Episode 229: Skin Deep?

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, David Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. Welcome

[00:01:14] to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, white people love to be named fiery kushmen, don't they? Man, so you're referring- I'm David Pizarro from Cornell University. You're referring to this tweet that- was it just a rando? It just seemed like a drive-by.

[00:01:36] Like just no real rhyme or reason to it. Yeah, somebody tweeted a screenshot of Fiery's bio from Harvard. I just said white people love to be named fiery kushmen. I gotta admit, it went viral and I felt a little like I'm part of something big here.

[00:01:56] I know that guy. It's very funny. Also there's like- I think it was like a chapeau adjacent guy who tweeted it. And I don't know to what extent it was meant in a mean way or like what a fucking doucheway.

[00:02:16] But like with Fiery of all people, he is not an asshole. No, not at all. I took it as just like- when you first heard the name Fiery, the name is funny. So I just took it as like a good hearted way of mocking weird names.

[00:02:38] I like that but it's white people love to be named. It's very funny. It's a tweet from somebody named pregabalinfanaccounts. I wonder what Fiery thought of it. Yeah, yeah. I'm her friend of the show. He's a former music carver. I'm sure he was a good sport about it.

[00:02:59] You can't live your life with the name Fiery and not develop a decent sense of humor about it. Yeah, I think that's probably right. So we're in the first segment. We're going to narrow down our finalist topics for the Patreon listener selected episode.

[00:03:15] We've got like over 100, like 150 suggestions that we have narrowed down to a kind of long short list each of us and we're going to try to agree on five or six finalists. Then in the second segment, we're going to tackle a topic, lookism, which is bias

[00:03:34] towards attractive people over unattractive people. We're going to look at two things, an article by William D'Alesandro called It's Fourth Coming. Is it bad to prefer attractive partners? And then we're also going to talk about another story by Ted Chang called Liking

[00:03:53] What You See a Documentary, which is where this idea is a central theme of it. And actually one of the people suggested this story in the Patreon. So they already win. They win. They don't even need to listen to that segment.

[00:04:11] I just want to give you props for the pairing. It's like a fish and a nice white wine. You found these two things. You know, it's sort of like the idea of like the hot side, hot cool side, cool, you know, the McDonald's. Oh, my God.

[00:04:30] A McDonald's commercial from 1989. DLT. You're coming with these these hot cultural references. We probably have some Gen X listeners. Like that was a very important thing that happened in there as Lachke kids when we would get home and turn on the TV.

[00:04:52] Remember when Lachke kids were a thing like they do new stories about it? I mean, I was a Lachke kid at one of my houses, not at the other one. Like, I mean, I don't mean like my family had two houses. I was the child of divorce.

[00:05:08] You weren't in your summer house. Yes. All right. But before that, yeah, let's get let's get to it. Let's get. So what a turnout, man. You mentioned it, but Jesus. Yeah. A ton of good stuff. Do we are we going to agree?

[00:05:22] Like this is always an interesting question, like whether we're going to agree. It's even even more so this time with like a hundred and whatever, 50 suggestions, like what are the chances that we have any overlap in our lists?

[00:05:33] Because I'm going to guess like we have at least four. Four. OK. Yeah, that's a good guess. We have roughly 12 on each list. Yeah. All right. Want me to start? Go for it. The act of killing the documentary. Jeff, it's the one. That's my first one too.

[00:05:52] Yeah, Jake Zielsdorf suggested this. You know, I saw that documentary. I remember being very disturbed, you know, upset, moved by it. And I would like to do an episode on it. I mean, I think that could be a good finalist

[00:06:08] because I think we've had a lot of people asking us to do it in one context or another over the years. So yeah. I've never seen it, but may or may not be related. But the book on killing that we've talked about a few times.

[00:06:22] Might be good to pair with with something like this. Yeah, not that I'm adding homework. Yeah, I think like it's enough for this and we can, you know, refer back to some ideas from that. Especially since that guy is the guy who wrote that now goes around

[00:06:40] training cops to be like warriors and to think they're going to like a like a military occupied like war zone every time they go hand in the hand. So I think that's probably responsible for like the choking of black men. Yeah, just to psycho.

[00:06:55] But yeah, you can separate the. I can separate the artist. OK, mine that while that was on my list, my next one is and I I hesitate even saying this because it's a large homework task. But this is both David Kroet and Ben Morrison

[00:07:13] suggested Julian Janes's on the origin of consciousness something we've touched on. I think we split brains maybe or maybe maybe when we were discussing, no, I've mentioned it when we discussed Westworld, but you haven't seen Westworld, so it must have only been in passing.

[00:07:33] Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, you know what it is, right? Yes, more or less. But tell the listeners. Yeah, yeah, basically it is a cool and kooky theory done written years and years ago by Julian Janes that posits that human consciousness

[00:07:53] arose in part from like the taking of psychedelics, but essentially the ability to separate inner voices and recognize that inner voices weren't external voices like voices of gods or spirits and recognize that it was our own inner voice. He thought was fundamental to the origin of consciousness.

[00:08:15] It's super interesting. I don't, you know, that's definitely a strong candidate on that topic. Then I'll also suggest 500 pages by the way. Sorry. OK, so we have to do a little chunk of that. Maybe this is shorter Douglas Hofstedler's strange. Yeah, that's on my list, too.

[00:08:34] And I figured it would be. Yeah. In fact, I have a note here that says, hold on, you're not giving credit to the readers, but not for this just because there were two people. So then they can't do the other way.

[00:08:47] Andrew Bow and Matt Rogers and I, my note to myself is not sure if Tamler would be down, but I like the idea. I don't know why people think I don't like Douglas Hofstedler. Like I like that. I think it's because you mocked me for liking

[00:08:59] for pretentiously claiming that I read. I read Gerdo Lashorbach. Yeah, you mocked me for saying I read it when I was like in fourth grade. Oh, that's right. Which is which to be clear was like the intro stories of Achilles and the tortoise that are sure. Sure.

[00:09:17] All right, so maybe that would be a shorter version of doing something unconsciousness. But I actually, you know, like if we could find us, like if listeners have an idea of a short version of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

[00:09:29] Oh, yeah. Anything in article form and the strange loops, too. I briefly peruse because strange loop is a book. But anything in article form that could be suggested for either of those. All right. What do you have next? All right. You.

[00:09:44] The only reason you wouldn't have this on your list is because it's a given that we're going to do it. But Brandon Sanchez suggested waiting for Gerdo. Oh, interesting. I'm so glad you put it on.

[00:09:53] I mean, I didn't put it on because I didn't think you would do it. I've not seen it or read it. And so I'm curious. And it's like existentially sounding. And I've seen so many things that feel like references to it.

[00:10:06] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would definitely do that. I don't know if we should put it on the list. But one thing that I kind of feel about it is that it's really better seen than read. Yeah. But you have to pick a version of it.

[00:10:23] Yeah. And there aren't like that I know of maybe like we'll scan YouTube for a good like theatrical presentation, which still isn't like being there. But it's also different than than reading. Yeah. Let's let's keep that in mind. I don't know if it makes the list, but

[00:10:39] I would love to do waiting for it. Oh, absolutely. OK. So there are some things. OK. Rowan Anderson, Hume on the standard of taste. I had this too. But it's like we were already talking about doing. We're always doing it.

[00:10:51] Very like it's cheatery to put it on the list. So so for my turn, I'll mention that and mention something that we probably most definitely wouldn't do. But many people keep keep suggesting it. And that is the video game disco Elysium. It's true that many people keep suggesting.

[00:11:10] Yeah. So Jake Ziels Dwarf this time mentioned it. And I kind of just if I have time to play a video game, so so I don't think we should put it on the list list. I would like because I don't think we're going to do it otherwise.

[00:11:24] Like OK. So like if enough people want us to do it, then I then I would do it. It's like the Ted Chang thing, you know, like I need external motivation. All right. And I also I think this came up in the context of the Ted

[00:11:36] Chang episode, but somebody said that it wasn't that hard. Like it's not a kind of game like I was like I'm such a fuck up in video games that I wasn't going to be able to like proceed with it.

