I was going to say the same thing. I would add though, if you aren't overly attractive, keeping yourself together is usually good enough. Dress well, good grooming, bathe regularly, keep the weight down, the usual stuff.

Even if they can't see you, attractive people tend to be more confident because they have fewer memories of negative feedback when they do something outside the norm. This leads to them being more daring in their creative and academic works, pushing norms because their experiences have rewarded pushing the envelope.

I’m not sure if this is true. I think that if you receive enough negative feedback you may adopt an IDGAF outlook on social feedback in general. If you are used to receiving positive feedback I think you may end up more constrained by the social feedback system. There is probably a dip in the middle where someone is more desperate for positive feedback but has not discarded the system, which probably works like you describe. Of course it is still best to be an attractive person who has also unhooked from the social feedback system, it just seems less likely to unhook in that case.

Resilience and healthy coping mechanisms are orthogonal factors. Someone who is resilient and optimistic is far more likely to do well regardless of their attractiveness because they’ll be able to adopt an IDGAF stance, as you say, to compensate in case of shortcomings in other areas.

That, however, is a separate skill that must also be nurtured and developed.

The problem with a IDGAF mentalities is you're optimizing for satisfying personal expression, not a balance between a low-stakes ostracization and those glimmers of brilliance that keep you in the loop. You're drawn to misanthropes and those who promote IDGAF aims for IDGAF sake.

I feel this is what happened to Louis C.K. After being ousted from the mainstream comedian community for his antics, he's become more beholden to the smaller subset of his audience that will worship him no matter what, so he gets high off his smaller cult following and less receptive to the larger scale waves of feedback and sentiment he got from his forays into the mainstream. As a result his recent specials have been more mediocre.

The frustrating thing is that it seems that the only people allowed to be truly transgressive and also mainstream are the conventionally attractive. We reward handsome and pretty people for "pushing the envelope" because the dopaminergic quality of their face and build allows all the weird stuff to go down easy. That allows those more genetically blessed to be more free to experiment and express their true selves.

In many professions there's some maximum I'd expect, particularly for women. Someone exceptionally hot may have trouble getting taken seriously.

Same is true I'd say in certain creative or deep science positions. If your phd computer genius (which I know is a bullshit label, but people get presented that way to businesses) comes in wearing a tailored suit and well groomed, people are going to be suspicious. If someone looking like RMS shows up, people will belive he's legit. Unfortunately most careers involve some acting.

What you said applies to race and sex. People expect their engineers to look and act like RMS, so minorities tend to have to "prove" they belong.