The Mathematics of Beauty / Lookism:
Many people do not view it this way, but under the hood, beauty is a function of math.
Society defines a global instance or standard based on the given era, and the central tendency of features across people then becomes the industry standard.
The element that becomes extremely subjective, or “eye in the beholder”, has to do with longstanding culture. You could argue that from a biology perspective, there are evidently universal metrics that are more objective like height, mass, distribution of bf, genetics, whatever we dont care.
The issue in society is that the lookism industry constantly has to clash with how culture creates its own definitions. Much of the reason why globally we have a “central tendency” towards euro-centric standards, is because well, within the past 1000 years, they had their peaks of hoarding all of the wealth, controlling all of the land, and stealing from other countries until their country mogged.
If I was a farmer in 1600 China, of course I would want to be European. But the cultural impact that is still lingering within asian has not gone away. It is almost as if culturally asia cannot let go of being deeply humiliated by Britain, and this is mildly evident in ccp’s hunger to never be weak ever again.
I’ll give you an example of strong culture that refuses to submit to euro-centric ideologies. If euro-centric ideologies convinced all of north america that only white is peak, then what happens to all of the minorities that are nothing like europeans? They all become ashamed to be themselves… Rightfully so, in American history, you could not convince the African Americans that their culture is any less; so they pushed back, now look at our culture ... Kardashians, LA, and the entirety of Miami… White kids from upper middle suburbs in durags... Euro-centralism is paying tax just to conform to the cultures that stood up for themselves, and said, no– we will not conform to your culture. So Now in the 21st century, the beauty standards average across the cultures that stand up for themselves to say, no, “our culture is beautiful”. People in the west want to be darker and curvy, and people in the east want to be white like ghosts and malnourished. They are all equally confused about how to define global variables. But within a fixed “myopic” local function of their culture, they all think that they themselves are correct in definition.
And I think to see how NA has played out across the past decades, some parts of Asia really need to take notes on what it means to be proud of one’s culture.
Parts of Asia have convinced their entire population, especially through modern media/pop culture, that to deviate away from euro-centric standards is “non-beautiful”-- which is bullshit, because you are just convincing your people to not be proud of who they actually are.
Can be seen very clearly in Japan. It is like they could not recover from their history and losing to other countries, and now they define being cool as being white. Even in anime, their main characters are italian, white, or blonde haired. They are victims of their own cultural diminishing. Japanese culture and history is so powerful and beautiful, and yet their institutions do not promote the way of Shogun samurai ranks, traditional practices–they just plaster their entire industry with extremely white looking Japanese people, or mixed/half people to represent the media. That’s so stupid, because Japan's leaders are nothing like that either. It is just a cultural industry that refuses to be proud of who they are.
Korea and China seem to be slightly more proud to be themselves, but it is still most profitable/optimal to conform to euro-centralism in the entertainment industry. It is just global capitalism extrapolated and then applied into their entertainment industry and brainwashing of the youth.
Stating that standards are essentially the vector matrices of features plastered over each other(take a 2x2 grid and map everyone on top of each other), until they converge to some central tendency—-is quite evident from the global scale. Take IMG magazine, or any of the globally renowned agencies. The people who you cannot really tell who they are(extremely diverse ethnic backgrounds), or possibly even alien looking people, are used for the most amount of profitability->a reflection to capitalism becoming more accepting to a wider range of culture.
From the optimistic lens, I think at least in NA, a lot of the bigger cities nowadays do a great job at accepting various cultures. Various big tech leaders are Asian, and the country does fairly well in judging by merit rather than exclusivity through individual background.
It’s certainly one of the reasons that make me happy to be Canadian, rather than being from middle of nowhere Wyoming being confused about my culture.
I think its extremely privileged to even have diversity in a country, and in America I would likely feel patriotic as well. Notice how there exists “American-Chinese”, ABC, but there does not exist “Chinese-American”. If you were italian born and raised in shanghai, they wouldn’t alter your definition to Chinese, you would just be an italian in china. NA is one of few non-ethnocratic places, making it one of the most accepting places to diversity.
It might sound corny, but there’s a reason why people say “if only we could evaluate beauty based on each other's souls and goodness”, because racism is just a natural byproduct of how culture clashes in unique instances.
The Dating Problem ------------------------------------------------------------------
What is this? The bipartition of gender? The XY-Matching algorithm of society? The Paradox of Choice? Non-determinism? The ambiguous set of 2-tuple order pairs?
