One of my colleagues in graduate was super ugly. Took me a while to even get used to looking at her even though I liked her. It was sad. Her dissertation was really good and she was invited to do a post-doc with a famous academic but she got very sick and couldn't do it and then died of cancer after a long fight.
Healthy people usually are more attractive and live longer. Drug use kills people off quicker. Think about Mama Cass Eliot. Obese and a drug user. She died in her hotel bed of a heart attack at a very young age. Then again, Keith Richards was a big drug user and his face is filled with ugly rivulets that look like a Rand-McNally book on rivers. He still lives and defies death. Julia Roberts should outlive Kathy Bates but Kathy Bates still hangs on, ugly as ever.
Elvis was considered one of the best looking men of his generation and didn't make it to 45. Errol Flynn made it to 50, and the autopsy said he had the body of a 75 yr old.
Just because one is blessed with looks doesn't necessarily mean they are blessed with mental clarity, fortitude, and prescience to take care of their health.
Mama Cass wasn't ever considered to be good looking, even on a good day. Now Michelle Phillips was very very hot indeed for her generation. She too did drugs, and she's still very much alive.
So ultimately looks is a neutral and can't really predict much of anything regarding life span. It certainly does help to have good genetics and a strong immune system, but that isn't necessarily based on outwardly attractive features.
At the time "One Day at a Time", I didn't know why someone as ugly as Mackenzie got on TV. Her being the daughter of John Phillips meant nothing to me but I was the usual ignorant teen.
Agreed. I was amazed to read the story about how Mick Jagger was waiting for years for MacKenzie to turn legal age, then took her upstairs on that birthday to deflower her as her dad waited helplessly downstairs. I know, it sounds made up. Maybe i did.
I would say Mick and Mackenzie were a good looks-match for each other with the understanding that a man's league is determined by more than just looks. Rumors say that Papa John would have been jealous at such a dalliance
I'm not sure Kathy Bates is ugly per se, although her relative unattractiveness was played for laughs in About Schmidt. Bates is an Oscar winner; the winner for supporting actress the previous year was Brenda Fricker, who is ugly to the bone
In old Hollywood, actresses were uniformly lovely except for the needed older woman like Jane Darwell or Sara Allgood or fit a situation like Hattie McDaniel, the O'Hara nanny.
Maureen O'Hara was beautiful and lived to 95. Just to see her in "The Quiet Man" is to see great beauty. Joan of Arc was the original transgender. She was burned at the stake at a young age. She died ugly.
Yes. I always expect more from good looking people because whom much is given much is expected. It’s an easier road so they should be doing good things. That’s why good looking aholes are the worst people in the world.
Of course the irony is that within the entertainment field, sometimes the best looking people tend to die way earlier than they should.
Example: Woody Allen is going to celebrate his 90th birthday later this year. He was born the same year as Elvis. I think the universal consensus is that Elvis was by far a more facially attractive man than ever Woody Allen was during their primes.
And yet Elvis died at 42. In point of fact one of Elvis's drawing cards is that he was quite telegenic and very attractive to women. For most of his adult life, he was considered a very facially attractive man.
Yet he didn't even make it to 45.
And Elvis did graduate from High School, btw.
Other examples of very attractive (classically attractive) men to women from Classic Hollywood would be: Erroll Flynn (died at 50); Clark Gable (died at 59); Gary Cooper (died at 60). Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson was always considered to be the best looking of the Wilsons, and he died first (at age 39). If one wants to include James Dean (died at age 24).
For women, Marilyn Monroe (died at age 36); Jayne Mansfield (died at age 34); Jean Harlow (died at age 26);
I bring this up because for Hollywood, then as now, looks matter, especially in the face. And yet, there are numerous examples of facially attractive men and women who died earlier than the average life expectancy for their generations.
It feels weird that Mariska Hargitay, the actress who plays the lady detective in the Law & Order franchise, is Jayne Mansfield's daughter. You'd expect there to be another generation in between.
Yes, you would think Mariska would be her granddaughter; maybe it's because Jayne died so young and Mariska didn't hit it big until she was 34. Also, Mariska's older half-sister is 13 years older than she is.
