My impression from similar studies is that we tend to discriminate against people who don't look like us, not necessarily based (just) on perceived negative characteristics.
So, I wouldn't be surprised if obese/unattractive people still discriminates against those perceived negative characteristics, but I also wouldn't be surprised if that discrimination was to a lower degree than when the person doing the discrimination isn't obese/unattractive.
Formerly secret, and perhaps extrapolating (surely for N > 0 discovered cases, there are M > 0 still secret cases, since it seems unlikely to have a 100% reveal rate). And "large numbers" is highly subjective in this case. It would be reasonable to consider two to be a high number for something so surprising.
> That's also the correct use of an Oxford/serial comma, yes?
In the off chance you were being serious, no. An Oxford comma goes (or doesn't go) after the second to last (penultimate) item, not after the final. And even then it's only used when there's a conjunction between the penultimate and last item.
I mean large in a relative sense. If there is a known small number of elected people, and we know that only few of them will be gay/bi, and we still find out every year or so that someone loudly campaigning against gay rights visited same-sex prostitutes or has a stash of related porn... Then either it's common or there's some weird correlation between that behaviour and drive for powerful positions.
A great explanation of this that I read somewhere was that only a gay person could believe the doomsday scenario of homosexuality ending human reproduction. A gay person thinks “huh that’s scary, what if everyone is like me” while a straight person thinks “I have 4 kids, how could that possibly happen.”
Would you really want a doctor who is obese? A mildly overweight doctor, sure. But obese?
The reality is, if you have a list of doctors and their pictures and know nothing of them except for their appearance I highly doubt anyone would pick the obese person as their first pick.
It’s just reality. Someone capable of going through medical school is capable of reducing their weight to being merely overweight as opposed to obese.
People going on “yeah if they know their stuff” are missing the point. You don’t know if they know their stuff at all.
You're saying that like being obese is has a trivial fix people just don't want to apply. I'd totally see a doctor who is obese. Or a doctor who smokes. Or many others. In terms of dealing with obesity they may actually have more insight and know more resources than people not affected by this issue.
There's a big difference between behaviours applied to self and knowledge applied at work.
The fix to obesity is caloric restriction. As an extreme example, look at pictures of people in concentration camps: no obese people there. The reason why it’s a good example is because it’s “forced” caloric restriction, and it shows that it works. Obese people make the choice to consume more calories than requires, hence being obese.
Sure, but that doesn't make it a trivial fix. Unless you figured out how to influence ingrained behaviours / addictions better than any existing methods? This comment is like "the fix to smoking is to not smoke" - yes everybody knows that. Actually applying that across population is the hard part.
The point still needs to be made, since there are _still_ people who honestly believe that weight loss is achieved by some mechanism other than consuming less calories than is expended. They still think there is some other form of "magic" involved. So to digress the discussion onto behaviours, etc. is a distraction from the fundamental fact that needs to be hammered home until it becomes ingrained. At that point we can work on the behaviours required to achieve that end. Otherwise you have what you have now, people changing behaviours and trying to eat healthy, or exercise more, thinking that those behaviours are the magic secret to weight loss. It is not, and you can lose weight eating McDonalds and sitting at your desk all day if the amount of calories in the McDonalds you're eating is low enough. It's not healthy, but healthy/not healthy has nothing to do with calorie restriction and consequently weight loss.
There's still a massive difference between eating food that's digested over a long time and eating candy with the same calories. It impacts the whole process and how much people will realistically restrict themselves. There's issues with body image where people don't realise they're actually obese. There's comfort food related to life stress. And so many other issues. Sure, calorie restriction is an important piece of the puzzle, but saying the rest is a distraction is a really shallow understanding of the problem. It's like that "how to draw an owl" meme - true, but the instruction are so simple they're useless.
I wouldn't say no signal at all. If I have data that they are the best doctor from my options and are obese, yeah totally, I'll go for them. But if I just see a lineup of doctors and all else is equal, I'm definitely picking the obese one last.
It's possible that they're obese due to some condition relatively out of their control, or that they're working on it, (and my answer applies specifically to the US) but when 40% of the US is obese, it more than likely reflects on them as a person and their values.
That would performance - if we're going for a run, how are they going to keep up and last the distance?
As another example, it's not unusual for top-level sports coaches (e.g. soccer, tennis) to be older, and to be overweight - it's their past experience that is useful, not their current appearance.
I think he's referring to a General Practitioner who IMO should really practice what the preaches. If doctor is unhealthy it doesn't exactly instill confidence.
Honestly as long as they know their "stuff" I don't really care at all about the appearance of a Doctor(or if they smoke etc). There are a multitude of reasons a person could be obese (genetics, digestive disorders/longer intestines). Also people have choices, if a Dr. tells me smoking is bad and he smokes he is choosing to do so despite evidence that its dangerous. I respect the ability for individuals to make choices, even if I don't agree with them.
