Quote: (04-27-2013 09:23 PM)Sombro Wrote:
Brains.
With brains you can figure out how to get muscles.
Vice versa doesn't work in this case.
Even assuming you can't use brains to get muscles, brains still beat muscles in utility.
Muscles are only good for picking up girls; brains can be leveraged more broadly to improve one's life.
My gut reaction was brains, but in case, that this was an artifact of my narcissism--I thought about this a bit more carefully, along different values of z-scores for muscles and brains.
My conclusion was that the closest muscles gets to brains is probably around +1 to +2 z-scores.
Somewhere around +1 or +2 stDevs in musculature you start seeing a qualitative difference in picking up girls; your physique alone will start attracting girls.
However, being +1 to +2 stDevs in intelligence isn't qualitatively different from being dumber than that, and "intellectual" pursuits such as STEM academia or quantitative trader are still out of reach.
By +3 the gap between brains and muscles is very wide again. Being +3 in physique doesn't "buy" you that many more girls than being +2 in physique would, but being +3 in intelligence opens up a lot of doors in life that +2 wouldn't.
I think of the returns to muscles as being a skewed logistic curve with the rate of change highest around +1 to +2 z-scores, but returns to brains being much less unbounded.