[maxbond]

I find this a bit perplexing. What value is there in telling people they aren't beautiful or smart? What objective sense of beauty and smartness are you trying to hold them to?

I can understand being bothered by things that are overly saccharine, I just don't understand the value proposition in providing a "counterpoint" or trying to check this in some way.

[yarg]

Because leading people to believe untrue things about themselves leads to horrific and often untimely realisations and disappointment later in life?

Or maybe I'm just a cunt.

[maxbond]

Well, I'm not interested in labeling you a cunt, but I think I see where the remark is coming from, and I know what it's like to say something on the internet and now there's just a firehouse of criticism with a lot of it not being in great faith, and I can sympathize with that.

I don't know how reflective the examples you gave are of things you actually say to people, but if you think you know that someone is objectively beautiful or smart and that you telling them that is some kind of bandaid to rip off for them - that is something to reflect on, these are textbook examples of socially constructed ideas. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. You're smart or beautiful when your community regards you that way, it's the consensus of tastemakers. It's nature as consensus can make it feel "real" or objective, but these are vague squishy concepts that change across time and across cultures. Even within a culture there's a huge diversity of preferences.

So some communities might prefer technical skills and call people smart when they're great programmers, some might value media criticism, it's not set in stone. Same goes for beauty, but I'd wager there's even less consensus there.

With that in mind, telling someone you don't find them beautiful is just placing a burden on them. It's telling them about how they fail to measure up to some measure in your mind, but the only outcome here is that either don't care or it bums them out. If you don't find them beautiful - that's a property of your eyes, not them, and you're entitled to feel that way but it's something to keep to yourself.

The thing you said in another comment about people being invariable reminded me of a comment I made recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35318596

[yarg]

> but if you think you know that someone is objectively beautiful or smart and that you telling them that is some kind of bandaid to rip off for them - that is something to reflect on, these are textbook examples of socially constructed ideas.

> Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say.

Genuine beauty exists is a strong indicator of health and fertility, extremes of human state (such as the anorexic or obese forms) are not only not beautiful but are profoundly unhealthy.

(Intelligence is a social construct, says a member of the only species intelligent enough to hold that notion.)

[maxbond]

> Genuine beauty exists is a strong indicator of health and fertility, extremes of human state (such as the anorexic or obese forms) are not only not beautiful but are profoundly unhealthy.

Plenty of people find extremely skinny people attractive - it's one of the reasons anorexia can be a problem, people feel compelled to go without food because they're trying to attain a body shape that isn't achievable while staying healthy in order to conform to a beauty standard. Plenty of people find larger people attractive, and at other times in history this was the dominant attitude.

This is just smuggling your preferences into a frame of objectivity with some spurious comparisons. You're ignoring the is-ought problem [1]. You can tell me a long stream of "is" claims ("this person is obese, this person is anorexic") but you can't actually come to a conclusion about beauty without making or implying an "ought" claim ("you ought to look a certain way"). The rhetorical game here is that, if you leave it implied as if it were obvious and required no justification, then you can pretend that it is an "is" claim instead of an "ought" claim in a trenchcoat. And if you pretend that you've made your argument using only "is" claims we can all agree on, then you can pass it off as objective. But it's mere sophistry, and once you understand how it works, it stops being convincing.

Even if we accepted your framing here, very few people are anorexic or obese or in another extreme state at a given time. So by your logic, surely the vast majority of people are beautiful, and we still don't need to go around policing who gets to feel beautiful.

> (Intelligence is a social construct, says a member of the only species intelligent enough to hold that notion.)

This is does not contradict any claim I made. I'm guessing you've conflated "socal construct" with "fictional," but that's not so. Voting and being elected are both social constructs, that doesn't mean Joe Biden isn't the president of the US. Being smart is real, as a concept, but reasonable people may disagree about the definition or about who is smart, and it's possible for none of them to be wrong.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

[wruza]

Plenty of people find extremely skinny people attractive … Plenty of people find larger people attractive … This is just smuggling your preferences into a frame of objectivity with some spurious comparisons

I think you forget that everyone’s stats are on a bell curve, and I may be a very beautiful boy for my mom, but her column is of height 0.02% and columns 20..100% don’t think so. You can’t start going to A if you think you’re at A and you can’t become a version of yourself you want to be if you believe you’re already perfect-ish. Being nice is one thing, another thing is gaslighting someone into unrealistic expectations. Who’s [not] wrong doesn’t matter if you have hard time finding a match or a job.

[maxbond]

What I'm telling you is that people are not video game characters, you don't have a charisma stat that determines how attractive you are, and you can't look at someone and score their charisma stat. Toxic positivity is real, giving people unrealistic expectations happens, but the underlying mechanism there is that the world is murky and the future is unknowable and if you tell someone they have control over their destiny you're making a promise you can't keep.

The mechanism is not that everyone has a stat block floating over their head that they can't see and you're lying to them about what that stat block says. It is not a gesture of "being cruel to be kind" to tell someone they aren't smart or beautiful, because you don't actually have that power to see into their destiny.

[watwut]

Except that people who feel good about themselves do much better off in their lives then people who are low on confidence? People who think they are ugly or worthless do worst regardless of what the actual state of situation is.