As you included social knack, I’ll take a bit more of attractiveness at the cost of intelligence, please.
The weird thing with intelligence is that the smarter you get, the less smart you feel. “The bigger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder/feeling dumb” I guess.
While intelligence brings the reward of endless fascination with the world of ideas and the physical world, for most of us happiness correlates more with pleasant interactions with the people around us.
I don’t think I’d give away any brains to be prettier (which is different from “attractive”, part of which is, IMO, based on brains), but I might consider shaving off ten IQ points to be pretty longer. Being the smartest person in the room is, as a rule, less fun than being the prettiest person in the room.
In a heartbeat. Intelligence is not as good people think it is, but being ugly goes a long way. Intelligence, or even just the expectation of intelligence, can make your life harder without giving much in return.
Everyone likes the attractive person. Nobody likes the smartass. Not only would I ditch my brains to look better, but I’d do it at an unfavorable rate of exchange.
No. Diana G may well be right that the prettiest person in the room has more fun than the smartest person in the room, but there’s comfort in the familiar, and I’m used to being the smartest person in the room.
(And, sadly, I bet I could gain myself a generous handful of attractiveness points just by losing weight and caring about how I present myself more).
I’d better stand pat. If I got any more intelligent or handsome, people would be scared.
No, really. I’ve never thought much of my looks, but evidently I’m not hideous and I wouldn’t say that’s held me back. On the other hand, my intelligence has a lot more to do with who I am and what I hope to do.
Elwood P. Dowd: Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, “In this world, Elwood, you must be” - she always called me Elwood - “In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.” Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.
I would sacrifice a few notches of intelligence in return for several degrees of attractiveness, but would not want to go too far either way: I’ve watched too many attractive women - even ones with a reasonable level of intelligence - make lousy choices when faced with so many offers, while in my experience, when you’re not that special to look at, although the offers might not come that often, one usually attracts the attention of a better class of person. That aside, I would welcome the experience of having a perfect body in order to truly indulge my perfect taste in clothes.
I’d certainly trade away some attractiveness to get more intellegence. How much depends on the relative scaling, which would be measured in different units if there were any units for measuring them. So, I wouldn’t take severe burn scars and birth defects to be able to master new programming languages in 30% less time. But I’d take baldness and acne scars and a big nose to do so in 50% less time, I think. Especially if I had some buyer’s remorse options.
Stephen Hawking isn’t much to look at, but he’s quite a thinker. I wonder what he’d say? He has commented that his disability has freed him to do more thinking, which I’m sure is true and is valuable. And, of course, I mention him because I suppose most would say his odd posture is unattractive, not because unattractiveness is the main feature of his disability.