There's at least one whopper like that from BBC every week in their science news.

"facts stored outside of our brains exist a la carte, as opposed to being embedded in a network of implicit connections. To generate novel insight these connections and networks of facts need to exist latent as background conditions underneath reflective thought. Of course for most people novel abstractions, analyses and streams of data are irrelevant" 
 
This is essentially the problem with these personal agent programs. I haven't seen any progress since Patty Maes was hyping agents up in the mid 90s. It's not too difficult to capture structured data, it's possible to capture unstructured data for a specific structured task, but capturing structured and unstructured data and making it relevant in a novel context is more trouble than it's worth

I wouldn't necessarily suppose his point is bayesian. Its genesis could just as easily follow from the insights of Quine, Lakatos, Putnam, whatever that knowledge can't be defined in a formal decision procedure, that there is a strange obsession in 20th century philosophy to collapse reasoning and human faculties into truth functional logic, that uncertainty and fallibility can't and won't be ruled out because scientific judgements are floating on an ocean of unscientific assumptions borne out of normal limits on rational beings, that every pretension to fact presupposes a web of knowledge, some more likely, solid, reasonable, persuasive according to good criterion that nevertheless cannot be derived from first principles, however worthy it is to pursue a more precise epistemological perspective.

I love how these news reports always tack on a celebrity of the moment to draw in the celebrity gossip crowd

exceptional attractiveness is pervasive with mass communication and choice is diminished in the absence quick transportation 
 
makeup and application techniques are also better today and studies show ~15% improvement in attractiveness before any plastic surgery to refine features and diminish dominant negative flaws 
 
the implication that power should increase choice might be constrained by stratification in class that isn't experienced today, more so in insular affairs of a King, as supposed above by others 
 
relative scales in choice like similarity (in features and overall levels of attractiveness) may also be discounted more than they should be. females are probably more motivated today to actively seek out otherwise inferior partners as the legal remedies for divorce include transfer of wealth, there are more opportunities for cheating/trading up, etc 
 
not that it explains away the question which still stands.

it doesn't seem like a particularly interesting point to me. basically what you're saying is that people are more concerned with small differences in people they find attractive relative to people they find unattractive, dressed in mumbo jumbo that makes it sound more precise or scientific

"And her eyes looks very asymmetric in that shot: right eye much smaller than the left." 
 
Women typically have a larger left side, although it isn't universal (and bilateral differences typically affect the entire body). With that said, it would fall under directional asymmetry (DA) in every face rather than fluctuating asymmetry (FA). IMO, the visual system probably over compensates for angles, or there is some fitness benefit from some degree of DA, as many people seem blind to bilateral differences, although it might figure in the gestalt projection of "attractiveness". Level of DA does have an effect on attractiveness but as you can see from any image of Shannen Doherty it isn't required. (btw, FA is very difficult to decompose consciously in casual viewing of natural faces, excepting deformities, or abnormalities like hemifacial microsomia) 
 
random comments about the article: 
 
-One possible confounding factor in the male/female typical rating test is that there is no proof the participants aren't rating by perceived attractiveness. The higher FA composites in the European sample are clearly less attractive and the Hazda sample are much closer in levels of attractiveness. The authors explain the ratings closer to chance in the Hazda and Macaque faces as "likely difficult for them [European students] with limited experience to judge masculinity in Hadza and macaque faces" (no proof because only European students rated the images) 
 
-Running together of effects by choosing bottom and top 15 FA. They threw out pictures with extreme FA to compensate for tilted or turned heads but they didn't test the general effect hypothesized by, for example, comparing a median sample with a bottom or top sample. 
 
-they compensate for the use of composites in the rater experiment and lack of significance of other measures by using a classifier. While interesting it seems to me they are trading potential computational artifacts. Composites are transformed faces, not necessarily reflective of natural faces, and the classifier doesn't mirror human perception. If the theory in the discussion were true it would follow that they would get a similar result by asking participants to rate individual faces rather than composites, and would further support the notion that it's significant to attractiveness and mate choice. 
 
