The reality is, if you have a list of doctors and their pictures and know nothing of them except for their appearance I highly doubt anyone would pick the obese person as their first pick.
It’s just reality. Someone capable of going through medical school is capable of reducing their weight to being merely overweight as opposed to obese.
People going on “yeah if they know their stuff” are missing the point. You don’t know if they know their stuff at all.
As for unattractive, yes that’s bad.
Being fat is different to smoking.
To get high from smoking you must smoke. To love food you don't have to be fat.
Being an alcoholic is more comparable. Or a two pack a day smoker.
A doctor should be vaping though. If they don't vape that is bad. But I feel like these things are small compared to all the other problems we have with doctors, like overwork.
I had to fact check and he did say it -
https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like-surg...
Realistically, adding any non essential criteria to my search would narrow my choices down to possibly a very small number.
Many parents even interview pediatricians before choosing who to go with.
There's a big difference between behaviours applied to self and knowledge applied at work.
I think it would depend on the specialty. I wouldn't really care if my radiologist is obese. He can read and interpret my scans just fine. Same for pathology, endo and renal docs. I don't think I'd want an obese ER doc as CPR is pretty tiring, same with my anesthesiologist- don't want them sweaty and out of breath while trying to put in an airway.
Maybe he's so skilled that his employers (e.g. hospital) disregarded his appearance?
Or perhaps you were thinking if he's sloppy with his appearance, he'll be sloppy providing care.
Or maybe doctors should just wear fat suits.
He also had bad teeth.
It's possible that they're obese due to some condition relatively out of their control, or that they're working on it, (and my answer applies specifically to the US) but when 40% of the US is obese, it more than likely reflects on them as a person and their values.
This is contradicted by the very large body of scientific literature "proving" phenomena that are in fact imaginary.
In the most sincere way, I implore you to prove them wrong. Even judging only by your articulate comment (and in a place like HN), you have a lot going for you. Be the outlier with the personality and drive that the studies can't account for.
It would be better to find ways of hiring without such biases being available. Like blind auditions for musicians. We should be aiming to hire the best person for the job, not trying to be aware of such biases and then trying to compensate the other way for such things.
At least your appearance and test scores are mutable characteristics.
Discriminating against unattractive people, has no equivalent justification. In fact, discriminating against unattractive people exaggerates a society-wide bias against unattractive people.
Ironically, it turns out that discrimination against minorities + discrimination against majorities = worse outcomes for everyone.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...
I'm really pretty good at Scala, though.
Videoconferencing seems to encumber both communication and charisma in some ways -- big and small, apparent and subtle.
For example, it seems like even slight latency or difficulty hearing people can make a very smooth interaction seem non-smooth.
And (as was exceedingly painful to me in a recent team meeting), none of the tools currently available would've come close to having a real-world whiteboard. There have been CSCW research efforts at this for a few decades, but, in practice, at the moment, it's usually just a dumb camera&mic, and sometimes screen-sharing.
Maybe, in getting an impression of a person, people haven't yet re-calibrated expectations for the videoconferencing media we're currently stuck with?
And maybe there's still some charisma projection adjustments that individual people can try tweaking, if they want, such with lighting, eye contact, lens distortion, etc.? (As someone who once dabbled in studio portraiture, I'm aware of some ways I could look better on videoconf, but it's been a relatively low priority, compared to countless other aspects of startup tech work.)
W/r/t the whiteboard thing - one of my interviews recently used google jamboard, and my input was lagging by like 30 seconds. I was writing a solution, and talking through it, and one of the interviewers started trying to help by starting a solution directly on top of mine. So apparently I just sounded like I was talking about hypothetical code. No harm, really - the interviewer was embarrassed, we moved on. But it was pretty awkward not inhabiting the same visual reality, and thus building divergent mental models of the interaction.
I live with a therapist, who confirms that their rapport building is encumbered via video chat. She's incredibly warm and emotive, and I think this compensates: her content is presumably affirming, and her tone (which comes through the thin walls) just oozes authenticity and positive regard. Certainly rapport building isn't dead, but the relative value of the parameters seem to have shifted.
