How being ugly can make you more attractive

first sponsor US history long time ago OkCupid a dating site used to post these blogs where they would analyze the data within their database and spit out a bunch of fascinating information about how relationships work and how dating works and meeting people and first impressions that kind of thing and trying to understand mathematically how the human mind works using big data they eventually ended up going in a different direction because some of these were quite controversial they deleted a whole bunch of these articles from their blog entirely things do not disappear from the internet I have managed to track down some of the articles that they wrote it's so interesting I love this stuff whenever I get an opportunity to chuck these factoids at people I do I think online dating is freaking brilliant particularly in this method it's so much more efficient for finding the kinds of people that would be better long-term matches but yeah today we're going to be starting with the mathematics of beauty these are written by Christian rudder by the way he's a brilliant writer he's really funny he wrote a book called Datak lism using some of the data from this these blogs but also some other stuff as well so yeah they've got a little less controversial as of late from how race affects the messages you get they've now gone more towards the best local dating spots which is perhaps not quite as interesting to me this one actually really reassured me especially considering like the data set 1.5 4 million votes 600 thousand messages almost and over 60,000 profiles they've analyzed for this we do only have their word for it and it can be used for good PR video this post investigates female attractiveness but without the usual photo analysis stuff instead we look past a woman's picture into the reaction she creates in the reptile mind of the human male these are the things that they found out from doing data analysis the more that men as a group disagree about a woman's looks the more they end up liking her guys tend to ignore girls who are merely cute that their definition of cute would be a four on a scale of one to five rather than differentiating between cute and hot as different types of attractiveness or something and in fact having some men think she's ugly actually works in a woman's favor fair warning we're about to objectify women big-time yeah this is this is reducing them down to data points so that's that's pretty much as objective as you can be but it's useful stuff this is useful for both guys and girls being able to understand how best to present yourself so you have a better chance in the dating world it's useful stuff men will get their turn under the microscope soon enough this article was only done on women but I would imagine there was some similarity to men let's start at the beginning all people but especially guys spend a disproportionate amount of energy searching for browsing and messaging our hottest users as I've noted before a hot woman receives roughly four times the messages an average looking woman gets and 25 as times as many as an ugly one they had a star rating system on the site from 1 to 5 they were able to measure how attractive people were as methodically as you can measure that getting swamped with messages drives users especially women away so we have to analyze and redirect this tendency lest OkCupid become sausage party com I'm pretty sure that's a website we don't want to go to it goes to plentyoffish OkCupid must have bought sausage party comm and redirected it to a competitor's dating site that's hilarious every so often we run diagnostic plots like the one below showing how many messages a sampling of 5000 women sorted by attractiveness received over the last month so here's the graph so messages received last month versus attractiveness so there's kind of this low curve down here but then you do get things like this like these random ones why are there some that are up here and some that are down here when they're this attractive and stuff like that these graphs are adjusted for race location age profile completeness login activity and so on the only meaningful difference between the people plotted is their looks I don't know if you can say that they're adjusted for a hell of a lot of things so that's significantly going to change it it is perhaps the biggest meaningful difference when you've accounted for all these after running a bunch of these we began to ask ourselves what else accounts for the wide spread of the exes particularly on the above-average half of the graph is it just randomness to you what is it about her that gets more attention than her so both these girls are statistically as a attractive is each other on a 1 to 5 star rating system by the way I believe as I understand it from what I've read in the other articles they asked everyone's permission for their photos to be used in this I wonder how I'd feel if some business came to me and said hey we want to use you to represent an average-looking person can we use your photo because they've done that I mean it makes the articles more interesting gives you some strong examples but fair play to the gulls for going through with it slight aside do girls find it uncomfortable to be referred to as girls because I use it kind of colloquially I don't know if women is the more respectful term or whamon I don't know it's never really bothered most of the people I've met but I think I've seen a couple of people on the internet get annoyed about that kind of thing what is it about her that gets more attention than her even though according to our users they're both good-looking so yeah there's a significant difference here so this is closer to a hundred messages a month versus 25 messages a month not all sevens are the same turns out that the first step to understanding this phenomenon is to go deeper into the mathematically different ways you can be attractive for example using the classic 10-point looks scale let's say a person is a 7 it could be that everyone who sees her thinks exactly that she's pretty cute and they they're using cute to be less attractive than hot rather than a different kind of attractiveness that's how I personally think of it but something extreme like this