I haven't analyzed the data, so I'm going purely off of the article's numbers, but the article states that 1) the median male is a 5.9 out of 10, and 2) each individual's ratings follow a normal distribution.
Considering our median male, that gives us the following quantiles:
> for (q in c(0.01, 0.05, 0.5, 0.95, 0.99)) { print(qnorm(q, 5.9, 0.4)) }
[1] 4.969461
[1] 5.242059
[1] 5.9
[1] 6.557941
[1] 6.830539
I appreciate the article's message, but I don't think that those numbers support such a strong thesis:
> Think of the most beautiful people you know; if you are average looking, you will almost certainly be that attractive to some other people you know.
Interesting data but the write up is poor. Graphs would be very helpful. There are two important variations here: how much does attractiveness scores for _the same person_ vary by different raters, and how does that compare to the variation for _different people_ by the same rater.
Saying what proportion finds the median person in the top percentile requires some more complicated math than simply looking up the width of a bell curve.
Also this blog post is from 2015.
I can totally believe the beauty-in-the-eye-of-beholder thesis, and it’s encouraging to think that I just need to find the 3% of people that will think I’m gorgeous. But it would be interesting to run the numbers and test the following thesis: are these people all the ones that are on average way uglier than me? I’m betting they are … and now the Tubes song “She’s a Beauty” is playing in my head…
The concepts of beauty and attraction should not have been mixed up by the OP. The underpinning article speaks only of attraction (and intelligence, ambition and other parameters measured separately) and never mentions beauty - which is also, and arguably, linked to aesthetics rather than to pure personal choice - at least from a scientific paper standpoint.
There's a review and meta-analysis somewhere of these kinds of studies (I should be working so am not going to look it up) estimating that about 1/3 of the variance in attractiveness ratings can be attributed to the person being rated, 1/3 due to rater, and 1/3 due to the interaction.
Original study: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/stuff_for_blog/sheena.p...
Yes it's that Gelman, but he's not an author.
That is why they say "Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder"
And yet this is directly in opposition to the old OKCupid data in which men rating women was a bell curve while women rating men was almost a power law (or highly skewed curve).
And the breeeding age opinions are most critical to the people who most care about attractiveness.
It's nice when the 60 year old grandparent thinks you're attractive. It matters whether the 22 year old clerk thinks you're attractive.
the data comes from speed dating, which is a really good environment to collect this kind of data from. (attractiveness is the biggest determinant of getting a date followed by conversation quality)
I am beautiful to >95% of population, for three reasons:
1) hazel eyes
2) bigonial width
3) high cheekbones
4) neutral canthal tilt
5) some iq as well but not a lot - i still dont know what p value means lol
People are always attracted to the essence and personal in the first place. What is beauty from the inside is beauty from the is beauty from the outside. But primitive people have approaches to each other as in stores when buying goods.
Long time ago I did some first-hand research on speed dating results and read a lot of papers. I am not familiar by the recent research, but I find it unlikely that the behavior of people would have changed dramatically.
I found that when we look at the behavior, such as replying to messages on OkCupid or Tinder, selecting a partner in speed dating events, or who people choose to dance with in couples dancing events, women behave differently from men.
The behavior of women generally follows the power law distribution, and the behavior of men follows the normal distribution.
This means that women rate the attractiveness of men based on something that is based on preferential attachment, for example how women believe others rate the attractiveness of the man, whereas men rate the attractiveness of the women on something that is independent of the evaluations of others.
When the pool of potential mates grows, the inequality experienced by most men grows, whereas the inequality experienced by most women stays the same. And the pool s growing due to internet dating.