Is there any research on the "first person" view that you mention? As I'm no scientist, I've only dealt with the already firmly established findings like loss aversion.

I do not know of any research on this directly. However, there is strong support for people's reported opinions being influenced by sitting in front of a mirror. So I just do educated guesses from the tangentially related research.

I've only dealt with the already firmly established findings like loss aversion.

Yup - you are playing it safe. However, this does not satisfy my curiosity.

You quote negativity/loss aversion bias as an explanation, but do you think it is the most accurate explanation?

OK, first a disclaimer.

My model of this is based only on the several people which I'm close enough to to get accurate reports about their private thoughts.

I have high confidence in their reports being as true to the internal experiences as they managed to communicate, but the sample is small and might not reflect the "average".

Based on this, I make the following bold claim (with moderate confidence):

The bias in question works by a sort of a doublethink: the subjects do in fact also have a roughly accurate estimate of their beauty somewhere in their heads, and when asked publicly, they will not report their inner experience of doubt.

If you ask a bunch of people who have issues with self-perception of beauty to fill a survey about it, they will tend to answer the questions by taking the "outsider view" (at least, unless the questions in the survey are very cleverly phrased).

My first thought on reading this was that given that people tend to be overconfident in just about every other area of their lives, I would find it exceedingly surprising if it were in fact the case that people's estimates of their own attractiveness was systematically lower than the estimates of others. I notice that there isn't actually a citation for this claim anywhere in the article.

Indeed, having looked for some evidence, this was the first study I could find that attempted to investigate the claim directly: Mirror, mirror on the wall…: self-perception of facial beauty versus judgement by others.. To quote the abstract:

Our results show proof for a strikingly simple observation: that individuals perceive their own beauty to be greater than that expressed in the opinions of others (p < 0.001).

In other words, the phenomenon that you "explain" in this article is literally the opposite of the truth, at least for the people in that study.

Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. Yes, surely some people under-estimate their own attractiveness, but if the explanation for this is cognitive biases which are present in everyone, how do we explain the people in this study who make exactly the opposite error? If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge, etc, etc.

OK, here's one example of something that is not covered: someone can feel that by focusing on their flaws, they get the benefit of putting more effort into presenting their best side, and improving their look. So they wouldn't want to stop concentrating on the flaws.

I mean, there's a lot of psychology/social pressures/doublethink/self-image/etc. issues around this. I anticipate that simply telling people"from now on, concentrate more on your positive sides!" does not solve the problem in most cases, and can even sound condescending (as if they didn't already know that!).

Don't forget selection bias. Even if purely objective and accurate measurements are possible, almost everyone thinks they're less beautiful than everyone else.

Amy's self-image is likely formed by seeing herself in a mirror before and during grooming, where she sees her friends and others mostly already made-up. Selection bias (the true average non-representative observations) leads her to believe that she's on average less well groomed than anyone else.

Similarly in other's reactions. Rejections and bad experiences tend to be private, where successful interactions are more often shared and reviewed with others. A straight average of all your experiences compared with those experiences that people have shared with you will make those others seem better off.

And, of course "beautiful" is a fairly poorly-defined word. It's not a very good target for debiasing, as it's very hard to measure an improvement in estimation. How does your post change if Amy is, in fact, less generally attractive than her friends?

Actually, what's the goal here? This isn't a topic where accurately assessing oneself is usually recommended, but rather to worry less and believe yourself beautiful. Are you trying to increase readers' self-confidence, or to help them rationally decide whether to put more effort into their appearance, or something else?

Negativity bias might be a better cite than loss aversion.

Yes, it's a thing.

And I think the bias occurs when interacting with videos/photos/mirror reflections/etc. of yourself, not just the "first person" view.

My theory is that we have a evolutionary anti-bias that only works with the "fist person" view, that prevents us from disparaging our own looks in that case.

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Your proposed fix seems... not enough. Let's think more about how to solve this.

(E.g. I know about some good effects from a "desanitizing" approach in similar areas, like judging your own voice recordings, maybe it could also be applied here.)

Your links are broken.

You're overthinking it

In the context of religious arguments, some say that the constants of the universe are improbably finely tuned for the existence of life and order. The constants refer to things like the gravitational constant, the strength of the atomic weak force, etcetera.

It is my understanding that the order part is key; most other possible constants wouldn't allow for an alternate form of life, for example, because everything would be so far apart as to never interact, or so close together as to never vary in its state.

Some will respond that there may be a multiverse of universes, with random universal constants, so that some improbable universes are bound to crop up.

To this, it is responded that inventing a multiverse to explain away apparently purposeful tuning of universal constants doesn't really work. It's an excuse.

Now, I know that MWI was NOT invented to explain away anything, that it was presented as a possible explanation for certain observations well in advance of this kind of argument.

But, here is my question. Does MWI limit itself to alternate universes with the same universal constants, or does it predict also the existence of universes with different universal constants?