Here’s one exercise: take your highschool yearbook, open one of the dense pages (with dozens of pics on it), and let your eye drift along the columns with no particular intent (this is hard); how many of the girls will actually catch your attention for being attractive and not for having, say, bizarre & outdated hairstyles? For me, it was less than 1 in 10. (One plain forgets about the bottom 50% and between that and 90% is the ‘unoffensive’ range.) Considering that my highschool was private and that selection effects were already operating, I have to revise the estimate further down; ~5% seemed good & is a nice round number.
For what it’s worth, I remember a study on Stanford undergrads with what was essentially speed dating; men suggested their interest in a second date with ~90% of the women they met, and simultaneously their top criterion for that choice was attractiveness. Even granting that they had loose definitions caused by the study, I suspect that under Dan’s metric (binary choice) a reasonably large minority might be tagged “pretty.”
I also didn’t get the impression from the photos on the website that anybody in the Knox case was pretty in the sense that you mean it—I think of your criterion as defining “remarkably pretty” rather than “pretty, if I had to choose,” and I’d say you’re probably right on <5% being remarkably pretty.
Here’s one exercise: take your highschool yearbook, open one of the dense pages (with dozens of pics on it), and let your eye drift along the columns with no particular intent (this is hard); how many of the girls will actually catch your attention for being attractive and not for having, say, bizarre & outdated hairstyles? For me, it was less than 1 in 10. (One plain forgets about the bottom 50% and between that and 90% is the ‘unoffensive’ range.) Considering that my highschool was private and that selection effects were already operating, I have to revise the estimate further down; ~5% seemed good & is a nice round number.
For what it’s worth, I remember a study on Stanford undergrads with what was essentially speed dating; men suggested their interest in a second date with ~90% of the women they met, and simultaneously their top criterion for that choice was attractiveness. Even granting that they had loose definitions caused by the study, I suspect that under Dan’s metric (binary choice) a reasonably large minority might be tagged “pretty.”
I also didn’t get the impression from the photos on the website that anybody in the Knox case was pretty in the sense that you mean it—I think of your criterion as defining “remarkably pretty” rather than “pretty, if I had to choose,” and I’d say you’re probably right on <5% being remarkably pretty.