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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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just googled her. Yeah I see what you mean about winning a few Keynesian beauty contests. Anyone describing her as 3/10 is definitely outside my comprehension.

Yeah I see what you mean about winning a few Keynesian beauty contests

Show me those AD-AS curves, baby...

Same Keynes, but different context. I'm actually curious about what @CloudHeadedTranshumanist meant by that qualifier - that even if Zendaya might not be the most beautiful in many particular judges' minds, she would clearly be the most widely-perceived as widely-perceived as beautiful?

She toned it down for Spider-Man: Homecoming (where her character wasn't supposed to be a Love Interest yet), with just hair/wardrobe/body-language choices that you'd think would be another "Hollywood Homely" trope but which worked okay, but even there claiming only 3/10 would be silly.

My intent in pointing at "Keynesian" beauty contests here, was to turn something arguably subjective into a more objective statement.

This is a general pattern I like. People can quibble over say, whether AI have qualia, but turn it into a question about the functions of the system and we can remove a lot of the disagreement. We can quibble over whether Zendaya is 'hot' and wind up arguing from our own preferences, but if we turn it into a question about whether most people would find her hot, we can make more clearly objective statements.

I do think she could win traditional beauty contests too, depending on the judges and the competition.

I doubt she would win if everyone on earth participated, just on priors I'd expect to find still greater outliers than her somewhere on earth. So- yes it's still not that absolute of a claim.

I hate it when my clever jokes turn out be me dumbly not getting a reference. But I learned something today, so thanks for that!