I think the issue might be deeper than that. There might be varied opinions on breast size, but pretty much everybody will agree that perky breasts are more beautiful than breasts that are hanging and collapsed as often happens after breastfeeding. But even in that case, breast augmentation is looked down on. Even where a majority could …
I think the issue might be deeper than that. There might be varied opinions on breast size, but pretty much everybody will agree that perky breasts are more beautiful than breasts that are hanging and collapsed as often happens after breastfeeding. But even in that case, breast augmentation is looked down on. Even where a majority could agree on the aesthetic value, it is still a somewhat controversial choice.
Maybe the trigger is exactly that it is possible to overdo it. Carefully applied botox will make the skin look younger in ways no cream will ever approach, but we have all seen the stiff faces that results from overdoing it. Same with breast augmentation. Someone getting their breast slightly adjusted to look more shapely will hardly be noticed, other than people regarding them as a bit more attractive, but we have all seen the giant balloons that some women ends up with.
It's hard to overdo teeth straightening or wart removal, but most other kinds of surgery can be taken all the way to end up looking like a circus act.
It's mostly religious conservatives who make body modification controversial. Speaking as someone who grew up as a hardcore evangelical Christian, the religious right has always seen vanity and recreational sexuality as sinful.
The fact that people can overdo some procedures only makes them more obvious and horrifying; breasts that are too large (whatever "too large" is as experienced by the viewer) or faces that are too stiff (again, as experienced by the viewer) create a knee-jerk reaction in most people. But it's the intellectual resolution that says "...and also that's not what God intended" that makes the subject polarizing.
For what it's worth, I'm fine with Hunter Schafer, Martina Big, Valeria Lukyanova, and really even athletes who use steroids. Change your gender, change your race, trade health for strength, add a phone charging port so your cellphone addiction is never threatened by low battery warnings, whatever.
There might be a more secular version of "that's not what God intended".
Beauty (clear skin, symmetry, signs of fertility, etc..) is an indicator of genetic fitness. It is one of the main factors we (at least subconsciously) use to determine if a potentially partner would be a good reproductive match for us.
You could say that cosmetic surgery is a kind of false advertising. What you see is not what you get. You are put at risk of reproducing with someone of less genetic potential than you thought.
This could tie in to Tove's point that it might be great for the individual (who get an advantage), but a potential disadvantage for the society at whole.
Yes, true, and it's good to come across people who can think sensibly about these things! Nevertheless, most wealthy urban liberal blue tribe body modifiers were never going to reproduce anyway. Evolutionarily speaking, those people are all sort of partying until the lights go out.
The only kind of body modification breeding adults are into is the tattoo, and I don't know of anyone who was fooled into thinking their paramour's genetic quality was artificially inflated because they had a really awesome tat.
I think you're right that there is a clear limit between the acceptance of beauty measures that can be overdone and those that can't. A related interpretation is that the dividing line has something to do with the spending of brainpower. When questions are simple people are urged to action, when they are difficult people are urged to just accept things.
For example, there is a very simple answer to the question "When should a wart be removed?" (As soon as possible, if it can be done at a reasonable cost). Also there is a simple answer to the question "How bad does acne need for treatment to be justified?" (Not bad at all, because treatment is often easy). And the question "How crooked teeth are too crooked?" tends to be answered by dentists with teenaged patients, giving it a professional aura.
By contrast, questions like "How big should a nose be allowed to be" or "How much should breasts be allowed to sag before operating on them becomes justified?" are genuinely difficult and a matter of taste. It complicates things that far from all breasts are round from the beginning (a search for Zulu Reed Dance gives probably the world's best unselected sample of youthful breasts, for example
Establishing norms for how round breasts should be before something should be done would be very costly. A significant minority of young women would be socially required to go under the knife.
If the limit for unconditional social acceptance of plastic surgery is when the decision to operate starts to require brainpower, I think transsexual plastic surgery logically belongs to the socially unaccepted side: The question whether to look male or female currently takes up unprecedented amounts of teenage brainpower.
> a search for Zulu Reed Dance gives probably the world's best unselected sample of youthful breasts
You always like to use equatorial populations as a stand in for natural subtropical/midlatitude/subarctic populations. I don't think it works. Don't skin textures differ with ancestry, just like pigmentation, height, body fat distribution, nose shape, etc?