You've inspired me to go read one of the guides on videoconferencing lighting I keep seeing. Hopefully to let my, um, inner beauty and competence shine through.
The company behind Invisalign had a blast the last quarter which they attributed to the people doing more Zoom these days. So, it seems it is still about appearances - now it is about whatever appears in the Zoom window. (not a comment on your teeth either way, it is just that Zoom-ing reminded me that my teeth aren't the best around - somehow it looks worse on the computer screen than in the mirror :)
In my teens/early 20s was so common for women to approach me and tell me I have beautiful eyes that I didn't realize they were expressing interest. At my first programming job, a chinese woman came up to me and haltingly said (yes, this was a programming joke): "your eyes are so captivating, like a python's." I said thank you. She blushed and rushed away.
My control here is that my weight fluctuates between 150-180, though, and when I'm heavier and I don't shave, the attention vanishes. Humans are just apes trying to be near the best apes. I'm glad I got a nice mannequin to walk around in, and I'm glad it compensates for the fact that I'm an objectively pretty weird dude. But it kind of sucks in every direction - beauty prevents people from getting really important negative social feedback, and often just exempts people from social consequences and warps their sense of reality. Likewise, preference-ing physical attributes over competence has to drive hilariously iniquitous outcomes, leaving a lot of smart, capable people in inferior positions.
While I'm just talking about random stuff: taking pride in one's appearance is off putting because you didn't earn it. Likewise, being smart/likeable/socially capable are also things that people generally haven't earned. All of the good things in our lives are arbitrary, as are all of the bad things. The things we work for are the only things that are of value - "our actions are our one true possession."
I have a zoom interview soon, we will see how that goes, maybe I need to hold banana or something for scale.
Do you know for a fact that you failed them, or is that just your perception? Interview questions are typically a little more open-ended than you suspect, and not being able to deliver the full answer of what's being asked for isn't a failure when you've only got 30 minutes.
1. They have something to point to if/when they get sued for rejecting someone
2. Make you feel like you failed so you don’t ask for as much money
3. Helps prevent there being >=2 perfect interviews and then dealing with ties
Personally, I find it very surprising most hackers have such a disdain for physical beauty, given the huge ROI for every $ invested - reportedly about 1,000x for Elon Musk personal worth.
Still, only a few CEO seems to have taken action to maximize their appearance, and mostly against their premature baldness. Even that is kind of taboo - while studying before an interview is not, even if it will certainly have a much lower ROI.
Why not hack your appearance?
There are many scientific studies documenting all that, but we ignore them. For an example of all the known variables, check for ex table 1 of the following for "Zero-order Pearson’s correlations between facial appearance and health, with the corresponding p-values and sample sizes":
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5290736/
If you want more example for a given variable, for example the effect of adiposity (we know it's quadratic), read one of the original papers:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6308207/
All this is well known now, as the first study was about 22 years ago:
Perrett, D. I., Lee, K. J., Penton-Voak, I., Rowland, D., Yoshikawa, S., Burt, D. M., … Akamatsu, S. (1998). Effects of sexual dimorphism on facial attractiveness. Nature, 394(6696), 884–887. doi:10.1038/29772
So why do we keep ignoring it, while focusing on other signals like which search engine (or operating systen) you use?
Maximize profits!
> If i want success and you give me a choice of "improve what you do" or "improve what you look like" for the same result, I'll take the first one every time.
In doing so, you are then neglecting the diminishing marginal returns: spend say the equivalent of 1 month or time (or earning from your work) on learning 10 times in a row will yield less than doing that 9 times + improving your appearance once (or twice, you get the idea...)
> I know that people around me care on a deeper level than a lie of appearance
You THINK you know. The studies in law, in resident selection in medicine, etc. seem to prove you wrong - unless you believe hackers are very different from doctors and lawyers at an essential level
Where does this number come from?
This meant that everyone knew which female residents were a larger size and which male residents were a smaller size. Everyone knew this which just added a distraction to an already information overloaded profession.
