In this episode, Simone and I discuss two very interesting studies that look at how men and women value romantic relationships and the speaker price of scientists in various fields. We also talk about why women are less likely to marry men who are in their "marriage market league."
00:30:41.140Rouge. So the more misshapen you are, the more cachet you have as a potential speaker. They're like, oh yeah, they look really messed up. Let's have them talk to us about biology.
00:30:58.680Think about like Stephen Hawking or like, you know, Einstein or something. Like the archetype we have is somebody who is not traditionally attractive, even though Stephen Hawking was originally quite attractive.
00:31:08.080Yeah. This is what's so weird to me. It's like, I remember in the halls of academia, like when we were talking with, or just hanging out with people at different departments, like, I remember the geology people, very attractive, but like party animals, like very rugged party animals, like get dehydrated digging all day. And then just get, and same with archaeologists.
00:31:34.880And then, I don't know, you've been like neuroscientists who are often just like-
00:31:39.840Yeah, I remember neuroscientists being fairly attractive, but maybe that's where we're from from this.
00:31:43.140Now, if we go further here, social scientists, beauty premium, in business fields, you have a really big one.
00:31:49.8800.034. Well, in the other social scientists, you have a highly, but not enormous of 0.364.
00:31:58.220I think about Diana Fleischman, you know, she is very attractive and she's in the social sciences, right? And like, she is a more public facing kind of person.
00:32:07.480Oh, sorry. I gave the wrong number there. It was B 0.204, P 0.034 for business fields. And then for other social scientists, it was B 0.364 and P less than 0.001.
00:32:19.220So, this would mean it's bigger than the other social sciences. I spoke wrong.
00:32:23.720Non-academic speakers with science backgrounds show the same pattern. Natural science background, unattractiveness premium.
00:32:29.420Social science business, beauty premium. Social science others, beauty premium.
00:32:36.720These findings suggest that public stereotypes about nerdy or geeky natural scientists create a market where less attractive natural scientists are perceived as more credible, competent, while social scientists benefit from conventional beauty premiums.
00:32:49.320Appearance versus substance. Despite no correlation between attractiveness and actual academic performance, there is, by the way, there just isn't within academia.
00:32:56.160The speaking market rewards different appearances for different fields, indicating that public perception, not academic quality, drives these premiums.
00:33:04.960The ugly Einstein effect. The paper references the cultural Cartesian dualism, where people believe you can either be physically attractive or intellectually brilliant, but not both, particularly for natural scientists.
00:33:16.340And this is a phenomenon that you and I have taken advantage of before. Remember the study on glasses and hair links?
00:33:23.040Yeah, that in general, people with shorter hair and people who are wearing glasses are seen as less attractive, less approachable, but more intelligent and more competent.
00:33:35.700And both men and women, one without glasses, but two with like long hair that's down, are seen as more attractive and more approachable.
00:33:44.280So I guess like the Jesus hair or the Fabio look are, but they're also seen as less, less intelligent and competent.
00:33:51.420It's funny, I definitely don't see men with long hair as approachable. I always think that they're going to be a creep.
00:33:56.360Yeah, but then again, you know, you have the Fabio thing. Like, how did that happen? Because I never thought that.
00:34:02.540Well, I think it might be urban monoculture brain people, because it's being collected from students and stuff.
00:34:06.380Maybe. See, I just perceived it as this subconscious association with feminine traits and beauty, regardless of the person's actual gender.
00:34:19.900It's like, oh, if it looks more like a woman, it's going to be prettier and dumber.
00:34:25.840I don't buy this. I think it's about urban monocultural social norms, the long hair.
00:34:31.780Maybe. And the glasses, I don't think are about urban monocultural norms. I think everybody generally assumes people with glasses are competent, but less approachable.
00:34:38.920I mean, you don't really need your glasses that much, but you still wear them based on this.
00:34:42.460When you first read these studies, I do think that people, men and women view women with shorter hair as more competent, which is why you cut your hair after that study.
00:34:49.720You used to have super long hair, like hippie hair. And then after a Brian Johnson, Brian Kaplan, Brian Kaplan came on our podcast and was like, hey, for your audience, you should probably grow out your hair.
00:34:59.040And now you you've grown out your hair. No regrets.
00:35:03.620You saw how much you hated your longer hair when you had short hair, because it was so easy to maintain to maintain.
00:35:10.260It is. It is. Well, I mean, do you want to go to wigs?
00:35:13.940Ew, no. Yeah, that's I mean, not not you to wigs, whatever you do.
00:35:17.960But like, I don't I don't want to do wigs. And I I'm fine with my hair the way it is.
00:35:24.840I love you to death, Simone. I am very excited for dinner tonight.
00:35:30.040I'm going to make you your death door. So we're doing mac and cheese.
00:36:25.940Because it's so stinky. So gross. I know I you did that.
00:36:30.040Sorry. I just feel like a rite of passage.