could just as easily be going on if someone is a 7 there could be 10 people saying this person is a 7 however there could also be 7 people saying there are 10 and 3 people saying there are 0 it could be really polarized or it could be kind of a consensus if we all know that she is a 7 there is no way to tell maybe for some guys our hypothetical woman is the cat's pajamas and for the rest she is the cat Garfield who knows as it turns out this distribution of opinions is very important isn't this the standard deviation celebrity photos to titillate and inform let's look at what the ratings distribution might be for a couple of famous people I imagine that for say the actress Kristen Bell it would be roughly like this miss Bell is universally considered good-looking but it's not like she's a supermodel or anything the baldies statement she would probably get a few votes in a super hot range Lots around very attractive and almost none at the unattractive end of the graph yeah this is where we start to objectify women but yeah it's it's for science compare her to Megan Fox who might rate like this lots of people in the high on the far right you have the many dudes who think she's the sexiest thing ever and the far left you have the small number of people who have seen her movies poor Megan unlike miss Belle miss Fox produces a strong reaction even if it's sometimes negative now let's look back at the two real users from before this time with their own graphs so yeah like I said OkCupid uses a 1 to 5 star system as so down here we've got the 1 to 5 systems ok attractiveness of 3.4 but the messages are 0.8 times the site average attractiveness of 3.3 but messages are two point three times the site average the use of a section of the site where you could upload your pictures rate a bunch of other people's photos and then get back your attractiveness for your photos with that other people are grated on so you could find out which photos were the best and how attractive you were like statistically which is useful stuff to note kind of give yourself some confidence or take you down a peg if you're a bit too arrogant about your looks I don't know the average attractiveness is pretty similar but look how different the standard deviation the deviation at least of the the ratings so a lot of people find her a 1 there are tons of people who look at her and think she is ugly and there are tons of people who look at her and think she's insanely hot but when most people look at her they think she's attractive not that she's insanely hot she's that she's a 4 rather than a 5 I would feel a lot more comfortable that I was not coming across as a misogynistic ass if there were also guys in this but they only did this on women for this particular article to put a fine point on it miss left is in our absolute sense considered slightly more attractive miss Wright was also given the lowest rating 142 percent more often yet MS Wright gets three times as many messages you can be more ugly to a lot of people but get more messages you can be more desired in this particular context even if more people consider you ugly so polarization can be a good thing that's what I'm getting at here when we began pairing other people of similar looks and profiles but different message outcomes this pattern presented itself again and again les messaged women was usually considered consistently attractive whereas the more message woman often created variation in opinion here are a couple more examples okay so it was male opinion so this only discusses guys they might not have included lesbians or bisexual women I don't know if they had any other gender options on the site at the time so what is it about this photo that polarizes opinions so much more than this photo those women aren't that dissimilar either in terms of their looks different eye color but it can't all be down to that the lighting is that one of the big things I think we felt like we were onto something so being math nerds we put on sweatpants and did some work yes it was standard deviation okay I'm not an idiot our first result was to compare the standard deviation of a woman's votes to the messages she gets we found that the more men disagree about someone's looks the more they like them okay so here's the deviation versus the messages this is the the multiple so like how many more messages or let a fewer messages they get compared to the average person of the same kind of attractiveness more consensus here these people or most people would consider attractive but then you start getting more polarization as you go here this is like a scale of emo Ness okay now she looks she could be perceived as emo but like up here you start the top tier you got lil bear the eyeliner being a bit heavier and then BAM listen to Avril Lavigne's albums full-on emo nests near the top really polarizes people but because it polarizes people it makes this person more attractive and more desirable as you can see a woman gets a better response from men as men become less consistent in their opinions of her so taking a second here this really hit me when I read through this it made me think rather than trying to appeal to everyone it's a good thing that I have something about me that I personally like that really differentiates me there really makes some people think of me as ugly in terms of dating it makes me way more attractive to the people who do like me statistically if this is applicable to guys as well and the analysis of those statistics are accurate so this this made me feel a lot more comfortable about looking weird to people because the people that I don't look weird to will find me more attractive that made me a lot more comfortable about relationships and like my dating life and stuff like that I think it's funny that for me it took an analysis of 60,000 people 600 messages and over a million votes to feel a little more comfortable about myself they actually went into much more detail creating an algorithm for this so that's like the specific algorithm for how to calculate how many messages you might get based on your ratings so see they're like having ones and having fives actually increases your chances whereas these are decreases so yeah here's the takeaways for this particular part the more men who say