To get high from smoking you must smoke. To love food you don't have to be fat.
Being an alcoholic is more comparable. Or a two pack a day smoker.
A doctor should be vaping though. If they don't vape that is bad. But I feel like these things are small compared to all the other problems we have with doctors, like overwork.
Where do you get to choose a doctor? I have a "primary care doctor" but if I had to choose another one, it would be an arduous process. And I have to pay a large premium to visit her rather than just going to urgent care. So for most situations, I effectively get whatever doctor is on shift when I go to the clinic.
Realistically, adding any non essential criteria to my search would narrow my choices down to possibly a very small number.
I’ve always chosen my doctor in the US. I’ve always had HDHP PPO health insurance. Even if you don’t have health insurance, you can call any office and make an appointment unless they’re a specialist requiring referral.
Many parents even interview pediatricians before choosing who to go with.
I'd be curious for a study looking at whether obese nutritionists would be more or less effective than fit ones. People tend to trust people more like them, and I can definitely imagine a dynamic where an obese person would resent a skinny doctor telling them how to improve their diet. And, since obese people are in the most need of nutritional advice, perhaps getting more obese representation into the ranks of doctors would do some good.
Unfortunately with the rise of the Fat Activist movement, many nutritionists now pander to clients by advocating eating practices that are unhealthy and dangerous.
Harm reduction is the name of the game. It's far better to get 50% of the obese to move to the highly overweight category than it is to get 10% to the normal category. I wouldn't be surprised (though I'd want to see evidence) that offering less severe and more achievable advice is more effective as a population-level strategy.
one of Nassim Taleb's better ideas is that you should pick the worst-looking doctor you can find -- weird-looking, fat, lower-class accent, whatever -- because if they're successfully practicing medicine, they must be very skilled to make up for the unfair judgments throughout med school interviews, residency, and fellowships.
Or they're just on the verge of a stroke or severely under-slept while deciding where in your skull to drill. Yeah I think I'm cool with the somewhat healthy doc.
Would you really want a doctor who is obese? A mildly overweight doctor, sure. But obese?
I think it would depend on the specialty. I wouldn't really care if my radiologist is obese. He can read and interpret my scans just fine. Same for pathology, endo and renal docs. I don't think I'd want an obese ER doc as CPR is pretty tiring, same with my anesthesiologist- don't want them sweaty and out of breath while trying to put in an airway.
I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but at least the stock market doesn't care. Look at Warren Buffet drinking his coke, or Soros with his girlfriend on the beach.
He's being ironic. As Will Smith's character said in The Pursuit of Happyness, finance is just about being good with numbers and good with people (for which you need rules 1 [Be Attractive] & 2 [Don’t Be Unattractive])
Personally, I find it very surprising most hackers have such a disdain for physical beauty, given the huge ROI for every $ invested - reportedly about 1,000x for Elon Musk personal worth.
Still, only a few CEO seems to have taken action to maximize their appearance, and mostly against their premature baldness. Even that is kind of taboo - while studying before an interview is not, even if it will certainly have a much lower ROI.
Why not hack your appearance?
There are many scientific studies documenting all that, but we ignore them. For an example of all the known variables, check for ex table 1 of the following for "Zero-order Pearson’s correlations between facial appearance and health, with the corresponding p-values and sample sizes":
All this is well known now, as the first study was about 22 years ago:
Perrett, D. I., Lee, K. J., Penton-Voak, I., Rowland, D., Yoshikawa, S., Burt, D. M., … Akamatsu, S. (1998). Effects of sexual dimorphism on facial attractiveness. Nature, 394(6696), 884–887. doi:10.1038/29772
So why do we keep ignoring it, while focusing on other signals like which search engine (or operating systen) you use?
Is it disdain or lack of interest in concentrating on appearance? I mean, what's the end goal? If i want success and you give me a choice of "improve what you do" or "improve what you look like" for the same result, I'll take the first one every time. If that pushes some people away, that's gain x2 - improvement and I know that people around me care on a deeper level than a lie of appearance (it will go away with time anyway).
> If i want success and you give me a choice of "improve what you do" or "improve what you look like" for the same result, I'll take the first one every time.
In doing so, you are then neglecting the diminishing marginal returns: spend say the equivalent of 1 month or time (or earning from your work) on learning 10 times in a row will yield less than doing that 9 times + improving your appearance once (or twice, you get the idea...)