00:36:32.860You know, no need to contextualize things as negative.
00:36:35.280It's a different experience of what it feels like to be alive.
00:36:37.580Yeah. Well, that's why it just I constantly think of this this one part.
00:36:41.900It was like this random like one off mention in one of Ian Banks culture series books where like one of the main characters is hitching a ride on a spaceship and meets someone who is exhibiting strange behavior.
00:36:55.580Because this isn't a post singularity sci-fi world where no one gets sick anymore.
00:36:59.500But on this particular ship, the human passengers had decided to take turns getting a virus because they heard that that used to happen to people back in the day and they would feel comparatively so awesome after that.
00:37:43.380I find this particularly interesting because it's one of the only times in your life you really get to feel the nerves in your teeth, except when you're in immeasurable pain due to like a dentist or a disease or something like that.
00:37:56.060A couple other things that I recognized after this was one, I feel almost no arousal when I'm at this level of illness, which is very interesting and often no desire to do some other things that I often do like play video games.
00:38:09.720The entire time I've been ill, I have had no interest in playing video games.
00:38:12.840And I'm sure this is like evolutionary, so I don't spread this to other members of the tribe and I don't go out and try to fight at war when I'm super sick or at least don't get excited about it.
00:38:21.140But like, is there not great utility in having a period of my life where I can sort of explore the world through the perspective of somebody who doesn't like video games or feels arousal?
00:38:30.920And another one is that because I'm like waking up all the time and I'm having these fever dreams, it caused me to ask a question that I'd never asked before, which is why are dreams so disrupted by something as pretty much insignificant as a fever?
00:38:44.480And it really got me meditating on the concept of dreams and sleep.
00:38:48.160And Simone also asked, why does the sweat from a fever smell so bad?
00:38:50.900And I was pointing out to her, well, that's probably evolutionary as well to tell other members of your tribe that you have an illness and to not come near you or at least to be able to detect that in other individuals.
00:39:01.600And it also, you know, gets a different experience of what sleep is like.
00:39:05.560I get to experience fever dreams, which are unique, if not, you know, entirely pleasant in a traditional sense.
00:39:11.020And I can sample this new way of being human.
00:39:13.700But I think more than all of that, whenever I have a flu, my mental state is quite differentiated from my mental state when I don't have a flu.
00:39:21.020It's probably as different as being drunk versus not being drunk.
00:39:25.080Not in the same direction, but it is definitely an alternate mental state where I approach things much more slowly, deliberately and methodically.
00:39:32.260And that's an interesting time to think about things.
00:39:34.240You know, I've written some really interesting things when I had a flu.
00:39:38.500And go out of your way to orchestrate uncomfortable and slightly compromised mental states because it does help you like avoid distraction.
00:39:48.220Like you'll wake up at 2 a.m. in the morning because, you know, you're only half awake.
00:39:54.040Your brain is desperately trying to get you.
00:39:55.420This is something I seek out because the different differential mental states allow me to produce differential work within different domains.
00:40:19.420We actually saw a new study on this recently about trauma.
00:40:22.400And again, it's more perception of trauma in youth than actual trauma in youth that correlates with mental problems as an adult.
00:40:28.200Well, it's specifically like this was this was a Spencer Greenberg team follow on to CDC reports that something like 63 percent of people who reported experiencing adverse childhood trauma or events, basically childhood trauma, also reported depression and anxiety.
00:40:49.520However, when they did more digging on this subject, they found that experiencing these things only explains like 10 percent of it, something something along those lines.
00:40:59.600Go to the clear thinking with I think their blog and what they didn't dig into, which we've seen in other story studies like this one Nordic study, is that when you look at people who report adverse effects or events in their childhood, they're.
00:41:14.540Yes, absolutely much more likely to report anxiety and depression, but when you look at what's actually documented in court cases, we're like, OK, this person clearly experienced real trauma that is documented.
00:41:24.880And we know because, you know, like the legal system got involved if they didn't actually report it, they also were not very likely to report having problems in the moment.
00:41:35.340So that's why we sort of come to this conclusion that a lot of it was it was it was that the people who did experience verifiable trauma as a child, but didn't remember it as an adult, did not have negative or did not contextualize.
00:41:48.040It wasn't it wasn't didn't remember it.
00:41:53.640And it's the same the opposite direction.
00:41:55.940People who didn't experience gender genuine trauma as a kid, but contextualized normal parent stuff as trauma ended up having all these negative outcomes.
00:42:03.700Yeah. And this is something that is one super important from a mental health perspective to understand that trauma is something that's incepted and contextualized.
00:42:13.180And I would definitely I mean, if you look at my childhood, I would have a lot of trauma from a generic standpoint.
00:42:19.560You know, I went to like prison alternatives at 13.
00:42:21.520I never lived with my family again after that.
00:42:23.420I was in fights constantly within, you know, the pseudo prison system.
