Lookism, racism, ageism, and more

Lookism: the problem of beauty

Start with Ted Chiang's observation on beauty

Psychologists once conducted an experiment where they repeatedly left a fake college application in an airport, supposedly forgotten by a traveler. The answers on the application were always the same, but each time they included a different photo of the fictitious applicant. It turned out people were more likely to mail in the application if the applicant was attractive. This is perhaps not surprising, but it illustrates just how thoroughly we're influenced by appearances; we favor attractive people even in a situation where we'll never meet them. 

Yet any discussion of beauty's advantages is usually accompanied by a mention of the burden of beauty. I don't doubt that beauty has its drawbacks, but so does everything else. Why do people seem more sympathetic to the idea of burdensome beauty than to, say, the idea of burdensome wealth? It's because beauty is working its magic again: even in a discussion of its drawbacks, beauty is providing its possessors with an advantage.

The unfair treatment of people based on their beauty is called "lookism". There are, I think, two main ways to finally make lookism a thing of the past.

Beauty for nobody

One is "calliagnosia", or "beauty blindness". Ted Chiang's story Liking What You See: A Documentary explores the social reactions of people on calliagnosia. The last argument in the story against calliagnosia has always struck me as ingenious and deeply wrong in a way I can't quite figure out. The argument is:

1. Assume a substantial number of people cannot perceive beauty, but a small amount of people still can. Call them Blinders and Seers.
2. Seers would still be lookist. 
3. Blinders are blind to beauty, so they cannot see how Seers are lookist.
4. Thus calliagnosia might increase lookism.

A similar argument has been used in the context of racism, to argue why racism would not be reduced if only parts of society become "color-blind" (that is, behaving as if race cannot be perceived). More on this interesting argument later.

As Ted Chiang noted, I think there is no hope of calliagnosia becoming prevalent, because most people are pleasured by perceiving physical beauty, and this pleasure far outweighs the general, collective, impersonal guilt of participating in lookism.

Beauty for everybody who wants it

The second is "mass manufacture of beauty", and which I believe has a far higher chance to succeed. All the plastic surgeries and medical research into youth and beauty point towards a future where beauty can be as affordable as robotic arms and tails and super-botox injections.

Years ago I read partially a story "The Depreciation of V" (V的贬值, by 宋宜昌). The basic plot is that a scientist, after getting rejected for being ugly, devoted himself to developing cheap technologies for making anyone beautiful. A heartbroken woman (rejected for being ugly) met this scientist and they decided to collaborate, with the scientist making her the first "artificial Venus" (Venus is the Roman goddess of love and beauty).

I didn't read more, but even back then, it struck me as a very reasonable and likely pathway towards finally ending lookism. Not by trying to make people ignore looks (it's against human nature) or selling calliagnosia (it's a hard sell), but by making everyone have good looks, so that it no longer matters.

Similar problems of love and sex

Making cheap love seems significantly harder. There are, of course, some things that are mass produced right now that can serve as love-objects, for example, dollies, plushies, body-pillows, but none of them is intelligent enough for interesting conversations.

Despite the difficulties, I remain hopeful, because of the fact that there is one kind of love that should be easy to make and have wide appeal. And that is unconditional love. Unconditional love is much easier than conditional love, since it has less conditions. Dogs and cats, who has no human-level intelligence, are capable of making unconditional love. It makes me hopeful that devices for making unconditional love would be on the market in a decade. It only requires deeper understanding of human emo-social-biochemistry to figure out an efficient and reproducible way to make unconditional love.

Cheap sex is significantly easier. Sophisticated sex exists, but most of the market for sex could be captured by very simplistic devices with no conversational intelligence. No breakthroughs in AI needed, only the slow and steady refinement of animatronics.

Ableism argument

Another interesting argument for beauty in the book is this:

1. Beauty is real.
2. If natural humans have the ability to perceive a real thing, that ability must not be taken away.

This argument is what I call "the ableism argument". It is hiding in many arguments. Let me list a few.

• Castration and sterilization are wrong, even if voluntary. (Personally, I'd love to sell my genitals for a bit of cash. I need my kidneys, but not my genitals!)
• Curing schizophrenia is okay, even if it is involuntary, and takes away a person's ability to perceive certain things, because these things are unreal.

There are cool counterarguments for ableism too:

• An ancient Chinese player of strings blinded himself by burning poisonous grass in a sealed room, so that he could be fully devoted to his art. This is an early example of exploiting neuroplasticity: when blinded, the brain areas devoted to seeing would be devoted to sound, hand motion, and other aspects instead. So to someone who loves music much more than anything else, this is in fact a net gain.
• Some deaf parents want to have deaf children. This is based on a counter-intuitive eugenic argument: deaf children are better able to integrate into deaf culture, which to these deaf parents, is a valuable trait that they want in their children.