> I know that people around me care on a deeper level than a lie of appearance
You THINK you know. The studies in law, in resident selection in medicine, etc. seem to prove you wrong - unless you believe hackers are very different from doctors and lawyers at an essential level
I'm not saying they don't care about appearance at all - we all do to some extent. Just that I don't see alienating people who care about appearance enough that it overrides your other achievements as a negative outcome.
Reading through the paper, I think the real buried lead here is that the reviewers discriminated in favor of selecting black and hispanic applicants, with a larger effect size than anything analyzed but test scores and attractive vs unattractive (not neutral vs unattractive). This includes obesity, grades / class rank, research publications, and honor society membership.
At least your appearance and test scores are mutable characteristics.
Is it actually buried though when the context is America? It seems like this kind of behavior should be assumed as default when this sort of outcome is exactly what American advocacy groups have been persuing for years. If equity only matters for minorities then an org is just going to err on the side of caution and favor minorities.
Yeah, but at least reviewers being biased towards Black and Hispanic applicants have some reason to be: they are trying to correct for society-wide discrimination. You can argue that it's not their place to do that, or that trying to do that on a case by case basis is unfair, etc., but it is at least some reason.
Discriminating against unattractive people, has no equivalent justification. In fact, discriminating against unattractive people exaggerates a society-wide bias against unattractive people.
After reading your sentence, it occurred to me that it's no longer clear in today's age if you're referring to people using racial discrimination to hire underrepresented groups as racist, or the ones who oppose racial-based hiring and only hiring on "merit" as racist because they oppose race-based preferential hiring.
I don’t think it matters. In general people that do harm to others in any way believe their actions are justified. It’s not special to racism, humans as a whole are pretty averse to causing unjustified harm to others.
When the privileged classes have had generations to generate social networks that connect privileged people with privileged people (arguably one of the greatest privileges white people have, along with generational wealth and societies general presuppositions that go along with it), is it so bad to actively recognize that and go against it?
Racism says an ethnicity is better or worse than another intrinsically.
This is recognizing a section of our population has been, by and large, historically kept from making those connections and intentionally favoring them, not just for their sake but for the sake of their children’s children, by working to get them the same levels of connections the privileged class has historically had.
Are Asian Americans privileged? For example, would you say that Vietnamese refugees and descendants of trafficked Chinese railroad laborers have been celebrated and given unfair advantages by white society?
Asian-American encompasses an very diverse set of experiences in America, you can’t really create a cohesive narrative in the same way you could with other groups. The fact that you easily identify different groups with very distinct experiences should clue you in to that.
So your claim is that Asian-Americans are diverse, while black and Hispanic people each form unvariegated, homogeneous identities?
I very intentionally point out particular groups in my original comment, because proponents of race-based affirmative action always avoid grappling with why it's fair to discriminate against some relatively successful subgroups of Asian Americans by bringing up red herrings about Hmong and Cambodian refugees (who, it's worth pointing out, are typically excluded from the benefits of affirmative action anyway, which makes it even more of a red herring).
If you take the population of black Americans you’ll find that the overwhelming majority of them have their history in the ~3.9 million people trafficked during the slave trade and the following diaspora from the south throughout the 40s-60s, the majority as in 80%+. If you look at Asian Americans, you’ll find that the overwhelming majority of them do not descend from the ~20k transcontinental railroad laborers.
It’s not hard to tell that their experiences must be vastly different, because 20k is a very small proportion of the total Asian American population, while 3.5m is a much larger percentage.
I hope this help you with differentiating how relatively homogeneous groups are.
At the same time it's fair to say that many of the Asian Americans will come from families that arrived with very little and have managed to become successful in the US within a generation or two, through hard work and disciple, no?
This is an extremely touchy and hotbutton issue. Many scholors have researched this very topic quite a bit. It helps to illustrate the point when you look into historical tensions between the black and Asian communities, especially in California.
Asian communities face less discrimination from the white community as there hasn't been a lot of reinforcement of negative stereotypes relating to any of the Asian communities. Compare that with the history and treatment of the black community and you can trace a direct line from slavery to where many communities are today. A lot of propaganda regarding black people had been fed to whites for hundreds of years in order to justify their enslavement.
The black community has seen Asians as a "preferred minority" who has benefited from their civil rights work and at the same time given opportunities they didn't have without giving back to black communities.
There is a lot of nuance in there, but that's the super short version.
> Asian communities face less discrimination from the white community
I am based in Europe so I maybe things are different here. We still hear a lot about how minorities are discriminated against, but it always seems based on equality of outcome as the "proof", and it seems to be pretty selective where they are looking. I see little evidence of real discrimination in fact most people seem quite disgusted by it.
There are plenty of eg, black doctors who raise privileged black children, and plenty of eg, poor rural whites who grew up in poverty.
Race-based affirmative action based on race doesn't do a good job of addressing the systemic problems with economic opportunity, and just causes rifts within society.