[00:11:48] So this is from Aaron Agostini and he suggested and maybe this came up in another one too, but I only put Aaron Agostini because he was first Stanislaw Lem and he recommended one of his. And I think the other person recommended Solaris. People have recommended Solaris.

[00:12:08] I'd love to do that and the Tarkovsky movie or just the book. People have said the book is is great. And I love the movie. The movie is phenomenal as well. But the one with George Clinton. No, not that one.

[00:12:20] That's the Soderbergh version, but which I haven't seen, but I've heard is OK. I don't know if that's true or not. But yes, I was I think that would be cool. It may have been a finalist already. It sounds familiar. Yeah, it does.

[00:12:36] I don't know if it was finalist, but it was definitely on people's list. So but that's fine. OK, my turn. I won't say Parfit because you've already promised to do Parfit. If you do stalker. If I do stalker, that's right. But I did, I said.

[00:12:52] Alistair Hardin, maybe an episode about intuition and epistemology. This is actually something I know a lot about, like I know a lot of the literature, there's a lot of good stuff. You know, there's a lot of interesting questions about to what extent

[00:13:06] our intuitions are reliable guides, you know, even separate from any experimental philosophy kind of debates. Yeah. So I don't know that might be one. I don't know if it's going to make the list, but I threw it on.

[00:13:20] I didn't I didn't put it on my list because it seemed like such a big, you know, like topic and I don't know that much about epistemology. But epistemology is something that I actually want to read more on.

[00:13:34] And so if we could find it, I would totally put on my list just because it's a philosophy topic that you agree. Yeah, right. I always get excited when you're willing to talk about philosophy. And yeah, and I like I said, I know some good stuff on this.

[00:13:48] All right, we'll keep this in the back burner. Maybe if we don't put it on the list, we'll definitely use it. We always have ideas. Yeah, it's always easier to put something on the list when it is a specific work rather than a topic. Here's another one, panpsychism.

[00:14:03] Just like I knew that would be on yours. Yeah, I just I'm curious to what extent like this is and you know, we have we could pick something by Galen Strossen. I actually like that because I don't know anything about panpsychism.

[00:14:19] And I actually think it would be fun to see what our listeners if like our listeners would really want to hear a psych about that. I'd kind of let them decide. Let's take that seriously as a final. All right.

[00:14:37] I feel like this is running long, but I'll just say this quickly. I don't think this is on your list. This is from Joseph Chiara and Zellie. Art and philosophy around addiction. Maybe double feature the short story

[00:14:47] The Swimmer by John Cheever and the Bert Lankesser film based on it. And I love both of those and they're really interesting. As an example of addiction, you know, all of Cheever's characters are pretty much alcoholics, but I would just love to do.

[00:15:04] And people have suggested them to. But those that short story and the book, they're both really cool works about a kind of alienation from suburban professional life that I think a lot of people can relate to.

[00:15:20] Even though, you know, it's very much of its time, but it's also timeless. I've never heard of the film or the short story, but he also mentions. Leaving Las Vegas, which I haven't seen it a long time,

[00:15:34] but it's like I really like that movie for some odd reason. But addiction is it didn't make my list, but I'm totally interested in it. So so let's put it maybe toward the bottom and see what we have. OK. OK. I think I'm getting to the bottom two.

[00:15:52] Emily, friend of the show, Emily, list said something about Sandman, the comic. If I can get if I think if I can convince you to read a comic volume, it might be Sam, it's it's part of the wonder of Sandman is the scope of it across like 10 volumes.

[00:16:10] So I'd have to pick well. Yeah. But as you can see, the big thing behind me, I have a huge blown up panel from the Sandman comic. That's the character of death. I was on a road trip. I listened to like an audio version of the Sandman.

[00:16:25] I did. So yeah, it was like the first, I don't know, three or four volumes of it. It was like a acted out version, but it was very much one that he near Neil Postman's at the Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman, sorry. It was good.

[00:16:39] But I stumbled and stopped listening at the Canaan Abel story. Because the guy, the Abel was such as just like a pathetic carrot. Just a simpering. Oh, well, I couldn't stomach it. If you.

[00:16:56] Uh, enjoyed any of the first part, maybe reading Sam and volume one would be fun. There is that's very good. Sam and volume one seemed very cool. Yeah. Yeah. Like and and I'm sure you're really missing something

[00:17:10] without having the visuals, but the story of them in the diner. It is one of it is one of the most fucked up things I have ever read. And I think you might enjoy it. Let's do it then. Let's let's let's definitely think about it.

[00:17:21] I've been wanting to get it. I've almost ordered it a few times. So yeah, I'll order it for you if you want. That's how much I love it. OK, do you have any more? Yeah, Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. I mean, obviously, I'm going to put that on.

[00:17:37] This is from Alex Leggett. It is short. It's very easy read. I would also do Steppenwolf, which isn't. Siddhartha is very much kind of a Buddhist story where Steppenwolf has that angst existential just anguish. What is sorry? What is Herman Hesse's Siddhartha? Is it a story?

[00:17:59] Is a story of Siddharth that's kind of loosely based on the Siddhartha of the Buddha. Yeah. But a beautiful or a short story. It's a it's a novel, very short novel. More of a novella. OK, I'm surprised that this is Neil Postman.

[00:18:18] This is why I got that confused. But the book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Deep. This is from Paul. Deep media literacy. It takes Margin McLuhan's phrase, the medium is the message and demonstrates how the medium of broadcast

[00:18:34] television transformed human society by changing such things as who is electable as president think that that would be really interesting. I've heard other good things about this book and like I'm interested. What? What do you want? You want to go out?

[00:18:51] But you're going to just kind of come back in. Yeah, I'm really interested in the whole idea of the medium is the message and Margin McLuhan in general. And if this is something that can help us talk about that stuff, I'd be into it.

[00:19:05] Yeah, I'll admit the post was so long that I barely read it. My Paul. Sorry, Paul. Sorry, Paul. But that sounds actually very interesting to me as well. All right, last one from Edgar. I mean, obviously, I'm going to do this too.

[00:19:25] I'd love to hear you discuss this paper, The Common Consent Argument for the Existence of Nature Spirits by Titty Smith, published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. He takes a common argument for the existence of God, which he doesn't think works, but he does think works.

[00:19:41] If you're trying to establish at least the reasonableness of believing in spirits, like animal spirits, mountain spirits, forest spirits. I did look at the article. It seemed really cool. His name is Titty. Titty Smith. That's like boy named Sue. You're going to have to learn to fight.

[00:20:05] Unless it could. Yeah, well, either way, if you're a woman or a man. You should probably take some like martial arts courses. Don't look at it. You should look at it. You wanted to do epistemology, right? Like this is hardcore epistemology. Real epistemology. Yeah, this is real.

[00:20:24] I mean, Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Like people like you worship journals like that. I didn't know there was things that I worshipped that I didn't know existed. There's another argument that that's a possible tip. All right. So. So that's it. Those are.

[00:20:45] Oh, wait, no, we have to decide. No, I have to decide. I think this has gone on so long, we must be done. Right. OK, so what I have on the list of things that we seem to agree on was the act of killing. Yeah. Strange loops, disco-alizium,

[00:21:05] intuition and epistemology. And then. So my interpretation of what we agreed on was a little different. I act of killing for sure, strange loops. Yes, panpsychism, I thought was more of. Yes. Yes, you're right. But the other ones that were discussed were the immorality,

[00:21:30] Siddhartha, Sandman, deep media literacy and the common consent argument for the existence of fairies and. Because what not? The dogmatism is so strong. OK, so so let's say that there are four for sure, active killing, strangely, disco-alizium, panpsychism of the others. Shall we just make it five?

[00:21:58] And we usually do it right. Yeah, I feel like I want to have a fun one like or two. We do five or six. I'm I'm willing to put your ghost article. If that's what you mean by fun, if it's not because things like video games aren't fun,

[00:22:16] but but Australasian philosophy, epistemology is fun. Then I'm willing to put that. Well, I don't know. I'm not wedded to that, but the swimmer is another one that we talked about, but you don't know anything about it. So I don't. In fact, I should say.

