DanArmak comments on The Amanda Knox Test: How an Hour on the Internet Beats a Year in the Courtroom - Less Wrong

42 Post author: komponisto 13 December 2009 04:16AM

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Comment author: gwern 28 December 2009 12:53:24AM *  9 points [-]

It's clearly absurd to say that pretty girls never murder people. But allowing for the normal hyperbole and inexactitude of conversational English, I don't think that's what SforSingularity means, rather, 'pretty girls are one of the demographic least likely to be responsible for a brutal murder'.

This isn't too unreasonable.

  • First off, the number of murders so ascribable are small: females make up half the population and if we limit pretty to the top 5% or so (a reasonable guess at % for 'pretty enough that a guy will actively note and think "pretty!"'), we're already down to less than 2.5% of the population.
  • Second, women in general commit far fewer violent crimes than men. http://www.ncjrs.gov/html/ojjdp/jjbul2002_10_1/page4.html mentions that for juveniles, at one point, the male:female ratio was 22:1. Let's be conservative and put the young adult ratio at 5:1; now we're down to 0.4%.
  • Third, attractiveness is correlated with IQ, and IQ is well-known to correlate with lower crime rates. (see Wikipedia for a few links; IIRC, WP understates the case but I can't be fashed to dig up the stronger correlations). Let's cut another 10% off the rate, down to 0.36%.
  • Fourthly, attractiveness correlates to higher socioeconomic status through multiple mechanisms, which cuts down violent crime even further. (I don't think I need to adduce any citations for that!)

And so on. I've missed many factors (eg. maybe happier & less stressed people are more attractive, and that too is correlated to less propensity for murder; maybe pretty women have fewer violence-inducing mental diseases and substance abuse habits; etc.). But I've already knocked their murder rate way down. I suspect it has much further to go in a true reckoning.

Does his comment still look satirical to you?

Comment author: DanArmak 28 December 2009 12:33:06PM *  5 points [-]

we limit pretty to the top 5% or so (a reasonable guess at % for 'pretty enough that a guy will actively note and think "pretty!"')

Interesting. When I read "pretty", I thought of a binary division (make guys judge "pretty or not") and I thought it would yield at least 30-40% as pretty. (Possibly much more, but I've a high degree of certainty that at least that much.)

Granted that your test is different than mine, what leads you to your 5% estimate, which looks low to me even with your test?

Comment author: Jack 28 December 2009 12:42:21PM *  5 points [-]

30-40% seems reasonable for Knox's age group (early twenties). Something closer to 5-10% seems reasonable for the entire female population. Keep in mind pretty people are almost certainly more visible than the non-pretty (especially if you have high socio-economic status).

Comment author: gwern 01 January 2010 11:20:43PM 1 point [-]

I think 30-40% is unrealistic: something like 20-30% of females in that age group are overweight or obese, leaving 70-80% in an attractive weight bracket; are we really going to call half of those 'pretty'?

It may just be my media-biased high standards, but I don't think I'd call half of all thin young women that.

Comment author: DanArmak 28 December 2009 12:56:36PM 0 points [-]

Right... I was a fool to miss that. You're perfectly right of course.

Which leads us to the question of what "natural category" to put Knox in. Should it be "a pretty woman out of all women" or "a pretty young woman out of all young women"? Or lots of other options, of course. (We use some category the moment we compare her to women and not to all humans.)

But I'm sure this has been discussed, I haven't read all of this subthread...

Comment author: gwern 28 December 2009 02:12:03PM 1 point [-]

Here's one exercise: take your highschool yearbook, open one of the dense pages (with dozens of pics on it), and let your eye drift along the columns with no particular intent (this is hard); how many of the girls will actually catch your attention for being attractive and not for having, say, bizarre & outdated hairstyles? For me, it was less than 1 in 10. (One plain forgets about the bottom 50% and between that and 90% is the 'unoffensive' range.) Considering that my highschool was private and that selection effects were already operating, I have to revise the estimate further down; ~5% seemed good & is a nice round number.

Comment author: Technologos 28 December 2009 03:47:49PM 4 points [-]

For what it's worth, I remember a study on Stanford undergrads with what was essentially speed dating; men suggested their interest in a second date with ~90% of the women they met, and simultaneously their top criterion for that choice was attractiveness. Even granting that they had loose definitions caused by the study, I suspect that under Dan's metric (binary choice) a reasonably large minority might be tagged "pretty."

I also didn't get the impression from the photos on the website that anybody in the Knox case was pretty in the sense that you mean it--I think of your criterion as defining "remarkably pretty" rather than "pretty, if I had to choose," and I'd say you're probably right on <5% being remarkably pretty.

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