[reactchain]

The argument here is that "smart people are worse looking" is actually a case of _of the people you encounter_ smart people are worse looking, but that overall there is no correlation. This makes sense, but I think it's more complex. If you took the entire population, I think you could still conclude the "smart people are worse looking" if you define smart to include non-innate, learned behaviour, for the simple reason that good looking people have an easier time in life (getting jobs and so forth) and are therefore less compelled to spend time and effort becoming "smart". So there's a self-balancing aspect that produces these correlations in the general population as well.

[Kranar]

This doesn't make much sense and I think may actually be another instance of this paradox. For example, why would having an easier time in life dissuade someone from putting in effort to become smart (by your definition of smart)?

Do you think people who have a hard time in life are compelled to study hard and succeed, as if somehow people living in poverty or in third world countries are putting in significant amounts of effort to become smart? Of course not, not because people in poverty don't want to be smart of course, but because they are compelled to deal with time consuming hardships.

People who have it easy in life are far more compelled to study, to the point that the term "scholar" is literally the Greek word for "leisure".

I wouldn't be surprised if you drew out two axis, one measuring an individual's hardship in life and one measuring how "smart" they are, you'd reveal how paradoxical your statement is. The overall population would show that hardship places a huge burden that inhibits ones ability to learn and pursue intellectual endeavors while having an easier time in life facilitates it... and yet if you then filtered out the bottom left group (hard life and low "smart" score), you'd see the exact inverse correlation that Berkson's Paradox is all about.