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ChristianKl comments on LINK: In favor of niceness, community, and civilisation - Less Wrong Discussion
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The set of things you could say is vastly larger than the set of true things you could say so unless lying is observed and punished you should assume that you are probably better off at least occasionally lying.
I'm a game theorist and think that wearing makeup or acting more confident than you really are, are forms of lying that frequently benefit individuals.
I think I spent to much attention at optimizing things like the clothing I'm wearing and the way the background is arranged at my first TV interview.
Being busy with tactics takes mental resources and builds anxiety. I would have probably done better if I would have spoken from a more relaxed state of mind that doesn't worry that much about the background of the image.
Do you in fact wear makeup on a regular basis?
No makeup, but I do fake confidence.
Why no makeup? It's possible to use makeup as a man in a way that accentuates manly features.
I'm open to the idea, I do dye my hair.
I think that if you really look at the makeup question you will find that's not cost effective.
A quick googling gives me the number that woman spent on average 91 hours per year applying makeup ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2175077/Women-spend-43-weeks-life-applying-make-perfecting-face-night-out.html ).
I think that a woman who rather spends the same amount of time in daily meditation sessions will get a higher return on her time investment.
In a world full of superficial people there's not much comparative advantage at trying to be better at being more superficial than everyone else. I think it's a better strategy to compete based on personal depth.
If you are open about who you are, that will make you more confident than if you walk around all the time with a mask.
Comparative advantage doesn't mean you can neglect something entirely. Personal attractiveness has large consequences on how people evaluate & treat you, and equally so for men and women, it looks like (Langlois et al 2000 (excerpts) claim gender is not a large moderator of beauty effects). Even if Miller goes beyond just dying his hair, he could still be well below optimal.
You can get personal attractiveness through different ways.
I went in three years from being told that I never smile while dancing to being asked why I smile while dancing without being able to give a reason.
It's not because I specifically worked on my smile but because I did emotional work on a deep level.
At a family event yesterday someone told me that I look taller then when we last meet a while ago and I probably do appear taller than I was a year ago because my body language changed as a result of deeper work.
If you become a more happy person who doesn't get anxiety because of all sorts of things that are happening around you, you will appear to be more attractive in any face to face encounter and even on photos.
If I want to connect with another person I care about perceiving the reactions that the words that I speak have on the other person. If the women with whom I'm talking doesn't show any facial reactions because she's on botox that makes it a lot harder for me to connect with her.
A good quote in the CBT book "The feeling good handbook" is "You can never be loved for your successes-only for your vulnerabilities. People may be attracted to you and may admire you if you are a great success. They may also resent and envy you. But they can never love you for your success."
Being vulnerable is useful. If all of your bodylanguage is fake and further signals are hidden by makeup than you aren't vunerable and you make it hard for other people to love you.
gwern in my you in my mind one of the few individuals who usually walks his talk. Do you think it's useful to use makeup? Do you use it yourself? Especially if you cite a paper that gender isn't very important when it comes to the effects of beauty,
Given the nature of the subject it might be hard to speak openly*, but do you do other black hat stuff to manipulate the people you interacts with into finding you more attractive?
*While I do promote openness I'm also willing to treat information that's marked as private privately and my commitment to openness, doesn't mean that I have a problem of protecting the secrets of other people.
I don't use makeup at the moment, but I have two main reasons for this: I interact with few people so I expect my gains to be less than average, and I am revolted by the very idea of using cosmetics or working on my appearance. (I think it's a mix of dislike of deception, laziness, and gender norms.)
The former is fine as far as it goes, but as far as the latter is concerned... I admit it is a bad reason; I've been trying to improve matters by small compromising steps which don't trigger my dislike: purchasing better-looking glasses, improving my shaving routine, more regular exercise, throwing out the worst of my clothes.
It's indeed a problem when you at the same time revolt against the idea of working on your appearance and think it's a high benefit activity.
I think the solution is either to work out that working on your appearance goes against the values of yourself or to revolve the emotional issues and work at your appearance.
