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Alicorn comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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These babies are soooo much cuter than your bunny.
The video of babies has the advantage because they are moving around. If the bunny hopped and sniffed things and twitched its nose and groomed its whiskers and nibbled on parsley and crept under a bush and peered out at you, it would be 75,119 times cuter than them.
I don't know. I just looked at some bunny videos. Cute. But those babies are way more adorable.
There's a selection effect - people take more videos of babies than they do of bunnies. That allows higher variance and better-quality high-end videos.
Fair enough. But the rest of our evidence consists of two pictures you selected! The selection bias potential there is way worse.
You have my word that the baby was the cutest baby in the first several pages of results for "cute baby" on a Google image search by my own lights, and the bunny was just the cutest bunny I happened to have on my hard drive.
Edit: Actually, I did reject one cuter baby because the picture was watermarked.
How long have you been collecting pictures of cute bunnies on your hard drive? :-)
Scratch that. The same picture is also first in google hits for "cute bunny"
Still, perhaps a larger data set makes sense.
I don't know how long I've been doing it, but my "Lagomorpha" folder contains 14 images.
Hrm... that at least brings up a possibility... Any chance that there's much higher variance in the appearance of baby bunnies than in baby humans? In that case "find the cutest" rather than "find average" might go rather farther with bunnies than humans.
Well, there was a supposed ~10000 humans bottleneck, not too far ago, evolutionarily speaking, so humans really do have less variance than many species.
Probably not variance that's easily detectable to humans.