As is so often the case, the most interesting thing to read on Sundays is the Washington Post column titled "Unconventional Wisdom."
Today's edition theorizes that smarter people are more likely to be good-looking, shows that ex-homeless people are less likely to pity the currently-homeless, and suggests that Bush should think about going on Letterman or Leno within two weeks of the election.
The "smarter people are prettier people" theory is at least ten years old. I remember reading it in Dan Seligman's old "Keeping Up" column in Fortune magazine.
ReplyDeleteYears ago my daughter had to participate in a high school science fair. She did a wholly forgetable project but we talked about testing the "smarter = prettier" hypothesis if she had to do it again the following year: take a yearbook from a neighboring school and show her peers pictures of the students, asking them to rank them on the basis of looks, then compare the results to their class rank. But the teacher who had been the science fair liason retired and her school never participated again. She never did the experiment.