you're hot the more messages you get men who think you're cute actually subtract from your message count so if you are holding off on like getting a tattoo or something and your dating life is struggling perhaps it's worth getting that tattoo since will polarize people some people will hate that tattoo some people will really like it that will push you perhaps from a 4 to a 5 for some people if someone doesn't think you're hot the next best thing for them to think is that you're ugly I love that feels like your Fall Out Boy lyric or something what we think is going on suppose you're a man who's really into someone if you suspect other men are uninterested it means less competition so if you look at someone and you think they will put off other people I might have a chance that that might encourage you to get in touch on a dating site so you have added incentive to send a message yeah you might start thinking maybe she's lonely maybe she's just waiting to find a guy who appreciates her least I will get lost in the crowd maybe these small thoughts plus the fact that you really think she's hot prod you to action you send her the perfectly crafted opening message sup on the other hand a woman with a preponderance of 4 votes someone conventionally cute but not totally hot might appear to be more in demand than she actually is to the typical man considering her she's obviously attractive enough to create the impression that other guys are into her but maybe she's hot enough for him to throw caution and grammar' to the wind and send her a message it's the curse of being cute ok so the overall picture looks something like this if everyone's interested and I'm interested I'll take my chances if everyone's interested and I'm not interested not my type if everyone's not interested and I'm interested she's all mine if everyone's not interested and I'm not interested yeah but that's one way to phrase it so here what you can do about this take whatever you think some guys don't like and play it up yeah this is what I've been trying as well I bet this works both ways just people in general not just guys who are attracted to the girls as you've probably already noticed women with tattoos and piercings seem to have an intuitive grasp of this principle so yeah here are two examples if you have piercings if you have tattoos prominent hair colors unless that's real in which case that's so cool doing something to yourself that makes some people consider you ugly is a good thing in terms of making other people consider you attractive if that's what you want we now have a mathematical evidence that minimizing your flaws is the opposite of what you should do I don't know if I jump that far maybe there are some flaws which generally universally considered unattractive then there's the the ethical argument of should you be straightforward with stuff like that I personally think you should as opposed in that sense every photo I ever take should have my teeth really prominent if you're a little chubby play it up if you have a big nose play it up if you have a weird snaggletooth play it up statistically the guys who don't like it can only help you and the ones who do like it will be all the more excited that article I thought was absolutely fascinating it only hit me so hard because data behind it seemed quite solid perhaps people who like women who look more emo or who have tattoos they might send more messages than guys who are into women who do not have tattoos or do not wear heavy makeup or whatever so perhaps it's not so much about the mindset of oh they are less desirable I have those types of guys who are into that just are more forward with their messages I wonder if there were any analyses of this particular blog the math behind OkCupid matching algorithm is surprisingly simple the first thing we needed to match people up was data the best way to get data quickly from people is to just ask for it so we decided that OkCupid should ask users questions do you want to have kids one day how often you brush your teeth do you like scary movies and big stuff like do you believe in God this is why I think dating sites are brilliant because it allows you to immediately filter out the people who are not a good long-term match for you if you are looking for a long-term relationship the do you believe in God example is a pretty big one there might be some couples out there where persons in a theist on one person is religious the work just fine but I know a lot of people who who would not want to be in a relationship with someone who did not have the same opinion when it comes to religion whether they want to have kids and things like this it's so useful to be able to immediately filter out those people it stops a lot of that pain that would come from meeting someone getting along really well then discovering you have this fundamental difference in opinion that means the relationship can't work this prevents a lot of freaking heartbreak that's also why I think tinder is not quite as good just something like OkCupid when it comes to longer term relationships most people on tinder perhaps they aren't all looking for long-term relationships okay I'm just trying to look for a little more criticism of the article someone else is very about it imagine the following scenario from an average guy's perspective let browse matches we are talking eight years ago so old memes oh damn she got it the email three days later no response look at her profile again she's logged in since it's in the email that means one thing that goddamn bitch rejected me change vote at one star hide match ragequit how do I know I do this all the time what a kind soul not trolling what's up with the less something-something how did that start is it used as a signal that you're a redditor yes that's definitely what it is OkCupid telling me how being cute is detrimental when I'm often told I'm cute is not what I need okay we get it you're cute let's move on with our lives please stop being a sensitive little bitch and appreciate the science behind our analysis even if it is at the cost of your fragile bitch self-esteem come on shake I want to calm it down a little bit I appreciate the sentiment perhaps there are nicer ways to express that this is a hard truth it looks like the women who