
The Opinions of Attractive People - imgabe
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_opinions_of_attractive_people/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2FihdT+%28The+Dilbert+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
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pavel_lishin
> Imagine a TV show about your favorite hobby, no matter if that is cooking,
> cars, technology or whatever. You wouldn't watch that show unless it had a
> lot of humans in it, preferably attractive ones, showing their faces.

Except I love "how it's made" type of show, and don't really care about the
people involved. Put halloween masks on them all, and I'd still watch.

~~~
itg
Yeah, I love watching Top Gear and attractive isn't the first word in mind
when it comes to describing Jeremy Clarkson.

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prawn
Top Gear is a bad example because whether or not the presenter is attractive
is secondary to whether or not they are entertaining. And Clarkson is
entertaining. And you see a lot of his face in the presentation of the show.

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jacquesm
Anybody that posits an idea as 'brilliant' should go and implement it
themselves.

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jokermatt999
Scott Adams seems to enjoy submitting ideas for discussion moreso than
actually developing them. I'm guessing he's already rather financially stable,
so it may not be worth the hassle to him to actually do it.

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brlewis
He couldn't possibly be financially stable. We know Dilbert cartoons cannot
attract much audience because they lack attractive faces. Didn't you read the
article? ;-)

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derefr
I wish I could link directly, but there's a section in Scott McCloud's
_Understanding Comics_ that talks about attractiveness as a function of visual
abstraction. The fewer details a face has, the more people will like it,
because more will identify with it. Dilbert's characters, "attractive" or not,
are very heavily abstracted.

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JoeAltmaier
Pretty faces spouting opinions turn me off. Most hollywood "celebrities" sound
ignorant when they soapbox on their favorite cause.

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tomjen3
One problem with this is that we don't want to see beautiful people giving
their opinion on stuff - we want to see beautiful people who are doing stupid
things (so that we can feel better about ourself) and/or who are of the
attractive sex and dressed in as little as possible.

~~~
hasenj
I'd even go further and say that when a beautiful celebrity voices an opinion
that we strongly disagree with, we stop liking him/her.

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jimlyndon
I liked this the first time I saw it, on every media outlet ;)
[http://futuremd.blogspot.com/2005/12/candy-crowley-and-
blond...](http://futuremd.blogspot.com/2005/12/candy-crowley-and-blonde-babes-
of-fox.html)

~~~
prawn
It's said that you use a blonde woman if you want your message received by
males, and a brunette if you want it received by females. I believe this
tactic is commonly used in advertising.

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BlazingFrog
He's right on at least one thing. None of us thought of Twitter.

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reduxredacted
It's an interesting idea but I have a few small concerns.

Billing the site as a site where people can vote on attractiveness of the
person giving the opinion would personally turn me off. Speculate as you wish
about my attractiveness, but it's just not something I'd be crazy about
participating in as either a person who is posting (my lack of desire to have
many strangers judging how I look) or as consuming (my assumption that anyone
posting a video would simply be an ego-maniac). Yes, those are quick and
possibly unfair judgements, but with the myriad of sites out there vying for
my attention, they'd be my first ones. A tweak would be to keep quiet about
the attractiveness angle and have someone Academia point that out later in a
groundbreaking study of influence on "FaceOpinionSpace" (best I could come up
with in two seconds).

One might need to incorporate something to ensure that users are really
posting a face (Imagine a /b/ campaign called "Post Your Penis's Opinion"). Or
maybe that last part is a whole other business idea. Automated video analysis
and Flagging of videos could help avoid this, but if it wasn't handled well I
wouldn't visit the site.

Lastly, it would take a lot of capital. Video isn't a low bandwidth endeavor
and if the big "feature" is attractiveness of the person posting their short
opinion, quality would have to be somewhat reasonable.

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ig1
> "You wouldn't watch that show unless it had a lot of humans in it"

It's called "radio" or "podcast".

~~~
roc
Where you see the exact same effect, with voices.

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Helianthus16
Reading Scott Adams almost invariably just makes me irritated. A number of
semi-plausible speculations coupled with intellectual smugness that's
(dishonestly, in my opinion) protected by virtue of being explicitly just a
guy's opinions.

It's more of the same here. Attractiveness is not universal and is often
_tied_ to the opinions a person holds--so people that disagree with arguably
attractive people will think them _ugly_.

The other big problem is that no one really cares about a pretty face
repeating words they don't understand. Pretty faces might get famous just for
being famous, but they don't get respected, only thronged.

