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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   26875 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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There's disagreement on that, but I'm going with my personal opinion and experience. There's a lot of studies, and if you want to pick your definitions and operationalizations, you can find damn near anything you want. Current meta-studies are saying there's no relationship at all between attractiveness and IQ, or maybe only on the lower end. I don't believe them, in part because I've met Scott (and a couple other geniuses).

I think humans whose genetic expression maximizes any one trait are going to have trade-offs in other areas. Height is correlated with athleticism, to a point. At some height, you can't move properly, so the tallest man in the world never plays basketball. Same thing with geniuses. At the real high reaches of IQ, these people are statistical freaks, and they generally look like it.

To date, I've personally met maybe five or six people smarter than me, and they are all much, much uglier. To the point a few look retarded/disabled. Even beyond the physical stuff you can see in a picture, their mannerisms, twitches and behaviors would be hugely off-putting to most people.

My theory is that attractiveness is generally correlated with IQ, but this horseshoes at the ends of the distribution.

Seems odd, what’s getting “traded off” for higher IQ? My understanding was mutational load is why higher IQ = better looking, as more mutations generally makes you uglier and dumber

As I understand it there is a large cluster of people whose strengths and weaknesses come out to around average. There is a somewhat smaller cluster of people who are dumber, less athletic, uglier, etc than average, but well within normal variations. There is a smaller cluster of people who are about a standard deviation above in every trait, and an even smaller cluster that is more than two standard deviations below in every trait(tards are usually ugly and unathletic to go with it), but no corresponding cluster of people more than two standard deviations above average on every metric. Looking back at the people noticeably smarter than me who I've met, they've been overwhelmingly male so caveat about judging their looks, but their appearances follow the same distribution as everyone else's. The one woman was not very pretty but more of a slightly below average than ugly.

This isn't DnD where you have a set number of character points to spend. Some people get a better hand than others. There are beautiful, highly athletic people with genius level IQ. Not very many of them, but they exist.

To date, I've personally met maybe five or six people smarter than me

You don't get out much I take it?

How ugly do Nobel Prize winners look? I think it's a pretty standard finding that there is only a small positive correlation, but if you look at say top 20% IQ vs. bottom 20% I think it's pretty clear who looks better. (Obesity make this all the more obvious.)

but this horseshoes at the ends of the distribution.

As Yud would put it, the tails come apart.

I don't think being wildly intelligent is negatively correlated with physical attractiveness, the way extreme height is negatively attributed with athleticism, for both reasons of physics and often resulting from a disorder.

Here's why you're probably less smart than you think you are:

Height's relationship to athleticism is a pretty bad example because those are both physical things. Height comes with performance tradeoffs due to physics, and in certain sports that is very apparent. Being extremely tall also tends to come with greater fragility and various health ailments at higher rates because it's "out of spec."

Intelligence and beauty are completely different things. There's no inherent trade offs for the shape of one's face with the performance of one's mind. There's also no reason to believe sexual selection would totally divorce the two.

People also try to believe that being really smart means you also are not as good as various mental things, or have a higher risk of mental health problems.

Which to my knowledge is all bogus cope because most humans don't like to realize that life is actually just unfair and it's not a like a video game with a finite amount of skill points for a character.

In my observations, the median person on the street is far uglier than the median person working (to filter out the obvious confounder of youth if students were considered) at a university. I think any effect to the contrary people notice might just be an artifact of attention - it is easy to ignore the ugly and unremarkable people in everyday life and only notice and remember the beautiful ones, while the exceptionally smart people will be remembered regardless of their appearance.

I think- university employees being a small group that's super confounded- it'd be better to compare freshmen at state flagships to seniors in high school. There's not that big of an age difference and state flagships usually take only the top x%.

People who work at a university aren't nearly smart enough to be on the far side of that slope.

Okay, fine, take the quantitative fields from among the Nobel prize winners vs. some random German environmentalist club (first non-university picture on Google Images found by searching "Bielefeld [group photo]"). Do you actually think the latter look more attractive on average?

(...or are Nobel Prize winners still an insufficiently exclusive bunch? Who is an example of the tendency you are talking about, then?)

Obvious fake is obvious: everyone knows Bielefeld doesn’t exist. Try again with a real German town.

There's disagreement on that, but I'm going with my personal opinion and experience. There's a lot of studies, and if you want to pick your definitions and operationalizations, you can find damn near anything you want. Current meta-studies are saying there's no relationship at all between attractiveness and IQ, or maybe only on the lower end. I don't believe them, in part because I've met Scott (and a couple other geniuses).

There's certainly a relationship once you get into abnormal cases; there are a number of conditions (e.g. Downs) which result in low attractiveness and low IQ. But checking out Nobel Prize winners (including finding pictures of them when younger in many cases) doesn't result in a list of uggles.

In computer science and related fields, I can say that Theodore Kowalski (fsck), Rob Pike, Vint Cerf, and Benoit Mandelbrot didn't have obvious twitches.

I think humans whose genetic expression maximizes any one trait are going to have trade-offs in other areas.

Statistics says that it will look that way even if they don't.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dC7mP5nSwvpL65Qu5/why-the-tails-come-apart

A lot of pushback on the least important part of a month-old post for a pack of people who like to consider themselves smarter than the average bear.....

Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.

Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.

And don't look up more recent pics of Kelly LeBrock.

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