get the high response rate are the vamp ish ones vamp ish how vamp ish is she oh this one's not vamp it at all I think he's looking for the word emo I don't know how interesting this will be I found this stuff fascinating there's tons more articles so let me know if this is the kind of thing you'd like me to do more analysis of it's super fun to talk about and I'm particularly interested to hear whether you think there are any problems with this kind of it's very easy to take articles like this as gospel but it's important to try and be critical with it as with any science so we can be more accurate say I'm I'm off to get another tattoo cheers for watching and have a nice day do remember the most important thing of all did knock knock man Dave oh I thought I told you to stop breaking and entering yeah perhaps where I came in through the front door that's still Breaking and Entering no and the door was already walking open so it's only entering reeking of open doors curiosity stream has thousands of documentary shape doors just waiting for you to open that's not a good segue look mate I've just about had it up to here with your fucking negativity if you think you can do this bear then you have a fucking go okay fine hi are you a nerd like me cool then you should check out curiosity stream for just $2.99 a month you can check out thousands of documentaries and nonfiction titles and a wide variety of topics available worldwide sorry mate carry on I enjoyed this one called cities of the future it showed some interesting examples of places people are experimenting with new technologies and ways to improve cities some of it didn't even look real it was pretty cool there's a whole load of that series on there about how technology might impact different aspects of society in the future I thought it was super interesting aniseh narrated by Sigourney Weaver and if you go to my link curiosity stream slash boy in a band and use code boy in a band you can get your first 31 days completely free that's not the URL I arranged yeah well I want them to know I get a better conversion rate than you do mate you won't get fucking hard for what I got unlike you I have courage he's so confident how about a bet I mean if I get more signups then you have to stop breaking into my house and knock politely like a normal human yeah bets off then me okay fine you have to wear some shoes next time like breeziness emoto's fine but if I win you have to do my strip for the next one of these things deal shake on it you fucking pleasure as always may please go to curiosity stream comm slash boyinaband and use the code boy in the band it's literally free for a month please yes oopsie time hello fellows and fella today we're going to be taking a look at the mistakes I made in the last video talking about Elon Musk's AI company and all the terrifying and impressive things it can do this is my friend Hannah if you see any mistakes in this video there um down in the comments and maybe your comment correcting David so one of the first things to point out Perez and his friends were astonished to see the unicorn herd so it knows that unicorns are in herds it knows that unicorns are in herds nope no horses are in herds unicorns aren't real sorry to burst your bubble there well no need to be so mean about it Micaela someone pointed out that unicorns are in blessing there are 22,000 freaking results on Google when you search for it ok statistically it looks like I'm edging it out but both both are pretty similar I don't really care my main issue is they weren't unicorns and story people were saying oh yeah this AI is stupid it thinks that unicorns have 4 horns if a human came across a horse with 4 horns on they would say that's a 4 horns unicorn whether or not it makes sense that's what your average person would probably think I like that a lot of people were discounting the ability of this AI based on this ignoring the fact that everything else is contextually relevant this is the nicest one I found Dave I love you and your pronunciation of Jorge is delightful calling it Jorge made it a lot easier thank you oops I forgot Danish and Iceland what also Vikings proceeds to apologize in Japanese perhaps I should learn how to apologize in Danish there was one guy you like part Danish part Japanese so he was country really sometimes you hear Danes say sorry which is a loanword from English ok so I'll apologize in the Danish way sorry I use fun scoot to apologize it's cute it was talking about how open AI was really good at dota 2 and was meeting other humans someone had pointed out it's no any of being OK into it it can only play a handful of heroes with item limitations then that makes it a lot less complicated than I thought it was but still even if even if you were if it's just a couple of carrots it's not still pretty impressive I can only show there's one here that made me smile hey it just sounds like a bee I mean rec manonoff composed flight of the bumblebee which 99% of the planet has heard in one way or another seems that was what that bit was sampling I think I must have been where I got it from however rec manonoff did not compose flight of the bumblebee he arranged it it was originally composed by rimsky-korsakov your hair is looking more pink than red oh really shut up no it's not it's not see maybe dave-o can use the sponsor money for some shoes I'll suggest it oh yeah Elon Musk is always posting fear-mongering tweets about AI yet he has the company specifically started to work on creating AI hypocrisy they name is must the company is specifically made to try and develop a ice safely so that it can be understood better rather than to develop it without thinking too much about the ethics or safety of it from what I understand I thought this was an interesting mistake I talked about where we're potentially going heading towards a really horrific dystopia Hilda rack here pointed out we've lived in a dystopia pretty much since recorded history really and I think that's a fair point Lucca pedia thinks it's a community or society that is undesirable or frightening if this is the definition that seems fair where we're currently in a dystopia that's been the end of oopsy time thanks for joining me with my friend Hannah she's for watching and have a nice day

