Could you please stop rewriting article titles in baity, editorialized ways? As commenters have pointed out, the way you editorialized this one has essentially ruined the thread. Worse, you've been doing it repeatedly (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32880519).
We take submission privileges away from accounts that do this. It's against the site guidelines, which ask you to "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
I don't want to take submission privileges away from your account, because you've also been posting some good submissions. But we need you to fix this!
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
If you need to paraphrase an article title because it's too long to fit HN's 80 char limit, please do so in a neutral and undistorted way, not in a cherry-picking way as you did here.
The title is incredibly editorialized. The title of the paper is:
>> Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching
It considers the effect of attractiveness on male and female students. In fact, it finds the beauty premium persists in online learning for male students but not for female students. I won't speculate as to why the title has been so heavily editorialized, but it seems to have significantly lowered the quality of discussion.
"A" beauty premium persists not "the" premium. I've only read the highlights but that reads like there's a dropoff for men, but not as steep a one as for women.
Edit: This'll teach me to read the whole study. The conclusion has this to say:
>This finding implies that the female beauty premium observed when education is in-person is likely to be chiefly a consequence of discrimination. On the contrary, for male students, there was still a significant beauty premium even after the introduction of online teaching. The latter finding suggests that for males in particular, beauty can be a productivity-enhancing attribute.
It's almost as if we've become socially accustomed to editorialized social media shared headlines that are intentionally crafted as rage bait to drive clicks and engagement for advertising revenue. Gee, I sure do wonder how and where that might have happened...
I've been saying for the past year, sensationalist submissions like the OP to the front-page are the norm on "H"N. Quite disappointing, considering I believed this website was once a source for high-quality information, but now it's almost as if I'm logging in on my LinkedIn home page.
Misleading HN headline IMO. I think the most interesting thing here is that:
1) attractive females have better grades in-person but not remote
2) attractive males have better grades in-person AND remote
Not wanting to add to the title, but if HN had a subtitle, this would be it:
"The effect is only present in courses with significant teacher–student interaction."
I mention this because I initially wondered if looks drove general confidence, and that somehow made them better students. But the subtitle implies that instructors have a bias in favor of looks.
That said, now I wonder how the gender and/or gender-preference of the teacher influences the bias.
Attractive girls may also have more offers to help them study, be more popular generally, etc., all of which also ceased to matter during government imposed remote learning
Attractiveness is at least partially mutable (grooming, diet, etc). Caring for oneself and getting good grades are both, to an extent, downstream from being in a good place mentally.
Just not being fat generally helps. I don't believe in fat shaming, and in most cases I don't think being fat is a sign of bad character, but I've had the experience of being fat (225 lbs at my heaviest) and dropping all that weight (today I'm 158 lbs at 11% BF). The difference in how the public treats you is night and day. People are friendlier and generally assume that you are more competent, sometimes overly so. If you want to be liked, be lean. Sorry to say it.
Facial bone structure is probably the most difficult thing to fix apart from height.
Right, instead of shaming it’s healthier to promote being your best self (carrot vs stick). I wasn’t able to be shamed out of addiction to cheap snack food, but I was able to change after I changed my mindset and the habit just didn’t fit my new tenets, my self-perception.
Society is so sensitive though that any message of improving yourself is interpreted as “shaming”, which hurts the individual.
That's a new angle I had never considered before, thank you. I have certainly hypothesized before that most people could be quite attractive if they took good care of themselves (exercise, sleep, etc) but I never connected that idea as a possible factor in the performance gap.
It's hard to argue that looking good isn't any advantage, but this could be an interesting nuance.
The effect is only present in courses with significant teacher–student interaction.
When education is in-person, attractive students receive higher grades in non-quantitative subjects, in which teachers tend to interact more with students compared to quantitative courses.
If it was about getting study help, the effect would be mirrored in quantitative courses.
The study addressed part of your hypothesis and found no evidence. There was no “beauty” effect found in courses where grades were quantitative instead of qualitative - where the grader presumably had less liberty to nudge grades up or down. This was prior to the switch to remote learning.
Presumably popularity and ability to garner help with studying would be the same for qualitative and quantitative courses.
Could we please stop with the Trumpist framing? The pandemic "imposed" the need for safety measures. The fact that our government (usually, at least) went along with what was obviously required to protect citizens' lives is not a reason to adopt this MAGA way of talking about it.
My Lyft app keeps trying to get me to complete my profile with a pic saying that it will help improve the experience. Generous me thinks it helps the driver find me when trying to pick me up. Less generous me says the drivers can quickly see my pic and decide to accept the ride or not. I have no idea how the driver app works, so I may or may not be full of it.
Perhaps these people are not overlooked (ha!) by others as much, leading to higher confidence, leading to better developed social skills, leading to better success as managers?
I've thought about this a little bit. My pet theory is that taller kids tend to be taller adults, and taller kids tend to be treated more maturely and given more responsibility than smaller kids.
As a tall person, I have always been looked to in any group so naturally began taking on the leadership role which I take to mean "gets the group towards the goal". I still do it, but I hate official leadership roles.
The findings in TFA state that the "beauty premium" for male students remained the same during the switch to online teaching (versus the decline in female students). This would appear to indicate that internal factors play a larger part for the former, whereas external factors play a larger part in the latter.
Yeah and all Hollywood actors are short. And all racing car/f22 pilots have fast reflexes. All labourers are physically strong. Roles are prepared for people who fit.
Height in management is not one of the fitting requirements.
Agreed, the manager does all the dirty work like negotiations between competing priorities and telling people no. His height and friendly disposition give him comparative advantage at these tasks so he can tolerate the job better than I could.
Mayim Bialik made a good point about it during Weinstein and was utterly demolished and nearly cancelled for it.
