The company I work for (a face recognition software company) has done some research on assessing attractiveness from photos of faces (as have some other research groups and no doubt other companies). Maybe using this to assess yourself would be useful. Or you could just put yourself on hotornot.
Women on OKCupid tend to rate men disproportionately low. There is an OKCupid blog post showing the distribution of the ratings they give men, and they are strongly skewed towards the lower end of the scale. This is one of the many reasons I don't use online dating sites.
Ok, that's true, and could potentially have the side effect that matches presented to women are more random (more noise in the data).
Even then, it seems like the effect would be kinda weak, no? And no individual guy loses out, except possibly to someone who was just about as attractive as him anyway (and he's equally as likely to gain).
Yep. Here it is. As a guy who's by most empirical measures not in the top 50% of attractiveness in the first place, this makes me depressed about human nature.
Male attractiveness is a lot more malleable than female attractiveness. Go to the gym, learn how to tell if clothes fit you and what colours suit you, always shower and shave, and get a decent haircut. You have now jumped 5-10% in attractiveness. Those are the biggest relatively easy gains. Posture isn't that hard to fix but it's hard to keep it fixed. After that there's the hard shit, becoming a more interesting, fun or rich person.
I tend to find the women OkC matches me with plain, average, or unattractive. So if their algorithms are correct, what does this say about me?