[00:22:34] But the Sandman, that would be a fun one. Yeah, Sandman volume. Let's put Sandman volume one and the common consent argument. OK. That way. So active killing, strange loops, disco-alizium, panpsychism, Sandman, common consent argument. All right, this is a different list than our other ones,

[00:22:51] because like I feel like our other ones had they were more big topics in psychology or philosophy. And yeah, yeah. Yeah, we tackled all of the all of the tough questions. We're done. We finished philosophy and psychology. We're talking about video games and comic books and ghosts.

[00:23:09] I think people are finally accepting that we we enjoy the realm of aesthetics maybe more than one. And that's true. Thank God. There's so many things that worked out with this partnership, but like that that that like we both kind of like trended in that direction.

[00:23:26] Like at the same time is pretty awesome. Yeah, right. Probably as a result of the interactions too. Exactly. Yeah, strange loop. Strange loop. I mean, we did like intelligence, IQ and race. Like we were we could do whatever we want. You can't fuck with that.

[00:23:50] Yeah, well, another one we're going to we're going to tackle. Is it is it wrong to like hot people? All right, we'll be right back. Today's episode is brought to you by one of our favorite sponsors, Givewell.

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[00:31:52] All right. So we are looking at two things today. The first is, as I mentioned in the opening of forthcoming article by William D'Alesandro called Is It Bad to Prefer Attractive Partners? And D'Alesandro argues that it is in fact bad. It's unfair.

[00:32:12] It is harmful to prefer attractive partners over less attractive ones. And one of the many questions I had about this article is, OK, let's just say for the sake of argument that he's right. Now what? Like, what do we do? He addresses that question a little bit,

[00:32:31] but we get a really fleshed out answer to that question in the second piece that we're looking at, which is a short story by Ted Chang called Liking What You See A Documentary.

[00:32:44] So this is another very good Ted Chang story that is told in the form of a transcript, like a transcript of a documentary on a new technology that induces callyagnosa or cally for short, which is an inability to appreciate the beauty or attractiveness of others.

[00:33:07] So it's this, I guess, kind of neuro technology that makes you unable to distinguish whether somebody is really good looking and in the kind of classical way that people tend to appreciate beauty or or not. And the documentary, you know, the script for the documentary focuses on a

[00:33:27] student led campaign at a college called Pemberton University that would require all students to adopt callyagnosa while they're enrolled at the university. And because it's a documentary, you just get a lot of different perspectives from students, faculty, scientists and others.

[00:33:46] But the main character is a freshman named Tamara Lyons, who grew up with cally because her parents made her get it and she went to a school, high school and middle school, I guess, where everybody had it.

[00:33:59] And then when she turned 18 and became an adult, she switched it off and was able to distinguish people according to their looks, be able to evaluate how good looking a person was for the first time in her life. And then she gets to college and they're thinking about

[00:34:15] instituting this new rule. She begins the story as an ardent opponent of the campaign, but grows more ambivalent, I would say, as the story goes on. All right, Dave, on the one hand, you're a good looking guy and you enjoy

[00:34:31] a pretty face. But on the other hand, this idea that people might be judged only by the shining jewel of their pure will. That must kindle some Kantian fires that burn inside of you. So where do you stand on cally? You know, credit to Ted Chang.

[00:34:56] Well, thank you for calling me a good looking guy. But I never thought you noticed. Ted Chang takes you on a journey. And I actually read the D'Alessandro article first and then the Ted Chang short story and I have to say I vacillated at least.

[00:35:17] I flipped at least twice in reading the story as to whether it would be a good thing to not be able to evaluate the aesthetic appearance of someone's face. And I think that equality making strategies like this one, assuming this is safe

[00:35:36] and in the story, it's safe and reversible, aren't a bad thing. It's just that there's no end to the amount of damage you could do to a human brain to try to equal a playing field. And I think I ended with maybe a monstrous view, which is

[00:35:57] that beauty is something I don't want to give up, even if it's not my own. Like I just want a world in which I can appreciate beauty and other people. Maybe that selfish thing of monstrous is drawn. It's a monstrous animal. I'm an animal. I might as well.

[00:36:15] It's just evil. It's eugenics. It's yeah, that that I think it would be a good thing to not judge people on the basis of their appearance and that we should strive to do that. But also that like you're losing something that I I like.

[00:36:36] That's something about the aesthetic domain. And there's a hint there in the end and I'm sure we'll talk about it. There's a hint there at the end that says a suggestion that perhaps in turning off these neural circuits that are responsible for

[00:36:53] the aesthetic evaluation of a human face, it might influence our aesthetic appreciation of other things. And that scared me enough. Yeah. Yeah. To at least rationalize your monstrous objection to this technology. But think about the upside. You wouldn't have to like search for porn.

[00:37:12] You would just land whatever you land on. That's so I had to just like setting inside the philosophical or ethical issues, two things that just make it off the table for me, which is porn would be was the first. I just don't like how are you going to?

[00:37:28] How does that work? Like I wish you would have just appreciate it all. Is that true or would you appreciate none of it? Like he doesn't really talk about the sexual aspect of it. Right. Right. Right. So I guess, you know, to be fair to the story,

[00:37:40] it's all of the other aspects of attraction are intact. And so presumably the even being attracted to somebody's body is something that Dela Sandra gets into more of the change. Yeah. Even that pheromones and and attraction to the way that they move or talk or assume

[00:38:03] the way that their body is shaped still is intact. And and you and whatever fetishes you have would survive. So like if you really liked feet, you would just search for a foot porn and you just wouldn't care about their face. I guess I hope. I don't know.

[00:38:17] Like I don't know if you mess up your brain circuitry that appreciates beauty or hotness or attractiveness. How is that not going to affect? I guess you could just stipulate that it's just not going to affect how much you get aroused, just get aroused by anybody.

[00:38:34] Is that let me let me read the in the Chang story. There is this is structured as you said, like a set of interviews as if it were a documentary, but we're reading the transcript.

[00:38:44] He says the condition is what we call an associate of agnosia rather than an apperceptive one. That means it doesn't interfere with one's visual perception only with the ability to recognize what one sees. A caliagnosic perceives faces perfectly well.

[00:38:57] He or she can tell the difference between a pointed chin and a receding one, a straight nose and a crooked one, clear skin and blemish skin. He or she simply doesn't experience any aesthetic reaction to those differences. Caliagnosia is possible because of the existence of certain neural pathways

[00:39:10] in the brain. All animals have criteria for evaluating the reproductive potential of prospective mates and they've evolved neural circuitry to recognize these criteria. Human social interaction is centered around our faces. So our circuitry is mostly finely attuned to how a person's reproductive potential

[00:39:25] is manifested in his or her face. You experience the operation of that circuitry as the feeling that a person is beautiful or ugly or somewhere in between by blocking the neural pathways dedicated to evaluating these features, those features we can induce caliagnosia.

[00:39:40] So stipulating it is just about the face. It's just that the face is so central. But then so this is part of my problem with this whole idea is then it just seems like you're just going to appreciate hot bodies.

[00:39:56] Like if you can't, so I think for the technology to really work and do what it's pretending to do, it would also have to be affecting your appreciation of bodies or else all it does is, I don't know, this leads to a larger issue

[00:40:12] that I have with this whole idea, which is, you know, it doesn't really eliminate unfairness or just reshuffle it so that now like different people are getting favored or have bias. But but but the point thing is interesting because the

[00:40:27] the idea is if you are not able to appreciate both bodies and faces in a way that would allow you to distinguish, then like, are you going to just get turned on by anything except your weird fetishes? I don't know. Well, the plots would start to matter more.

[00:40:45] You know, like the personality of the characters having sex. We'll be going back to like 70s kind of boogie night style porn. Yeah, yeah. When people actually cared about the production, you know, it would all be on film again. That's right. Beautiful, beautiful.

[00:41:05] The second problem, like the the issue is related to what you said about that there was some worry that maybe you wouldn't be able to appreciate symmetry and art because you can't appreciate it in faces. And maybe that would affect like how you watch Stanley Kubrick movies.

