Vaniver comments on Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks - Less Wrong

70 Post author: HughRistik 07 October 2009 04:35PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (568)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Vaniver 03 January 2014 04:42:29PM 3 points [-]

It seems it's women that underestimate male attractiveness. Men's judgments are almost symmetrical.

I'm not sure "underestimate" is the right description here; my opinion (as an androphile) is that the male attractiveness distribution is heavily skewed, basically in the way that women think it is, if the 1-5 scale measures the underlying strength of attraction rather than quintiles. (3s, 4s, and 5s all fall in the top quintile of male attractiveness, but it seems that there are much larger gradations there than there are in the top quintile of female attractiveness.)

And for the underlying question of access to sex, the message distribution is more important, but isn't scaled correctly for comparisons between the two.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 January 2014 05:46:40PM *  0 points [-]

I'm not sure "underestimate" is the right description here; my opinion (as an androphile) is that the male attractiveness distribution is heavily skewed, basically in the way that women think it is, if the 1-5 scale measures the underlying strength of attraction rather than quintiles. (3s, 4s, and 5s all fall in the top quintile of male attractiveness, but it seems that there are much larger gradations there than there are in the top quintile of female attractiveness.)

I'm not an androphile myself, but that's my impression too, for various reasons (see e.g. the paragraph starting with “Similarly” in this post).