Comments on: People fusion

By: Arbitrary Chronological Signifiers | Cosmic Variance

Arbitrary Chronological Signifiers | Cosmic Variance — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 22:39:27 +0000

[...] People Fusion [...]

By: Cynthia

Cynthia — Fri, 12 May 2006 03:08:09 +0000

Human aesthetics encompasses a haphazard route towards a nondescript landscape of flatness. In contrast, the culinary and musical arts entail an orderly trajectory through a picturesque field of peaks and valleys. Therefore, a landscape explorer needs a minimal degree of navigational skills to traverse the meandering path towards human beauty. On the other hand, a landscape explorer needs a maximal degree of navigational skills to charter the finely-tuned course towards great tasting food and great sounding music!

By: jb

jb — Fri, 12 May 2006 02:50:18 +0000

I’d like to see averages of different pictures of the same person. It seems possible to me that anyone would look better when averaged with several pictures of themself. If those pictures look just as good as averages of different people, then it would seem like a bad sign for the people-fusion theory.

By: Jack

Jack — Fri, 12 May 2006 02:45:26 +0000

I’m afraid that the answer in this case may be rather mundane: the averaging process appears to “airbrush out” facial blemishes! Thus the average face seems to have perfect skin! The superposition principle: on average, you can expect, at any given point, that a bump in the skin will cancel out that nasty acne pockmark!

By: jay

jay — Fri, 12 May 2006 01:07:13 +0000

I always wondered about this. When we have a large number of something differing in some physical property, we usually see a distribution more or less peaked around the average value of the physical property. But, why isn’t it the case with the people’s faces? The averaged face, the most aesthetically pleasing one, is so rare that you got to be extremely lucky to have one close to the average. Does anyone know the answer?

By: anonymou

anonymou — Fri, 12 May 2006 00:55:54 +0000

Alas, the discrete nature of genetic inheritance means that future people are unlikely to look more “average” than people today. Darwin puzzled over this as well, wondering why natural variations weren’t “averaged out” over succeeding variations. Mendel put it straight.

By: citrine

citrine — Fri, 12 May 2006 00:52:31 +0000

Oops!! I read several posts by Clifford and then came to this.

Great post, Sean.

By: citrine

citrine — Fri, 12 May 2006 00:51:38 +0000

Great post, Clifford!

Nancy Etcoff goes into the People Fusion issue in her book “Survival of the Prettiest” (about humans being hard-wired to respond to beauty – which we subconciously equate to fertility). She says that throughout most of human evolution, traits such as asymmetric features were generally due to ill-health or some kind of physical weakness and therefore we learnt to correlate healthy stock with average (as in not too deviant) physical traits. Thus features that are statistical averages became embedded in our subconscious as appealing.