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Women's Attractiveness Judged by Software
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to Haaretz, an Israeli team of computer scientists has developed software that ranks facial attractiveness of women. Instead of identifying basic facial characteristics, this software has been designed to make aesthetic judgments — after training. The lead researcher said this program 'constitutes a substantial advance in the development of artificial intelligence.' It is interesting to note that the researchers focused on women only. Apparently, men' faces are more difficult to grade."
There are some obvious criticisms: In the first stage, 30 human participants were asked to rate from 1-7 the beauty of several dozen pictures. For a masters project (which this was), that's a decent sample size. For research and practice, I do not think that will suffice.
Second, this was done using eigenalysis and principle component analysis. While that's interesting, I have not always found that to be a great approach. Five or six years ago, they were all the rage although I cannot really find anything fruitful that has come from applying this to human faces. This also means that they cannot generate the 'most beautiful' face but if they did, it would simply be the composition of all their eigenvectors (in this case, ghostly looking images of faces) into one representing the highest scoring beauty. The lead researcher said this program 'constitutes a substantial advance in the development of artificial intelligence.' Having taken several AI, computer vision & machine learning courses, I don't find this to be at all substantial. An interesting masters project for sure, but several years ago I saw people doing the same things at local universities with the same results.
Why don't they tell us how this scored some celebrities from around the world like say Iman Abdulmajid, Zsa Zsa Gabor & Angelina Jolie? I have a feeling that their system is over-trained and would perform poorly in real life. Facial beauty requires imagination and this system was hand trained on a hundred points. I don't think that's enough but I wish they would have published more results to either prove or disprove my criticisms.
My work here is dung.
"Apparently, men' faces are more difficult to grade."
Or perhaps their bank accounts are easier to derive a "value" from!
I kid, I kid. I think.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Men will nail anything and the women really control sexual interactions. The cost of mating is far lower for men than for women therefore women are far more choosy.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Yes and no. Yes, you'll get a more accurate answer, as far as the machine is concerned, but no, in that the answer will be the lowest common denominator of attractiveness.
When you put enough numbers together, all you really get is the sort of bland result that is acceptable to the largest number of people. The female equivalent of McDonald's food, top 40 music, and white bread...No real room in there for the beauty that can occasionally startle you, stop you in your tracks, that we all look for and seldom find on television.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Not me, but that's pretty much my point. You thought she was beautiful and I didn't, and neither of us is objectively right or wrong.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
you are kidding right? Even programming a very simple algorithm along the lines of
bigger eyes, beauty++
highly symmetrical face, beauty++
triangular or oval shaped face, beauty++
clear skin, beauty++
will give you a pretty good set of matches
-- the cake is a lie
The conclusion was the more 'average' the woman looked, the more attractive she was.
My unscientific opinion is that men tend to rate nearly all women as attractive, and are not very picky beyond that. It's almost a binary, yes/no kind of thing. If pressed a man might be able to say, "this woman is a 6 and this one is a 7" but that rating has no meaning because few, if any, men will pass up the 6 in order to pursue the 7. The male strategy seems to be a shotgun approach - flirt with every woman.
Women on the other hand, seem to rate very few men as attractive, and do seem very picky. A woman will judge a male as "6" and ignore him completely, because she knows a 7 is out there somewhere, if she keeps looking.
In summary, I think that if you picked 10 males and 10 females at random, and then asked 100 or so males to judge the females and vice versa, you would find that the males ranked the majority of the females as attractive, and "in the field" so to speak, you would find the males flirting with all of them. You would find that the females ranked a minority of males as attractive, and "in the field" you would find that those are the only ones they are interested in.
So like you said, an average female face is indeed attractive. This is good news for women. Most of them (and they know this) are attractive to the opposite sex.
The idea that there are no set standards for beauty is wishful thinking. Every guy wants to find a girl who is beautiful and for some reason nobody else has noticed. In reality this never happens. The next time you see a pretty woman in the airport, don't look at her, look at all the guys as she walks by, it's quite noticeable. Attractive people are treated better from a young age and, knowingly or unknowingly, they leverage this asset to get what they want. This is not some quirk in the study of psychology, it's the driving force behind the behaviors that shape evolution. It's a cruel trick of nature that we are not all created equal, and I'm glad we're civilized enough to moderate some of the resulting inequality.
Perhaps, but it turns out if you take one attractive but not perfectly symmetrical face, split it down the middle and combine with its mirror images, the resulting symmetrical faces are not more attractive; they look wrong.
I fell in love, unexpectedly, with a woman who was not a classic beauty.
Within a handful of months, I noticed I was finding women with facial and body characteristics similar to hers more attractive than the magazine beauties I normally ogled. Indeed, the model types started looking odd to me.
Now add in cultural and racial preferences and this "breakthrough" starts sounding like "bullshit".
Yeah, or maybe their teachers and parents put more effort into educating them because these girls "looked smart."
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
I don't believe he ever said or implied that being attractive had no negative points, just that it is an inherent benefit - or perhaps it's better to say weapon - in human social interactions. Somewhat akin to the two-edged sword analogy, it can either help or hurt you. Attractive people either wield their attractiveness knowingly to further their own ends, or unknowingly and to an unknown end. Using it actively can cause unforseen negative repercussions (fanboy stalkers etc.), and using it unknowingly causes all sorts of benefits and detriments to the attractive person and to those around him/her. Being unattractive works in much the same way, albeit with vastly different effects.
There's a quote I can't seem to remember but paraphrased, it's something like this:
If you think no one takes you seriously because you're beautiful, just see how seriously they'd take you when you're ugly.
