Reddit reviews How to Judge People by What They Look Like

Yet more scientific proof that humans are pretty good at judging people based on their appearance alone, and that old school stereotyping and discrimination was (and still is) scientifically justified - which has all sorts of "disturbing" implications when it comes to passing judgement on the the racism, classism, and phrenology of previous generations, modern police profiling, and the hereditarian views of we Alt-Righters.

And if anybody is interested in looking at more of this type of taboo science, Edward Dutton wrote an entire book on how to judge people based on their appearance alone. And you can watch this YouTube video that he made which conveniently summarized the book's findings.

There is an academic who has been gaining in popularity somewhat recently for his foray into non-pc topics such as his book published for general audiences called How to Judge People by What they Look Like.
While watching a few of his videos, I was struck by an issue that he brought up in his critique of Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now. I have timestamp the video, and the transcription is below. The issue is the direct opposition between the necessities for robust evolutionary selection and the "objectively good things" that individuals desire in their lives.

>He(Pinker) ultimately ends his book by saying” life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, knowledge is better than superstition.”

>Yes that is the case at the individual level. But what he evidently fails to understand, what he willfully doesn’t want to understand, is the importance of group selection. The fact that we know that we can pass on our genes directly by having children, at the kin level by looking after our kin, and at the ethnic level by looking after our group which is an extended genotype. We know from computer models that, all else being equal, it is the more positively and negatively ethnocentric group that will triumph. And therefore if you want to preserve civilization, the only way to do that is to balance enlightenment values with these ethnocentric values which allow the more intelligent society to defend itself against the potentially more ethnocentric enemy at the gate. You have to have that balance right, or you are in serious trouble.

>At the level of group selection, life is not necessarily better than death: It is good to have an optimum number of people willing to lay down their lives for society. Health is not necessarily better than sickness: If you are under conditions of harsh Darwinian selection, and the sick are selected against, then you will become healthier including more mentally healthy and thus more likely to win the battle of group selection. Abundance is not better than want because when groups have abundance the intense Darwinian selection pressures are reduced, and they become less adaptive, less intelligent, and less able to survive in certain conditions. Freedom is not necessarily better than coercion: If everybody is free and nobody is coerced into doing anything then nobody will fight for the good of the society. Happiness is certainly not necessarily better than suffering at the group level because those who are happy can become decadent and can therefore just let things wash over them whereas to those who suffer, it can act as a motivator to great things; it can act as a motivator to genius and great art, and it can make the group less decadent and more warlike and more likely to survive the battle of group selection. Knowledge is not necessarily better than superstition if that superstition holds the group together, elevates its ethnocentrism, and makes it more likely to win the battle of group selection for that reason. And it is not better if that superstition is the thing that motivates people towards Truth.

>He ends by saying (paraphrasing) “the story of knowledge is the story of every tribe, every part of humanity.” Clearly that is not true. Clearly there are some groups who have contributed disproportionally to human endeavor, and they have done so because of the optimum combination of high intelligence, of a sort of pro-social cooperative personality that has managed to produce a society where people have impulse control and can look to the future and can plan and can discover things because it has an optimum level of genius that’s adaptive.

>It’s nonsense. This book is not a defense of science. It’s a defense of a sort of ideology, of a Christian theology without belief in God which has developed out of science. And there is a degree to which it is the enemy of science, and it is the enemy of the kind of society that would be able to sustain civilization and sustain science.


So what would the standards of such a society be? In other videos he admits that increased group intelligence inevitably leads to less superstition and less group selection which nearly always leads to social collapse and then to being overtaken by a less intelligent, more-group-selected tribe. I have not heard him give a definitive answer to this problem, but I agree with him that Pinker is mostly wrong in the above assertions.

Is there some steady state of society in which science and group selection are promoted or did the scientific revolution bring about an inherently unstable state? Is it just the nature of a civilizations to be cyclic in this way?

Got through most of it, ended around here: "BAP asserts an inherent connection between physical health, good looks, and human worth. No 'eye of the beholder' clichés here! I suppose this is the place to note that one constant in BAP’s Twitter feed is pictures of muscled, shirtless beefcake"


Celebrities tend to have predictably progressive politics. What to make of them, then? They'd balk at BAP.


Also, reminds me of this book How to Judge People by What They Look Like.

This may come as a shock, but in reality, there really are differences between races and yes, you really can judge people (in many/most cases) by how they look. Having said that, as a society, we've decided not to go that route, for better or worse. We, as a society (well, actually largely in the West and not really in most parts of the world) have decided to exercise cognitive dissonance with regard to many aspects of humans. For instance, we know for a fact that genetics/bloodlines can breed better dogs/cows/pigeons/plants but in humans we teach our young that genes "hardly matter".

Somehow, humans are exempt from nature's laws in this regard. Yet, on the quiet, sperm banks have all sorts of requirements for donors. So what I'm trying to tell you is, it's not that your work is inherently flawed or "the science is wrong". It's just that scientists today are "prohibited" from looking too deeply into issues that might cause social unrest. Again, for better or worse. If you hope to keep your job and career prospects, stay away from topics like these.