Channel: Boyinaband

Views: 1,540,860

Rating: 4.9572954 out of 5

Keywords: boyinaband, okcupid, ugly, hot, attractive, dating, plentyoffish, how hot, cute, people try, to be more desireable, by being more ugly, weird huh, elon musk, ai, unicorn, oopsie time

Id: qLNwa_hoz4w

Length: 23min 52sec (1432 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/blacksnow666]

Isn't this like, High School level stuff? Yeah, a guy might go after you because he thinks you aren't in demand like that. He doesn't have to be super interested, but you're available so he makes efforts towards you.

I think there's a difference between being ugly and guys kinda being divided on your looks. I think ugly connotates that most men, in general, don't find you attractive. This kinda implies that these "ugly" women still get a fair amount of attention because of their looks.

I guess to summarize my thoughts, this phenomenon probably works best if you're still attractive to some degree. Like a 5/6 and up, I don't see this being very valid for conventionally unattractive people.

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EDIT: Then there's a cultural context that could be added. People tend to be attracted as to what is common amongst their own ethnicity. So how many people are ACTUALLY ugly and how many just look too "ethnic" for certain peoples?

[u/flawy12]

I think this is the article he was using as a reference.

https://gizmodo.com/the-math-of-beauty-5729660

[u/[deleted]]

I guess it's worked for me, despite my weight.