Hot chick geeks

Oh boy, here we go again! Some of the bloggers at the excellent ScienceBlogs site have fired off posts in high dudgeon over a perfectly innocuous post that Razib wrote, noting his surprise that a hot girl was blathering on about science fiction and fantasy books in a wine bar. This event is obviously noteworthy for at least two reasons:

1) You would have to randomly sample, what, millions -- tens of millions? -- of females to find a single member of the intersection of the "hot" and "hardcore sci-fi nerd" sets. Any clearheaded person would take notice due to the sheer statistical rarity of the event.

2) Assuming you uncovered such an individual, you would expect to have gotten that information by large-scale confidential polling, rather than by the individual offering up the information not only in public, but in a public space where people are supposed to act suave and sophisticated (a wine bar). Any clearheaded person would take notice due to the boldness, bravery, or whatever, belonging to the person in question.

There then followed three responses that completely missed the point (one, two, three). At the core, the complaints were about unfair stereotyping of the sexes regarding what interests they tend to have. But as I read Razib's post, his point generalizes to both sexes -- you would be surprised if you caught a hot person of either sex nattering in a wine bar about sci-fi / fantasy books. Let me emphasize that the girl in question was described as "Reese Witherspoon's more attractive brown-haired cousin." So, she looks like this, only more attractive and brunette? Yowza! If a straight girl beheld a male model-ish bartender prattling on about sci-fi / fantasy books in a wine bar, I bet she'd be just as surprised, and no one would upbraid her publicly if she posted a note on her blog saying, "You'll never guess what I just saw!" Remember, we're not talking "merely" pretty girls or handsome guys but blood-stirringly beautiful people.

Moreover, Razib's post is completely agnostic as regards the cause behind the evident pattern of negligible overlap between the "hot" and "hardcore sci-fi nerd" sets. A simple answer is that hot people have a lot going for them and don't want to jeopardize their status by indulging in things that society views as belonging to losers, while the latter, having nothing left to lose, are not put off by the prospect of low status. This sets up a feeback loop, obviously. Thus do we return to our two points above: observing a hot chick (or stud) who was also geeky would arouse our curiosity enough to post about it because 1) it's damn rare, and 2) a person of high status is risking ruin by flouting social conventions, also rare.

I'm sympathetic, though, to those who would object to point 2 by noting that the risk may not be sufficiently high to make us take notice, since hot girls could disrupt a primetime Presidential address by devouring an aborted baby on camera and still get away with a slap on the wrist as far as social shaming went. Still, we would be left with the sense of wonder that Charlie must have felt when he sampled only a handful of chocolate bars and found an extremely rare golden ticket. Even if we were in Veruca Salt's extraordinary position and had sampled n chocolate bars where the probability of finding the golden ticket was 1/n, we might not be shocked to find our treasure, but we might feel warm enough inside, now that the hunt was officially over and we could take a nap with our golden ticket safe in our hands, that we might still shout the good news from the rooftops.

NB: I don't read sci-fi or fantasy, even if some of my favorite movies or TV shows are dystopian science fiction, so don't read anything more into the "golden ticket" reference other than the statistical argument. Now, if this bartending babe had been suggesting which Edward Gorey books to start off with...

UPDATE: SB blogger Zuska hemorrhages vitriol like a hyperalart skunk spraying indiscriminately in all directions after hearing the wind blow.