Reprint on high-status hippies
In previous item on Senior and Junior Niedermeyer, I mentioned the high-status hippies who used the hippie era as a springboard for prosperity. This deserves a slightly edited reprint of a 2015 item on the fact that fashionable people retain fashionable beliefs.

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Here's a typically stupid article on culture in the Atlantic.

Main point of article:

The congressmen with facial hair were thought to be more masculine, less feminist, and less likely to support women’s rights, Herrick wrote in a blog post about her work. As a consequence, women and self-identified feminists in the group said they were less likely to vote for them.

Totally confused. Probably some truth in the observation, but the article jumbles up every possible constant and variable in discussing causation.

Unpacking.....

Start with one constant rule: Attractive people hold fashionable beliefs.

Like most rules of behavior, this is far from absolute. Circumstances and random shit can get in the way. Still, it's a fairly valid generality. Why is it mainly true?

Attractive people get most of what they want. Jobs, mates, status.

For obvious reasons, culture tells us that the way to get jobs, mates and status is to follow the currently fashionable beliefs and behaviors. Culture also makes it easier to follow fashionable beliefs and behaviors.

Therefore, most people start out doing the "right" things. Attractive people get good results, so they have no reason to change. They continue doing the "right" things and believing the "right" beliefs. Unattractive people get poor results, so they lose faith in the fashionable beliefs and start doing unconventional things.

The rest is temporary variables. The permissibility of beards is strongly variable. In 1850 every man had a beard unless forbidden by religion or occupational necessity. In 1950 every man was clean-shaven unless forbidden by religion. At those points in fashion history you couldn't use beards as an indicator.

Since 1960 whiskers are purely optional. Thus owning a beard is a pretty fair indicator that a man is unattractive and wants to improve his appearance.

So we have the basic causation. Variable: Beard means unattractive. Constant: Unattractive men have been forced to examine fashionable beliefs closely, because adhering to fashion doesn't work.

One more variable: Currently fashionable beliefs about human characteristics and behavior are wildly delusional, which means that unfashionable beliefs are inevitably closer to reality. This wasn't always the case. Before 1960, the beliefs you'd pick up from books and schools and media were reasonably close to the facts of Nature, so unattractive people were more likely to hold delusional views like feminism. Since 1960 the Correct Line has been steadily accelerating toward an unimaginable set of bizarre psychotic hyperdelusions. As late as 1990, any human who held today's LEGALLY REQUIRED beliefs would have been considered dangerously insane.


Professor Polistra attempts to illustrate. Top part of graph shows the range of fashionable views (beige blob) in 1950. The fashionable blob was clustered near truth. Unconventional views thus had to move away from truth. Bottom part of graph shows the range of fashionable views in 2015. The blob is literally off the chart, beyond all measurable lines of falsehood. Unconventional views have to move closer to truth because there's no room on the more delusional end.


Closing the circle back to the original survey: The politicians with beards were correctly perceived as low-status and unattractive, and that's why the female voters didn't like them. The female voters correctly attributed low-status beliefs to the low-status men. The rejection was based on the primary judgment of status, not on the secondary beliefs. We're not allowed to think in terms of caste, so the judgment had to be associated with ideology.

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