[00:41:22] And like, if that's the case, then fuck this. If ever there were a symmetrical director him and Wes Anderson, your appreciation of Kubrick and Anderson, which is go down the drain. Am I, you know, I'd give up Wes Anderson right now for like 20 bucks, but not Stanley Kubrick.

[00:41:39] I much more prefer video essays about Wes Anderson films than the films themselves. Yeah, I can live without either without not that I don't respect them. It's just not for me. You're right. Right. But you know, Chang acknowledges this, I think as a more sophisticated

[00:41:57] view of the brain that even if there are specialized functions, localized specialized functioning, it doesn't mean that that doesn't play a role in another domain that's not that it wasn't designed for. And so he mentioned sort of cars. Is it him that mentions cars?

[00:42:12] Yeah, I think he does. I think people. Because cars have like a face look to them when you're when they're. Again, like Wes Anderson, something I could live without. But but this is the problem, you know, like technology wise is

[00:42:26] I know, you know, Ted Chang takes very seriously, like trying to make these things as realistic as possible. But it strikes me as hard to believe that there wouldn't be more collateral damage than just these little kind of caveats or worries.

[00:42:43] He does. I love the description of it. He says basically you put a helmet on that targets these circuits and it turns them off and there's nothing that can really do that permanently. But there is trans trans cranial magnetic stimulation, which can

[00:43:02] temporarily turn off parts of your brain. And so I think he's building off of that possibility. And so you just put a helmet on, turn off that little area of your brain. And you can choose to turn it back on.

[00:43:15] So there's even a suggestion of like temporarily turning it off. So here's a question for you. If you were interviewing, say, I don't know, PhD students that you were going to take. And you knew that what they look like does not like an odd not play a role

[00:43:35] in your evaluation of them. Would you switch it on so as to not be affected by their good looks? Again, I have to know more about what other stuff it was affecting. But at least according to how the technology is described, you know, I guess, but I also

[00:43:56] mean, this is something that a lot of people say in the story. And obviously we can be self-deceived about this to a large degree. But like I don't think when it comes to like, say,

[00:44:07] have taking somebody for a job or something like that, I don't feel like I'm that influenced by it and I have a just general kind of don't want to fuck with my brain unless it's alcohol or drugs. Yeah. The occasional psychedelic technology.

[00:44:27] But I don't know, like I think that's sort of interesting is the idea that it's just like glasses that you can put on. Right. I think we do. People are trying to do that in all sorts of different ways.

[00:44:38] Last time we interviewed, we had a script that we had to stick to for one of the interviews, you know? So let's just talk about this more generally. And then we can talk about the story and the article in more detail.

[00:44:51] But I think there's two different kinds of objections to this idea. The first is that all this is doing is taking one thing out of the equation. And so now all these other things are going to matter more than they did before,

[00:45:06] which are equally unfair, like whether like a person's race, maybe, or a person's wealth, how rich they are, or whether they're like a really good athlete or whether they're really funny. We talked about that, I think last episode, like, you know, that's not something you that's

[00:45:22] something you have about as much control over, I would think of as your looks or, you know, talented like those those kids that can like come out of the womb and already draw practically like they are already like really talented artists.

[00:45:37] So there's all these other ways in which we're just inevitably going to favor people for things that are out of their control. So just turning one of them off doesn't kind of I don't think it makes it more fair.

[00:45:52] It just kind of makes it different people that are getting bias in their favor for things that they don't control or deserve. Like, you know, this is where the moral luck stuff is real, you know. So there's there's a couple of versions of what you might be saying.

[00:46:08] Earlier, you were saying something that I found interesting, which is that if we just stick to the domain of aesthetic evaluation or say sexual attraction, what might go on is that all of your sexual energy, all of the part of you that is dedicated to finding

[00:46:25] somebody who is attractive like that were hardwired to find, you know, in partners, something that we find attractive, especially physically attractive, that all that energy would simply move, say, to like the body or to the hair or whatever hip to waist ratio, you name it.

[00:46:41] And that what would happen is not an equality, but like rather just like the like in a sort of hydraulic model that has to go somewhere. And I guess that's one possibility. But it could also be that that is just that it does just go away.

[00:46:57] And so you're still left with like, say, five out of six physical characteristics that that you judge people on, but you're taking one of them away. And so what's so long as it's safe, you're just making it more fair.

[00:47:09] Like I don't like does that make it more fair, though? Because people are still being favored for things that aren't in their control or disfavorable, say like there's an American control. It's just now it's different people. Or as before, the person with the really beautiful face is getting

[00:47:27] favored now, the person with the really hot body or the people or the person who's like, you know, right. Or but or importantly, it could that's that's still sort of following this view that it has to go some like somewhere. Right.

[00:47:42] It could be that what happens is you are whatever the things that you think are morally appropriate to value people on just become louder. Right. So that's the idea. But like this reminded me a little bit of the debate over

[00:47:56] canceling like SAT requirements at universities or GRE requirements. That's something we could talk about. Yeah, we definitely could. But in this context, the reason it reminded me is because, you know, the idea is that if black people say do worse on their SATs, then for various

[00:48:15] cultural reasons, then eliminating that requirement will make things more fair. But then it's just like more attention gets paid to these other things like teacher evaluations or your grades or all these other things. Recommendation letters. That's my big concern. Yeah, recommendation letters.

[00:48:34] So so and of course that's also going to affect negatively the people who are poor or or black or whatever. You know, like just because these are deep social problems. If you just treat one symptom, you're not necessarily making

[00:48:54] society healthier by just kind of isolating one treatment and only doing that because especially if that's just going to make the other symptoms like flare up more and to be clear, I don't think like I think that the body thing is a red herring.

[00:49:09] Like I think for this to be an interesting idea or thought experiment, it has to be that it's not just the face. It turns a little bit on this view that that face processing is super central to human social interaction, which is true. But it's obviously not everything.

[00:49:29] Right? It might very well be that in the absence of face information, you don't shift all your attention to the body. You actually start listening to what people are saying. OK, so then let's stipulate that that's how it is.

[00:49:39] Right. And you're just less concerned with people's looks in general. There's still going to be all these other ways that people are being favored or disfavored and you're right. Some of them are we have decided whether on good grounds or not.

[00:49:53] We have decided this is a good thing. This is a fair thing to judge somebody by, whereas looks aren't. But which when we get to the D'Alessandro article, I really want to save some of that for the specific claim that D'Alessandro is

[00:50:06] making, which is a more specific one than not that Ted Chang is making a claim, but it is specific to partner preference. Which yeah. So this but this is one kind like genre of objection to this is,

[00:50:19] you know, ultimately we're no more or less in control of our looks than we are big aspects of our personality. And we have just decided or some people have decided that one of these things is

[00:50:32] a fair thing to judge a person on like whether they're funny, nice or generous or we have decided that's OK. Like but there's going to be all these other things that end up mattering that are and this takes me back to my sort of free will responsibility

[00:50:49] skepticism days, but like that ultimately are also just luck just as how you look as luck. So is this really making us more equal? Or is it just OK? It used to be that you people were unfairly

[00:51:04] preference to now this group of people is going to be unfairly preference because they're talented in some way, they're wealthy, they're whatever. So that's one objection. The other is and you alluded to it earlier, it's like fundamental to life to appreciate like how beautiful and good

[00:51:22] looking people are and it's like to just take that away. And I think the story does kind of get at that. Like there was something so sad about the kids who were raised on it, trying to guess which actors in a movie were good looking.

[00:51:37] They're using like the heuristic that the lead actor must be the better looking one. Right. And that said something that I don't even know. I assume Chang was saying in a purpose, but I don't even know.

[00:51:46] But it's it's that the desire for beauty still existed in these kids. Right. But they couldn't like they were it was being denied to them. This is why the Tamara character was so upset that her parents did that to her.

[00:52:00] That's such a big part of like growing up is having some, you know, actress that you love and talking about that and, you know, just being like. And I suppose you might say that that would just get sort of filtered into

[00:52:14] like, you know, like let's take comedians, right? The mature person doesn't like a standard comedian because, you know, we like Stephen Wright's well, maybe, but not because of what he looks like. Maybe that's what kids would do for actors.