Racism, sexism, ageism, and other ways to perceive differences in humans

There are many kinds of humans. This creates a permanent tension with liberal humanism, which assumes that humans are similar enough that they all have certain human rights and obligations. There are many kinds of fairness, not all of which are compatible, either. This creates even more tension. And yet more tension comes from the fact that certain economic developments are inevitable processes of history, and history is not kind.

Racism and nationalism

Racism is a way to make distinction between people by certain visible traits. It is currently replaced by nationalism, which is even less supported by biological reality: the racial differences are already small, and the national differences, microscopic.

The previously mentioned argument against callisagnosia has also been applied to against race-impartiality: that, if we really become blind to race, justice cannot be served, because some people would still suffer, it's just that now most people would be unable to intuitively understand why they suffer.

Thought experiment: UV-lookism

Suppose that there are a select few people who can in fact see in UV, and according to these UV-seers, certain people have really beautiful facial coloration, and they favor such UV-beauties. 

Now, is this a problem? Really, what does it mean to be UV-fair? 

Suppose this UV-lookism is never discovered directly, because UV-seers just never mentioned it to other people. How could it possibly be discovered indirectly? Perhaps it would eventually emerge after social scientists run enough statistical analysis on who likes seeing what face, and finds some kind of statistical anomaly in the face-preference of certain people who happen to have certain genes that cause their eyes to perceive UV.

And would it even matter? Breaking the news to the world, the scientists are met with amusement and shrugs.

And what if nobody could consciously see in UV, but somehow, the appearance of a face in UV light has been found to correlate with business success? 

How could humans deal with an invisible unfairness? If an unfairness is sufficiently hard to be causally linked to something conscious, does it still matter according to human moral intuition?

Thought experiment: luckism

Suppose scientists have found hidden traits in a baby that can predict how lucky they would be at school, or at work, or something. The amount of luck that this trait could predict is not total, but good enough for publications. For most areas of life, having just a bit of bad luck is okay, but in certain situations, such as in outer space, a bit of bad luck is too much.

So, just as astronauts are selected for their cardiopulmonary function, intelligence, technical training, mental stability, manual dexterity, and so on, they are also selected for that bit of extra luck. Is this okay?

Why not treat people differently based on their luck? We already discriminate people with many fine criteria: past behavior, dress, general personality, emotional tendencies, diet choice, opinion on certain issues, scores. Why not luck?

Just... what is the human method of determining what is just, and what is not? I am no longer sure.

How diverse should humans be?

Generally, lookism, sexism, racism, elitism, nationalism, etc, are all ways of acting differently based on differences between people. Just because a difference exists doesn't mean it becomes socially relevant, and just because it used to be relevant doesn't mean it stays relevant. 

The meaning of a difference can change vastly depending on context, history, surrounding technology, geography, and so on. In an alien invasion, national differences hardly matter. In a German invasion, it is a matter of life and death. Being female used to mean no university education. What doesn't change is that diversity changes.

It's a common argument that diversity is good, but is it really? And how much diversity, in what form? Can it be measured? 

One argument against modern voluntary eugenics is that if most parents have access to eugenic technology, they would modify out most of the unwanted variations in the human gene pool, which is bad, because diversity is good.

A stronger version of this argument is that, not only should genetic enhancement be banned, selective abortion and genetic therapy for removing genetic illnesses should also be banned, because genetic illnesses enrich the human gene pool.

While I am sympathetic to the desire to inject more diversity to the human race, with my love for creative disruption, I must ask, should we also use randomized ionising radiation in the womb to create new birth defects? And further, this argument for diversity-preservation also argues forcefully for genetic enhancement, because genetic enhancement also increases diversity in creating humans that are far above the normal range in intelligence, athletics, empathy, or other aspects.

If instead of real diversity, we only want a feeling of diversity, then eugenics is hardly a problem: people regularly find ways to differentiate between residents of two cities that are merely 10 km apart. No amount of eugenics beautification could stop people from finding ways to make humans seem diverse.

Nihilism

Personally, I don't believe there is justice in history. Rationality is weak and flabby, and even if there is a rational morality, it would not matter, because the only thing we observe is not rational, but survivable. It might be that the rational morality demands suicide, but we live anyway because anyone with a strong enough rationality has died. 

Rationality can be defined as ways of knowing that can be done impersonally. Rationality can be done by any physical stuff that is arranged regularly enough, such as a human brain, or a computer. If there is no hope for us, evolved creatures, to be very rational, then how do we know except by feelings? And there are so many different ways to feel in this world. Even among humans, there are many ways to feel, and across species, many millions more ways. Who feels in the right way?

