When I went out to plant floor, it was like my perceived IQ went up by 20 points. Suddenly the things I said made sense. I think most of this effect can be attributed to the fact that I cared enough to show up, and that it's easier to communicate in person. That's most of it, but I'm also a large-ish white male (6 feet tall, 250 pounds at that time) and that physical presence does seem to have an effect on some people.
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It's easy to think that I'm making a moral statement one way or another by what I've said here, but you don't have to think that.
I'm sure there are social effects I don't perceive because I've been tall since I was a teenager. For instance, it's hard to believe that the average Fortune 500 CEO is 6' tall just by coincidence. Height also seems to predict overall financial success in an interesting way: https://news.utexas.edu/2009/12/15/research-shows-height-may...
I thought you were going to conclude that factory workers are dumb, so you appeared relatively smarter.
(Before anyone gets upset, I have grandparents who were factory workers; I admire hard work.)
I cringed pretty hard when the image at the top loaded; was not expecting this kind of story, was expecting a missive on the song from the 90s.
Also, this story reminds me of a passage, among many, from the Deus Ex timeline wiki (https://deusex.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline):
"Antoine Thisdale, an un-augmented oil rig worker sues for the right to have both of his fully functional natural arms amputated and replaced with cybernetic arms in an effort to compete with mechanically augmented workers in his profession. The Supreme Court rules in his favor, clearing the way for elective augmentation."
It is really not healthy to obsess over this stuff. As I said, natural selection is pretty cruel in general, but it is also stochastic in nature. Being short, or bald, is not a death sentence, although it does make things harder.
There's one thing I have to say though. If you're successful and you still need to go to such lengths to attract women, you have yourself to blame and not your height.
Is it? I think this is just the fallacious conclusion that results from a lack of humility and from a sense of entitlement. If you believe you're entitled to X, but you don't have what it takes for X, then you set yourself up for self-pity, envy, and grievance as if you've been wronged somehow by not getting what you (falsely) believe you are entitled to. But neither our qualities nor what those qualities can bring us are things we are owed. The solution is to recognize the truth about ourselves, here the immutable truth, and play with those cards instead of wishing we were someone else or had different cards, or hating those with better cards. The latter is a waste of time and ultimately self-destructive.
There is also a kind of dualism at work here. We see ourselves as somehow separate from our qualities. But we are those qualities! They are part of who and what we are. You could not have been otherwise without being someone else.
Egocentrism is a recipe for misery and no amount of manipulation or make believe will ever address the underlying mental and spiritual problem. It's much healthier to accept what you are and be grateful and work with what you have. Occupy your niche. If you're a tortoise, be a tortoise instead of fantasizing about being a cheetah.
Furthermore, surgery like this is essentially a form of lying. You are falsely advertising about your qualities. Whatever benefits you receive because of the mere appearance of having such qualities instead of the genuine thing is a species of fraud. Anything you receive through fraud will taste like ash in your mouth in the end.
And these traits won't be communicated to your children. In this way, you subvert natural selection.
Note also the incoherence. If the trait matters, then your deception is made worse. If the trait doesn't matter, yet people seem to value it anyway (a common form of denial among the have-nots), then why cater to those with a bad sense of value? Any appreciation you receive is fake anyway.
I did not comment on the surgery and do not approve of such measures.
Do other women want men taller than they are, or do they want men taller than other men? I don't understand the mechanism myself.
Of course, it wouldn't solve the causal question. Are women rejecting men who are shorter, or are men mentally gear-shifting around people who are taller than them? The latter might sound insulting, but that's actually what you'd want it to be, because then you could overcome it with a really good attitude. If all of the grown up monkeys going around in this world are programmed to let the big monkey do the bossing around, that's something you'd expect to see subconsciously acting on both sides - and you'd be able to deal with half of by yourself.
he missed a LOT of school, because he basically couldn't function for 48 hours after the next increment was done.
The alternative was that his left leg would be 8" shorter than his right, so it was probably the right thing to do, but good lord it's not without cost.
And as insensitive as this might sound: get over your god damn insecurities. All the statistics in the world of how much more money tall guys make can't account for individuals, and we all know plenty of short rich business owners and poor big guys working terrible construction jobs or worse. The only real limitation in being short is dating tall women. But guess what, there's plenty things limiting your dating pool: baldness, being fat, facial features, age, social and financial status, etc. Nobody has it all and you will never finish if you go the rabbit whole. You can only end up like those women butchered by too much cosmetic surgery.
