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D_Malik comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - Less Wrong
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It's common knowledge that taller people are more successful. This effect is also pretty strong - for instance, tall people make an average of $789 per inch per year and this has been shown repeatedly in a set of four large-scale salary survey studies.
We don't know that it's causation, but it seems very likely that people judge others' general fitness, consciously or not, by looking at their height (which makes evopsych sense, considering for instance that malnutrition decreases height).
I can think of two ways to Goodhart this (are there more?): you can improve your posture, or you can raise your feet off the ground using elevator shoes or heel lifts, giving you say 2'' (which is $1,600 per year, plus nonmonetary gains) for less than $20.
Intelligence is correlated with height.
This says to me that early childhood nutrition is the common factor here.
Right, so that implies that some of the benefits from being taller might actually be benefits from increased intelligence, and so merely increasing height might not confer those benefits. It also implies that you could make people think you're smarter by making yourself taller.
It's a pretty weak correlation though, I don't think that it could realistically account for an earning difference of nearly $800 per year per inch if height is just an intermediary for the causative agent of intelligence.
I am climbing on my ladder to contemplate the best ways to use this information.
Standing on the shoulders of giants, indeed.
Even discounting for skull size?
It's not as cheap as platform shoes, but it would be economically beneficial and very munchkiny to get limb lengthening surgery. Even a modest 2 inch procedure would easily pay itself back in 10 years.
Cost: $10,000 in India +incidentals
Benefit $800 x 2 x 10 years = $16,000.
Apparently taller people don't live as long and once you control for height, male/female longevity differences go away. (It makes some intuitive sense to me... there are really old people and really tall people, but when's the last time you saw a really old really tall person?)
Given that living just a bit longer could plausibly allow you to live forever, if the right technologies get invented within that extra timespan, I think this is something worth considering.
Your intuitive reasoning is flawed. People get shorter with age (vertebral disks flatten, posture gets worse as muscles weaken).
Even ignoring all possible cohort effects (e.g. people growing up in the 1930s getting worse nutrition than people growing up in the 1990s), that just sounds like Berkson's paradox.
(I have no objection to the rest of the comment, and indeed I upvoted it.)
Came here to say this, after viewing parent comment -- though the point I was meaning to make was quite different.
Take it from someone who thought about this for longer: if you do it when young (and young's the best time for your body to do it), and don't start off rich, and have the sense to do it somewhere nice like Germany where the costs are 100 000 euros for 4 inches (honestly now, you're gambling your fucking legs), and your professional life could need about that sum to get a kickstart -- all of which is a rather more plausible scenario than best-case -- LL fucks you up financially. Hello awesome new height, goodbye life savings up to that point, goodbye chance to start your own company with that money.
As well as that, goodbye normal human proportions. Your legs are long, but the rest of your body is that of a short person. Hopefully people aren't going to notice your T-Rex arms. Tying your shoelaces is going to be fun. There's nothing you can do about it, as there's no torso lengthening, and forearm lengthening is too risky to be done for cosmetic purposes (affects movements of the wrist), and while there is humerus lengthening, it makes no sense to fuck up your upper arm / forearm length ratio.
Also, you better go away from everyone you know post-surgery, or prepare yourself to answer some awkward questions. The year you spend in hospital is a year you could have added to your job experience, to make yourself a more attractive asset for employers. You prepare a set of elusive answers to give people who ask you how that long trip to Europe / Asia / wherever was.
And all of that is assuming the surgery and everything goes well. (Did I mention that it is a gajillion times more painful than probably anything you've experienced in life up to that point?)
Not saying it's not worth it, but only if you're so crazy about your height that it outweighs all the other costs combined. It's not a walk in the park, people, and most certainly not a goddamn investment.
If the logistics of it interrupt one's career or education, that would also be a significant cost. But this might be worth it for some people.
It's also supposed to be incredibly painful.
Indeed; if I recall correctly, recovery time is on the order of six months...
Also: for what it's worth, leg lengthening surgery makes you a worse athlete; your post-surgery muscles don't work quite right with your longer legs, so you can't do this to become a better basketball player.