The hell of it is, this could _work_. It wouldn't work by the mechanism he
declares, though--it would work because we connect with real people, and it's
fun to experience people in short snippets with no obligation. The problem is
that we've just described Chatroulette, only decoupled from the present time--
and sharing the present time is what makes chatroulette interesting.

~~~
Tycho
But there's fairly objective standards that are correlated with attractiveness
in any study of the phenomenon, eg. facial symmetry. Physical attractiveness,
of course, which presumably is what SA was talking about.

From my own observations about how people react to amateur video productions
on the Internet, eg. "omg who is that lecturer she is so cute!!", I think Mr
Adams is onto something.

~~~
Helianthus16
Correlated. Just because we can say "This person is generally more attractive
because of facial symmetry, well-aligned teeth, and x,y,z" doesn't mean we
have any particularly useful quotient to judge the attractiveness of a person.
Such a general measure is way too broad. And you missed my point: the
perception of physical attraction is not based solely on physical traits! Look
at Sarah Palin--some would say she's attractive, but if you mentally recoil at
the thought of a Palin presidential run I'm sure you would not think so.

Your amateur video productions _prove my point_ because the attractiveness is
in the ordinary, the "just a person at home making a video." It is in the fact
that the person is presumably contributing something valuable. So why would
people care if models were paid to say something?

This is why Adams articles frustrate me: because it provokes discussion
without moving anything forward, because he's used a terrible model to
abstract attraction and as a consequence our definitions are semantic (read:
fucked) to begin with.

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riffer
The problem with user-generated video is that YouTube has a huge network
effects advantage. This may not be a bad way of trying to finesse that,
especially if it's combined with an attempt to do a really good job
recommending clips, since the training period would pass quickly in clock time
(30 votes in 5 minutes).

~~~
kilian
So you let people upload on youtube and post that on your site :)

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jared314
Seesmic. I think the lesson learned there was that everyone wants to watch
others, but few want to record themselves, out of fear. Solve that, though
force like chatroulette, or inspiration like funny or die, and you could make
something I would visit...but not participate in.

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dmor
Isn't this what Seesmic did long long ago?

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david_p
The described system exists since a couple of years and is commonly know as
"Television". Or is it ?

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gaius
It's video hotornot.com

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blasdel
This is what YouTube was originally. Turns out people just upload clips from
film, sports, and television instead.

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sesqu
Some of the most upvoted submitters on YouTube are quite attractive. I have no
actual data, but off the top of my head I can think of the word of the day
girl, the trainer girl, and the old spice guy.

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duck
I think a lot of the threads missed what Scott was talking about. In general
we like to look at other faces, no matter what they look like - the Dilbert
comic is exactly that. The attractive part is where we will listen to /
believe them more.

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melissamiranda
How is it then that Justin Bieber is the most popular thing on YouTube?

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tfh
Just ask your teenage sister. She knows the answer.

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hasenj
I thought of micro-blogging before I knew twitter existed.

Oh, and I think twitter is a failed idea. It mostly has turned to another form
of RSS feeds. The intended use-case has failed (small updates on your daily
life, e.g. "I'm drinking tea with my wife").

This idea will also fail; you can't tell people how to use a service. If you
allow people to post 30 second videos, they'll use it to send messages to each
other instead of expressing opinions on public issues. Or, they might just
post short funny videos ("epic fail" videos, etc).

~~~
derefr
> twitter is a failed idea

Nobody cares about Twitter-the-idea, and that's never what anyone means any
more when they use the term. What everyone loves is Twitter-the- _platform_ ,
which is a huge success.

> This idea will also fail; you can't tell people how to use a service.

Yes, you can. When the site is small, you can manually moderate all
submissions, literally telling people how they may use it. After the site
grows, the "base" will continue to obey the site's culture. As long as the
base has more power (in some metric or another) the site will continue in that
direction without further work. (This is basically how HN has been set up.)

Note that this might keep the site _small_ —like HN, and unlike Twitter. But
that's still entirely monetizable, especially if you have a much larger
viewing population than submitting population.

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JoeAltmaier
Short messages can be easily categorized, searched, favorited. Easier to
browse than youtube. SoundByteFace.com!

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jhrobert
How long before someone implements this? one day? two days?

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Alex3917
Bigthink.com is basically the same thing, and it's already been online for
several years at this point.

~~~
foenix
That doesn't mean that someone can't do it better…

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filmschool
TED. Intelligence is attractive.