I found that confidence can overcome a few inches in height and good communication skills can overcome the advantage taller people have, well, except for dating stuff...
So, I created a joke.
“Why are people in the Netherlands so tall?”
“Genetic pressure. They have had occasional dike failures over the centuries, and the short ones drowned.”
To confirm the latter, it is not enough to look at who is the taller in most pairings.
https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2019/11/06/man-woman-...
Does your height vary much? /joke
Flying sucks.
Can't fit in a Miata and sports cars suck in general.
Showers in hotels suck.
Buying T-shirts is annoying.
I did have a nice dating life....but I missed out a ton because I was a quite oblivious lol...now I'm married and it doesn't really matter.
Unbelievable :(
Isn't that entirely to be expected just because men are on average taller than women? As a very quick 'n dirty numerical check, if you pick pairs of numbers from two normal distributions with means that are 2 standard deviations apart, only in 7.8% of the cases will the number from the distribution with the lowest mean be larger than that from the other distribution. In real life male and female heights aren't exactly normally distributed with the same standard deviation and just a differing mean, but is the true expected number of such pairs really much higher than 7.5%, that the result is significant?
Another one in the hall of "writers who don't read their own articles," this was the sentence preceding the one about the wage gap.
I worked in sales for a decade. I was better than top 1% at it nationwide. I'm 6'4". Was that because people just love buying from a tall person, or was it because I felt comfortable walking up to anyone and everyone since I was taller than them?
Don't men also tend to prefer women who are shorter than them? I know I do personally (though my first two girlfriends were taller than me, go figure.)
Until we solve the inter gender pay gap, I'm not really interest in the intra gender height gap.
It seems like the people in my SES/field of work trend substantially taller, especially the younger cohort. I’m 1/4” shy of 6’ so it seems strange, but I always assumed it was due to better nutrition. I think a few years less of the pasta-based food pyramid would have made a difference. Or maybe they’re all just getting hormones.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/687/small-things-considered
P.S. if it is ok to give trans kids hormones for gender dysphoria, I don’t see any issues with giving cis kids hormones for dealing with height dysphoria. At least the consequences of HGH are less severe and better understood.
See a shirt in a store? On me a L is a belly shirt and an XL is a baggy belly shirt.
I’m tall and wish I was average and I’m not even “super tall” just 76”/193cm. I straight up feel sorry for people taller than I. They end up on crutches before dying in their 60s.
WFH has been wonderful for this reason, everyone is a half body stump on camera.
I don't think the people in the article are aiming to be super tall. Just tall enough to match their peers. Arguably super tall people (YMMV since everyone is tall to me) and short people both want the same thing, to be average.
With all that being said, I don't find the tradeoff of cost, lost time, immobility, and pain to be worth that marginally extra social respect. And to be honest, it's just a mild annoyance.
Seriously, as another skinny-ish tall person, I wish "L-Slim" was a thing. That would be so nice. I'm tired of wearing shirts that are way too wide.
Mediumish quality.
That said I'm perfectly ok and wouldn't get surgery even if it was a routine thing, but I don't see any real benefit and only a few annoyances. (Buying clothes or bikes, not all chairs are comfy to sit on, etc).
But the lying about height is pathetic and always backfires, often spectacularly, because the women can tell immediately when the guy shows up three or four inches shorter. So at that stage the problem is lying, not height, and it makes for a very awkward date if the date even continues.
Most men show up 1 or 2 inches shorter. Even tall men.[1]
[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/thebigliespeop...
It might create noise on the other end, but they are heavily incentivized to lie.
"Be kind to your knees, you'll miss them when they're gone." -Mary Schmich
Fascinating and somewhat shocking phenomenon. I was under impression that length would be the only aspect of humans that can’t be altered - turns out that was wrong.
An example video would help a lot.
I recommend the Haworth Very for taller folks. At the max height my femurs actually sit slightly above the horizontal plane containing my knees so I don’t feel boxed in.
With this chair:
- My feet can touch the floor, even without shoes
- The armrests can move down to the place where my forearms naturally rest
- The armrests can point from my elbows to the front corners of my keyboard
- I can sit for long periods without my any discomfort
I agree on all of your points. Bless the designers for saving our back/knees/hips etc!
Sorry first thing that came into mind when reading the title.
Which lead me to make this: https://imgflip.com/i/6tigza
Yes, because it's more painful and irreversible.