There is actually a Seinfeld connection between mother and daughter; in February 1993 Jerry says to his girlfriend Teri Hatcher "You know, that Jayne Mansfield had some big breasts. Really big, huge. Just coming out the top of her dress, they were like, choking her" who responds "I hear that's how she died". Three months later Mariska herself appears on the show auditioning for the role of Elaine on the Jerry sitcom-within-a-sitcom
Not sure about attractiveness (however measured) being correlated with health as much as one's self-image which is certainly affected by how you perceive others see you. Woody Allen and Keith Richards could give a shit what others think, whereas Elvis likely did (not about his appearance, but others qualities of self), which could result in self-destructive behaviors.
It's not that attractive people live longer. *Healthy* people live longer, and we evolved to seek out healthy mates. "Attractive" just means, "I want to reproduce with her."
If there were anything to attractiveness that was more objective than raw sexual attraction, then I, a normal male, could predict how normal females might rate those 1974 Dutch soccer players' attractiveness. And I really can't. No idea. I look at them and all I see is a bunch of guys that probably smell bad. Conversely, show me a group picture of a women's team, and the first (and last) thing I'll think about is, which ones are the hottest?
I don't think this is truly accurate. Sure, one might rate the gender that they're attracted to more accurately or in detail than the one they're not attracted to, but "physical attractiveness" does seem to be distinct from "someone that YOU are personally attracted to". Granted, the photo on top isn't a good one, but even most straight guys can probably determine which guy in a group photo is most attractive, at least facially. I think most guys can tell Brad Pitt is better looking than Matt Damon.
Compare the shopping cart contents of ugly people with good looking people at your local Food Lion. Ugly people don't buy much in the produce section. But look at the quantity of Mountain Dew in that there shopping cart!
Or compare the looks of people at high end grocery stores like Whole Foods vs. Wal Mart.
There are exceptions, but the correlation between diet and looks is very strong. I'm surprised that ugliness was worth only one year in life expectancy.
Yes, there is a wealth/IQ correlation, but it is much less strong. The Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons is based on real data. Plenty of left-brained high IQ/high income people wolfing down the pizza and Jolt cola, with looks to match.
It's funny, I was just thinking about comparative beauty in grocery stores as an iSteve theme after visiting a Midwest Whole Foods (upmarket) and Aldi (downmarket) successively.
Contrary to what one might see on the coasts, both stores had plenty of ugly people and a few beautiful people, though in different ways. WF customers tended to be doughy and plain in the way of people who have spent their adult lives sitting at desks under florescent lights, while Aldi people were more often hard luck cases at the edge of mortality or just genetic mis-dealt hands. The few beauties at WF were young (late teens to twenties), apparently affluent, mostly in groups, a little haughty, and in some cases appeared to be visiting on a lark rather than for a serious victualing. Surprisingly to me, there were a similar proportion of beauties at Aldi, but they were a little older (late twenties to early forties), working class to middle class, usually alone, and more approachable despite all clearly being engaged in the serious business of grocery buying.
On the coast, there is usually a much more pronounced beauty gradient between the upmarket and downmarket grocery stores. Maybe Midwesterners' native thriftiness works against that? Or maybe the most attractive Midwesterners who should be populating their upmarket grocery stores have already moved to coasts, steepening the coastal gradient while leaving the Midwest's gradient much shallower?
I've looked at people in the Target and the Costco in Van Nuys, CA a lot. Target carries approximately 97 brands of shampoo and Costco carries 3. Thus, Target has more beautiful young women shopping at it, while Costco shoppers seem more weather-beaten by life. On the other hand, the Costco shoppers (it costs something like $140 per year for a Costco membership) are no doubt higher income on average.
I go to Costco about twice a year. I hate the place. But you see these women with huge baskets of groceries. I look out of place when I buy a single salmon for Friday's supper for the family.
Without doxxing myself by being more specific about the location, I will say that my local Costco in Northern New Jersey is where humanity went to die. I'm not a member but I would go sometimes for alcohol or the food court but I haven't even done that in three years or so
Young single women shop Target. Older women with a couple kids shop Costco because you can't buy normal quantities. If you have the family for it, that $140 should pay for itself in bulk savings, no?