[00:52:25] They would actually appreciate them for their acting and have posters of good actors on their wall. I mean, that's what character actors are for. John C. Riley posters. Don't you want to be moved by his beauty? But again, he has this talent. Like he's a great actor.

[00:52:43] He's a hilarious and like a good singer even. And just, you know, like all the again, a lot of these gifts are still gifts. And you're just stripping away one gift from people. It doesn't mean that we're going to all of a sudden be judging people according

[00:53:00] to their Kantian jewel like will or their MLK content of their character. Yes. Right. Tamela is anti MLK for the record. Yeah, just like a couple days after. Mind the thing, you know, less. But I do think that, like, you know,

[00:53:19] there I guess the idea would be that you're attracted to them because of their personality and also like how good a match they would be for you. That's right. And we'll let when we switch to the paper, we talking about a match will be critical.

[00:53:34] But, you know, I think to be charitable, the idea here would be that still in some domains and Ted Chang says as much in his note, he says, you know, I think it would be worth giving this a try. The idea that maybe in an interview,

[00:53:52] you could just focus on the qualifications for the job, for instance. If I'm hiring a programmer, I'd ask him questions about programming and they'd answer me, I don't give a shit whether they can control that or not.

[00:54:04] I'm sure they were born with these God given talents to think mathematically and became a programmer, but I don't really care. What would suck though is if the better looking programmer gets a job, even though there was a better programmer.

[00:54:17] And maybe the idea is that people who look like John C. Riley find it harder to get jobs because people don't pay attention to their acting skills as much, whether or not those acting skills are inborn. So that's what that's what tempts me.

[00:54:31] You know, I think this is what is behind our impulse to not have pictures submitted on CVs or sometimes even try to be blind to the name of a participant. Yeah, or to try like it's behind pure review, like double blind reviews. It's behind so much stuff.

[00:54:47] Like I said, there's so much stuff that we do in job interviews that we didn't used to and honestly, like a lot of it I was opposed to for reasons like this. OK, you're eliminating one form of bias, but all these other forms of bias

[00:55:01] now have are just going to get more emphasis. But I've also appreciated some of them too. Like the standardized interview questions actually leads to like it might be an illusion, but a seemingly fairer way of comparing how people responded to questions and stuff like that.

[00:55:19] And yeah, yeah, I agree. You know, I just want to get back to something you said. You said you were fairly certain that something like beauty wouldn't influence your evaluations. I'm not so sure about myself. Yeah. And I also I'm not really.

[00:55:33] I don't want it to, but but it's it's hard. You know, you're not doing it consciously and bias correction isn't easy. And it wraps itself up into a whole package of a holistic person where you don't think you're evaluating their looks or their charm or whatever.

[00:55:50] But, you know, one of the good things about Ted Chang's story is they talk about like how advertisers make use of this and how and I'm sure this would happen. Like there's this organization called the people for ethical nanotechnology. They're coming out staunchly against Cali and

[00:56:10] giving talks on campus to try to persuade people not to do it. And it really is just backed by these cosmetic companies that are going to lose a lot of money. And you know, that would happen. So depressing that you love that cynicism in the story about like

[00:56:25] these fake grassroots campaigns and these like paid students to like pretend that they were opposed. What do you think of the second idea, though, that there's just certain fundamental aspects of life that you can't fuck with unfair as they are?

[00:56:38] And so I have two kind of like the strong version of this just says, yeah, it's unfair that some people are better looking and some people aren't. But that's just life and life is unfair in a lot of different ways. That's part of what makes it rich.

[00:56:53] That's part of what's actually in some ways like, you know, if you're a John C. Riley and you're not, you don't look like Brad Pitt, you're going to have challenges, but then you overcome them through other means. And that's just that's just life.

[00:57:07] And you have to accept that and not fuck with that because you're fucking with something kind of sacred. You're fucking with something that's too fundamental to our humanity. Now, you can make that argument all the while knowing that people have,

[00:57:19] I'm sure, made that kind of argument for like a defense of slavery or some other like horrible thing that just seemed like a fact of life to them as they grew up. Well, of course, some people have slaves and some people are slaves. That's just life. Yeah.

[00:57:36] I am. I think more on the side of let's fuck with some things and see if they can improve because just the downside of a lot of these biases are so bad. And the truth is I've been so

[00:57:52] fortunate in not having a lot of things against me, go against me in terms of those biases. So have you seen this these recent? I think I even sent you one, these sort of recent studies.

[00:58:04] I haven't evaluated them to see how good they are that masks have caused people to get tipped more evenly. Right. So like good people don't get tipped more. Good looking people don't get tipped more. Yeah, like now it's more just evenly distributed. I have masks. Yeah.

[00:58:21] And that people sort of are getting people who are unattractive aren't getting the downsides. Like people are actually it's hard to judge attractiveness when a mask is on. So people use eyes and it turns out that people's eyes just tend to be on average better.

[00:58:36] Like it's like a nice feature of people's face like mouths and noses are the ugly parts. And so people are getting treated differently for it. And I think to myself, I don't know how much damage is doing to any individual, but like like everything,

[00:58:51] it would be a trade off. It would be all right. This is like an aspect that I really enjoy. But if people are being slaves because of it, I don't want it. And and everything in between to me has to be sort of taken as as a judgment

[00:59:03] of what would what would morally improve life and like enrich that part of our lives rather than just sort of justify it because it's part of our human nature. Yeah. There's one thing you said that I actually wanted to address that I do fundamentally agree with, which is

[00:59:21] it's always been weird to me that people refer to beauty and appearance as shallow and surface and they refer to personality as something deeper and more fundamental about somebody. And I'm totally with you. And this is a big problem I have with the Dallas

[00:59:38] Andra article that focuses on the morality of partner preference, like whether you should pick a romantic partner based on parents. That shit isn't under your control either. If it were introverts would probably choose to be extroverts and get a lot of benefit from it, but they can't.

[00:59:54] So so that that part is like why is a personality deeper than a face? Beneath a face. Yeah. You know the story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut? I think it's come up before. Yeah, it sounds familiar. I don't think I've read it either way.

[01:00:11] So I feel like that takes this idea to its logical conclusion. So in that story, they don't just equalize for looks because then. Oh, yes, I have read it. They rightly note that then all of a sudden there's going to be people

[01:00:27] who are all of a sudden like really good ballet dancers are going to be favored because of their talent at ballet. So they do mask how you look in all sorts of ways, like make people ugly, who are beautiful and make people.

[01:00:41] But they also like weight like athletes down, you know, and they really try to equalize everything. And that just seems like if you don't go the Harrison Bergeron route, anytime somebody has an unfair advantage, you you equalize it.

[01:00:59] Then I kind of wonder and I wonder if this is something like you could actually figure out or calculate in some way. I kind of doubt it, but like, is this ultimately more fair? And one way it might be is if you were drawn to people,

[01:01:17] you know, like let's say for their looks heavily, but that that doesn't correlate well with how good a match you would be. And so now people are coming together not because they're in the same looks class

[01:01:32] as which is kind of how it usually is, but because there's something about their personalities that are a good fit for each other. That's like how large swaths of the internet work. You find people who share interests and you befriend them.

[01:01:47] You have no idea what they look like. And it seems like that's fine. You know, that's like there is a kind of I think what you're saying is something I agree with which is whenever you have diversity of any kind, it might be used to treat people unfairly.

[01:02:08] But you are left with taking it to its ultimate logical conclusion. You are left with a world in which every form of diversity gets eliminated in order that we don't like start using that. So if if we did everything except for what kind of pants people wore,

[01:02:28] people would start not not in a bias way. They might just be like, oh, I have those kind of pants too and like talk to each other and it just would. We go about our world choosing people to become friends with, to get into

[01:02:42] business with, to whatever co-teacher class with, to date. All of those things are based on what makes that person different from somebody else. Right. And so it's hard to like model. I think what you were getting at is could you model interaction in a way where

[01:02:57] you would like sort of eliminate all of this information that you get from these differences across people? Yeah. What would you have? Exactly. Like, is that even coherent? Yeah. Like maybe if you had just a lottery that just

[01:03:13] but then all of a sudden like the thing itself, which is sexual attraction or just attraction in general is all of a sudden it's not recognizable anymore. It's just a weird. It's a very weird thing to say like, suppose that you said

[01:03:31] to like a real simple example, it's unfair. Well, not even it's unfair. Let's not get there. Discriminating between the kind of tie based on the color of the tie and the pattern on that tie and the materials it's made of is something that we should

[01:03:46] eliminate. The only way to do that is to like make them all the same so that everybody has the same tie and then you've lost something about why people buy ties like it's in the first place. Yeah. Then it's like, well, there's no point to buying a tie.