Opportunity-based affirmative action is something that I think would be desperately useful, but ... it would run into a lot of the same perceptual problems as race-based programs.
The historical lines correlate strongly (though yes, not 100%) with race so the white kid who's in the program as a result of the affirmative action who grew up in a poor area with poor schools is going to blend in with the "regular" whites whereas the black kid who was the child of doctors is going to still be judged on the first thing people notice about them - their skin.
Fixing our past sins will take both proactive action AND continual vigilance by all of us to fight our snap judgments and first impressions.
But I believe it would be MUCH better than today's "merit" based systems which just create insane amount of pressure on kids starting in middle school or even earlier, to pad resumes and compete for the best schools, etc. That's a race to the (mental health) bottom of a whole different sort.
Tell that to the cis-white-male who was raised on a trailer park by a single mom when you explain to him why he doesn't get a scholarship though. Not everyone who's white or male is in a position of relative privilege. Affirmative action can create new forms of injustices as well. Somehow nowadays we think that deciding who gets what on the basis of sex and skin color is A-OK, because we're doing it right, we're doing it for the greater good... What could possibly go wrong?
Im pretty sure a cis white male can get a scholarship if coming from a poor background. This link for examplw comes first when doing a quick google search, and everyone on their promo picture is white: http://www.collegescholarships.org/scholarships/low-income.h...
This can be debated on a case by case basis, but that's not how racism works. We're talking statistics here. If you're white in the US you are statistically more likely to have privileges not afforded to others.
If you're white re you more likely to be successful and face less discrimination from your point of birth going forward? Yes you are.
Further, if you do make it through the rough parts of your life and push through and find yourself in a situation where you _could_ get a job in some industrious, high-paying field, like hires like, so the reality that many other people of your ethnicity DO have those privileges allows you to take advantage of them, too because "oh hey, I was interviewing that guy and we really got along. he's just like me!"
What you’re doing here is using the color of somebody’s skin to make very broad assumptions about the experiences of their life. Aside from the fact that these assumptions will often just be flat out wrong, it’s also a very racist way of viewing other people, and an especially arrogant way of treating them.
If you think people who are systemically disadvantaged deserve some additional help, then target it to people who are systemically disadvantaged. You can do that without without creating any racial discrimination, or any of the harm that comes along with it.
If you take a historical map of the US slave population and overlay that with the concentration of the black population in the Southern US today and then overlay that with a map of median income, avg life expectancy, education, etc. you'll see a very clear connection.
I agree that a more level playing field along income lines would create a more fair and just society, but you're talking about a problem that the free market cannot solve and would lead to an argument for a very different type of economic model. I'm all for it, but it's a tough sell in the US.
And none of that makes anybody any more or any less entitled to help from society, or equal protection under law, based upon their ethnicity. Non-hispanic whites make up the largest population of people living in poverty in the US by a very significant margin. Those people are equally as entitled to assistance from society as any other ethnic group, and they are not at all deserving of facing the racial discrimination they face at all levels of society. These policies are definitively racist, which I guess you're welcome to offer your support for, but it doesn't change the fact that racial discrimination is racist.
The free market also has nothing to do with this conversation at all. All possible programs you could conceive for addressing problems like this fall under the umbrella of market intervention.
Not sure about America, but I don't understand what do you mean by saying that being white anywhere in the world comes with priviliges. I am a white male from a Eastern European country where 99.9% of people are the same race. How am I priviliged and in comparison to who?
Historically, predominantly white empires colonize territories that aren't white. If you're black, brown, indigenous, you're most likely from a former or current colony. It's been used as a justification for blatant exploitation.
This type of marginalization has happened and is still currently happening in Eastern Europe, but it's done around ethnic and/or religious lines. The most obvious examples of this are the the treatment of Jews and more recently the Bosniaks in the Balkans. It also happened in Russia to the Cossacks and Crimean Tatars, among others. It operates on the same principal.
Sorry, but I still don't understand your point. How am I priviliged if people from a foreign country colonized another part of the world? I and my ancestors didn't have anything to do with this. Our country was, in fact, "colonized" for more than a hundred years too.
All the minority groups you just mentioned are also Caucasian, so they are priviliged, but at the same time they... are not? In your original post you made a racial claim that just didn't make much sense to me at all, same as all race-related stereotypes that try to somehow classify groups of billions.
It's purely tribalism at its heart. It's much easier to exploit a group if they are perceived as different. Skin color and looks are the easiest things to distinguish one group from another. It's more challenging to marginalize a group if they can be seen as just like you and me.
In the Americas, the dominant group, both financially and politically has been people with lighter skin. This is how we've been trained to think for a very long time and it persists to this day. Had history played out differently and people with dark skin did the colonizing to people with white skin, things would be different, but that's not the case.
