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Reading Scott Adams almost invariably just makes me irritated. A number of semi-plausible speculations coupled with intellectual smugness that's (dishonestly,

Reading Scott Adams almost invariably just makes me irritated. A number of semi-plausible speculations coupled with intellectual smugness that's (dishonestly, in my opinion) protected by virtue of being explicitly just a guy's opinions. It's more of the same here. Attractiveness is not universal and is often _tied_ to the opinions a person holds--so people that disagree with arguably attractive people will think them _ugly_. The other big problem is that no one really cares about a pretty face repeating words they don't understand. Pretty faces might get famous just for being famous, but they don't get respected, only thronged. The hell of it is, this could _work_. It wouldn't work by the mechanism he declares, though--it would work because we connect with real people, and it's fun to experience people in short snippets with no obligation. The problem is that we've just described Chatroulette, only decoupled from the present time--and sharing the present time is what makes chatroulette interesting.

Tycho 16y ago
But there's fairly objective standards that are correlated with attractiveness in any study of the phenomenon, eg. facial symmetry. Physical attractiveness, of course, which presumably is what SA was talking about. From my own observations about how people react to amateur video productions on the Internet, eg. "omg who is that lecturer she is so cute!!", I think Mr Adams is onto something.
- Helianthus16 16y ago
  Correlated. Just because we can say "This person is generally more attractive because of facial symmetry, well-aligned teeth, and x,y,z" doesn't mean we have any particularly useful quotient to judge the attractiveness of a person. Such a general measure is way too broad. And you missed my point: the perception of physical attraction is not based solely on physical traits! Look at Sarah Palin--some would say she's attractive, but if you mentally recoil at the thought of a Palin presidential run I'm sure you would not think so. Your amateur video productions _prove my point_ because the attractiveness is in the ordinary, the "just a person at home making a video." It is in the fact that the person is presumably contributing something valuable. So why would people care if models were paid to say something? This is why Adams articles frustrate me: because it provokes discussion without moving anything forward, because he's used a terrible model to abstract attraction and as a consequence our definitions are semantic (read: fucked) to begin with.

Tycho 16y ago

But there's fairly objective standards that are correlated with attractiveness in any study of the phenomenon, eg. facial symmetry. Physical attractiveness, of course, which presumably is what SA was talking about. From my own observations about how people react to amateur video productions on the Internet, eg. "omg who is that lecturer she is so cute!!", I think Mr Adams is onto something.

Helianthus16 16y ago
Correlated. Just because we can say "This person is generally more attractive because of facial symmetry, well-aligned teeth, and x,y,z" doesn't mean we have any particularly useful quotient to judge the attractiveness of a person. Such a general measure is way too broad. And you missed my point: the perception of physical attraction is not based solely on physical traits! Look at Sarah Palin--some would say she's attractive, but if you mentally recoil at the thought of a Palin presidential run I'm sure you would not think so. Your amateur video productions _prove my point_ because the attractiveness is in the ordinary, the "just a person at home making a video." It is in the fact that the person is presumably contributing something valuable. So why would people care if models were paid to say something? This is why Adams articles frustrate me: because it provokes discussion without moving anything forward, because he's used a terrible model to abstract attraction and as a consequence our definitions are semantic (read: fucked) to begin with.