Yeah my experience has been what we can change about ourselves has a much bigger impact than what we can't. Social proof is vastly more powerful than genetics.
Of those, two are wildly underapprciated: skincare and in-group knowledge. Details matter a ton. It's the opening to American Psycho for crying out loud. These details cannot be produced in an afternoon. They take years if not a lifetime of commitment and are immediately apparent.
But there is a good historical reason for that. Facial features really are correlated with intelligence, and that correlates with status. It is not universal though, but a quite reliable predictor nonetheless.
> Facial features really are correlated with intelligence
Do you have a citation for this claim? Because I spent a little effort looking, and the overwhelming majority of results were on the "perception of intelligence." The only study I found that touched your point refutes it:
This has been observed by countless fiction writers all these "smart deep eyes", "large foreheads" etc. Heck, even in everyday interactions we all make split second judgements about intelligence based on appearance; and we often are right.
These kind of observations go against the politics of identitarian academia, so you probably won't find much of confirmation there.
> These kind of observations go against the politics of identitarian academia, so you probably won't find much of confirmation there.
You mean to say that you prefer the older identitarian politics wherein people who look different from you are less than human? Indeed, science has moved on from that, and prefer to deal with data and not unexamined biases with sources such as fiction writers.
"The researchers also found that the participants rated men with a high IQ as more intelligent based solely on their facial photograph. For women, however, the researchers found no statistically significant link between perceived intelligence and their actual IQ."
Nice quote, but when you drill down a little further, they observe that the correlation didn't actually follow the facial features.
> But these facial characteristics were only associated with perceived intelligence. The researchers found no link between these facial traits and actual IQ scores.
> “This means that our raters accurately assessed intelligence from faces of men based on visual cues that simply are not explicable from shape variability in men’s faces,” the researchers wrote.
Try again. Or better yet, recognize that this just-so argument is a lost cause, and abandon it.
"We also showed that IQ has no statistically significant association in facial morphology in both men and women (at least as it was delimited by the landmark configuration used within this study). This means that our raters accurately assessed intelligence from faces of men based on visual cues that simply are not explicable from shape variability in men's faces. It is important to recall that our subjects were prompted to assume a neutral expression while their photo was taken and only photos of subjects with a neutral expression were included in the study. We can speculate about attributions of intelligence based on particular configurations of eyes or gaze, colour of eyes, hair and skin, or skin texture. These hypotheses should be tested in future studies."
Which means that the authors literally meant "face shape" in a narrow literal sense (such as round on elongated) , and hypothesize that other facial features
which they deem as unrelated to shape (although configuration of eyes IMO are clearly part of what usually is called facial features) are at play; they clearly are puzzled about the ability of respondents to reliably predict male intelligence from the pictures of their faces (even filtered to remove visual clues related not the faces per se, but facial expressions).
Stop pushing your agenda and engaginng in creative reading, please.
No, I do not mean anything different from what I said: there is a correlation between appearance and intelligence, not perfect correspondence. The _data_ in social sciences in _unreliable_, because it is often _heavily_ _politicized_, no one wants to end up being a pariah as the authors of "The Bell Curve" had become.
Fiction authors across all cultures, ideologies and epochs, reliably underscore same facial features as the sign of intelligence; if this was entirely uncorrelated with the reality, this notion would not survive many thousands years.
Phrenology is entirely different discipline than judging intelligince by looking at the faces; the latter has obvious correlation with developmental defects, such Down's syndrome, fetal alcohol syndrome etc.
You keep making personal attacks, they're not helping your case. And yes, TFA's list of facial features includes "complexion," aka skin color. Weird hill to die on, especially if you don't actually know what you're standing for.
But even facial features such as "broad, flat nose" are strongly correlated to race. And that's what you meant by "heavily politicized," isn't it? Methinks your innocence in this regard is feigned.
After all, fiction writers have been leaning on racist tropes since time immemorial, doesn't that make them a valid source of truth in your line of reasoning?
I actually do know, what is my "hill". What is yours?
I grew up and live in multiracial city, where there is no paranoia about seeing racism everywhere. This is you, Americans (and Westerners in general) are traumatized by notion of being racist (because deeply inside you really are). All your posturing about being offended by seeing illusory racism in someones words is guilt overcompensation.
Having said, you really seem to be too narrow minded, to understand that within any race there are faces that look smarter, irrespectively of particular features; the puzzling factor rising from the combination of the features matter. I have no problems finding the face of say Habib Koite higher IQ than face of say Yoav Gallant or some random truck driver in Gifu prefecture.
I actually stressed out that observation (made by poor, accused by your being racist, fiction writers) that intelligence has complex correlation with facial features is persistent across races and time periods. What you are doing now is typical identitarian pretend-antiracist-but-really-crypto-racist notion, that blacks, asians etc. cannot have good share of stupids in their groups, or they are inferior and deprived of ability to see that difference in faces.
Only, I'm not offended by this, because I understand that I have absorbed racist biases from my environs (not according to some hifalutin theory -- I've witnessed my own failures in this regard). Such is the human condition. You're the one getting your underwear tangled over that "accusation."
"The results reveal a unique constellation of facial features that underlie judgements of social class. Faces perceived as poor exhibited particular characteristics such as being wider, shorter, and flatter, with downturned mouths and darker, cooler complexions. Each of these facial features also made faces appear more incompetent, cold, or untrustworthy. In contrast, faces perceived as rich were narrower and longer with upturned mouths and lighter, warmer complexions – features which corresponded to those associated with perceptions of competence, warmth, and trustworthiness."