I have found that Aldi's hires younger, better-looking people, especially the women. Our Food Lion has a lot of fatties, people who working for Food Lion is as good as it gets.
One peculiarity of Aldi is that despite its lowest-prices/downmarket appeal, because of its European ownership, it has Euro-class treats during the holidays, and even a few white-label treats year-round. Possibly this brings in strain of gourmand custom that other downmarket venues wouldn't attract?
I go to Aldi's because I enjoy their cheap $3.49 red wines. But I have noticed that their workers are more energetic than the workers of other supermarkets.
Whenever I feel fat, I just go to Aldi to feel better in comparison to other shoppers--and buy cheap snacks.
My Aldi keeps dropping items that I like. It was their excellent honeydew that got me going there, but they've now been absent for years. Recently, their German soups disappeared. Sometimes they return.
Fat people generally die earlier than thin people. And yes, the shoppers at WalMart and Food Lion are fatter and uglier than the shoppers at Whole Foods. But I'd still rather eat hash browns from the freezer section than hydroponically grown lentils.
Half Sigma used to make the point that the benefit of having a high IQ is that it gets you onto a good track career-wise. If for some reason you can't get onto this track, your IQ generally does you no good remuneratively
There are people who make high incomes as sysadmins who live off of pizza and Jolt Cola. They are ugly -- almost as ugly as the fat Black women in my town who wear tights that stretch into butt cracks big enough to swallow a large cat.
It's curious that lookism, discrimination on the basis of looks, hasn't received much attention in today's "everything is discrimination" era. I suspect that much of progressive politics is a proxy for lookism activism. It's quite obvious to any neutral observer that the uglier a young woman is, the more likely she is to be a radical progressive. The core principle of progressive circles is "I won't judge you if you won't judge me." What could possibly appeal to an ugly person more than that? "Join us, we honor trans women, fat black women, FTM transexuals with little mustaches, and women with nose rings." Hmm, what do all these people have in common?
Yup. Since the civil rights era concluded successfully, you can be black (or whatever) and if you are good looking society will reward you. You just can't have actively negative traits like stupidity and a violent temper.
Good looking people lead entirely different lives from the average and bad looking. They have not the slightest notion of which of their experiences are abnormal. This makes their occasional advice hilarious.
It seems a stretch that yearbook good looks is caused by good health. More likely good looks helps people enjoy life more and do better, including as to health, because they're well-received in society. Add assortative mating and presto: successful, healthy, and good-looking parents have children who share their parents' good looks, which is predictive for their own good life outcomes. All the better when good-looking women marry smart men, which I hear happens from time to time. The kids get good looks and smarts, the latter being an independent predictor of longevity.
What I want to know is, why did the researchers compare the bottom sixth to the rest, rather than to the top sixth? The latter would produce a stronger signal, easier to understand quantitatively.
My experience is that if you have like 6 categories, you run all of them statistically in parallel and correct with Bonferroni for multiple testing. So probably they picked up the strongest statistical signal with the uggliest 6th. I mean, at least that's the correct way to do it. Many social studies "forget" Bonferroni and thus produce irreproducible junk.
I'd never actually heard of that correction (that I remember). I'm definitely familiar with the problem it is correcting, but never heard of it. It makes a lot of sense but requires the researcher to be honest with himself :)
It's a very straightforward approach BUT it is fairly "expensive". It also works best if your data distribute parametrically. If they don't, Bonferroni becomes extremely costly - ie it kills almost everything you have that maybe tending towards signficance.
most scientists ignore the fact that significance testing was invented as a reality check, not a goal of an experiment. If everyone was this rigorous about their stats, we'd have about a tenth as much medical literature.
No - the way it works in medicine (and worked before rigorous statistics) was that you actually get 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th confirmations from people from all over the world. So once you get to that stage, it becomes secure knowledge.
Most of the other things are junk. And people do have long memories of things that others can not reproduce. Since a lot of social studies actually fool around with statistics, that caution is probably coming back.