I can't remember the exact words, but she noted that Hollywood was a lot harder for actresses that producers etc. didn't want to fuck. While the casting couch was a hard, demeaning career path, it was a career path, and one that a crafty, resourceful actress that powerful people wanted to fuck might even be able to work around and take advantage of without having to do anything. But if you're just a good actress and not seen as a bedding opportunity, there was just a wall.
This is a game I like to play: whenever I see an actor in a big/expensive production that I feel is a bad actor, I try to figure out how they got the role.
90% of the time, you can just go to their Wikipedia page and see that their parents or aunt/uncle is a well connected Hollywood type. The other times, you'll see paparazzi shots of them partying with 65 year old dudes, who end up being big Hollywood players. Because there's nothing attractive 20-somethings like to do more than party with people who are their grandfather's age.
If you think this then you haven't looked very hard. It's trivial to find a wealth of articles and commentary (scientific and otherwise) with a simple "attractiveness privilege" google search, for example.
That you can find discussion with a focused search doesn't really address the opinion that "the people who usually talk about [privilege]" haven't "properly acknowledged" things like beauty privilege.
Certainly, sophisticated academics and other deep thinkers consider – or at least mention when being comprehensive – the many possible dimensions of privilege. They're not secrets, nor unstudied.
But the people most often flagging things like "white privilege" or "male privilege" often don't mention things like "height privilege" or "beauty privilege" or "personality privilege". They don't want the distraction.
Some even get prickly if it's mentioned that those other privileges can have a larger influence on relevant measurable outcomes, like say income, than headline-grabbing race/gender privileges.
And yet we talk about the "white privilege" all the time, and I bet
dollars to doughnuts that "beauty privilege" has more impact on a person life in the year 2022.
People who aren’t fat are more attractive.
People who aren’t fat are more likely to eat healthy and exercise.
Eating healthy and exercising improves your cognition.
Beauty and money are life's lubricants.
In my experience, beautiful people of both sexes are no more dumb than ugly people.
They basically need to put less effort into everything in life, so they don't need to know much.
The woman doesn't need to drive, the man does it for her, the man doesn't need to flirt or treat the woman well, they go after them, etc.
Occurs with other... social traits. All my bosses were children of a businessman, or a friend, a son of a friend of a businessman, family or higher social class. (Hence my theory about generalized mismanagement: it is because the manager is not prepared to manage, they are chosen based on some social characteristics)
These traits have more "social capital". It's basically impossible to beat one if he has more social capital than you, you may be a brilliant professional, but in the end, social capital is more important.
For a reason I can’t explain, submissions about attractiveness, gender-based discrimination and relationships between the sexes seem to be highly upvoted and generally have a lot of comments despite generating no actual intelligent discussions and often devolving into Reddit adjacent levels of reflections. It is a bit depressing.
Then again I’m here in the comment section posting something so I should probably start with policing myself.
Yeah, I agree. Maybe we can salvage the discussion though.
Nathan Fielder graduated from one of Canada's top business schools with really good grades. And famously, his American green card mistakenly identifies him as a woman. There must be something there.
I'm a guy in his 40's and you didn't actually supply me with any advice apart from "do as I say"... I see a lot of that these days. I've no idea who this Elliot is and don't really care - if you want to provide advice at least provide some substance.
This is an incredibly dangerous and anti intellectual way to think. The merit of an argument is always separate from who else is saying it, no matter how unpalatable a character.
Attractive people are more likely to be intelligent. Obesity and other "unattractive" traits have negative impact on cognitive functions and IQ. And being smart is attractive trait on its own!
I’m not so sure about that correlation. Some of the smartest folks I’ve ever met have been overweight. I’ve also known plenty of attractive people who were pretty dumb when you got to know them. I’d bet on a random distribution of intelligence across the spectrum.
> includes all babies born during the week of March 9, 1958 in Great Britain
> When the children were 7 and again when they were 11, their teachers were asked to describe them physically. For the purpose of the analysis below, the children are defined to be attractive if they were described as attractive at both age 7 and age 11.
> Sixty-two percent of the NCDS respondents are coded as attractive.
It is possible that teacher involuntary describe rich students as attractive and poor students as not attractive, or at least there is a bias. Or perhaps it's a bias for some race that is correlated with wealth that is correlated with intelligence. Malnutrition cause learning problems. Poor students get bad schools and not out of school tuition when necessary. It's not a 100% correlation, but perhaps enough to cause a difference in the study.
That is interesting. It makes me wonder if this difference is due to something innate, or due to the apparent leg up that attractive people have— teachers being more prone to spend time with them, etc.
That's why professors, doctors, and lawyers are so hot.
There's literally a term "law school hot" which means definitely not hot, but hot for a lawyer.
> used to describe women who, in any other scenario would be considered hunchbacked, slovenly, heinous wildebeasts. But, because of their captive audience (law school men) and their alternatives (other trolls, buffalos, and wildebeasts) they somehow garner attraction.
Not so sure about intelligence, but perhaps fitness to some extent. Unattractive traits are usually red flags for other problems that don't necessarily have anything to do with IQ.
> And being smart is attractive trait on its own!
Being competent would probably be more accurate. I assume you mean intelligence when you use the word smart here, in which case I would say that most people consider intelligence to be boring. But no one likes an idiot. One can be competent, or perhaps smart (which is really more about decision making than processing capability), without being abundant in intelligence.
We take submission privileges away from accounts that do this. It's against the site guidelines, which ask you to "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
I don't want to take submission privileges away from your account, because you've also been posting some good submissions. But we need you to fix this!
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
If you need to paraphrase an article title because it's too long to fit HN's 80 char limit, please do so in a neutral and undistorted way, not in a cherry-picking way as you did here.