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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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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.