I have a friend with an impressively massive beard, which he’s frequently complimented for. However, two separate women have indicated to me in private that they find the beard unattractive. This, together with other personal experiences, leads me to believe that number of compliments can be a misleading metric for looking good.
Specifically, I think standing out will give me more compliments, pretty much independently of whether it improves my attractiveness, and it will be hard to tell if I’m actually becoming less attractive. I’m therefore focusing mostly on (b).
Empirical observation: healthy foods often taste bad.
Why do my taste buds like fat and sugar, instead of a vegetable smoothies? Here’s my half-serious attempt at applying formal reasoning to explain the phenomenon.
Proposition.
At a food consumption equilibrium, all healthy foods have significant downsides (tastiness, price, ease of preparation, etc.).
Proof.
We say that a food is “healthy” if the average person would benefit from eating more of it.
Consider an arbitrary food X which doesn’t have significant downsides.
We assume that food consumption is at an equilibrium, such that the better a food’s overall profile, the more of it people will choose to eat.
Any food is toxic (i.e., not healthy) in large enough quantities, which means the equilibrium consumption is finite. In particular, the average consumption of food X is at a finite equilibrium.
However, food X was assumed to have no significant downsides. So if it was healthy, people would eat more of it. But on the contrary, X is at an equilibrium. Hence, food X cannot be healthy.
QED
As an example, take salt. Salt is necessary for human survival. And it tastes good! But now most people eat too much of it, so it’s generally considered unhealthy.
I think the weakest point of my proof is the “food consumption equilibrium” assumption, and the non-standard definition of “healthy” foods. But the subject didn’t originally seem mathable at all, so I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.