I think attractive women are a lot more likely to be favored.
Attractive people overall are more likely to be favored in social situations: this is a result of the halo effect, whereby they're judged as being "better" across all categories, such as personality or skills. It's not too hard to resist this bias once you've become aware of it.
It makes a lot of sense for men as well, especially if you include assertiveness, social confidence etc.
Laura ABJ, I don't know if your post is intended seriously, but your proposal does seem to raise some obvious concerns. It's quite plausible that inexperienced men would gain most by improving their overall social confidence rather than naïvely focusing on sexuality. Eliezer's original post mentions the considerable difficulty of empathizing across a gender gap, and how the "pickup artists" community claims to have a viable solution. These claims should be taken with extreme caution, but what little scholarship exists in this area lends them ...
A word about the terrorists being called cowards: when you take into consideration their complete certainty that they were going directly to paradise, the statement that they were cowards seems more reasonable. As a thought experiment, imagine that some person was faced with a choice between preventing the violent deaths of some 3000 people, or going directly to a paradise of eternal bliss. If this hypothetical person were to choose the former, I would consider that to be a brave decision. If they were to choose the latter, I would have to go with cowardly (and reprehensible, obviously). Put it this way: in their eyes at least, they were taking the easy way out, at least if my understanding of their radical doctrine is correct.
Some data on gaming the system (gambling) i.e. not following a value investing model.
Suppose the scientists S_10 and S_20 are fitting curves f(i) to noisy observations y(i) at points i = 0...20. Suppose there are two families of models, a polynomial g(i;a) and a trigonometric h(i;Ï,Ï):
g(i) <- sum(a[k]x^k, k=0..infinity)
h(i) <- cos(Ïi+Ï)
The angular frequency Ï is predetermined. The phase Ï is random:
Ï ~ Flat(), equivalently Ï ~ Uniform(0, 2*Ï)
The coefficients a[k] are independently normally distributed with moments matched to the marginal moments of the coefficients in the Taylor expansion of h(i):
a[k] ~ Normal(mean=0, stdde... (read more)