If I try to avoid to show emotions on my face, it gets tense. That reduces blood flow in my face. Less bloodflow means that it's more difficult for my immune system to clear my face of bacteria that cause acne.
This is very interesting; is this a significant cause of acne, and if so how do you know? If this were true, we would expect that other things that decrease blood flow in the face (such as cold weather, maybe?) would also increase acne.
Here are other hypotheses on acne, not sure whether they're true:
Several of these would also explain the nerd-acne connection. Or, that connection could go the other way round, because acne could cause people to stay inside, have lower status, etc.
If this were true, we would expect that other things that decrease blood flow in the face (such as cold weather, maybe?) would also increase acne.
Cold weather might reduce your blood flow for a few hours but it will come back to normal once you are again in a warm environment.
If I would run an experiment I would attempt to measure how tense the muscles in the face happen to be and how warm the skin happens to be and see whether those ratings correlates with the amount of acne.
...This is very interesting; is this a significant cause of acne, and if so ho
Scott, known on LessWrong as Yvain, recently wrote a post complaining about an inaccurate rape statistic.
Arthur Chu, who is notable for winning money on Jeopardy recently, argued against Scott's stance that we should be honest in arguments in a comment thread on Jeff Kaufman's Facebook profile, which can be read here.
Scott just responded here, with a number of points relevant to the topic of rationalist communities.
I am interested in what LW thinks of this.
Obviously, at some point being polite in our arguments is silly. I'd be interested in people's opinions of how dire the real world consequences have to be before it's worthwhile debating dishonestly.