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coffeespoons comments on Link: Toward Non-Stupid, Non-Blank-Slatey Polyandry - Less Wrong Discussion
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Female attractiveness is very malleable too. Haircuts, clothes, exercise etc make a huge difference. Most attractive girls, in my experience, spend a great deal of time working on making themselves more attractive.
FTR, I am female, and until I was 22 or so, I had no idea how much difference wearing clothes that suited me and styling my hair would make.
Indeed. I vaguely recall from my high-school days how much less attractive some girls looked in gym clothes, while others actually looked better.
I have a similar feeling about the cliched 'Hollywood transformation scene' or Beautiful All Along.
On the one hand, it's pretty absurd to show 'geekette into goddess' since the actress was selected for goddess-potential in the first place - on the other hand, it is empirically demonstrating that the same physical girl* can look geekette vs goddess, and while the average girl does not have the same potential nor access to movie facilities, illustrates that there can be a substantial difference**.
* An assumption that grows less true as time passes, I suppose...
** One does wonder how many girls underinvest in attractiveness, given how common a desire it is, and what the real-world gap is.
That seems like a biased way to formulate the implicit question. Might it not be the case that many people overinvest in attractiveness?
No idea why your comment got downvoted, you raise a valid point. And apart from the issue of over- or underinvesting, for some people the ROI doesn't seem high or even positive.
I never said the number had to be positive. It's a complex topic, though, so I couldn't say with tremendous confidence that the number is negative - it's not a pure positional game, but has elements of positive, zero, and negative-sum games.
I would expect that the number of women (and men) who overinvest in attractiveness is positive. Ditto the number who underinvest. Both questions are interesting, imho.
If that's the case, there should be a large number of undervalued-but-hot girls out there. Such a market inefficiency is just begging for some arbitrage. Either guys are failing to pick up on such opportunities, or are not motivated to go after them. Either way, some enterprising LW gentlemen should be getting into the LBO business!
Obviously there are some, but I don't know whether there should be large numbers. I mean, most girls are well-aware that things like cosmetics and hair-styling exist.
The missing could be no arbitrage at all, in that effort spent finding them, convincing them to improve, and then maybe reaping the benefits (either because the improvement doesn't work or because the girl trades on up - similar to why employers may be disinclined to invest in employees' education) could exceed just improving yourself or spending more time going after existing hot girls.
(A little estimating suggests they could be rare: half the dating population, figure given sky-high US obesity rates that you need to halve it again just to get girls in appropriate weight brackets, then figure that even in the transformation scenarios the girl is still somewhat cute to begin with suggesting that they're only moving up <50 percentiles, halve it again...)