>>Don't skin textures differ with ancestry, just like pigmentation, height, body fat distribution, nose shape, etc?
Yes! And in that light I find it all the more interesting that the distribution of breast shapes doesn't differ much between the Zulus and the teenage girls I have spent time with naked myself. Other aspects of the female anatomy differ much more between populations.
If you know of any representative, unselected sample of nude or semi-nude European women, please tell me. I have tried, and failed, to find pictures that show how a representative sample of European women actually looks without clothes. So far without much success. We simply lack a despotic king that force us all out in front of cameras once in a lifetime.
Well, I guess some things are not supposed to be said. "Spent time with naked" might have been a misleading way of describing the state forcing me to shower with other girls until age 18.
Why wouldn't people be interested in how humans actually look? I find that as interesting as anything else.
Some subjects are ticklish; if you say some things too bluntly you'll raise eyebrows. But I definitely prefer to live in a world where there is a space and place for everything to be said. If you find there are things that can't be said in any way, no matter how carefully or politely, then you are living in a prison created by the smallness of others' minds.
Occasionally speaking bluntly is the price of perpetually thinking bluntly, I guess. Reason enough to think twice before speaking.
According to that coin-nerd article, the pictures have been burned. In general, when I read about Sheldon's pictures I get the impression that almost no one is interested in data: People are busy with either being morally outraged or dismissing Sheldon's conclusions as irrelevant. Few people seem to appreciate that someone systematically registered how Western higher-class people actually look. Ethical or not, it is interesting.
which was one of my favorite posts that no one will ever read. The overwhelming majority of things that were ever made or done are ultimately just lost. You have to fight to maintain and recover the past, and then there's these people who just burn it. They register as being animal-like to me; my cats show the same level of unconcern with the past and future. But the fact that most of what was has been lost means that what survives is merely the tip of this enormous iceberg, and who knows what else could have been there - but likely not *nothing.*
Coincidentally Scott Alexander even wrote a piece only a short time later taking the ignorant contrary view, which I bothered to read and comment on; my comment was just ignored.
By the way, there's something weird about everybody at ACT! I was over there recently mentioning that last post I made, and saw it again; they feel like a closed circuit of Silicon valley Millennials talking about completely meaningless stuff. I wonder what proportion of them are Woke, and just trying to make small talk rather than ignite huge controversies. (They talk about being "grey tribe," rather than blue tribe, but grey tribe doesn't exist.)
I don't know what happened at ACX, but whatever it is, it happened very fast. It is the same with Less Wrong. When I discovered those sites a few years ago they were clearly interesting. All kinds of people who like to think were there. Then something happened very fast, maybe mostly during the last year or two.
I'm thinking of Scott's post about the cycles of subcultures https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures to explain what happened. Rationalists are too peaceful to infight. Instead, when enough people found the rationalist movement, a core group formed and that core group was able to nudge more peripheral people out with sheer boredom. I have now given up on ACX and only glance at it once in a while. I enjoyed the meet-ups a lot, but I fear they are developing along the same route.
Huh. What was wrong with it? It's still sitting there with my own Like on it - the proverbial dollar you put in the tip jar to make people feel like it's normal to put more in.
> Scott's post about the cycles of subcultures
Well, I think that was already after the rot. Reading it over, it looks extremely close to other ideas bandied about online. But rather than getting rid of the pathological focus on status that rationalists always obsess over, it got rid of the psychopaths and Narcissists, who seriously exist, and are seriously obsessed about status, and if Meika Loofs Samorzewski could *ever* make any sense, I'd be seriously interested to read what he thought about it.
The fire went out at SSC/ACX because Scott stopped feeding it. At least, that's the way it looked to me: the smarter people caught on first, and boiled off. Those who remain remind me of the fanbase of the Reimagined Battlestar Galactica by season 4, after Saul Tigh "was a Cylon" and Starbuck "came back from Earth." Or, if you don't care about me bashing Christians, they remind me of Christians now that evolution is a thing.