In a profession where the goal is identifying the people with top competencies, it never made sense to me who signed off on ordering that particular type of scrubs. I would have thought everyone should wear the same color or at least have the colors indicate something useful e.g. speciality.
For me, the discussion ultimately leads to two points:
First, do we believe that the playing field must be leveled for all from birth. If the answer to that is Yes, then you're probably in favor of socialism to some degree, such that opportunity is provided in equal measure to all citizens, regardless of the circumstances they are born into. Personally, I don't find this realistic, but I accept that there are people who do and that's fine.
Second, if you don't feel the playing field should be leveled from birth, but rather that every citizen is born with a set of advantages and disadvantages, then the question is, do we need to afford special attention to those whose disadvantages are insurmountable? Regardless of whether you're born dull or smart, attractive or unattractive, African or Asian American, most Americans can find success in life by making more good decisions than bad and persistently working towards the life they'd like. We have had a 2 term black president, have a black woman vice president, an openly gay presidential candidate, an openly gay cabinet member, multiple black Fortune 500 CEOs, openly gay entertainers, and many wealthy black athletes and entertainers. Achieving success is possible for all, some have to work harder at it than others.
But is such success possible for all? It's obvious to me that the answer is no. I am not referring to those with disabilities, but rather those whose life circumstances guarantee they have zero chance at success as defined in the US today. A kind of worst case situation might be a child born into a one parent household, parent is addicted, and neglects them. They live in the worst school district in the city, and in an area ruled by street gangs. What forces would enable an 8 year old in such circumstances to somehow push through all of that adversity and actually wind up in a college earning a degree that enables him to get a steady professional job? Or expose him to an opportunity to learn a trade, such as electrician or plumber? Or work up the ladder in food service or retail companies? In many cases, he's exposed to drugs, persistent gang violence, likely frightened for his life most of the time and learning that survival means physically subduing others or being subdued by them. Many life lessons about discipline, team work, 'social skills', and earning what you want are not modeled to such a child, and I'd not be surprised to learn there are 100s of thousands of them in America right now.
My view is that if we are going to maintain the approach that hey, we all have advantages and disadvantages, we must recognize that groups faced with insurmountable obstacles to success need an effective accommodation or we are failing overall as a society.
No, what I would like to see is the occasional acknowledgement that it might affect a few situations. I do not need any kind of recognition ceremony or anything, just a nod to it. I don't want attractive people to feel bad over it or rub it in their faces, just ... could stand to have fewer people falling all over themselves to say no no, that cannot possibly be.
What you are not free to do is judge someone’s looks and use that as a criteria in the hiring process in jobs where beauty is not a relevant criteria.
If this study proved that X number of over-weight or unattractive people applied, but were rejected at a noticeable clip, how is this not legally actionable?
Bringing it back to tech for a second. We all acknowledge the pipeline problem with women at tech companies. But, in my experience, a lot of your startups are really white across the various job disciplines (from the CEO down to the interns). That stuff is not an accident either, would love to see some studies on this.
I suppose we all need to do a good job filling out the optional questions at the end of a job application that identifies your ethnic background. Where is all this data and how do we get it, and is it possible to dig down into the tech center and really see what’s going on?
Because attractiveness is not a protected class, unlike sex, age over 40, religion, family status, race, or the couple other I must be missing.
So, I wouldn't be surprised if obese/unattractive people still discriminates against those perceived negative characteristics, but I also wouldn't be surprised if that discrimination was to a lower degree than when the person doing the discrimination isn't obese/unattractive.
It’s good to get the data but surely they knew what the results would be?
Next up: “The sun is bright”.
Sadly one of them died recently at ~40, turns out he had an underlying heart condition since birth which might explain alot about his past performance.
Having said that I did know a particularly fat and ugly friend that has a great personality and was quite successful running her own small publishing business. Smarts and drive can shine through no matter what you look like.
If you can't get a job, start your own. Once you start seeing opportunities instead of wages you'll probably never go back.
