Although “unattractive individuals commit more crime in comparison to average-looking ones, and very attractive individuals commit less crime in comparison to those who are average-looking” is evidence for SforSingularity’s claim, his comment is absurd enough to be taken as satire.
It’s clearly absurd to say that pretty girls never murder people. But allowing for the normal hyperbole and inexactitude of conversational English, I don’t think that’s what SforSingularity means, rather, ‘pretty girls are one of the demographic least likely to be responsible for a brutal murder’.
This isn’t too unreasonable.
First off, the number of murders so ascribable are small: females make up half the population and if we limit pretty to the top 5% or so (a reasonable guess at % for ‘pretty enough that a guy will actively note and think “pretty!”’), we’re already down to less than 2.5% of the population.
Second, women in general commit far fewer violent crimes than men. http://www.ncjrs.gov/html/ojjdp/jjbul2002_10_1/page4.html mentions that for juveniles, at one point, the male:female ratio was 22:1. Let’s be conservative and put the young adult ratio at 5:1; now we’re down to 0.4%.
Third, attractiveness is correlated with IQ, and IQ is well-known to correlate with lower crime rates. (see Wikipedia for a few links; IIRC, WP understates the case but I can’t be fashed to dig up the stronger correlations). Let’s cut another 10% off the rate, down to 0.36%.
Fourthly, attractiveness correlates to higher socioeconomic status through multiple mechanisms, which cuts down violent crime even further. (I don’t think I need to adduce any citations for that!)
And so on. I’ve missed many factors (eg. maybe happier & less stressed people are more attractive, and that too is correlated to less propensity for murder; maybe pretty women have fewer violence-inducing mental diseases and substance abuse habits; etc.). But I’ve already knocked their murder rate way down. I suspect it has much further to go in a true reckoning.
we limit pretty to the top 5% or so (a reasonable guess at % for ‘pretty enough that a guy will actively note and think “pretty!”’)
Interesting. When I read “pretty”, I thought of a binary division (make guys judge “pretty or not”) and I thought it would yield at least 30-40% as pretty. (Possibly much more, but I’ve a high degree of certainty that at least that much.)
Granted that your test is different than mine, what leads you to your 5% estimate, which looks low to me even with your test?
30-40% seems reasonable for Knox’s age group (early twenties). Something closer to 5-10% seems reasonable for the entire female population. Keep in mind pretty people are almost certainly more visible than the non-pretty (especially if you have high socio-economic status).
I think 30-40% is unrealistic: something like 20-30% of females in that age group are overweight or obese, leaving 70-80% in an attractive weight bracket; are we really going to call half of those ‘pretty’?
It may just be my media-biased high standards, but I don’t think I’d call half of all thin young women that.
Right… I was a fool to miss that. You’re perfectly right of course.
Which leads us to the question of what “natural category” to put Knox in. Should it be “a pretty woman out of all women” or “a pretty young woman out of all young women”? Or lots of other options, of course. (We use some category the moment we compare her to women and not to all humans.)
But I’m sure this has been discussed, I haven’t read all of this subthread...
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.
First off, the number of murders so ascribable are small: females make up half the population and if we limit pretty to the top 5%..., we’re already down to less than 2.5% of the population.
That’s like saying very few murders are committed by people named Amanda. That’s OK, if you’re very careful, but you have to, at least, weigh it against the very few murders by people named Rudy. 2-4 are OK, though.
Reference class tennis. Being an attractive female with a (formerly) well-off family is far more important a reference class than being named Amanda; and the corresponding reference class for Rudy would be being an unattractive man who is a poor African immigrant.
Reread your comment. What is the point of your your first bullet point that pretty girls are rare? That tells you nothing, just as the fact that Amandas are rare tells you nothing. Points 2-4 about the relative propensity to murder are relevant. But I’m explicitly talking about point 1 in isolation.
What is the point of your your first bullet point that pretty girls are rare? That tells you nothing, just as the fact that Amandas are rare tells you nothing.
Yes, it does. If there is any sort of inverse quasi-linear relationship between prettiness and propensity to murder, as one would expect, we would expect the reduction in murder rates compared to the average to be the largest at the extremes—that is, for rarely pretty girls we will expect rarely large effects.
My own reading of the bullet points in the post is something like this:
1) Group X is a small fraction of the population.
2) Reason A why group X is disproportionately unlikely to commit murder.
3) Reason B why group X is disproportionately unlikely to commit murder.
4) Reason C why group X is disproportionately unlikely to commit murder.
In the great-grandparent comment above you list an additional reason why pretty girls would be disproportionately unlikely to commit murder, but that wasn’t clear at least to me from the original post. So, I agree with Douglas_Knight that bullet point 1 seems to serve a different purpose from points 2 through 4.
I think the “My probability estimate of guilt was around 1%” bit is probably pretty spot on (for the reasons you state), and not absurd.
I think the “I only saw a photo of Amanda Knox’s face. Girls with cute smiles like that don’t brutally murder people” and “Perhaps it is confusing to people that the actual killer is probably a scary looking black guy with a sunken brow” bits are absurd-enough-to-be-satire.