[01:03:59] Yeah. On the other hand, there's, you know, like one of the things that kind of moved me in the story and just hit me is that at the school where Tamara went before Pemberton, where everybody had to have the Cali technology.

[01:04:17] A lot of a lot of students with like face burns and other facial abnormalities and bone cancer and stuff like that, that they went to that school and for the first time in their lives were treated as like probably, you know,

[01:04:34] like normal human beings who have just as good a chance as anybody else of making friends and getting a girlfriend or a boyfriend. And that's quiet. There is something kind of beautiful about that, you know? It is nice.

[01:04:49] And this is why it's such an interesting discussion because it pulls those moral intuitions that say, yeah, like we should do something about it. Just in the implementation process, it becomes difficult to see where, like what exactly ought to be done. Like where do you draw the line?

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[01:06:45] Again, that's B-E-T-T-E-R-H-E-L-P.com. Slash VBW. Now thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizards. So you brought up as an objection to the article, this idea of, well, like you just can't control who you're going to be attracted to.

[01:07:05] Like I obviously think that's true and also in general, fine. One of the cool things about life is that you just have certain people you're attracted to, certain people you're not, that maybe other people are.

[01:07:18] And but what he says is that it's true that you're not going to be able to do it entirely, but just like you can train yourself to eat good foods, healthy foods, even though you might want to eat ice cream and fried chicken

[01:07:35] and German chocolate cake, like you can sort of get yourself through just a series of steps in developing good healthy eating habits. You could maybe start to get yourself to do that or at least it's not clear

[01:07:50] why you could do that with food tasting appreciation, but you couldn't do it with beauty tasting appreciation. Yeah, I call it like I think in my notes, I wrote it like, you know, people are like kale, like it's just like. Kale is a good example.

[01:08:09] Like I'll eat kale now. I like it, you know, I had to give it a chance though. I didn't give it a chance at first. Yeah, so my my problems with the article stem from the fact that it's narrowed

[01:08:22] down this question of of lookism, of beauty bias, narrowed it down to the question of picking a romantic partner and whether or not it is immoral to to select a romantic partner based on their appearance. Then he wants to argue no.

[01:08:39] And so he presents arguments why he says it's unfair to people. And that it harms people. And one of his arguments about unfairness is that really they have people have no control over the looks.

[01:08:53] Yeah, and and I wanted to bring what you were saying before to this argument because here is where really, really, I think stood out that. You can't control shit if that's what you're hanging your argument on. I'm sorry, buddy, but it's uncontrollable all the way down. Right.

[01:09:13] Like there are very few things that we can truly control about ourselves. And so I don't see why picking based on intelligence or picking based on personality or picking based on sense of humor, charisma, why any of that is better than picking based on appearance.

[01:09:30] And and and I think that's a reductio for this argument. I think that that he goes to sort of like weird like if I were writing the article, I think it would become an obvious objection that we can't control any of these things.

[01:09:41] So him not talking about it seems like I'm addressing it. Yeah, it seems like an odd omission. And that that retort that he has to like, well, what about control on the other side? What I can't control whom I'm attracted to?

[01:09:56] Well, just try just like whatever in an Aristotelian fashion, structure your life so that you'll be attracted to ugly people. It seems just like weak sauce to me. It's like, like I'm not. I'm not sure that's possible in the same way that I'm not sure it's possible

[01:10:14] to become more funny. Like I don't I don't know how much control you have over what you're attracted to. Well, OK, let me play a devil's advocate here and like speak on behalf of maybe some Sam Harris listeners and say, wait a minute,

[01:10:32] you're just said we don't have control of anything. And so you can't make those kinds of distinctions. I thought you were a compatibus. I thought you thought we can have control over certain things, especially if they're tied to choice and reason.

[01:10:46] And you don't control how big your nose is or how how hot your ass is or how big your dick is or whatever it is that you are out like symmetrical. Your face is how like if you can't control how big your dick is.

[01:11:02] I've been spending a lot of money. Wastefully wasting a lot of money. Sorry to break it to you, but I saw it before and after pictures. It said. But no, like isn't the compatibus position that you can like distinguish

[01:11:20] between like how big your dick is versus how how good a person you are or how reasonable your beliefs are or how moral you are. And if that's true, then why wouldn't it be better to judge people based on those things rather than dick size?

[01:11:43] Yeah. So I think that that's good. And I think that that one, it would help if he said that if he, you know, maybe this is neither the time nor place. But again, it seems like a glaring omission to say

[01:11:58] that some of these things that it's more it. It struck me as as building on the intuition that it's wrong to be racist. Therefore it must be wrong to judge to want to date somebody based on their

[01:12:09] appearance and and there was no thought into why control is so central. Then why wouldn't it be wrong to like people based on how funny they are charismatic they are or how, you know, how extroverted they are. Yeah.

[01:12:27] And like and then we could have we could have discussions about how much control people do have over those things and it might be that people have more control over their moral character than they do over how anxious they are.

[01:12:39] But here's what it comes down to for me. Like it's the fact that it's that he's trying to make a moral claim about who you ought or ought not be attracted to that in my mind doesn't even

[01:12:53] get off the ground because I actually don't think that it's immoral to have any preferences, whether people can control them or not for a romantic partner. And I think we can distinguish this choice from things like people being qualified for jobs and being evaluated on things that that

[01:13:12] have nothing to do with that job or people getting access to, you know, health care because of their race, like all of that stuff. There's a ton of stuff where it deeply matters that you that you not be biased. But when it comes to partner preference,

[01:13:30] I don't think that it's immoral to pick whomever you want just out of the most arbitrary reasons. And he gives the example that he's trying to fight. He's trying to use to pull our intuitions that this is wrong.

[01:13:43] He says, you know, white supremacists who will only date white women, that's wrong. And I feel like that's wrong because he's a white supremacist. It's not wrong because he's attracted to white women. Right? In fact, a white supremacist who is actually attracted to only black

[01:13:59] women, but because of his principled beliefs that that that black people are inferior, chooses white women, that would be wrong. But I can't get behind the view that I owe anybody anything when I'm picking them for as a romantic partner.

[01:14:16] I can't get behind if you like Asian people, then cool. If you like amputees, cool. If you like Jews, if you like Jews, if you have a fetish. Even Jews? That's how serious I am about this. About my argument here.

[01:14:34] If you try to start picking a romantic partner, is the ultimate social discrimination task? We will base it on a lot of stuff that for sure they don't have control over some stuff that they have a little bit of control over.

[01:14:47] But I find it hard to make a moral judgment against the person who's making the choice. All right, I agree. Again, let me try to play a little devil's advocate by saying, well, you know, that's an easy position to have if you're a reasonably good looking person.

[01:15:03] If your looks are not an obstacle to you having partners, right? And just like with, you know, somebody might say about race, like, look, I think racial equality is fine. But I think everyone has the right to hire like whatever race of people that

[01:15:27] they want for their job or it's hard to draw this fine line. You like remember the should the baker have to have to cook a cake for a gay wedding for a same sex wedding or not.

[01:15:41] Like all these things kind of bleed into each other and maybe, you know, as someone who, you know, where looks haven't been an obstacle for you. Yeah, of course you think looks should be like this sacred, inviolable domain where you can just be attracted to who you want.

[01:15:58] Because that doesn't affect you like it affects some people. Fair enough, but it's not. But I'm not saying this for just looks, I'm saying this for nearly any feature of a person that makes them different.