This same thing has been done to Jews in Europe and elsewhere for a couple thousand years. These groups of people who are "different" have been used as convenient scapegoats, which we know has played a central role in civilization since the very beginning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoating
To bring it back to the US, the black population and eventually the Hispanic population have been used as scapegoats for white societies to look at as the source of their problems. It's a way of maintaining social cohesion (in the dominant group).
You are educated, smart and self-reliant. You are a threat to the Politburo and ought to be replaced with someone helpless, dependent and loyal. Everything else is just optics.
It is racist to implement systems of racial discrimination. There is no way that you could modify the meaning of the word racism to the point that it no longer includes racial discrimination.
Racism also doesn’t presuppose any particular motive. There are many reasons that somebody could choose to be racist, and if you look at real world racists, you’ll find that they offer a wide variety of justifications for their views. Just as you have done in this comment. You are making the argument that your racism is morally righteous, and that it will create positive outcome (which, coincidentally, certainly isn’t an uncommon position for racists to take).
You’ve also made the mistake of presuming that the problem you describe requires a racist solution. It absolutely doesn’t. If wealth creates more inter-generational wealth, and poverty creates more inter-generational poverty, then you need a solution for social mobility, not to artificially elevate people based on ethnic group membership (which of course also disadvantages others based on their different ethnic group membership). A poor white or Asian kid, who’s family has always been poor, is going to face the same socio-economic disadvantages that you’re describing, and a wealthy black kid isn’t going to be facing them at all. The solution your offering (aside from being racist) doesn’t solve the problem you’re describing. In many cases, it actually makes it worse, because if you look at how such systems operate, you’ll find that a decent portion of the people who benefit from them actually come from relatively well off families.
Suppose we created a national social graph, and gave each person a value in it. High prestige, high social access people automatically get a certain high rating, and other nodes are given fractional social access ratings dependent on their neighboring nodes. The devil's in the details here, but you get the idea.
Affirmative action could then be targeted depending on your level of social access. The less you have, the more affirmative action you get. This would allow for a lot more mixing of the social graph and result in a gradual leveling over time.
Is this appealing, in lieu of race-based affirmative action?
I came across similar conclusions when researching CA Prop 16, and it makes sense. Many affirmative action-ed students, by virtue of their systematic disadvantage, just can't keep up with their more privileged colleagues. I'm really disappointed, though, that the authors did not address the fact that this "mismatch" is still just another symptom of the problem affirmative action is trying to solve.
If you think these students faced a systematic disadvantage that made them unable to answer multiple choice questions about basic math problems, or material they were supposed to have learned during undergrad, you ought to point out what it actually is, and how big an effect size it has, and why.
Elephant in the room: most of the "privilege" you are talking about is literally parents giving a damn and pouring endless time and energy into teaching stuff to their kids and trying to engrave delayed gratification into their personality.
But instead of rewarding and praising this behavior, and trying to make it a role model for the struggling minorities, we try to punish and discourage the kids that have learned the skills with their parents' help, so they won't succeed in life either.
Of course, this doesn't affect the "admission by donation" kind of families, that leaves me wonder: is it about helping minorities succeed, or is it about replacing arrogant self-reliant challengers with grateful and loyal underperformers, to further entrench the elites' position?
One form of discrimination begets another - since subpopulations often happen to be quite different in various aspects, positive discrimination towards one racial or ethnic group would be expected to cause some discrimination of other factors that happen to be correlated with belonging to that group.
What about mean looking people? Surely nobody wants to be around a mean looking person. They might do well in prison or during the draft for war. But otherwise, I'm sure they get ostracized....which just boils up their meanness. So that one day, they might be plotting to ruin Christmas from their cave overlooking Whoville.
Hmmm I wonder, I'm 6'4", average looking, have a European accent(which i hate) but last time I interviewed for 3 jobs I received offers from all of them. I don't think it was my actual skills as I failed two out of three questions in one of the interviews. I'm not particularly smart either, just common sense and can hack things together.
I have a zoom interview soon, we will see how that goes, maybe I need to hold banana or something for scale.
Having been on the interviewer side of the table at a couple smaller companies as well as a FAANG or two, I can say I've never seen a question on the slate where the candidate was obviously intended to fail. Maybe some other companies do this.
However, if a candidate answers my first question easily I will try to extend or constrain the problem enough that it pushes them out of their comfort zone a bit. This gives them a chance to show off more skill than if I only asked an easy question.
Also, there are very rarely "perfect interviews"; it's rare for people to get the highest score on even one of their interviews, let alone all of them.
