / fitness in the sense that people like to say "it will fade", but the reality is that it provides a ton of benefits well into the 60s barring catastrophic injury.

EQ does not exist. Trait agreeableness from the big five does.

Not sure that follows. I would imagine a normal person would be a worse conversationalist than one with quirks or scars or issues.

Well, an anxious, self-conscious, depressed person will certainly struggle to carry on an engaging conversation.

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