A lot of medical statistics goes back to Ronald Fisher. He's viscerally hated by the anti-racist folks.
Not to scare you but most of the medical literature has been bunk for decades. When I was a resident in the early 1990s, our department head did journal club with us most weeks. He would rip a paper a new asshole (usually based on stats) every week. At first I thought he was a petty guy who was envious of rivals but eventually I got the point--just because it's in a journal doesn't mean it's good science.
And yes there are supposed to be confirmations all over the world, but confirming someone else's results just isn't as satisfying as generating your own.
I don't want to come across as anti western medicine. Western medicine is the best. All the other medicines are silly. But the amazingness of western medicine created such prestige, that people with MDs get away with a lot of, shall we say, hand waving?
There's also such a thing as being photogenic, and to a lesser extent, the obvious. I can buy they identified the ugliest 6th, but I suspect if you tried to do the hottest 6th you'd be overlooking a lot of better looking people in the second hottest 6th who just don't photograph well.
"Do good looking people live longer?"
Yes, I believe we do.
LOL
I don't know if being more attractive makes you live longer, but I can state with certainty that living longer doesn't make you more attractive.
Now that was fucking brilliant.
Why the "at 20" modifier? To exclude the ones who died after a graduation party or at basic training?
I sure hope that bottom 6th is *really* goofy looking. I'm looking forward to living high that extra last year.
Really, the headline should be “ugly people die sooner.”
One of my colleagues in graduate was super ugly. Took me a while to even get used to looking at her even though I liked her. It was sad. Her dissertation was really good and she was invited to do a post-doc with a famous academic but she got very sick and couldn't do it and then died of cancer after a long fight.
That's very sad.
Life is really tough for ugly women. I should be nicer to them.
How unfair.
Didn't Prof Severus Snape tell Harry Potter "Life is unfair"?
He stole it from Mike Ditka who, based on the order in which I heard it, stole it from my dad.
No, he said...
By Grabthar's Hammer, what a savings!
Healthy people usually are more attractive and live longer. Drug use kills people off quicker. Think about Mama Cass Eliot. Obese and a drug user. She died in her hotel bed of a heart attack at a very young age. Then again, Keith Richards was a big drug user and his face is filled with ugly rivulets that look like a Rand-McNally book on rivers. He still lives and defies death. Julia Roberts should outlive Kathy Bates but Kathy Bates still hangs on, ugly as ever.
That's an opinion, and difficult to quantify.
Elvis was considered one of the best looking men of his generation and didn't make it to 45. Errol Flynn made it to 50, and the autopsy said he had the body of a 75 yr old.
Just because one is blessed with looks doesn't necessarily mean they are blessed with mental clarity, fortitude, and prescience to take care of their health.
Mama Cass wasn't ever considered to be good looking, even on a good day. Now Michelle Phillips was very very hot indeed for her generation. She too did drugs, and she's still very much alive.
So ultimately looks is a neutral and can't really predict much of anything regarding life span. It certainly does help to have good genetics and a strong immune system, but that isn't necessarily based on outwardly attractive features.
> Michelle Phillips was very very hot indeed for her generation. She too did drugs, and she's still very much alive
As is her stepdaughter Mackenzie at 65
Mackenzie was on the ugly side. Certainly nowhere near as hot as her step sister Chynna.
At the time "One Day at a Time", I didn't know why someone as ugly as Mackenzie got on TV. Her being the daughter of John Phillips meant nothing to me but I was the usual ignorant teen.
Yes, having her and Valerie Bertinelli as sisters sure was puzzling, although Schneider would have been happy to have any of the three
Valerie more than made up for Mackenzie's lack of looks.
Agreed. I was amazed to read the story about how Mick Jagger was waiting for years for MacKenzie to turn legal age, then took her upstairs on that birthday to deflower her as her dad waited helplessly downstairs. I know, it sounds made up. Maybe i did.
I would say Mick and Mackenzie were a good looks-match for each other with the understanding that a man's league is determined by more than just looks. Rumors say that Papa John would have been jealous at such a dalliance
He wanted to fuck Mick too?
