Would the world be a better place if...

[Gr3yL3gion]

No thanks, I'll end up ugly forever.

 

[Firstlady]

You can see it in people's eyes and in their smiles if they are good people. If there's a smile and the eyes aren't smiling back... exercise caution.

*is now paranoid* o_O

 

[CCA]

No because ugly people like me would never get laid because we know have bad personalities to complement our looks.

WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ME

*breaks down in a corner and cries*

 

[BasketCase]

Such a world as described in the OP would probably not even exist.

We are built to be effective creatures, not happy ones. Happiness is no use to you if you're dead, and the traits that define us are chosen, first and foremost, for whether they help us to stay alive, not whether they make us happy.

It's even been proven in laboratory experiments. Such as one project I read about on the web in which two monkeys were placed in adjacent cages, each cage rigged with a lever which, when pressed, dispensed a treat to the monkey in the other cage.

The results were rather disturbing. "Nice" monkeys routinely got stepped on by their peers. When the other monkey learned that he was paired with a "nice" monkey, he pretty quickly stopped pressing his own lever and ceased to reward the "nice" monkey.

The results persisted when the monkeys were removed from the cages. Nice monkeys were mostly ignored rather than recognized for being nice.

However, there is a plus side: "evil" monkeys (who never pressed their lever no matter what) got stepped on as well, and this behavior also persisted outside the lab cages--evil monkeys were actively disliked, and sometimes even physically attacked. The big picture, however, is that "nice" was not the best way. The most effective method for a monkey to gain respect--and therefore treats--from his or her peers was a mixture of nice and evil.

Sorry to bust your chops, but that's just the way the world is.


Edit: having only now read Franciso's post just above, I'm sorry to bust your chops as well, but what I just wrote seems to hold true with dating as well. I read all the time about women (and have met several such women) who keep going back to the man who mistreats them. Men act that way because it works.

 

[Harbringer]

I think itd be interesting just to be who would change and all that jazz but for the most part I think it would be a bad idea, Its not that I think looks can tell you everything, but looks can generally tell you what you need to know, and although stereotyping is pretty bad, well if it looks like a chicken, walks like a chicken and talks like a chicken then 99 percent of the time, its gonna be a chicken.

 

[Eukaryote]

Such a world as described in the OP would probably not even exist.

We are built to be effective creatures, not happy ones. Happiness is no use to you if you're dead, and the traits that define us are chosen, first and foremost, for whether they help us to stay alive, not whether they make us happy.

It's even been proven in laboratory experiments. Such as one project I read about on the web in which two monkeys were placed in adjacent cages, each cage rigged with a lever which, when pressed, dispensed a treat to the monkey in the other cage.

The results were rather disturbing. "Nice" monkeys routinely got stepped on by their peers. When the other monkey learned that he was paired with a "nice" monkey, he pretty quickly stopped pressing his own lever and ceased to reward the "nice" monkey.

The results persisted when the monkeys were removed from the cages. Nice monkeys were mostly ignored rather than recognized for being nice.

However, there is a plus side: "evil" monkeys (who never pressed their lever no matter what) got stepped on as well, and this behavior also persisted outside the lab cages--evil monkeys were actively disliked, and sometimes even physically attacked. The big picture, however, is that "nice" was not the best way. The most effective method for a monkey to gain respect--and therefore treats--from his or her peers was a mixture of nice and evil.

Sorry to bust your chops, but that's just the way the world is.

We're here to discuss if such a world would be fun to live in, not if it's evolutionarly plausible. It's a hypothetical scenario anyway, why does any of the stuff you said even matter in this dicussion?

 

[Brighteye]

People have different ideas about what is right and wrong, what is nice and not nice and what is beautiful and attractive.
So trying to find one system and draw a relationship between them would be tricky.
And then how would you recognise people if their looks changed all the time?
You'd have to have a system whereby your looked more attractive to people who valued your character traits, but ugly to people who didn't. And that's what we've got now, only it doesn't use looks, it uses character traits.

 

[BasketCase]

We're here to discuss if such a world would be fun to live in, not if it's evolutionarly plausible.

Dood, I'm perfectly clear on what you're asking:

Would the world be a better place if how beautiful or ugly you looked was determined by how good and kind of a personality you had?

And my answer is: no, because such a world isn't possible and we would therefore be DEAD. Whether said world is evolutionarily plausible is entirely relevant to the question.