[Splines]

And not to be too hand-wavey, but what if (I know this sounds crazy) there's actually a reciprocal effect here? What if there's a natural conceptual affinity between people who are attractive to each other? What if I only like the topics I like, because those are the ones the people I find attractive like? Or they like them because I do?

That's an interesting idea. You'd need to do a similar experiment, swapping the topics for faces, and do a scatter plot to see if there's any covariance between topic-interest and attractiveness. I'm inclined to think that there isn't, but it'd be interesting to see the data.

[zachster]

You know, I was actually thinking of this. What SxSW really needs is just a tiny bit of NLP to do a tag cloud for the panels. I think that could be used to perform the kind of experiment you describe.

And I wouldn't bias such a thing by predicting the outcome, but can we agree that the panelists on topics we're interested in will be appealing to us in some way? Maybe not physically all the time, but they will be attractive to us.

I guess all I'm saying is that the inverse is true. Someone's nature, and interests do come through in their appearance (book cover judging rules!), especially in a set of people already pre-selected for common interests like the sxsw crowd.