I'm not sure Kathy Bates is ugly per se, although her relative unattractiveness was played for laughs in About Schmidt. Bates is an Oscar winner; the winner for supporting actress the previous year was Brenda Fricker, who is ugly to the bone
In old Hollywood, actresses were uniformly lovely except for the needed older woman like Jane Darwell or Sara Allgood or fit a situation like Hattie McDaniel, the O'Hara nanny.
https://youtu.be/NVGZqnXyoX8?feature=shared
LOL
Maureen O'Hara was beautiful and lived to 95. Just to see her in "The Quiet Man" is to see great beauty. Joan of Arc was the original transgender. She was burned at the stake at a young age. She died ugly.
Elagabalus lived 1200 years before Joan of Arc...
And he wasn't burned. Simply knifed, I believe.
Yes. I always expect more from good looking people because whom much is given much is expected. It’s an easier road so they should be doing good things. That’s why good looking aholes are the worst people in the world.
Of course the irony is that within the entertainment field, sometimes the best looking people tend to die way earlier than they should.
Example: Woody Allen is going to celebrate his 90th birthday later this year. He was born the same year as Elvis. I think the universal consensus is that Elvis was by far a more facially attractive man than ever Woody Allen was during their primes.
And yet Elvis died at 42. In point of fact one of Elvis's drawing cards is that he was quite telegenic and very attractive to women. For most of his adult life, he was considered a very facially attractive man.
Yet he didn't even make it to 45.
And Elvis did graduate from High School, btw.
Other examples of very attractive (classically attractive) men to women from Classic Hollywood would be: Erroll Flynn (died at 50); Clark Gable (died at 59); Gary Cooper (died at 60). Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson was always considered to be the best looking of the Wilsons, and he died first (at age 39). If one wants to include James Dean (died at age 24).
For women, Marilyn Monroe (died at age 36); Jayne Mansfield (died at age 34); Jean Harlow (died at age 26);
I bring this up because for Hollywood, then as now, looks matter, especially in the face. And yet, there are numerous examples of facially attractive men and women who died earlier than the average life expectancy for their generations.
Jayne Mansfield died in a car accident
Maybe only beautiful women are invited on rides in expensive cars.
It feels weird that Mariska Hargitay, the actress who plays the lady detective in the Law & Order franchise, is Jayne Mansfield's daughter. You'd expect there to be another generation in between.
Yes, you would think Mariska would be her granddaughter; maybe it's because Jayne died so young and Mariska didn't hit it big until she was 34. Also, Mariska's older half-sister is 13 years older than she is.
There is actually a Seinfeld connection between mother and daughter; in February 1993 Jerry says to his girlfriend Teri Hatcher "You know, that Jayne Mansfield had some big breasts. Really big, huge. Just coming out the top of her dress, they were like, choking her" who responds "I hear that's how she died". Three months later Mariska herself appears on the show auditioning for the role of Elaine on the Jerry sitcom-within-a-sitcom
That photo reminds me that I need to buy a new mop.
Not sure about attractiveness (however measured) being correlated with health as much as one's self-image which is certainly affected by how you perceive others see you. Woody Allen and Keith Richards could give a shit what others think, whereas Elvis likely did (not about his appearance, but others qualities of self), which could result in self-destructive behaviors.
It's not that attractive people live longer. *Healthy* people live longer, and we evolved to seek out healthy mates. "Attractive" just means, "I want to reproduce with her."
If there were anything to attractiveness that was more objective than raw sexual attraction, then I, a normal male, could predict how normal females might rate those 1974 Dutch soccer players' attractiveness. And I really can't. No idea. I look at them and all I see is a bunch of guys that probably smell bad. Conversely, show me a group picture of a women's team, and the first (and last) thing I'll think about is, which ones are the hottest?
I don't think this is truly accurate. Sure, one might rate the gender that they're attracted to more accurately or in detail than the one they're not attracted to, but "physical attractiveness" does seem to be distinct from "someone that YOU are personally attracted to". Granted, the photo on top isn't a good one, but even most straight guys can probably determine which guy in a group photo is most attractive, at least facially. I think most guys can tell Brad Pitt is better looking than Matt Damon.