Hey by the way, you kept recommending I read some lady's work, but I never had time. I have time now! What was her name again? She had ideas about religion...
I think this is true, but I also think it breaks the social contract in a more subtle way.
We all know that that beautiful people have it easier in life. Plenty of studies have shown that beautiful people get better jobs, higher salaries, better mates, etc, and while we may not exactly like it, it is somewhat accepted as just the way the cards are dealt.
Cosmetic surgery is kinda like cheating in the game of life, and it generates a lot of resentment. Why should you be allowed to jump the line when I still have to stand where I am?
It's a bit weird as you could in some way see it as democratising beauty, making some of the same life advantages available to those not as genetically gifted, but that is not really how it works out.
I can't say I know any hard figures, but is this the way cosmetic surgery is actually being used in most cases? As much as I see of it, it is more of a way to place oneself in a certain social category than as a way to get a competitive edge at the mainstream markets for labor and dating.
Breast augmentation, nose reduction and lip injections look like the female equivalent of visible tattoos on males: Tattoos don't make a man more handsome, really. Rather, they place him in a certain aesthetic and social category. I think that is what most nose-reduced, lip-augmented young women gain to: The clear belonging to a certain class of people.
Anything garish enough to be clearly identifiable as the result of surgery, and especially when done by young people, is clearly more for group affinity than objectively becoming more attractive.
But discrete facial lifts, botox, lifted breasts or mommy makeovers are incredible common. In some environments, like around professional business women, continuing to look young and vital is a almost a prerequisite and certainly an advantage, resulting in places like NYC having loads of clinics where you can drop-in and get it done discreetly.
Some years ago I was to dinner with a large group of business women in NYC, and the hot topic of the evening was "lunchbreak botox" with a lively discussion of which clinics were the best and most conveniently located. I was really surprised how accepted, even expected, it was among them.
I think the issue might be deeper than that. There might be varied opinions on breast size, but pretty much everybody will agree that perky breasts are more beautiful than breasts that are hanging and collapsed as often happens after breastfeeding. But even in that case, breast augmentation is looked down on. Even where a majority could agree on the aesthetic value, it is still a somewhat controversial choice.
Maybe the trigger is exactly that it is possible to overdo it. Carefully applied botox will make the skin look younger in ways no cream will ever approach, but we have all seen the stiff faces that results from overdoing it. Same with breast augmentation. Someone getting their breast slightly adjusted to look more shapely will hardly be noticed, other than people regarding them as a bit more attractive, but we have all seen the giant balloons that some women ends up with.
It's hard to overdo teeth straightening or wart removal, but most other kinds of surgery can be taken all the way to end up looking like a circus act.
It's mostly religious conservatives who make body modification controversial. Speaking as someone who grew up as a hardcore evangelical Christian, the religious right has always seen vanity and recreational sexuality as sinful.
The fact that people can overdo some procedures only makes them more obvious and horrifying; breasts that are too large (whatever "too large" is as experienced by the viewer) or faces that are too stiff (again, as experienced by the viewer) create a knee-jerk reaction in most people. But it's the intellectual resolution that says "...and also that's not what God intended" that makes the subject polarizing.
For what it's worth, I'm fine with Hunter Schafer, Martina Big, Valeria Lukyanova, and really even athletes who use steroids. Change your gender, change your race, trade health for strength, add a phone charging port so your cellphone addiction is never threatened by low battery warnings, whatever.
There might be a more secular version of "that's not what God intended".
Beauty (clear skin, symmetry, signs of fertility, etc..) is an indicator of genetic fitness. It is one of the main factors we (at least subconsciously) use to determine if a potentially partner would be a good reproductive match for us.
You could say that cosmetic surgery is a kind of false advertising. What you see is not what you get. You are put at risk of reproducing with someone of less genetic potential than you thought.
This could tie in to Tove's point that it might be great for the individual (who get an advantage), but a potential disadvantage for the society at whole.
Yes, true, and it's good to come across people who can think sensibly about these things! Nevertheless, most wealthy urban liberal blue tribe body modifiers were never going to reproduce anyway. Evolutionarily speaking, those people are all sort of partying until the lights go out.
