

Why Are Smart People Usually Ugly? - powertower
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2012/01/are_smart_people_ugly_the_explainer_s_2011_question_of_the_year_.html

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AndrewDucker
Terribly headline, great answer.

One explanation of the illusion is that if 10% of people are _really_ smart
and 10% of people are _really_ good looking then only 1% of people will be
both. Which makes it look like the two don't go together very often, when in
fact they go together as often as you'd expect.

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wushupork
In society's definition of beauty, for those class of beautiful people
(celebrities for instance), they work especially hard at looking beautiful. I
would guess a female celebrity spends a lot of effort on her hair and makeup
and has a personal trainer, dietician, etc so that she looks beautiful. A
"smart" person on the other end of the spectrum I would imagine spends little
or no time on "looks" once they get past a certain threshold of neatness and
cleanliness because they simply don't care that much about how they look.
That's doesn't affect their sense of self worth as much.

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zeroonetwothree
Actually, beauty and intelligence are positively correlated.

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Craiggybear
They aren't. I am very smart and, of course, stunningly beautiful.

But seriously, surely looks are a very subjective thing?

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Udo
Genetically, looks and brains shouldn't be linked at all and I do believe
there is no serious (anti-)correlation here. There are, however some factors
dependent on attractiveness that probably influence the personal development
of a person to a great deal. For example, I think there is a huge ratio of
assholes among beautiful people due to similar processes that inspired the
German proverb "money corrupts the character". Along those same lines, good-
looking people often don't have to work very hard - so they usually don't
enter academic careers, leading to a disproportionate amount of ugly people in
academia.

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dextorious
"""Genetically, looks and brains shouldn't be linked at all and I do believe
there is no serious (anti-)correlation here."""

How did that "should not" come about?

How about creatures with worse looks (less attractive to their species), cope
up by being smarter to turn sexual selection in their favor?

The notion of "looks" has not just come about in the last century or so, it
exists even in totally foreign species, like flowers (attractiveness to bees
by features/colors/smell/etc).

And looks have been shown to correlate strongly to sexual selection (from big
tits to body fat).

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Udo
Because neither "looks" nor "smarts" are simple real numbers that can be
adjusted up and down. It's not like eye color or ear lobe size. Both are
complex phenomena with many different parameters, and there is no evidence to
suggest that those myriad parameters are linked in a way to suggest worse
looks lead to inherently smarter brains. The null hypothesis is that they
don't and that's what we should stick with.

On a more anecdotal note, I don't think inheritance is a strong factor for bad
looks over many generations (which would be necessary for the kind of
adjustment you're describing). Ugly parents can have beautiful children. And
stupid people can have smart children, too. There is a genetic predisposition,
yes, but the simple mixing of genomes over a few generations seems to be
enough to sufficiently randomize a child's outlook.

