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The article says: Why is beauty a productivity-enhancing attribute for males in non-quantitative subjects? Generally, it is difficult to disentangle the reason
by CodeyWhizzBang 6mo ago
The article says:
Why is beauty a productivity-enhancing attribute for males in non-quantitative subjects? Generally, it is difficult to disentangle the reasons behind why beauty improves productivity (Hamermesh and Parker, 2005). However, relative to other students, attractive men are more successful in peer influence, and are more persistent, a personality trait positively linked to academic outcomes (Dion and Stein, 1978, Alan et al., 2019). In addition, attractive individuals are more socially skilled, have more open social networks, and are more popular vis-à-vis physically unattractive peers (Feingold, 1992). Importantly, possession of these traits is significantly linked to creativity (Soda et al., 2021). In our setting, the tasks faced by students in non-quantitative subjects, for instance in marketing and supply chain management, are likely to be seen as more ”creative”, and significantly contrast the more traditional book-reading and problem-solving in mathematics and physics courses, the latter presumably perceived as more monotonous. Together with the large use of group assignments in non-quantitative courses, these theoretical results imply that socially skilled individuals are likely to have a comparative advantage in non-quantitative subjects.
- cubefox 6mo ago[flagged]
- atwrk 6mo agoAnd have you tried to find out why IQ associations are "taboo" in academia?
- cubefox 6mo agoYes. Have you tried to find out why making certain pieces of scientific knowledge taboo has had very bad consequences in the past?
- atwrk 6mo agoWell I happen to have a phd in that broader domain. It's not censorship, as you imply, but IQ is just way fuzzier a concept than people outside of this area of research think. The popular view is IQ is an objective thing, exactly measurable and so on (the metaphor of brains being computers, essentially). In reality you can put a 14 year old from a bad environment into an optimal environment and their IQ increases by up to 20 points over a view years.
- cubefox 6mo agoIQ is highly heritable, so I don't think there is any environmental factor that has this big an impact, except in extreme cases like severe malnutrition. Also note that IQ increases with age roughly into early adulthood independently of environment, so the IQ of a 14 year old increasing is a perfectly normal part of the heritable parts of development.
- tptacek 6mo agoWhat's "highly"? It's likely somewhere between 15%-50% --- weak-to-medium, if you read it as a correlation coefficient.
- cubefox 6mo agoIQ is about as heritable as body height. > The results show that the heritability of IQ reaches an asymptote at about 0.80 at 18–20 years of age and continuing at that level well into adulthood. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-human-genetics/article/wilson-effect-the-increase-in-heritability-of-iq-with-age/FF406CC4CF286D78AF72C9E7EF9B5E3F https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-hu...
- tptacek 6mo ago2013 is the phlogiston era of this science. Even the hereditarians hedge on the 0.80 claim now.
- fn-mote 6mo agoThat's an interesting take given that the previous sentence specifically lists "these traits" and none of them sounds like "IQ": > attractive individuals are more socially skilled, have more open social networks I'd say you need different evidence if you want to grind that axe.
- cubefox 6mo agoAmong the Big 5 personality traits, Openness to Experience is the one most correlated with IQ.
- nathan_compton 6mo agohttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=IQ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=IQ Yes, crickets.
- cubefox 6mo agohttps://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/how-to-lose-tenure-with-one-sentence https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/how-to-lose-tenure-with-one...
- nathan_compton 6mo ago"How to lose tenure with one sentence": "Maybe it will be fine to pursue my career in Florida." Anyway, my point stands - there is plenty of research on IQ. Only if you are specifically interested in correlating IQ with genetics have ethicists at large determined your research may be harmful. We can debate about that, I guess, but the idea that one cannot use IQ in research is a hyperbole.
- nathan_compton 6mo agoActually, I want to add something to this. The general vibe in this research area is NOT that you cannot compare IQ with genes. Indeed, its more or less an accepted fact that some portion of IQ and measures like it are indeed heritable. The specific issue this person faced is in the use of race. I'm not suggesting that we accept all the woke orthodoxy whole cloth, but race really is a socially constructed concept. No person out there in the world is "of a given race" as a scientific fact. People have genes, they don't have races. The scientific community recognizes that genes influence intelligence, but has no interest in promulgating the frankly dumb idea that humans have distinct races, probably because the last time people got really into that idea it lead to concentration camps, apartheid, and the pointless destruction of vast swaths of human potential. The main issue with the research described is that it uses genes to construct a racial narrative. If that is the world you want to live in, you do you, I guess, but I would prefer that people not be pigeon holed on the basis of (for example) arbitrary qualities like "European Ancestry," which the person explicitly states they constructed a sort of genetic fingerprint for. In a meritocratic society people should be judged on their performance, not some inference people make about what genes they have on the basis of their level of melanin, to refer to the study this guy is talking about.
- dude250711 6mo agoI guess even attractive males have to work hard. One gender still has to approach, the other gender still waits to be approached.