The only kind of body modification breeding adults are into is the tattoo, and I don't know of anyone who was fooled into thinking their paramour's genetic quality was artificially inflated because they had a really awesome tat.
The religious will inherit the Earth.
Not if my kids can help it.
I think you're right that there is a clear limit between the acceptance of beauty measures that can be overdone and those that can't. A related interpretation is that the dividing line has something to do with the spending of brainpower. When questions are simple people are urged to action, when they are difficult people are urged to just accept things.
For example, there is a very simple answer to the question "When should a wart be removed?" (As soon as possible, if it can be done at a reasonable cost). Also there is a simple answer to the question "How bad does acne need for treatment to be justified?" (Not bad at all, because treatment is often easy). And the question "How crooked teeth are too crooked?" tends to be answered by dentists with teenaged patients, giving it a professional aura.
By contrast, questions like "How big should a nose be allowed to be" or "How much should breasts be allowed to sag before operating on them becomes justified?" are genuinely difficult and a matter of taste. It complicates things that far from all breasts are round from the beginning (a search for Zulu Reed Dance gives probably the world's best unselected sample of youthful breasts, for example
http://www.africaimagelibrary.com/media/b2f0734a-f0fd-11e0-a42d-c9c1a2266b82-zulu-reed-dance-at-enyokeni-palace-nongoma-south-africa)
Establishing norms for how round breasts should be before something should be done would be very costly. A significant minority of young women would be socially required to go under the knife.
If the limit for unconditional social acceptance of plastic surgery is when the decision to operate starts to require brainpower, I think transsexual plastic surgery logically belongs to the socially unaccepted side: The question whether to look male or female currently takes up unprecedented amounts of teenage brainpower.
> a search for Zulu Reed Dance gives probably the world's best unselected sample of youthful breasts
You always like to use equatorial populations as a stand in for natural subtropical/midlatitude/subarctic populations. I don't think it works. Don't skin textures differ with ancestry, just like pigmentation, height, body fat distribution, nose shape, etc?
>>Don't skin textures differ with ancestry, just like pigmentation, height, body fat distribution, nose shape, etc?
Yes! And in that light I find it all the more interesting that the distribution of breast shapes doesn't differ much between the Zulus and the teenage girls I have spent time with naked myself. Other aspects of the female anatomy differ much more between populations.
If you know of any representative, unselected sample of nude or semi-nude European women, please tell me. I have tried, and failed, to find pictures that show how a representative sample of European women actually looks without clothes. So far without much success. We simply lack a despotic king that force us all out in front of cameras once in a lifetime.
Sheesh I'm just lucky I wasn't drinking anything while I read this response
Note to self: if Tove becomes queen, pornography is out, but nudism is in.
Well, I guess some things are not supposed to be said. "Spent time with naked" might have been a misleading way of describing the state forcing me to shower with other girls until age 18.
Why wouldn't people be interested in how humans actually look? I find that as interesting as anything else.
Some subjects are ticklish; if you say some things too bluntly you'll raise eyebrows. But I definitely prefer to live in a world where there is a space and place for everything to be said. If you find there are things that can't be said in any way, no matter how carefully or politely, then you are living in a prison created by the smallness of others' minds.
And of course everyone is interested in how humans actually look. Unfortunately the last time anybody did that, he was cancelled before cancelling was even supposed to be a thing: https://coinweek.com/confronting-sheldon/ (See the section on Atlas of Women, which made use of photographs from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos )
Occasionally speaking bluntly is the price of perpetually thinking bluntly, I guess. Reason enough to think twice before speaking.
According to that coin-nerd article, the pictures have been burned. In general, when I read about Sheldon's pictures I get the impression that almost no one is interested in data: People are busy with either being morally outraged or dismissing Sheldon's conclusions as irrelevant. Few people seem to appreciate that someone systematically registered how Western higher-class people actually look. Ethical or not, it is interesting.
Yeah this kind of thing is why I'm always saying the past is more than you think,
https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/the-past-was-more-than-you-think
which was one of my favorite posts that no one will ever read. The overwhelming majority of things that were ever made or done are ultimately just lost. You have to fight to maintain and recover the past, and then there's these people who just burn it. They register as being animal-like to me; my cats show the same level of unconcern with the past and future. But the fact that most of what was has been lost means that what survives is merely the tip of this enormous iceberg, and who knows what else could have been there - but likely not *nothing.*
Coincidentally Scott Alexander even wrote a piece only a short time later taking the ignorant contrary view, which I bothered to read and comment on; my comment was just ignored.
