David's World

March 5, 2005

Ask HotOrNot: Should I get a hair cut?

All these difficult decisions in life. Accept the Hardvard or the Stanford offer? Merc or Beemer? Go out with Ann or Amy? Get a hair cut today or not?
At least with regard to the last question, I could never really make up my mind. I decided to run a little experiment: I'd let the public decide! What follows is probably one of the more narcissistic entries in my little diary here.

On HotOrNot you can put up your picture for rating, and of course you can rate other people. My pictures and their respective ratings are shown below. Website visitors could give ratings between 1 (ugly as hell) and 10 (ultimately hot). Notice how much the 'running Dave' polarized people? As for the final results, a big red 8 means that the picture is ranked at around 80 percent - it doesn't mean that on average, people gave me an 8 out of 10. That is, you can see a high ranking and medium ratings. How unfortunate. The final verdict: get a hair cut, and mess up your hair.

Big disclaimer: Ratings not normalized per subject (blaim Hotornot), pictures were only controlled for hair status, not for lighting or other contextual factors, smiling, the like. Finally, the author couldn't be bothered to run a significance test.