> I failed two out of three questions in one of the interviews
Do you know for a fact that you failed them, or is that just your perception? Interview questions are typically a little more open-ended than you suspect, and not being able to deliver the full answer of what's being asked for isn't a failure when you've only got 30 minutes.
It's hard to say, and second guessing yourself is never useful. There are competent and incompetent tall people, and competent and incompetent short people. I'm a shorter guy, and I've gotten job offers where I've failed (by some standard) 6/6 interview questions. Just work your hardest and try your best to be objective and make your workplace more equitable, which is all anyone should do anyway.
I like studies like these because it shows different types of discriminations the societies are comfortable with vs some other types of discriminations which are not only uncomfortable, but have severe legal consequences.
Going through this latest round of job searching, rapport building/interview success has been so much more difficult over zoom/etc. It makes me wonder how much of my past success has been from being a tall-ish, attractive-but-not-so-much-it's-threatening, pleasingly built dude, instead of my apparent technical competence. All of my non-verbal rapport building skills really fall flat, and the fact that I'm bumbling, a little haphazard, kind of anxious is less charming quirk and more off putting anti-feature.
I mean, this isn't really about my looks per se, just the growing sense that I've been the beneficiary of positive discrimination to give anecdotal corroboration to the study. That said, people have repeatedly told me I look like Jude Law and Tobey Maguire. I have repeatedly been a focus of group discussion among strangers, "which celebrity does this guy look like?" Strangers also ask "Do I know you from somewhere?" No, I'm just pleasing to look at in a familiar, trustworthy sort of way.
In my teens/early 20s was so common for women to approach me and tell me I have beautiful eyes that I didn't realize they were expressing interest. At my first programming job, a chinese woman came up to me and haltingly said (yes, this was a programming joke): "your eyes are so captivating, like a python's." I said thank you. She blushed and rushed away.
My control here is that my weight fluctuates between 150-180, though, and when I'm heavier and I don't shave, the attention vanishes. Humans are just apes trying to be near the best apes. I'm glad I got a nice mannequin to walk around in, and I'm glad it compensates for the fact that I'm an objectively pretty weird dude. But it kind of sucks in every direction - beauty prevents people from getting really important negative social feedback, and often just exempts people from social consequences and warps their sense of reality. Likewise, preference-ing physical attributes over competence has to drive hilariously iniquitous outcomes, leaving a lot of smart, capable people in inferior positions.
While I'm just talking about random stuff: taking pride in one's appearance is off putting because you didn't earn it. Likewise, being smart/likeable/socially capable are also things that people generally haven't earned. All of the good things in our lives are arbitrary, as are all of the bad things. The things we work for are the only things that are of value - "our actions are our one true possession."
Beauty and intelligence are in the resources bucket. Just like oil in the ground is valuable, so is beauty and intelligence.
Beauty has its professions: politics, movies, modeling, CEO, trophy spouse etc.
Intelligence has its professions: engineering, law, medicine, accounting, entrepreneurship, science etc.
Einstein doesn’t go and compete in swim suit competition for the brilliant.
Don’t worry about people mistakenly hiring you over a more capable programmer because of your height / looks. Worry more about if you are maximizing your potential not putting your height, looks, and intelligence to work more efficiently all together.
Appearance can be earned. Staying fit, learning how to dress, what hairstyles work for you, how to do makeup, correcting your posture, etc. All these take a lot of effort, and makes a big difference in how people perceive you.
I have a friend who I met at the gym who’s a software engineer at Amazon, and she has ~50k instagram followers because she lost a lot of weight. Like, from 300lbs to “the fit girl at the gym”. She was used to being bullied when she grew up. Social perception of attraction can definitely be earned.
Similarly, being likeable and socially capable is something that can be earned too. From personal experience, it takes a lot of practice and putting in effort to understand others. Even gaining perspectives from MDMA and LSD helps a lot. Human behavior isn’t set in stone, and with effort can be changed.
It sounds like we're more philosophically aligned than might be clear.
I agree about all of that - I have spent substantial time figuring out grooming/dressing/posture, and it helps.
But in my thinking, I take the nature of initial conditions out to the extreme. The fact that I was able to identify deficiencies, make a plan, and execute that plan - that's just kind of lucky. If I was too emotionally dysregulated to follow through on plans, I'd be hosed. Or if I wasn't intellectually capable of identifying problems and forming viable plans, I'd be hosed.
And even on a day to day basis: I feel like my ability to program is a product of decisions my past self made. My current self isn't responsible for my capabilities, he's just the beneficiary/victim of past choices I've made.
Maybe this is all a little woo, I don't know. But I feel like the only reality is the one directly before me, and the only meaningful choices are the ones I make in this moment.
We should all have the problem of fearing that we've been coasting on our ridiculous good looks. :) But seriously, as I think you meant your comments...