By the way, there's something weird about everybody at ACT! I was over there recently mentioning that last post I made, and saw it again; they feel like a closed circuit of Silicon valley Millennials talking about completely meaningless stuff. I wonder what proportion of them are Woke, and just trying to make small talk rather than ignite huge controversies. (They talk about being "grey tribe," rather than blue tribe, but grey tribe doesn't exist.)
I read it...
I don't know what happened at ACX, but whatever it is, it happened very fast. It is the same with Less Wrong. When I discovered those sites a few years ago they were clearly interesting. All kinds of people who like to think were there. Then something happened very fast, maybe mostly during the last year or two.
I'm thinking of Scott's post about the cycles of subcultures https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures to explain what happened. Rationalists are too peaceful to infight. Instead, when enough people found the rationalist movement, a core group formed and that core group was able to nudge more peripheral people out with sheer boredom. I have now given up on ACX and only glance at it once in a while. I enjoyed the meet-ups a lot, but I fear they are developing along the same route.
> I read it...
Huh. What was wrong with it? It's still sitting there with my own Like on it - the proverbial dollar you put in the tip jar to make people feel like it's normal to put more in.
> Scott's post about the cycles of subcultures
Well, I think that was already after the rot. Reading it over, it looks extremely close to other ideas bandied about online. But rather than getting rid of the pathological focus on status that rationalists always obsess over, it got rid of the psychopaths and Narcissists, who seriously exist, and are seriously obsessed about status, and if Meika Loofs Samorzewski could *ever* make any sense, I'd be seriously interested to read what he thought about it.
The fire went out at SSC/ACX because Scott stopped feeding it. At least, that's the way it looked to me: the smarter people caught on first, and boiled off. Those who remain remind me of the fanbase of the Reimagined Battlestar Galactica by season 4, after Saul Tigh "was a Cylon" and Starbuck "came back from Earth." Or, if you don't care about me bashing Christians, they remind me of Christians now that evolution is a thing.
Hey by the way, you kept recommending I read some lady's work, but I never had time. I have time now! What was her name again? She had ideas about religion...
I think this is true, but I also think it breaks the social contract in a more subtle way.
We all know that that beautiful people have it easier in life. Plenty of studies have shown that beautiful people get better jobs, higher salaries, better mates, etc, and while we may not exactly like it, it is somewhat accepted as just the way the cards are dealt.
Cosmetic surgery is kinda like cheating in the game of life, and it generates a lot of resentment. Why should you be allowed to jump the line when I still have to stand where I am?
It's a bit weird as you could in some way see it as democratising beauty, making some of the same life advantages available to those not as genetically gifted, but that is not really how it works out.
I can't say I know any hard figures, but is this the way cosmetic surgery is actually being used in most cases? As much as I see of it, it is more of a way to place oneself in a certain social category than as a way to get a competitive edge at the mainstream markets for labor and dating.
Breast augmentation, nose reduction and lip injections look like the female equivalent of visible tattoos on males: Tattoos don't make a man more handsome, really. Rather, they place him in a certain aesthetic and social category. I think that is what most nose-reduced, lip-augmented young women gain to: The clear belonging to a certain class of people.
Anything garish enough to be clearly identifiable as the result of surgery, and especially when done by young people, is clearly more for group affinity than objectively becoming more attractive.
But discrete facial lifts, botox, lifted breasts or mommy makeovers are incredible common. In some environments, like around professional business women, continuing to look young and vital is a almost a prerequisite and certainly an advantage, resulting in places like NYC having loads of clinics where you can drop-in and get it done discreetly.
Some years ago I was to dinner with a large group of business women in NYC, and the hot topic of the evening was "lunchbreak botox" with a lively discussion of which clinics were the best and most conveniently located. I was really surprised how accepted, even expected, it was among them.
Sounds very plausible. People tend to have a faster life strategy where I live.