[01:16:10] But it's that I think that there is a strong line that we can draw between access to the kinds of things that people ought to have access to, that they have a right to have access to like the right to get a job if they're

[01:16:25] qualified or not be mistreated, be allowed into a restaurant, no matter what race there are all of those things are deeply important. And if you're a racist and you only date white people because you're racist, you're wrong for being a racist.

[01:16:37] I just think that it's such a unique decision to choose somebody to be partnered with that arbitrary decisions in this domain that aren't affecting the class of people or a group of people or they're not being made into law or they're not being in a content way, universalized.

[01:17:00] If I like someone who has dirty nails, fuck it, like who could judge me for liking somebody just because their nails are dirty? It seems like a misapplication of a basic intuition about equality once you move into this domain.

[01:17:14] Yeah, I just like and it's very weird that you're making that argument. I know, I expect the email. But it's a blurry line where you draw the line. Like, you know, like who you're attracted to is completely up to you.

[01:17:31] But like who you choose to have as a colleague isn't again, I agree with you. I just think it's a little blurry in terms of how sharp you can make the distinction. Because a lot of the same arguments, this is what the article

[01:17:47] that D'Alessandro really leans on is a lot of the same arguments that you're making people make to justify racism or to justify sexism or to justify, you know, all sorts of prejudice that are, you know, that we now think is wrong. So.

[01:18:06] But I don't think yeah, I like just to double down. I don't think my line is being drawn. Like there's no blur there. I'm saying literally the romantic partner preference is the only one in which

[01:18:17] we have free free reign because it's because it really is just affecting you and your happiness with this person. Having said that, I really do think that D'Alessandro, it would have been nice to try to present some data arguing that

[01:18:36] people who are unattractive don't get into romantic relationships at the same rate because I kind of think that's not true. I thought he did. No, he made he presented data about lookism in general, which I do think is is a bad thing, which is that like

[01:18:51] people who are good looking get favored in all sorts of ways. But he didn't present relationship data. And I think that. But you don't doubt that. I do. I think that I think that what we find is in the marketplace of romantic

[01:19:06] coupling is that people end up being with people who are at similar attractiveness levels. There are plenty of people at every level of attractiveness. So so I think good looking people get a separate but equal. That's what she's dragging for. Let me tell an attitude.

[01:19:23] I have a good friend whose name I won't mention, but this cracked me up. I she's a good looking young woman and I met her at work. And she introduced me to her. Yeah, now it's my turn. She shut the fuck up. Yeah, nice.

[01:19:44] She introduced me to her ex-boyfriend who when I met was this charming French guy who is super good looking just like he had it all. Like, you know, if I didn't like him so much, I'd be mad at him. And I remember asking her where she met him.

[01:20:02] And she's she's like, it's kind of embarrassing. And I was like, why? She's like, it was online. I was like, everybody meets people online. She's like, no, it was an online dating site for attractive people. So you literally had to submit a photo.

[01:20:16] And if you were attractive enough, you got to be part of the pool. And I was like, does your fiance know that your ex-boyfriend? That's just all that is doing is kind of establishing a company for what you're arguing for.

[01:20:32] Right. But if there were, yeah, if there were websites where it's terrible to say, but like less attractive people, like say, if you could rank people, people in the middle of the pile could find people in the middle of the pile to date.

[01:20:45] People at bottom of the pile find people at bottom of the pile. I would say that's great. But it's not equal and it's not separate but equal, the kind of idea that you are touting because the people who are in the lower attractive tiers would

[01:20:58] definitely date the people in the upper attractiveness tiers, right? But the same isn't true the other way. So like there isn't equality of opportunity. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't, you know, maybe they want to stick to their own. I mean, maybe, right. I mean, here's a quick.

[01:21:17] Everyone's like, what's the deal with that? We've talked about this before, but do you think that there is that it is immoral to prefer certain races in your pornography viewing habits? I hope not. Right, you know, like you got to like something.

[01:21:39] And if that something happens to be co extensive with a social group that is already treated too well, then maybe you can reconsider. But it wouldn't be by dint of just you being attracted to that group.

[01:21:55] It would be by dint of that group already getting so much good for all sorts of other reasons, like it's right. And now they also get you jerking off to them. Like who wouldn't want that? Look, I'm on your side on this. I'm just trying to.

[01:22:12] You were expecting I love this, this flipping of the. Yeah, the flipping of the script for sure. Again, like here's where I'll go back to being me in terms of just my general philosophical attitude. There's something about this argument and this whole debate that strikes me

[01:22:29] that, you know, as similar to like, is it fair to love your children more than you love other people's children or something like that? It's like that's just the wrong question to ask. Like there is just certain givens with being human. Like I'm with you that fundamentally like

[01:22:47] sexual attraction and the very, very ability with how that works and the particularity of your own preferences just is one of those just central things to life. And no, it's not fair because ultimately nothing is really fair in this life.

[01:23:05] And some people get lucky and they get a good roll of the dice and some people don't. And, you know, maybe if you're a compatibilist, like there's you can play your cards in better or worse ways.

[01:23:18] And maybe that's, you know, not even that doesn't ultimately come down to luck. But ultimately, like this is there is a kind of richness and messiness and just like, I don't know, just a fundamental part of being human that you can't fuck with

[01:23:32] like that. And, you know, and that's why I think like, you know, loving your kids is in that category. And I think just being attracted to who you're attracted to is also in that category.

[01:23:43] It is. And I don't think it's such a hard line to draw where you would say, I mean, look, we do this all the time in a way that until maybe recently hasn't been morally problematic, but I'm only attracted to women sexually.

[01:23:57] Like I would only want a data woman. God knows, like I wouldn't mind being bisexual or gay. Like I kind of think it might be fun. It's just that I'm not right. And so to tell me that it's immoral to prefer women over men,

[01:24:11] strikes me as like a misunderstanding of what's going on in my in my mind about what meeting a partner that I'm attracted to is all about. Yeah. There's there's a section because I want to do him. I want to do D'Alessandro justice.

[01:24:26] I'm trying to find the section because I don't want to misconstru his argument, but he says something along the lines of a lot of other things like say getting a job, right? The right to be looked at equally, whether you're white or black.

[01:24:44] When it comes to that's a right people would consider that a right, a fundamental right. He says, don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing that everybody has a right to be chosen as a partner. But what he is saying, he says, is something softer.

[01:25:00] He thinks is softer that people, everybody deserves to be in a romantic relationship. And so the unfairness is coming in by not allowing unattractive people to be in romantic relationships. You are fucking with some fundamental dessert that they have to be in one.

[01:25:18] It all hinges on whether or not I think the quality of the argument that you're making that people do have a right or deserve to be in a romantic relationship. And I just don't think so. Otherwise, you're treading on some in Sally territory that I'm not comfortable with.

[01:25:33] Like you might not get chosen and that's fine. Yeah, like I agree. I think this is not the strongest for a bunch of reasons. But I think the problem is that he is trying to come up with some sort of reason why it's unfair that attractive people are,

[01:25:55] that people have more of a bias towards being in a relationship with attractive people than unattractive people. And so he tries to cash that out in terms of dessert. I don't think he needs that.

[01:26:05] I think we can get on board with the intuition that there is something a little unfair about the fact that Brad Pitt is going to have a lot more access to be in relationships than, I don't know, Stavi from come town probably. No offense to him.

[01:26:28] I don't know who that is. Very funny. But you know, like this gets to the like, you know, Will Chamberlain will get a lot more MBA contracts. Right. But like that's but I think like, you know, to the extent that you're not a hardcore libertarian,

[01:26:40] you think that maybe some of it's OK to have some kind of redistribution or something like that. Or at the very least that yeah, people should have equality of opportunity. I don't know what that means.

[01:26:56] You know, part of my resistance, I think also comes down to some things that I believe at least to be psychological features, which is that I don't think like the kale analogy is a huge step of the argument. And whether or not it is possible to say,

[01:27:16] become attracted to people who you ought to be attracted to. That is a big question mark. And I agree. I just don't I just don't think it's true. So so your your if odd implies can there's a very big constraint on this.

