(04-24-2013 02:28 PM)Bad Hussar Wrote: Interesting theory. I know you didn't mention it, but it's not anywhere near as true for men. i.e. There are a good number of very smart fat men.
Good point, I think one factor is that to be considered a smart man you have to VERY smart, as the competition amoung men is real, ( a computer program either works or it doesn't, you can't hide behind a pretty face or bureaucracy) and devote a LOT of time to your discipline. To the extent that your health suffers?
(04-24-2013 02:28 PM)Bad Hussar Wrote: As an aside: There must be hot chicks born into the American underclass you talked about.
What is their general trajectory in life?
Do they often use their looks to escape? Or is it difficult/impossible and they typically end up walking in their mothers footsteps. That to me is always heartbreaking.
WRT "getting out" of poverty, some do, at least they should be able to marry the guy in town with the successful repair shop. But class as a unipolar dimension doesn't really exist unless you consider it to be merely money alone. For instance, there are rural families that are very smart but just prefer more time with their families and don't like cities, therefore they do not become the center of attention like someone like Paris Hilton.
And for me, a hot chick is not just bone structure and skin quality, it implied emotional sensitivity and stability. I see hard looking strippers that shape-wise look great but I have no attraction for.
That said, let's take hypothetical diamond-in-the-rough girl, very pretty, fairly bright and born in the boonies with a nice personality.
Even when gifted such, she is more likely to go off the rails from the point of view of achieving her optimal place in life because she's going to get a crush on a dull, local young alpha who is also a business mediocrity, get married young--and that's the end of her options.
If she uses her looks to get out of Nowhere, she has already extricated herself from the true underclass, but that may not be good. Take Pamela Anderson as an example, she was spotted in the crowd in a football game for her beauty Some camera guy zoomed in on her and suddenly she was on national TV with no effort or previous experience in show business.
She married a too-wild Alpha ( Tommy Lee) from whom she caught Hepatitis C, for which there is no cure and from which she now still suffers. So yeah, she became"somebody", and is almost certainly far wealthier than she would have been in Alberta ( or wherever it was), but was that really "good"?
It's sort of like all the male rock stars that "made it" and promptly used their financial freedom to kill themselves with drugs.
(04-24-2013 02:28 PM)Bad Hussar Wrote: [quote='Bad Hussar' pid='428853' dateline='1366831699']
Leads me to believe that something in the system is really messed up when this happens.
Well, there are systems, but there is no "System."
In other words, tragedy is an unavoidable property of the fundamental and inalterable randomicity of the Universe.
There is no big chess master making the moves. When Einstein said "God doesn't play dice" it didn't mean anything, because there is no God.
Holding on to such infantile ideas helps many people feel happier, which is fine by me as long as they're not planting bombs, but every example of some kid getting childhood leukemia and dying makes such an idea patently absurd. Any "god" would either have to be powerless or obscenely sadistic.
Or to put it another way, you still harbor an unconscious "just universe" hypothesis; the idea that somewhere something cares and will put things right.