Women's Attractiveness Judged by Software 348
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."
Original Paper & Obvious Criticisms (Score:5, Insightful)
There are some obvious criticisms:
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.
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.
Wrong Metric! (Score:5, Insightful)
Or perhaps their bank accounts are easier to derive a "value" from!
I kid, I kid. I think.
requires external criteria (Score:5, Insightful)
As we all know.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Even beyond that... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Even beyond that... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Even beyond that... (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:more average is more attractive (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Even beyond that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:more average is more attractive (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
what of love? (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
Re:Something ommitted (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Even beyond that... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Even beyond that... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:As we all know.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:more average is more attractive (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Even beyond that... (Score:3, Insightful)
"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.
Re:Someone doesn't know the definition of empirica (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Skin smoothness (Score:3, Insightful)
Chicks before D**** (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I'm assuming the team was mostly male... hopefully I don't offend anyone with this obvious assumption.
Re:Woman scientists will retaliate... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.