Is it any wonder that people who have lost hope with total rationality have embraced feelings? They say that "it's good to base morality on feelings, because there's nothing else to base it on". They say that a world controlled by total rational beings is terrible, because morality requires feelings, and out of feelings, after extensive testing and processing, we can discover the true morality for this world. They are like drunks searching for their keys in the bright light, even if there're no keys, because they could not see anywhere else. Even funnier, they claim to have found the keys when there are no keys in their hands.

The real reason for this optimism is not that feelings are somehow aligned with morality, but that "reason is the slave of the passions" (as Hume said), and even a defeat by reason is quickly twisted into a victory. Feelings are optimistic, so the rationality quickly gets to work to explain the optimism.

Further, the optimism bias makes it unlikely for a human article to end in a sad note, and even more unlikely for other people to read, share, and repeat the article. As such, if you read randomly, optimism is everywhere, even in irrationality, even in existentialism, even in the holocaust. How could anyone still be a Christian after the Holocaust, if not a diehard optimist?

There will be no obligatory optimism here because I don't feel optimistic. Even I cannot escape feelings, even I, a mathematician, has a weak and flabby rationality. Laugh with me.

How to stay young (warning: personal weird opinion)

The sound of "racism" and "sexism" have their powerful bite mainly because of the powerful and long social justice movements on racism and sexism. That's because race and sex are very permanent, and sinks into the deepest layer of a person's identity. As such, people demanding racial and sexual equality are well-motivated to fight for something that could affect their whole life, and onlookers are usually affected by their moral force.

In contrast, it's much harder to create a powerful and long social justice movement against ageism, because young people grow old. It's really hard to stay at an age group.

When humans know there is something they grew out of, they dismiss it to preserve their time-consistency, and that makes things hard. Like, why can't I just tell women who demand their rights, "Just man up!" or tell black people who complain about racism "Just get white!".

So why is it okay to tell teenagers, hippies, and other wild youths to "just grow up"? The answer is again, time-consistency: since people grow up eventually, and do not want to denounce themselves, they belittle previous versions of themselves as uncalibrated, defective, less correct than the latest version.

There is nothing wrong with being teens. Anything that is worthy that an adult can do, a teen can do (with enough study). Anything that only an adult can do, is unworthy. But the adults imagine themselves the pinnacle of human development, as much as the kids think of themselves too. The difference is that adults have a louder voice. The world might no longer be run by straight white men for straight white men, but it's still run by adults for adults, and they run the culture department.

Adulthood is not a biological category, anymore than the female gender. Adulthood is a social role that might be assumed by anyone, or not. Why else would some people demand others to "grow up"? And it is my hope to make the world a more accommodating place for non-adult ways of life.

A pacifist cannot survive the law of the jungle. A vegan cannot survive on the Tibetan plateau. A child (usually) cannot survive without adults. A human cannot survive without its gut microbiome. All ways of life are based on material reality. Moral superiority does not matter. It might be better to be vegan, pacifist, or human, but they are outgrowths of physical energy and matter. 

To stay young, the world has to be "nice" to young people. The most urgent matter, a matter of life and death, is the fact that most young people die fast. They either die directly (rare), or die indirectly by being silently replaced with some older impostor (distressingly common). This is the real Great Replacement, if there is ever such a thing as a "Great Replacement". The cause of this is biological and social. 

1. First, there's the issue of brain changing its structure into an adult structure. It's kind of hard to stay yourself when your very brain is changing. 
2. Second, the demand for people to be productive and handle the practical stresses of daily life direct people away from a volatile and edgy mindset towards a stable and blunt mindset.

In this modern world, it is unlikely to stay young. But I see signs of change. Among all primates, humans are already very neotenous in their mental development, since their brains take so much longer to stabilize in structure (at around 24) compared to their reproductive, muscular, skeletal, and most other systems (around 16-20).

If I were to make a slogan, I would say that making the world a more accepting world for the young mind is continuing the great direction human evolution. Throughout evolution, ancestral humans became progressively more playful, creative, idealistic than their fellow primates. Let's push for a world where people can be even more playful and idealistic.

The main technologies for such a world are neurological -- pushing the brain towards a more adolescent structure, and physiological -- long-lasting young bodies that don't grow old as fast. Other developments are also important: a general enrichment of society allowing more fanciful ways of life to exist, more social value of unproductive fun, and finally, new forms of human reproduction, because if there's one thing that adulthood is preparing for, it's child-rearing, and with radical changes on child-rearing (such as child-rearing by professional mothers), the current adulthood hegemony would crumble.