If you walk around and it's clear that your appearance isn't optimized because you don't believe in doing so but could if you wanted to that's respectable and can be a high status move. If you appear to be trying hard to work on your appearance and fail in doing anything because you revolt against the idea of working on your appearance that no sign of social status.
For myself the time when I put the most attention on my appearance was being 1 year into dancing Salsa. The activity gave me a new perception of my body and after I perceived I had internal motivation to improve. At the time I was also trying to optimize to effect other people with I'm not really anymore but I'm still not badly dressed. I'm no Zizek ;)
I'm not so sure. Women who don't wear makeup are much less attractive, which significantly reduces their social status and their dating market value. These are things people greatly value.
I think confidence depends mostly on practice and genetics and situational factors. If anything, I think the superficiality-confidence connection is the other way round - being confident makes people see you as more genuine, because of the halo effect, i.e. because everybody loves to hate low-status people. People without masks are weirdos, because what people call "being normal" is a learned behavior, a mask.
This is true for certain subcultures. It is NOT true for other subcultures. And this is, of course, before we go into individual differences -- some girls are very pretty with a freshly-scrubbed look.
You will get less real practice if you are walking around with a mask. If you worry what other people think about your looks to the extend that you spent 30 minutes to look presentable that will effect your confidence.
Why do you believe that there a difference between men and woman in that regard? I think the fact that you separate genders has a lot to do with status quo bias.
That depends a lot on the environment in which you are moving. There are corporate environments where you are expected to wear a mask and where you can't drop it completely. Yet Steve Job who was a Buddhist who meditated a lot did very well while wearing a sweater instead of dressing in a suit.
Steve Job wore no makeup with is not typical for people who go in front of the camera and on big stages and have the budget for makeup stylists.
For all the talk about game theory, strategy matters. If you want to play Steve Job's strategy that's not compatible with spending a lot of effort on looking attractive but instead sitting a lot and meditate.
Getting bogged down in tactics isn't good.
Then again, you'll be more confident wearing a mask the more practice you have with it. I think we mean different things by "masks" though.
The quote I was replying to dealt exclusively with women. That said, there is a big difference, especially if by "makeup" you mean what everyone else means by "makeup". Men are not respected more if they wear eyeliner and blusher every day. I do think that men would benefit from optimizing their personal appearance, eg by getting rid of acne, whitening teeth, dressing better, wearing heel lifts, etc.
Re Steve Jobs: Giving one outlier as a counterexample does not undermine the general principle. Anyway, Jobs seems to be countersignalling: "I'm so awesome I don't even need to dress up for you to know that I'm awesome." It wouldn't have worked if people didn't already think highly of him, and I'm not even sure it worked at all. (We don't know what would have happened if he had cared more about his appearance.)
The kind of makeup that male actors on TV use isn't about wearing eyeliner.
There are women who use makeup to look artificial and there are women who go for a "natural look". I don't think that a women who goes for an artificial look will get more status in a Yoga class than a women who uses less makeup. The benefits of looking artificial for women depend on the social circle in which the woman moves.
While Angela Merkel does use makeup, she didn't get in a position of political power by being good looking. Using makeup to make her look very feminine wouldn't help her.
A lot of men have acne because of hormonal issues. 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.
I don't think it's an accident that you see acne more often in asocial nerds than you see it when you look bodybuilders. The difference also isn't that the bodybuilder went to more dermatologists.
Your brain will always know that you are afraid to be open if you wear a mask for the sake of impressing other people. I don't have an issue with a woman putting on makeup because she enjoys putting on makeup and don't think that will reduce confidence.
I'm talking about making strategic choices. Steve Job is someone who went to Buddhist meditation retreats before he was famous. That distinguishes him. As a result he wasn't obsessed about optimizing his appearance on the makeup level.
It's not a choice that in the cards for someone who did that level of deep internal work, to put on makeup to impress other people. Yes, there are women who are on that level who put on makeup because they like the activity but it comes from a very different place than putting on makeup to make people like them.
... depending on the eye of the beholder.
This crossed my mind as well, but for me spending 3-5 minutes on makeup in the morning is enough to make a substantial difference in my appearance. One has probably reached a point of diminishing returns by the time one makes it to 91 hours per year.