Unfortunately–whether people are deterministic or not is some real debate between biology, philosophy, physics, psychology, and computer science. For the sake of conversation, if people are relatively non-deterministic, the dating problem should not really be left in the hands of mathematics.
(we are solving the halting problem before scientist understands dating)
If you know math, you may be familiar with the secretary problem–in a contiguous sequence, one should iterate through the initial 37%(1/e) candidates, then shortly after choose the next who beats the rest. Evidently, this makes little sense in practice—since computer scientists won’t be able to schedule enough dates to make this sorting meaningful ! (skull emoji) (bounded input size)–-
and comparison-based algorithms beg the question on metrics(what are you assessing over?) and then the problem gets super Asian…
For example in China, since chinese people like numbers, some regions see parents posting their children with statistics looking to buy / sell(PNL) like wallstreet— but instead of shares, you hedge against future marriages or something. I’m not joking, they literally have data-centers that take calls in order to conduct dating matches, ie: paid matchmaking agents(like real estate except you are the property).
Obviously the west is not as materialistic, so for the sake of conversation we are assuming human relationships hinges on whether you get along, enjoy time, etc. not just materialism, class, sat score, etc.
Human connection variables begs the question of determinism. Given any two types of people, how likely are they to get along? If you are Korean you might believe in MBTI like it's the bible, but unfortunately, that was debunked to be pseudoscience if you read any further of its derivation(pattern recognition of human psychology and behaviour is extremely “grey area”)
So how can you predict people? People change–preferance, situation, etc. How can behaviour be mapped with software? How can data be best used to improve odds? Luckily for you, company profitability may depend on users' inability to match !! If you are satisfied, how will Meta keep you addicted scrolling and consuming their infinite content? Need to keep you sad for business to stay alive. You know the drill !
There are lots of "human relationship" issues at the micro and macro-economic scale, and plenty of reasons to whine or complain like typical human beings do…. However, we are concerned with any suggestions to improve in the scope of math or software. Some core issues are how software implementation maps rigid data-driven metrics to flaws in human nature. Nooooo, not the surjective mapping :( Cooler. How Greedyyy. No bijection :( !
For example, if you were to base a ranking system based on any data, unfortunately due to the way humans behave on apps---there is a huge skew in normal distribution based on shallow variance– variability as stupid as photography: image quality, lighting, angles, props, PSL(blackpill variable), basically data to quantify what upper echelon of appeal humans sort by, etc.
Basically–-human beings behave like stupid animal creatures and use their eyes….duh.
The apps goal of churning profitability is not in the intention to help the problem tho, rather, introduce further problems such as the paradox/illusion of choice. This introduction of the illusion is necessary for monetization on their platforms.
The invention of social media also postulates other relevant phenomenons like “baddie inflation”; used to describe the modern experience of altered–perceived PSL across the digital landscape, negatively impacting homosapien decision making. As in, humans were not meant to see so much soft-ph for their dopamine receptors, but mega-corporations need you to consume consume consume, so businesses can blow huge money on Ad spent. Basically, humans behave like emotional animal things, and capturing any amount of attention is in good business interest (whether ethical or not).
Any software solutions to help this issue? Don’t ask waterloo for sure.. Or any nifty engineer– the internet has lots of goonery intentions behind the decisions it makes. Yes, lots of modern cities and regions are seeing a decline in families or desire to mate, but there are hundreds of other socio-economic factors at play behind the scenes(kinda need a prosperous economy).
Unlike mathematics, humans are quite human. Not “randomness”---but humaniness. The Dating Problem does not get easier with improved statistics either—if anything, the rise of internet devices seems to make infidelity more common amongst the wealthy or “glamour”.
Do you think the kardashain’s never cry? They get depressed too, albeit, possibly for justification foreign to the mass. Noooo :( not your tenth LV bag not being the color desired !
If anything, in practice we may see maximal optimization of key "human stats" equating to less game→possibly due to sacrificing your life towards obtaining said whatever. What if the beauty of being human is to be flawed? Not to be something worth over-optimizing, as no cookie cutter definition of people can make people “ideal”? Maybe that's too much sob for math, and I am also no shakespeare.
[to be continued]
Funny to mention:
I actually find it too ironic that the entire internet just agreed to romanticize, and hard appeal glaze the field of quantitative finance—when shy math nerds were the epitome of “who the jocks are supposed to bully” in hollywood just 10 years ago. Since when did the internet make math so sexy? Math is not that cool… I missed that cultural shift in society—not sure why tiktok larps about this word yet doesn’t yearn for euclidian geometry…