Videoconferencing seems to encumber both communication and charisma in some ways -- big and small, apparent and subtle.
For example, it seems like even slight latency or difficulty hearing people can make a very smooth interaction seem non-smooth.
And (as was exceedingly painful to me in a recent team meeting), none of the tools currently available would've come close to having a real-world whiteboard. There have been CSCW research efforts at this for a few decades, but, in practice, at the moment, it's usually just a dumb camera&mic, and sometimes screen-sharing.
Maybe, in getting an impression of a person, people haven't yet re-calibrated expectations for the videoconferencing media we're currently stuck with?
And maybe there's still some charisma projection adjustments that individual people can try tweaking, if they want, such with lighting, eye contact, lens distortion, etc.? (As someone who once dabbled in studio portraiture, I'm aware of some ways I could look better on videoconf, but it's been a relatively low priority, compared to countless other aspects of startup tech work.)
W/r/t the whiteboard thing - one of my interviews recently used google jamboard, and my input was lagging by like 30 seconds. I was writing a solution, and talking through it, and one of the interviewers started trying to help by starting a solution directly on top of mine. So apparently I just sounded like I was talking about hypothetical code. No harm, really - the interviewer was embarrassed, we moved on. But it was pretty awkward not inhabiting the same visual reality, and thus building divergent mental models of the interaction.
I live with a therapist, who confirms that their rapport building is encumbered via video chat. She's incredibly warm and emotive, and I think this compensates: her content is presumably affirming, and her tone (which comes through the thin walls) just oozes authenticity and positive regard. Certainly rapport building isn't dead, but the relative value of the parameters seem to have shifted.
You've inspired me to go read one of the guides on videoconferencing lighting I keep seeing. Hopefully to let my, um, inner beauty and competence shine through.
>over zoom/etc. It makes me wonder how much of my past success has been from being a
The company behind Invisalign had a blast the last quarter which they attributed to the people doing more Zoom these days. So, it seems it is still about appearances - now it is about whatever appears in the Zoom window. (not a comment on your teeth either way, it is just that Zoom-ing reminded me that my teeth aren't the best around - somehow it looks worse on the computer screen than in the mirror :)
As a high BMI individual, I'm fully in support of instituting minimal hiring and promotion quotas for fat people. Given that there's "obesity epidemic" going on, I propose we set it at 50% to ensure that there's no systemic discrimination. No fewer than 50% of people on corporate boards should be fat, also. /s
Yes, all of us need to be aware that we have biases that impact decisions we make that affect the lives of others. Nonetheless, being obese or unattractive is a surmountable obstacle. One may have to take more interviews, but will ultimately find work. Moreover, those who are neither obese nor unattractive almost certainly have their own disadvantages they had to overcome. It's rare to find people who are successful and literally had no obstacles in life. Obstacles are an opportunity to learn persistence, diligence, and what we are and aren't suited for. Having zero obstacles might simply mean that a person simply has few ambitions.
For me, the discussion ultimately leads to two points:
First, do we believe that the playing field must be leveled for all from birth. If the answer to that is Yes, then you're probably in favor of socialism to some degree, such that opportunity is provided in equal measure to all citizens, regardless of the circumstances they are born into. Personally, I don't find this realistic, but I accept that there are people who do and that's fine.
Second, if you don't feel the playing field should be leveled from birth, but rather that every citizen is born with a set of advantages and disadvantages, then the question is, do we need to afford special attention to those whose disadvantages are insurmountable? Regardless of whether you're born dull or smart, attractive or unattractive, African or Asian American, most Americans can find success in life by making more good decisions than bad and persistently working towards the life they'd like. We have had a 2 term black president, have a black woman vice president, an openly gay presidential candidate, an openly gay cabinet member, multiple black Fortune 500 CEOs, openly gay entertainers, and many wealthy black athletes and entertainers. Achieving success is possible for all, some have to work harder at it than others.
But is such success possible for all? It's obvious to me that the answer is no. I am not referring to those with disabilities, but rather those whose life circumstances guarantee they have zero chance at success as defined in the US today. A kind of worst case situation might be a child born into a one parent household, parent is addicted, and neglects them. They live in the worst school district in the city, and in an area ruled by street gangs. What forces would enable an 8 year old in such circumstances to somehow push through all of that adversity and actually wind up in a college earning a degree that enables him to get a steady professional job? Or expose him to an opportunity to learn a trade, such as electrician or plumber? Or work up the ladder in food service or retail companies? In many cases, he's exposed to drugs, persistent gang violence, likely frightened for his life most of the time and learning that survival means physically subduing others or being subdued by them. Many life lessons about discipline, team work, 'social skills', and earning what you want are not modeled to such a child, and I'd not be surprised to learn there are 100s of thousands of them in America right now.