[01:27:34] And I would be an interesting question. Let's say that there are certain races, let's say you're not attracted to Hispanic women, Hispanic women. And then you just kind of forced yourself at first to only watch like Hispanic

[01:27:49] like the Latina porn for for six months straight and only that. Do you think you might become more attracted to Latina women? Like it seems it's interesting. I'm taking that question seriously. It seems as if, in fact, I've actually morally mistreated Latina women by like

[01:28:08] just selecting them on the category of the race and trying to use them to like morally better myself. It seems kind of unfair. Like let's say porn wasn't part of it. Let's say I didn't have porn.

[01:28:20] Let's say I only wanted to so so I like go to more Latin get together groups and and you know, try to talk to more Latina's. And and at some point one of them asks me, you didn't used to come here before.

[01:28:35] And I say, well, I'm trying to get more attracted to Latina's because so I'm exposing myself. That seems it seems weird to me. It seems it seems odd. Again, my philosopher like devil's advocate hat for which has been absent for so long is coming back.

[01:28:54] But like people might say that again about like affirmative action. It's like, you know, it would be insulting to try to hire somebody or prefer somebody just because they were black or a woman or from a marginalized category.

[01:29:08] And if I went up to them and I told them, oh, by the way, like that would be wrong. That doesn't mean it's it's not good to try to increase the diversity of your faculty or your company argument. You're right.

[01:29:20] My argument really, really hinges on romantic attraction being a separable thing. One that we can we can remove from all of the other sort of injustices because all of those other things I do think are deep injustices and we should do things like expose ourselves to others.

[01:29:40] There's just something weird about like is a guy is a white guy who loves Asian chicks less racist? Like I think what we want to know is whether they're racist. Right. We want to know is do you like Asian chicks because you somehow have

[01:29:55] this negative stereotype about the kind of person they would be in a relationship? Or is it just that you've overcome your bias toward white people? Like those questions matter, not really who you're attracted to matters. Like, you know, the white supremacist, like I said before,

[01:30:11] the white supremacists who picks white people, they're bad because they're white supremacists, not because they picked a white person. And I, you know, the attraction thing is interesting because you said this earlier, but it's the same as true for me.

[01:30:22] Like you could show me as much gay porn as you wanted. Like I'm not going to begin. Like I just like it's just it does seem like it is not in your control in a way that certain other things are. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:30:37] And I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. And I certainly am willing to be corrected on this. And we haven't talked about ableism and fat, and there's some interesting things there to be discussed. But I don't know how different the conversation would go.

[01:30:53] But I did want to say as we wrap up, maybe, how much I appreciate Ted Chang's the thought that he puts into this format of a story where I really felt like I was saying before, like he was carrying me through these

[01:31:10] intuitions and arguments in the format of these mock interviews where I gave it a lot of thought and I wasn't sure what the right thing to do and what the wrong thing to do was. And again, in this extended case of society and lookism,

[01:31:25] I kind of felt in the end kind of like Ted Chang felt like, well, I would give it a try. Like let's see if it as opposed to the format of a dry philosophy article. And maybe, you know, it's not that's not to be,

[01:31:39] you know, the Dallas Ender article, as you said, was clearly written and argued in all that. It's just that you can in the hands of somebody like Ted Chang, putting ideas into somebody's head and having them play with them is such goes such it's a such more smooth.

[01:31:56] I love this form of like a story. Like I think it's such a brilliant idea. I haven't really seen. I wish someone filmed it. Yeah. It would be a cool film project. Yeah. But you know, as someone as like a writer,

[01:32:08] I think I would like to write this form, you know, like, yeah. But I agree because you get all these different perspectives. And this is again, something that you couldn't have in a philosophy article just by because of the genre of it.

[01:32:20] But like I love this Laurie Harbour, who is a student at another college. And she says, Kallie is for wusses. My attitude is fight back. Go radical ugly. That's what beautiful people need to see. I got my nose taken off about this time last year.

[01:32:39] And like she just goes around freaking people out being radically ugly. And just like that's a great thing that you can do in a story is just give all the different kinds of reactions that people might have to this kind of technology.

[01:32:53] And and we haven't even talked about Tamara's final. Maybe we should conclude with that because maybe she's like you in the sense that she started out being radically opposed, really angry at her parents for making her do it.

[01:33:07] And I think legitimately and very excited to have it off and to realize, oh my God, I'm actually kind of pretty. And it didn't interestingly, she had this boyfriend from high school that who wasn't it turns out she finds out she learns that attractive.

[01:33:24] But it didn't affect how she thought of him. And so she kind of convinces him to take to get his Cali removed. And they start talking and you know, because she wants to get back together with him and she knows that once he takes it

[01:33:40] off, it would be like this reveal that like shit, my girlfriend's hot. Yeah, exactly. And then she thinks and meanwhile he's going through, he's realizing for the first time, oh, I'm not that good looking. And like he's feeling a little isolated wherever he's going to school.

[01:33:56] And so she thinks maybe I'll go to his place and then it'll help him that she's with a good looking girl. And she goes and she's very honest, like even though, you know, there's a vanity to her kind of understandably, but

[01:34:12] she's very honest with herself and she starts to realize that she's trying. She's now using her looks, her prettiness to try to get him back in a way that even she finds objectionable. Right. And so in the same way that advertisers

[01:34:28] were manipulating other people, she was like using this power. Yeah. And so she tentatively decides to put the Cali back on by the end of the story. But the advertiser link is really interesting. And it's again, one thing that Cheng deals with that.

[01:34:45] If there's anything compelling about this, it's also just all these other ways that people's looks can influence our behavior. And then just as like a self-defense mechanism to have this technology, I'm a little skeptical that it means as much as Cheng seems to suggest in some of

[01:35:03] these that it has that much of an influence. But I guess I would be if I was. You talking about the Cali stuff? No, that the looks of somebody or effects like how much you believe them or how much you want to.

[01:35:18] The end at the end, when he talks about this new technology that alters digitally things like linguistic, postural and facial movements and like linguistic whatever. Yeah. And that turned the election. Right. Which is separable from just the facial beauty appearance.

[01:35:40] Like that that influenced whether or not it was used to influence whether or not people voted in favor or against something. Yeah, I don't know. It's it's it's hard to know, right? Because I think what he's getting at is a charisma charm. Right.

[01:35:57] Like you can you can use it to magnify people's charisma. And I think politicians are put a lot of stock in the power of charismatic leaders. So so it would be interesting there. It's like now you're getting to that in between where it's it's like, well,

[01:36:15] if you've trained to speak in a persuasive way and to gesticulate in a way that people find comforting, you know, the way that they trained Bill Clinton to put his fist on his palm, like presumably because that communicated something good about his power, then maybe.

[01:36:31] Clearly, like putting your thumb like up and when you're talking to people has been shown to influence people because like politicians do that all the time. It always looks so weird to me. Like, what the fuck are you doing with your thumb? Are you like hitchhiking?

[01:36:44] Wicked. I know. It's like they decided that somehow it's like it's not pointing and it's not like it's not too threatening and it's not too weak. It's just the right amount of like confidence. You know, yeah. That's funny. All right.

[01:37:00] Well, a great story from Ted Chang is nice to get back to fun. It's interesting that he is in favor of it. You know, it's like, I think he has a certain ethical position that you can discern,

[01:37:15] but he's so good about presenting all sides of an idea that is, you know, I'm almost surprised that he does the notes at the end. That's what gives his tells where he stands. Right. It's unclear whether you should read the notes like for

[01:37:32] a great right after you read the story. You might want to let it sit in before you read. I mean, I do like I don't have like the self-control to stop myself from, but I totally agree. I'm not sure it's a great idea to do that.

[01:37:47] It's like director's commentary is on a DVD. I feel like you should be very familiar with a movie before you ever listen to one of those. Yeah. I like the Lynch attitude, which he's not going to tell you jack shit. I do too. Absolutely. Yeah.

[01:38:01] All right. All right. Do you think I'll get hate mail? For what? For being like a only liking white women. For being a lookist. Well, we'll just have to wait and see. Maybe, you know, join us next time if we're attractive enough for you. Join us next time.

[01:38:19] I'm very bad with you.

[01:39:00] And a very good man. Just a very bad wizard.