00:42:28.520They have these private prison alternatives.
00:42:30.280Think holes is a very good depiction of one of these.
00:42:32.440They're they're in the desert and they're often run by Mormon extremists and they they they send some kids there like instead of it.
00:42:38.460And it might have been a cash for kids thing.
00:42:39.960We don't know because I don't really think I did anything that warranted going there.
00:42:43.640For context of what it's like at these places, I would have been around 13 at the time.
00:42:48.720And by the time I got out, I was either at I can't remember either 65 or 75 pounds, you know, obviously extremely malnourished.
00:42:55.780You could just see all my bone structure was crazy.
00:42:58.200When I got there, they would do strip searches and cavity searches.
00:43:01.940And, you know, most of the time you're there, they have armed guards.
00:43:04.980For people who don't know what this is, it was something called the OK, so the troubled teen industry is something that's been used more broadly.
00:43:10.880But in the 90s, a portion of the industry began to be used by judges in the United States as an alternative to sending kids to juvie when juvie became overcrowded.
00:43:21.260The reason I ended up getting sent, largely speaking from what I can tell, is my parents were in a divorce and neither of them wanted the other to get custody.
00:43:28.700So they both convinced the judge that the other was such a bad parent that I would be better off living on with the government than living with them.
00:43:36.120And so the government just assigned me to a prison alternative instead of living with either family.
00:43:40.800And most of these facilities have since due to the high number of suicides in them and the abuse allegations, because they were pretty much like the adult private prison industry, except there was virtually no oversight at all.
00:43:58.840But a good depiction of them is the movie Holes, as I mentioned.
00:44:01.580How bad they were were hidden for a long time, because the industry was really divided into two sections.
00:44:07.680One was the court-appointed alternative to prison, like a private prison industry for youth.
00:44:13.740And then the other was for, like, rich kids, like Paris Hilton went to one.
00:44:17.720And so there was a lot of, like, movies and Netflix shows about the ones for rich kids, which were very, you know, not nice, but at least, you know, nobody was actually, you know, killing themselves on property or anything like that at high levels.
00:44:31.920Which was not the case at the ones that the government was sending kids to.
00:44:36.220And after that, I never lived with either of my family again, ever.
00:44:40.160I would say until after college, but I didn't live with either family until after college.
00:44:44.740As for some fun anecdotes I can throw in, because I really, really don't want to do a full episode on this, at the one that sort of, like, Holes, the wilderness type, because there's various types of these.
00:44:53.740And I went through a cycle of them, you know, just because I wasn't going home.
00:44:57.100And the ones that are more like that, I have this vivid memory of some of the kids were running away into the desert.
00:45:04.740They told us that nobody really ever makes it away because, you know, there's miles of desert in every direction.
00:45:11.360And you could hear on the radio, and they were chasing the kid down with, like, hunting dogs and, like, Jeeps.
00:45:17.660And all the other kids were cheering because we could hear the progress on the radio, you know, hoping the kid, obviously, he didn't get away.
00:45:22.780But it was a funny, vivid memory for me.
00:45:26.020Another one was when I went to one of the school varieties that they had.
00:45:29.980Because, you know, obviously, you can't just stick a kid for, you know, however many years in the wilderness.
00:45:35.380There was an instance where a teacher threw a kid through a closed window.
00:45:39.400And I remember that one really vividly because I was like, whoa, man, like, that's crazy.
00:45:43.060Like, even going through that, I was like, that's crazy.
00:45:45.920At the school one, the other thing I remember is, like, all the teachers were selling drugs.
00:48:41.380Agency taken away and having to sit in a chair and listen to a teacher all day.
00:48:44.080Like, and for people like us, we'd be like, oh, the second is worse.
00:48:47.100So even with people like her, when people are like, oh, you don't understand Trump.
00:48:49.700Well, clearly Ayla does understand any traditional form of Trump, right?
00:48:53.800Like, and, and with that, she's still like in public school is worse.
00:48:58.040The reason I make these comparisons is I'm trying to show that people who have experienced different types of childhood trauma are able to recontextualize it, even if it is quite severe by modern standards.
00:49:12.500Whether it's Ayla, where I don't think you could experience more physical abuse other than like having a limb ripped off.
00:49:18.180Or I don't really think there is any higher level of financial abuse than having a million dollars taken out under your name without your permission.
00:49:25.500Or in my background, the point I'm making here is even people who have undergone quite severe things are able to recontextualize them.
00:49:32.060And in some cases, it may be impossible.
00:49:34.660For example, in each one of these three cases, there was no sexual abuse happening.
00:49:38.520And so it may be impossible in that instance.
00:49:41.060But the reason I use these three cases is they represent a wide diversity of types of abuse in which every individual was able to recontextualize.
00:49:49.820And I just don't see it negatively, like even a little bit, because I really like who I am today.
00:49:54.040And I feel like all these things contributed to that.