My view is that if we are going to maintain the approach that hey, we all have advantages and disadvantages, we must recognize that groups faced with insurmountable obstacles to success need an effective accommodation or we are failing overall as a society.
As someone who is quite unattractive, enough so that complete strangers, sober ones, occasionally feel compelled to point it out without any prior prompting or contact, for me it isn't about the playing field or anything else like that. As unpleasant as it is, I get that sometimes you're on the unfun side of the bell curve.
No, what I would like to see is the occasional acknowledgement that it might affect a few situations. I do not need any kind of recognition ceremony or anything, just a nod to it. I don't want attractive people to feel bad over it or rub it in their faces, just ... could stand to have fewer people falling all over themselves to say no no, that cannot possibly be.
I was at a dinner once with several medical residents and they mentioned that at one hospital, the surgical scrubs were color coded by size.
This meant that everyone knew which female residents were a larger size and which male residents were a smaller size. Everyone knew this which just added a distraction to an already information overloaded profession.
In a profession where the goal is identifying the people with top competencies, it never made sense to me who signed off on ordering that particular type of scrubs. I would have thought everyone should wear the same color or at least have the colors indicate something useful e.g. speciality.
One can imagine that color coding by size may have had good intentions, allowing people to grab the right size of scrubs quickly without having to check the tag. If so it'd be a good example of unintended consequences and not thinking through second order effects.
I'm sure I've commented something similar on another article, but as a rather unattractive person, can we please give these kind of studies a rest. Quite literally every single fucking study I've read that looks at this always says the exact same thing: being unattractive is correlated with lower salary, or being less likely to get a promotion, or being less likely to have other people think you are "nice", etc. etc. I just feel like being unattractive is correlated with about every negative outcome one can think of, and at this point I just want to scream: I get it! Being ugly sucks. You don't have to tell me twice (or five thousand times).
In aggregate, yeah, maybe. Individuals still get choices, though.
In the most sincere way, I implore you to prove them wrong. Even judging only by your articulate comment (and in a place like HN), you have a lot going for you. Be the outlier with the personality and drive that the studies can't account for.
Arguably politics is a mess in most places because of the incentives designed into the systems for elevating people to power, and because humans are predictably and inescapably manipulable due to their cognitive biases. Appearances in the aesthetic sense play a relatively minor role.
I upvoted you, but one thing that is good about studies into stuff like this, is that they prove we aren’t imagining it. They are a good antidote against gaslighting.
This sounds like the argument for "positive" discrimination, which I dislike (I don't see discrimination as a positive thing whatever way it swings).
It would be better to find ways of hiring without such biases being available. Like blind auditions for musicians. We should be aiming to hire the best person for the job, not trying to be aware of such biases and then trying to compensate the other way for such things.
I don't think I'm arguing for positive discrimination. I agree that if possible it would be good to remove avenues for bias to sneak in (such as by implementing blind auditions). Although without knowledge that bias exists, it might be hard to find the motivation to implement those changes. And sometimes even with motivation it might be hard to implement technical changes like that.
I agree we should hire the best people. I agree compensating for bias is not as good as eliminating bias. My hope is that in cases where technical changes can't be done, self-reflection might allow people to reduce their own bias.
What you are not free to do is judge someone’s looks and use that as a criteria in the hiring process in jobs where beauty is not a relevant criteria.
If this study proved that X number of over-weight or unattractive people applied, but were rejected at a noticeable clip, how is this not legally actionable?
Bringing it back to tech for a second. We all acknowledge the pipeline problem with women at tech companies. But, in my experience, a lot of your startups are really white across the various job disciplines (from the CEO down to the interns). That stuff is not an accident either, would love to see some studies on this.
I suppose we all need to do a good job filling out the optional questions at the end of a job application that identifies your ethnic background. Where is all this data and how do we get it, and is it possible to dig down into the tech center and really see what’s going on?
Not in the US but having hired quite a few fat guys over the years (agriculture, construction) I can say that obesity has always turned out to be a sign of them being lazy and untrustworthy, even in management positions. All drinkers mostly.
Sadly one of them died recently at ~40, turns out he had an underlying heart condition since birth which might explain alot about his past performance.
Having said that I did know a particularly fat and ugly friend that has a great personality and was quite successful running her own small publishing business. Smarts and drive can shine through no matter what you look like.
If you can't get a job, start your own. Once you start seeing opportunities instead of wages you'll probably never go back.
So, I wouldn't be surprised if obese/unattractive people still discriminates against those perceived negative characteristics, but I also wouldn't be surprised if that discrimination was to a lower degree than when the person doing the discrimination isn't obese/unattractive.
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