The human condition is that most of us are a$$holes to people we don't know. Beautiful people tend to have different experiences with jerks, but studies have shown time and time again that they ultimately benefit from their beauty. Including lower rates of depression and teenage suicide as well as other metrics such as paycheck size. When I hear someone prettier than me complain that people don't take them seriously because they are beautiful, it generally annoys me... at least they're getting some attention at all.
It's a similar comparison to a rich person who is stressed out about the fact that they're going to wear the same outfit to two parties. The stress is real, but it's nothing like worrying about whether you can pay your next rent bill.
In my experience, the prettier people who complain about problems due to their attractiveness are not attention whoring, but actually feel as if their attractiveness is a burden, but fortunately for them, they have never actually had to worry about the isolation and other problems that occur when one is unattractive.
The entire philosophy is completely alien to me.
Well, I think that a lot of it is basic, sexual-species instinct. A male who is too picky leaves fewer offspring than a male that is less picky. Thus, we all have the genes of those less picky males, and thus we are less picky. Conversely, a woman makes a huge investment in a child. At least several months and as much as three or four years. A woman who is less picky might get pregnant by a beta male, and then tomorrow, when that alpha male comes along, she can't take advantage of his genes. She loses. So as a result, the more picky females left more fit offspring, and as a result we all carry the genes for picky females.
Contraceptives and abortion haven't been around long enough to change those instincts.
Layered on top of that is our cultural programming, but its effect seems small, often invisible. Culture tells men to commit to one woman and buy her a giant diamond ring, but most men don't (or they do but they cheat) and women complain that men are "afraid of commitment" but that's like saying a bear is afraid to stay awake all winter. Culture tells women - actually, not even culture, most women are smart enough to realize that an average guy with a steady job and no major vices like alcoholism or violence will give them a happier life, but it's just so hard to resist the instinct that says, "bang the dirty guy from the biker gang." LOL!
It's *very* difficult to overcome instinct, especially when you deny that the instinct exists. That's what we do. We pretend that we're special, that we're the only animal without these instincts.
Complaining about being beautiful is like complaining about being rich. The benefits massively outweigh the drawbacks to the point of not even making a difference. Just like when your rich, you can easily make yourself not rich, someone who is beautiful can easily make themselves not beautiful. The reason that beautiful people, particularly women, often get treated like "barbie dolls" is because as a group, they are FAR more likely to be dumb. Why would this be? Because they are human. Humans generally take the path of least resistance. If they don't have to learn, they generally don't learn. A hot woman is way more likely to live well by leveraging her looks than an ugly woman. This is not a judgment of 'women' as much as a judgment of 'human'. Stop for a second and think about whether you would REALLY spend as much time and effort improving your intellect if for your entire adult life, you had a line of women that would buy you whatever you wanted, and have sex with you any time you wanted. I know I wouldn't be as smart.
"All beautiful women who have been stalked, abused, or raped because they are physically attractive, may beg to differ."
I think that every ugly woman who has been stalked, abused, or raped irrelevant of their physical appearance may beg to differ with you.
It's real simple. Any beautiful woman that REALLY thinks being beautiful is worse than being ugly is too stupid to have a valid opinion. If she really believed it, and was smarter than a retarded monkey, she would just stop being beautiful.
Yes, but there is empirical evidence of highly parallel preferences among males that indicate the presence of common perceptions regarding what constitutes beauty.
The fact that there are no empirical standards for beauty is not due to the absence of any common standards for beauty (albeit not universally applicable), rather our inability to represent the metrics of the mind using mathematical or linguistic representations.
I hate printers.
I would mention that Cindy Crawford had a mole on her face. In fact, at one time 'beauty marks' were considered highly attractive in all women, so much so that they would apply then with makeup if they had none of their own. What does that do to the symmetrical theory?
Qxe4
Yes, I'm assuming the team was mostly male... hopefully I don't offend anyone with this obvious assumption.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Don't be sorry. I hope I don't sound patronising or like I'm lecturing; I just wanted to share my view and thoughts on the situation.
I don't think wealth = attraction, although wealth is often associated with high social status/value. But you don't have to be wealthy to have high social value.
Maybe your ex really is a gold digger (and I don't mean that in a spiteful or hateful way) and wanted to be with the other guy because he lavished so much money and expenses on her. But I think it's important to realise that all that wealth means nothing... she doesn't really love him, she just loves being pampered and spoiled by him. And that definitely does not equal attraction, it only equals affection (big difference). Affection can get men sex, but only grudgingly, and in increasingly fewer spurts. It's a bit like the other guy is paying her for sex; that kind of arrangement won't stay happy or continue forever, so he's the big fool in all of this.
Once again, I want to emphasise: wealth does not automatically mean attraction. In fact, spending lots of money on a girl is typically the way that "beta males" get women to grudgingly have sex with them. (there are exceptions of course, you can spend lots of money on a girl and still be a complete stallion and ladies man, as long as you know how attraction works)
In any case, the one thing that is for certain is that your ex seems quite messed up emotionally and is definitely not a person you should stay in contact with. In fact, it's probably best to have no contact at all. Unless of course you want to be the guy on the side who she goes to for hot sex, but that's probably not the wisest or most ethical thing to go with.
I'm sorry it's turned out like this, but as you say, it's good that you at least found out before you married her. I agree with the other poster, there are plenty of other wonderful women out there, just waiting to be discovered. You thought you had your special girl, but it turns out she wasn't the right one. That's life, and that's OK; you just carry on and continue your journey.