Compare the shopping cart contents of ugly people with good looking people at your local Food Lion. Ugly people don't buy much in the produce section. But look at the quantity of Mountain Dew in that there shopping cart!
Or compare the looks of people at high end grocery stores like Whole Foods vs. Wal Mart.
There are exceptions, but the correlation between diet and looks is very strong. I'm surprised that ugliness was worth only one year in life expectancy.
Yes, there is a wealth/IQ correlation, but it is much less strong. The Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons is based on real data. Plenty of left-brained high IQ/high income people wolfing down the pizza and Jolt cola, with looks to match.
It's funny, I was just thinking about comparative beauty in grocery stores as an iSteve theme after visiting a Midwest Whole Foods (upmarket) and Aldi (downmarket) successively.
Contrary to what one might see on the coasts, both stores had plenty of ugly people and a few beautiful people, though in different ways. WF customers tended to be doughy and plain in the way of people who have spent their adult lives sitting at desks under florescent lights, while Aldi people were more often hard luck cases at the edge of mortality or just genetic mis-dealt hands. The few beauties at WF were young (late teens to twenties), apparently affluent, mostly in groups, a little haughty, and in some cases appeared to be visiting on a lark rather than for a serious victualing. Surprisingly to me, there were a similar proportion of beauties at Aldi, but they were a little older (late twenties to early forties), working class to middle class, usually alone, and more approachable despite all clearly being engaged in the serious business of grocery buying.
On the coast, there is usually a much more pronounced beauty gradient between the upmarket and downmarket grocery stores. Maybe Midwesterners' native thriftiness works against that? Or maybe the most attractive Midwesterners who should be populating their upmarket grocery stores have already moved to coasts, steepening the coastal gradient while leaving the Midwest's gradient much shallower?
I've looked at people in the Target and the Costco in Van Nuys, CA a lot. Target carries approximately 97 brands of shampoo and Costco carries 3. Thus, Target has more beautiful young women shopping at it, while Costco shoppers seem more weather-beaten by life. On the other hand, the Costco shoppers (it costs something like $140 per year for a Costco membership) are no doubt higher income on average.
I go to Costco about twice a year. I hate the place. But you see these women with huge baskets of groceries. I look out of place when I buy a single salmon for Friday's supper for the family.
Without doxxing myself by being more specific about the location, I will say that my local Costco in Northern New Jersey is where humanity went to die. I'm not a member but I would go sometimes for alcohol or the food court but I haven't even done that in three years or so
Young single women shop Target. Older women with a couple kids shop Costco because you can't buy normal quantities. If you have the family for it, that $140 should pay for itself in bulk savings, no?
You are overstating the cost of a membership by more than double; it is currently $65 per year for two cards in the same household
I have found that Aldi's hires younger, better-looking people, especially the women. Our Food Lion has a lot of fatties, people who working for Food Lion is as good as it gets.
One peculiarity of Aldi is that despite its lowest-prices/downmarket appeal, because of its European ownership, it has Euro-class treats during the holidays, and even a few white-label treats year-round. Possibly this brings in strain of gourmand custom that other downmarket venues wouldn't attract?
I go to Aldi's because I enjoy their cheap $3.49 red wines. But I have noticed that their workers are more energetic than the workers of other supermarkets.
Whenever I feel fat, I just go to Aldi to feel better in comparison to other shoppers--and buy cheap snacks.
My Aldi keeps dropping items that I like. It was their excellent honeydew that got me going there, but they've now been absent for years. Recently, their German soups disappeared. Sometimes they return.
Fat people generally die earlier than thin people. And yes, the shoppers at WalMart and Food Lion are fatter and uglier than the shoppers at Whole Foods. But I'd still rather eat hash browns from the freezer section than hydroponically grown lentils.
Half Sigma used to make the point that the benefit of having a high IQ is that it gets you onto a good track career-wise. If for some reason you can't get onto this track, your IQ generally does you no good remuneratively
There are people who make high incomes as sysadmins who live off of pizza and Jolt Cola. They are ugly -- almost as ugly as the fat Black women in my town who wear tights that stretch into butt cracks big enough to swallow a large cat.