Although “unattractive individuals commit more crime in comparison to average-looking ones, and very attractive individuals commit less crime in comparison to those who are average-looking” is evidence for SforSingularity’s claim, his comment is absurd enough to be taken as satire.
It’s clearly absurd to say that pretty girls never murder people. But allowing for the normal hyperbole and inexactitude of conversational English, I don’t think that’s what SforSingularity means, rather, ‘pretty girls are one of the demographic least likely to be responsible for a brutal murder’.
This isn’t too unreasonable.
First off, the number of murders so ascribable are small: females make up half the population and if we limit pretty to the top 5% or so (a reasonable guess at % for ‘pretty enough that a guy will actively note and think “pretty!”’), we’re already down to less than 2.5% of the population.
Second, women in general commit far fewer violent crimes than men. http://www.ncjrs.gov/html/ojjdp/jjbul2002_10_1/page4.html mentions that for juveniles, at one point, the male:female ratio was 22:1. Let’s be conservative and put the young adult ratio at 5:1; now we’re down to 0.4%.
Third, attractiveness is correlated with IQ, and IQ is well-known to correlate with lower crime rates. (see Wikipedia for a few links; IIRC, WP understates the case but I can’t be fashed to dig up the stronger correlations). Let’s cut another 10% off the rate, down to 0.36%.
Fourthly, attractiveness correlates to higher socioeconomic status through multiple mechanisms, which cuts down violent crime even further. (I don’t think I need to adduce any citations for that!)
And so on. I’ve missed many factors (eg. maybe happier & less stressed people are more attractive, and that too is correlated to less propensity for murder; maybe pretty women have fewer violence-inducing mental diseases and substance abuse habits; etc.). But I’ve already knocked their murder rate way down. I suspect it has much further to go in a true reckoning.
Does his comment still look satirical to you?
Interesting. When I read “pretty”, I thought of a binary division (make guys judge “pretty or not”) and I thought it would yield at least 30-40% as pretty. (Possibly much more, but I’ve a high degree of certainty that at least that much.)
Granted that your test is different than mine, what leads you to your 5% estimate, which looks low to me even with your test?
30-40% seems reasonable for Knox’s age group (early twenties). Something closer to 5-10% seems reasonable for the entire female population. Keep in mind pretty people are almost certainly more visible than the non-pretty (especially if you have high socio-economic status).
I think 30-40% is unrealistic: something like 20-30% of females in that age group are overweight or obese, leaving 70-80% in an attractive weight bracket; are we really going to call half of those ‘pretty’?
It may just be my media-biased high standards, but I don’t think I’d call half of all thin young women that.
Right… I was a fool to miss that. You’re perfectly right of course.
Which leads us to the question of what “natural category” to put Knox in. Should it be “a pretty woman out of all women” or “a pretty young woman out of all young women”? Or lots of other options, of course. (We use some category the moment we compare her to women and not to all humans.)
But I’m sure this has been discussed, I haven’t read all of this subthread...
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.
That’s like saying very few murders are committed by people named Amanda. That’s OK, if you’re very careful, but you have to, at least, weigh it against the very few murders by people named Rudy. 2-4 are OK, though.
Reference class tennis. Being an attractive female with a (formerly) well-off family is far more important a reference class than being named Amanda; and the corresponding reference class for Rudy would be being an unattractive man who is a poor African immigrant.
Reread your comment. What is the point of your your first bullet point that pretty girls are rare? That tells you nothing, just as the fact that Amandas are rare tells you nothing. Points 2-4 about the relative propensity to murder are relevant. But I’m explicitly talking about point 1 in isolation.
Yes, it does. If there is any sort of inverse quasi-linear relationship between prettiness and propensity to murder, as one would expect, we would expect the reduction in murder rates compared to the average to be the largest at the extremes—that is, for rarely pretty girls we will expect rarely large effects.
That’s not how you used it in your post. Seriously, just read your post. What do these numbers mean?
I rather think I did, since I wrote it.
It means that we’re talking about an extreme part of the population.
My own reading of the bullet points in the post is something like this:
1) Group X is a small fraction of the population.
2) Reason A why group X is disproportionately unlikely to commit murder.
3) Reason B why group X is disproportionately unlikely to commit murder.
4) Reason C why group X is disproportionately unlikely to commit murder.
In the great-grandparent comment above you list an additional reason why pretty girls would be disproportionately unlikely to commit murder, but that wasn’t clear at least to me from the original post. So, I agree with Douglas_Knight that bullet point 1 seems to serve a different purpose from points 2 through 4.
I think the “My probability estimate of guilt was around 1%” bit is probably pretty spot on (for the reasons you state), and not absurd.
I think the “I only saw a photo of Amanda Knox’s face. Girls with cute smiles like that don’t brutally murder people” and “Perhaps it is confusing to people that the actual killer is probably a scary looking black guy with a sunken brow” bits are absurd-enough-to-be-satire.