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cousin_it comments on Shortness is now a treatable condition - Less Wrong
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Why in the world does this make it worthless? They've discovered an effect above and beyond any possible aesthetic trends in the assorted races; if they hadn't included that control, the data could be written off with "well, maybe white men are just all so ridiculously attractive, of course people write them back".
The problem is that if you're trying to detect racism, the variables you're controlling for had better be independent of racism, which in this case they obviously aren't. Actual racism could go either way and still be consistent with their findings. At the very least I'd like to see the data before and after applying the control; this would give us more information, but probably wouldn't let the OkCupid team make sweeping generalizations about me like "White guys are shitty" (actual quote).
Attractiveness is wildly subjective. If people find the features of minority races to be less attractive than the features of white people, that just is a type of racism. Any possible objective standard of physical attractiveness (candidates include symmetry, youth, koinophilia relative to the world population, health) would have only the weakest possible correlation with race.
Nearby in this thread, gwern gave an example of how an attractiveness rating can be influenced by factors other than actual subjective attractiveness to the rater... and how those factors can be related to, yes, race. If after reading his comment you'll still think you know an unambiguous way to interpret the post-control data that OkCupid published, I'd really like to hear it. To me the whole situation looks more like a trainwreck.