4 ms·

As someone who has been involved in academia in some fashion for over ten years, here are my observations (note: this is heavy on subjectivity): 1. Those invol

As someone who has been involved in academia in some fashion for over ten years, here are my observations (note: this is heavy on subjectivity): 1. Those involved academically or professionally with some form of STEM, seem to be, on average, less physically attractive than the average population. If this is true, we can say that there is an (loosely) inverse relationship between physical attractiveness and intelligence. 2. People who have hyper-lower confidence in their attractiveness tend to have profile pictures of things other than themselves (anime, The Joker, wolves, flowers, etc.). If this is true, then there is a positive correlation between physical attractiveness and propensity to use a non-facial PFP. 3. Therefore, if 1 and 2 are true, then it follows that intelligence is roughly positively correlated with having an anime PFP.

truckerbill 6y ago
That's not entirely watertight - it's not necessarily intelligence that's correlated with looks; maybe its just influencing what people pick as their major. Maybe attractive people do less STEM because they naturally are more socialised growing up, and spend less time shut away. That results in less STEM knowledge, but not necessarily less intelligence.
ipnon 6y ago
This is an interesting hypothesis. Attractiveness appears to be weakly related or unrelated to intelligence.[1][2] [1] https://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/I2011.pdf https://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/I2011.pdf [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4415372/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4415372/
szemet 6y ago
> an (loosely) inverse relationship between physical attractiveness and intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox 1. certain (genetic) diseases lowers both intelligence and attractiveness 2. I vaugly remember some theory from the early time of population statistics (Galton maybe?), that if successful men (which may correlate with intelligence) tend to marry beautiful women - then on the long run we can expect attractivenes and intelligence to correlate more - but have not heard if it was ever empirically verified or not...

truckerbill 6y ago

That's not entirely watertight - it's not necessarily intelligence that's correlated with looks; maybe its just influencing what people pick as their major. Maybe attractive people do less STEM because they naturally are more socialised growing up, and spend less time shut away. That results in less STEM knowledge, but not necessarily less intelligence.

ipnon 6y ago

This is an interesting hypothesis. Attractiveness appears to be weakly related or unrelated to intelligence.[1][2] [1] https://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/I2011.pdf https://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/I2011.pdf [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4415372/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4415372/

szemet 6y ago

> an (loosely) inverse relationship between physical attractiveness and intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox 1. certain (genetic) diseases lowers both intelligence and attractiveness 2. I vaugly remember some theory from the early time of population statistics (Galton maybe?), that if successful men (which may correlate with intelligence) tend to marry beautiful women - then on the long run we can expect attractivenes and intelligence to correlate more - but have not heard if it was ever empirically verified or not...