It's curious that lookism, discrimination on the basis of looks, hasn't received much attention in today's "everything is discrimination" era. I suspect that much of progressive politics is a proxy for lookism activism. It's quite obvious to any neutral observer that the uglier a young woman is, the more likely she is to be a radical progressive. The core principle of progressive circles is "I won't judge you if you won't judge me." What could possibly appeal to an ugly person more than that? "Join us, we honor trans women, fat black women, FTM transexuals with little mustaches, and women with nose rings." Hmm, what do all these people have in common?
Yup. Since the civil rights era concluded successfully, you can be black (or whatever) and if you are good looking society will reward you. You just can't have actively negative traits like stupidity and a violent temper.
Good looking people lead entirely different lives from the average and bad looking. They have not the slightest notion of which of their experiences are abnormal. This makes their occasional advice hilarious.
> It's quite obvious to any neutral observer that the uglier a young woman is, the more likely she is to be a radical progressive
That's because being good-looking is playing life on easy mode; if everything is handed to you, then of course you are going to end up conservative
It seems a stretch that yearbook good looks is caused by good health. More likely good looks helps people enjoy life more and do better, including as to health, because they're well-received in society. Add assortative mating and presto: successful, healthy, and good-looking parents have children who share their parents' good looks, which is predictive for their own good life outcomes. All the better when good-looking women marry smart men, which I hear happens from time to time. The kids get good looks and smarts, the latter being an independent predictor of longevity.
What I want to know is, why did the researchers compare the bottom sixth to the rest, rather than to the top sixth? The latter would produce a stronger signal, easier to understand quantitatively.
Ken
My experience is that if you have like 6 categories, you run all of them statistically in parallel and correct with Bonferroni for multiple testing. So probably they picked up the strongest statistical signal with the uggliest 6th. I mean, at least that's the correct way to do it. Many social studies "forget" Bonferroni and thus produce irreproducible junk.
I'd never actually heard of that correction (that I remember). I'm definitely familiar with the problem it is correcting, but never heard of it. It makes a lot of sense but requires the researcher to be honest with himself :)
It's a very straightforward approach BUT it is fairly "expensive". It also works best if your data distribute parametrically. If they don't, Bonferroni becomes extremely costly - ie it kills almost everything you have that maybe tending towards signficance.
most scientists ignore the fact that significance testing was invented as a reality check, not a goal of an experiment. If everyone was this rigorous about their stats, we'd have about a tenth as much medical literature.
No - the way it works in medicine (and worked before rigorous statistics) was that you actually get 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th confirmations from people from all over the world. So once you get to that stage, it becomes secure knowledge.
Most of the other things are junk. And people do have long memories of things that others can not reproduce. Since a lot of social studies actually fool around with statistics, that caution is probably coming back.
A lot of medical statistics goes back to Ronald Fisher. He's viscerally hated by the anti-racist folks.
Not to scare you but most of the medical literature has been bunk for decades. When I was a resident in the early 1990s, our department head did journal club with us most weeks. He would rip a paper a new asshole (usually based on stats) every week. At first I thought he was a petty guy who was envious of rivals but eventually I got the point--just because it's in a journal doesn't mean it's good science.
And yes there are supposed to be confirmations all over the world, but confirming someone else's results just isn't as satisfying as generating your own.
I don't want to come across as anti western medicine. Western medicine is the best. All the other medicines are silly. But the amazingness of western medicine created such prestige, that people with MDs get away with a lot of, shall we say, hand waving?
E.g., the Lennon-McCartney song that Fincher/Sorkin play over the end credits of “The Social Network”:
“How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people? Baby, you’re a rich man”
Yes. And Brian Epstein died young of a drug overdose shortly after the song came out.
Yearbook good looks are a function of affluence and parental interest rather than health.
There's also such a thing as being photogenic, and to a lesser extent, the obvious. I can buy they identified the ugliest 6th, but I suspect if you tried to do the hottest 6th you'd be overlooking a lot of better looking people in the second hottest 6th who just don't photograph well.