Symmetry Is Not Pretty
From Chatty Apes we learn that symmetry has little to do with whether a face is attractive:
Measurable symmetry accounts for less than 1% of the variance in the attractiveness of women’s faces and less than 3% of the variance of the attractiveness of men’s faces. … the initial studies showing big effects typically involved samples of less than 20 faces each, which is irresponsibly small for correlational studies with open-ended variables. Once the bigger samples starting showing up, the effect basically disappeared for women and was shown to be pretty low for men. But no one believed the later, bigger studies, even most of their own authors — pretty much everyone in my business still thinks that symmetry is a big deal in attractiveness. So, the first lesson I learned: Small samples are … My solution has been to ditch the old p<.05 significance standard.
I see the same thing in health economics; once people see some data supporting a theory that makes sense to them, they neglect larger contrary data.