Some related scenarios are discussed in my post here, e.g. when popularity ≈ beauty + substance, and if popularity and beauty are readily apparent then you can estimate substance.
That’s basically the exact same idea I came up with!
Your link says popularity ≈ beauty + substance, that’s no different than my example of “success of a species = quality of offspring + quantity of offspring”. I just generalized to a higher number of dimensions, such that for a space of N dimensions, the success of a person is the area spanned. So it’s like these stat circles but n-dimensional where n is the number of traits of the person in question. I don’t know if traits are best judged when multiplied or added together, but one could play around with either idea.
I’m not sure my insights say anything that you haven’t already, but what I wanted to share is that you might be able to improve yourself by observing unsuccessful people and copying their trait in the dimension where you’re lacking (this was voted ‘wrong’ above but I’m not sure why). And that if you want success, mimicking the actions of somebody who is ugly should be more effective, and this is rather unintuitive and amusing.
I also think it would be an advantage for an attractive person to experience what it’s like not to be attractive for a while, getting used to this, and then becoming attractive again. Since he would have to make up for a deficit (he’s forced to improve himself) and then when the advantage comes back, he’d be further than if he never had the period of being unattractive. And as is often the case with intelligent people, I never really had to study in school, but this made me unable to develop proper study habits. If I learned how below-average people made it through university, this would likely help me more than even observing the best performing student in my class.
A related insight is that if you want a good solution, you have to solve a worse problem. Want a good jacket for the cold weather? Find out what brands they use on Greenland, those are good, they have to be. Want to get rid of a headache? Don’t Google “headache reliefs”, instead, find out what people with migraines and cluster-headaches do, for they’re highly motivated to find good solutions.
Anyway, I swear I came up with these ideas before you wrote your post, the similarity is a coincidence though it looks like I just wrote a worse version of your post. I was partly inspired by I Ching hexagram 42 which says something like “When the superior man perceives good, he imitates it; when he perceives faults, he eliminates them in himself”
Some related scenarios are discussed in my post here, e.g. when popularity ≈ beauty + substance, and if popularity and beauty are readily apparent then you can estimate substance.
That’s basically the exact same idea I came up with!
Your link says popularity ≈ beauty + substance, that’s no different than my example of “success of a species = quality of offspring + quantity of offspring”. I just generalized to a higher number of dimensions, such that for a space of N dimensions, the success of a person is the area spanned. So it’s like these stat circles but n-dimensional where n is the number of traits of the person in question. I don’t know if traits are best judged when multiplied or added together, but one could play around with either idea.
I’m not sure my insights say anything that you haven’t already, but what I wanted to share is that you might be able to improve yourself by observing unsuccessful people and copying their trait in the dimension where you’re lacking (this was voted ‘wrong’ above but I’m not sure why). And that if you want success, mimicking the actions of somebody who is ugly should be more effective, and this is rather unintuitive and amusing.
I also think it would be an advantage for an attractive person to experience what it’s like not to be attractive for a while, getting used to this, and then becoming attractive again. Since he would have to make up for a deficit (he’s forced to improve himself) and then when the advantage comes back, he’d be further than if he never had the period of being unattractive. And as is often the case with intelligent people, I never really had to study in school, but this made me unable to develop proper study habits. If I learned how below-average people made it through university, this would likely help me more than even observing the best performing student in my class.
A related insight is that if you want a good solution, you have to solve a worse problem. Want a good jacket for the cold weather? Find out what brands they use on Greenland, those are good, they have to be. Want to get rid of a headache? Don’t Google “headache reliefs”, instead, find out what people with migraines and cluster-headaches do, for they’re highly motivated to find good solutions.
Anyway, I swear I came up with these ideas before you wrote your post, the similarity is a coincidence though it looks like I just wrote a worse version of your post. I was partly inspired by I Ching hexagram 42 which says something like “When the superior man perceives good, he imitates it; when he perceives faults, he eliminates them in himself”