--- 
"While this would be plausible for a species in which small deviations in symmetry may have large effects, as is the case for flying, it is difficult to imagine such small deviations in symmetry would impact on motor action in faces so much as to appear unattractive." 
--- 
 
There is a large difference in bite force with a few mm difference in jaw size. Women love when Johnny Depp clenches his masticators. Restricted breathing through the nasal cavities via trauma, chronic illness, or allergies affects facial
More....

The paper itself seems interesting but the discussion in the news article reminded me of some of the papers coming out of, say, the Santa Fe Institute in the 90s during the complex systems and game theory fad.

"The work on facial expression of emotion, started by Darwin and fleshed out by Paul Ekman, shows that these reflexes are basically universal." 
 
One detail in my mind from reading the literature on nonverbal communication is that expertise can reduce ambiguity but can not eliminate it. And a corollary about biases not making one immune to their effects.  
 
Most people are naturally deluded to interpret social signals such that (a) they are the subject, (b) positive affect in expressions, (c) receptive stance. There is clearly an adaptive benefit in self deception. 
 
Recognizing subtle differences in expressions can save embarrassment in some cases, however they are often indeterminate relative to very different internal states, in addition to base error in conditions of performance

Looks like it's fixed now. Anyway, good match for them. Marty Peretz and Asper family are both pro israel pro zionist anti arab anti palestinian center liberal.

My favorite is that guy who always shows up in a thread about topic x to discuss his pet theory about it (he nearly always succeeds in an unmoderated system). One of the benefits of threaded discussion is (i) discussions are separated unlike a flat system and hot button topics are less likely to dominate (ii) in a system like Slashdot the display of threads will be altered by moderation and other parameters (if the default isn't newest first unworthy discussions won't snowball). One of the good qualities with positive moderation is that there is less of a need to chill discussion with down moderation, although that could be an artifact of site volume where there are so many comments that no one bothers to read the comments that aren't up modded 
 
There are also simplified hybrid systems with threads or nested comments and simple moderation (e.g. poll based moderation that changes the color of text)

s/meta moderating/moderating/

Your posts create your audience and in turn the sub that comments. If most of the posts on your site are "technical" there's less of a need for heavy handed moderating to cultivate a community. 
 
I remember talking about this with Volokh before he had comments. The method that seemed to work for his site was to selectively enable comments on posts less likely to be a political lightning rod; however some ruthless moderation was required with contributors like David Bernstein drawing readers. I notice comments are now enabled on every post and the average quality is what one would expect in a laissez-faire regime considering the content. 
 
I think gnxp maintains good balance. I try to comment as little as possible in my ignorance as I come here to learn from razib and peterb but some ignorance in good faith can be instrumental in a productive comment thread. 
 
A system like Slashdot does a good job of offloading the moderation to readers but it might be undesirable in a small community. First because it's necessary to deny comments on a post to the user meta moderating, second because there is less of a problem with bias when moderators are chosen randomly from a large pool of readers.

I think the point Chris made regarding "stuff happening in the brain" was in the context of questionable inferences in a few studies reported in the media. I doubt he would disagree that good inferences can be made from the analysis of imaging data.

since we're off on a complete tangent: 
 
flashy by itself usually isn't effective. it has to look effortless like you have good sense but don't care, otherwise its seen as a desperate or transparent attempt to manipulate

"Homely macho guys can definitely get girls -- that's a different strategy from the pretty boy strategy, which I'll discuss on Wednesday." 
 
There's also a distinction to be made between studies where subjects are asked to rate or rank attractiveness and actual pairings. Not only because of other factors (which a speed dating study would probably underestimate) but also factors like chance and attainability.

I believe Hönekopp and others have shown that there is a substantial subjective component to attractiveness judgements but that can be misleading because there's a strong partial ordering. There is variation in what is considered optimal but there is an obvious pattern when cohorts are compared. So personal disagreement and variation in taste can be perserved without implying that inter subjective comparisons are meaningless.

I do like Tyler Cowen's point because it seems like a lot of huffing and puffing about this issue is because of social comparison and status seeking by proxy. I'm thinking it might be useful to head off controversy by pointing out some of the other things people can take pride in.

i didn't disagree with the original point. political orientation does motivate some to minimize individual differences

^^ 
 
Having now read the article it seems to me you're nit picking to score points for your particular ideology. Most of the article is a descriptive discussion of the past not an endorsement of the social and political conditions that led to those abuses.