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D_Malik comments on LINK: In favor of niceness, community, and civilisation - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
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.
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.
It's a working theory of myself at the moment.
The background is there are techniques in the hypnosis realm for resolving "trapped emotions" which often work to help solve physical alignments.
My perception of the bodies of other people is also getting better and I get better at perceiving when a certain part of the person I'm interacting with is colder and tenser than it should be.
As far as self reports go, some people improve their acne by washing their faces less and others by washing it more.
Hunter gatherer tribes have nearly no acne. I would be wary with an explanation that focuses on the utility of getting acne in a hunter gather tribe to explain the acne we have in Western civilisation.
... 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.