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Comment by tomphoolery | Hacker News Reader

> If I could make the rules, being good looking wouldn't matter as much as it does.

It actually doesn't. And you probably look better than you think you do, because if you were unpopular in high school you were not "groomed" to be beautiful. So you may not realize how beautiful you actually are.

From what I've seen, here's what seems to matter most (in no particular order): Money, self-confidence, and doing something interesting with your life.

If you're rich, confident enough to ask girls out on dates (comes with practice, "fake it till you make it" is the name of the game here), and you're doing interesting things that you can talk about passionately, some beautiful person is going to be with you at some point. It's inevitable. Being "good looking" is less about actual physical traits and more about how you carry yourself.

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Studies show that people who are on the "good looking" side of the spectrum have distinct advantages over the rest of us. Taller men, men who are more "handsome" and have more "manly" features (e.g. chin, deep voice, etc.) consistently have advantages in negotiations for jobs, pay, status, etc. A casual search turns up a plethora of articles covering everything from getting interviews to pay to grades in school (here's one near the top, just as a starting point: http://www.businessinsider.com/beautiful-people-get-more-job...).

Being "good looking" is more about actually having physically "good looking" features than anything else you mentioned. What you mentioned are things the rest of us can do to try to compensate for a lack of physical attractiveness.

"Beauty is only skin deep" — "Looks only go so far" — and the plethora of other cultural restrictions on "beauty".

As is always pertinent to this discussion:

    Do we worship the Gods because they are beautiful, or are the Gods beautiful because we worship them?

We could generalize this to those interests that particularly come from reports of these demographics, and subdemographics. Or we could go abstract into architecture: Xer functions, functions which are more "readable" or have more "examples"; or classes which have more "features" consistently have advantages in negotiations for place in a codebase, frequency of reuse, event-state participation.

Actually, "beauty" is bone deep. If you don't have the bone structure, doesn't matter if the skin is perfect.

Unfortunately, we don't choose our image.

This is a nerdy thing to chime in, but: that doesn't establish a causal relationship. Attractive people might simply have more self confidence, which leads to more money and success with the opposite sex.

I know I've seen an interesting study that shows that at least part of the height income gap disappears if you account for teenage height. I.e. a man who was 5'4" as a teen and 5'10" as an adult is more similar in income to someone who was 5'4" all their life than someone who was 5'10" all their life. That's hard to explain in a model where beauty at the present moment is a larger determinant of income.

>This is a nerdy thing to chime in, but: that doesn't establish a causal relationship. Attractive people might simply have more self confidence, which leads to more money and success with the opposite sex.

It doesn't matter if it's causal or not, the fact that the correlation exists is enough to show "good looking people have it better".

5'10" all their life? Must have been a hell of a childbirth...

A lot of people don't realize that there's an investment in physical attractiveness. People who are generally considered physically attractive have invested more in their appearance.

Your genes are only maybe 25% of the picture. Having good hygiene, being well-dressed, having a nice haircut, and carrying yourself confidently ("swagger") can get you pretty far toward the attractive end of the spectrum. These things take time, money, and practice, but they really affect the way people perceive you.

exactly, you can't control how you were born, but there is plenty you can control. This includes how you smell, how your teeth are, and what your hair looks like. Trust me, just getting these down will put you above most people.

edit: also, how you dress.

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