because women and nu males go in to those degrees
All women, even beautiful ones, are completely neurotic about their looks; I think every woman would be fundamentally sympathetic to a theory that explains human happiness in terms of looks.
No, what I think happened with psychology and psychiatry is an "inadequate equilibrium" (in the Eliezer Yudkowsky sense): the current situation is evil and kills people, everybody knows it, but no one can do anything about it for a variety of reasons.
Looks are a taboo subject (just think about the guts it would take to drive to a college and enroll students for an experiment on the relationship between looks and happiness: "hey I need more ugly people to participate, ugly people please come here"), hypotheses in psychology are very hard to confirm scientifically (leading to this weird perpetual circlejerk on the works of the pioneers, Freud and Erickson basically, which have been enshrined because seniority is the only thing that can be enshrined), psych departments don't want to fund studies that undermine their prestige and utility, we are still dealing with the fallout of Nazism, etc.
It's a giant can of worms, and it's gonna last for a long time.
Elements of hope:
- Big Data: data acquired through the internet and AI will allow infinite testing of lookist hypotheses in a scientific manner, while bypassing IRL taboos on looks and sex. The OkCupid studies on the relationship between pictures and dating success are just a start.
- Asians: the Chinese, Korean, Japanese have never been afraid to call an ugly man ugly. They don't deal with our historical and ideological baggage. They are the most likely to talk openly about the relationship between looks and happiness and develop welfare programs based on looks optimization.
