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Comment by tjic | Hacker News Reader

> Well, you know, just as long as she doesn't have a mind of her own.

Zing! Nicely said.

> I honestly find discussion about dating on HN a bit disturbing.

Huh? Why? It's of interest to hackers, and I find it quite an interesting thread.

> I mean, would you be comfortable with a girl that you wanted to date reading this post? Speculating on her "quality" as if she was a horse.

Yes, by all means, let's PRETEND that when it comes to software engineers there's such a thing as quality, and when it comes to cofounders there's such a thing as quality, and when it comes to friends there's such a thing as quality, but OH, NO, NO, there's no such thing as quality in women - because every single woman on the planet is equally perfect, and it would be SO politically incorrect to say that one woman is cuter, funnier, more intelligent, more loyal, sexier, or tolerant of weekly board game night.

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It would be nice if you could exercise some minimal charity in interpretation. Of course I'm not saying that all women are equally attractive -- who would say such a thing? My reaction is to the tone of the comments, which seem to indicate a minimal interest in women as people as opposed to "mates". It's the obsession with casting everything in terms of genes and gene "quality", because some people apparently can't bear to make even the most important decisions in their lives on grounds that are actually personal or emotional. Pop evolutionary psychology (which is about a scientific as astrology, frankly) is not going to make you happy or find you a partner. I think a lot of nerds like to cast dating in these pseudoscientific terms because they are basically terrified of things like people, feelings, desires and emotions -- the things that actually matter when you are dating.

> Huh? Why?

I mean that I find the content of the actual discussions disturbing, not the mere idea of discussing this subject on HN.

I think you're misunderstanding what he meant. At least, it seems that what you got out of what he said isn't what I did. When he said 'quality', I didn't think he was talking about people as "mates" or as gene quality or some such. I took 'quality' to mean exactly what you want it to mean - attractiveness, how much fun they are to be around, etc etc. Basically, whatever you would look for in a 'significant other' - certainly not just gene quality or whatever.

As for the tone, it is a bit unusual, I guess. Our crowd - hackers, programmers, engineers, nerds, whatever you want to call them - does tend to like abstracting things away, trying to model life that goes on around us in a precise and systematic way. The tone is due just to that.

Don't you think that "quality" is an odd word to use for that? I make no apologies for responding to the connotations of a word in context as well as its literal meaning.

Eh, not really. You can talk about quality of conversation, quality of life, quality of friendship. Why not quality of people?

I find the phrase "quality of people" pretty jarring. YMMV, I suppose.

I suppose it is important to note that we're talking about the subjective quality of the person. You're lying if you can't look at someone and tell me whether they appear to meet your personal criteria for physical quality.

My suspicion is that there is a correlation between self-esteem and ones comfort with the word "quality" when applied to people. I know that anyone whose judgment I respect would view me as a "quality person", so I have no problem with the term. If I was insecure and didn't think of myself as a person of quality, then I might have an issue with the concept.

Do you honestly think I am arguing against the banal and obvious truth that some people are more attractive than other people? I'm not going to rehearse my point all over again, but please, give me some credit...

> I know that anyone whose judgment I respect would view me as a "quality person"

But then, presumably you wouldn't respect their judgment if they didn't :)

> But then, presumably you wouldn't respect their judgment if they didn't :)

Indeed, but that's the point, isn't it?

Well, I don't agree with that. You should respect the judgment of people who think that you're a bad person if they seem to have generally good judgment in other areas. Basically, this is the jester's point in Twelfth Night: "I'm better because of my enemies and worse because of my friends."

Of course you do--the idea of all people being equal is pretty strongly ingrained in our society, so the idea of some people being fundamentally higher or lower quality is difficult to accept.

I don't find it difficult to accept myself. Sure, some people are better at some things than other people. Some people are hot and some people are ugly. If you think that you're some kind of intellectual rebel because you've noticed these obvious truths, then I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but none of this has anything to do with what I was saying.

>the idea of all people being equal is pretty strongly ingrained in our society,

The idea that all people have equal rights is deeply ingrained, but I've never met anyone who actually thought that everyone was equal in a dumb, literal sense; that's just a straw man.

"Sure, some people are better at some things than other people. Some people are hot and some people are ugly."

No, I meant even more literally--the idea that some people are fundamentally higher or lower quality, that some people have more worth as a human being than others.

That is (a) false and (b) has nothing to do with the point at hand (the OP has "good skin" as one of his indicators of quality -- he's clearly not talking about quality in a deep sense, unless you think that having good skin makes you worth more as a human being!).

Why not? It might make you worth a little more as a human being, all other things kept equal. Wouldn't the perfect human have good skin?

Seriously though, the reason describing people as being "high quality" or "low quality" sounds jarring is because on a very fundamental level, it sounds like we're judging people, and judging people is taboo.

>Why not? It might make you worth a little more as a human being, all other things kept equ

No, it wouldn't make you worth any more. To make this more concrete, are you seriously suggesting that given the choice between saving the life of someone with bad skin and saving the life of an otherwise identical person with good skin, you could cite skin quality as your justification for choosing to save the one over the other? Clearly, the dilemma in this case would be just as acute as in a case where you had a choice between saving one or other of two precisely equal people -- it would be grotesque to suggest that skin quality could act as a tie-breaker in such cases.

I suppose it might look from your perspective as if there is some kind of weird "taboo" on judging people, but really it's just that you're doing it wrong. People aren't valued according to a weighted sum of their qualities and virtues. (Of course, you can weight their qualities if you like, and you can sum the results if you want to, but the result will serve only as a measure of your callousness.)

"No, it wouldn't make you worth any more. To make this more concrete, are you seriously suggesting that given the choice between saving the life of someone with bad skin and saving the life of an otherwise identical person with good skin, you could cite skin quality as your justification for choosing to save the one over the other?"

Having to choose between any two people in that situation would be difficult. This is getting rather far afield, though.

"I suppose it might look from your perspective as if there is some kind of weird "taboo" on judging people, but really it's just that you're doing it wrong. People aren't valued according to a weighted sum of their qualities and virtues."

If you haven't noticed a massive taboo against judging people, either we live in very different cultures or you haven't been paying very close attention. Would you suggest a better way of judging people?

>This is getting rather far afield, though.

No it isn't. It's directly addressing your claim that good skin makes a person worth more. If you really believed that, you would not find your choice in that situation to be difficult at all.

I think that your claim is just hard-headed posing. You don't really believe any such thing, but for some reason you seem to think that you ought to believe it, or that professing to believe it makes you sound objective and rational. It doesn't; it makes you sound crazy.

>If you haven't noticed a massive taboo against judging people, either we live in very different cultures or you haven't been paying very close attention.

The taboo is on judging people in the same way that we judge products, services and merchandise. And quite right too -- there should be a taboo on doing that.

"your claim that good skin makes a person worth more"

It was a passing thought, not a claim. Pay it no more attention.

"The taboo is on judging people in the same way that we judge products, services and merchandise. And quite right too -- there should be a taboo on doing that."

No, it extends further than that. Even judging people on moral grounds is condemned as "judgmental".

>It was a passing thought, not a claim. Pay it no more attention.

Ok, so then I direct you to what I was saying originally:

"the OP has 'good skin' as one of his indicators of quality -- he's clearly not talking about quality in a deep sense, unless you think that having good skin makes you worth more as a human being!"

If you've changed your mind on the issue of good skin adding to a person's worth, then perhaps you'll now agree with me on this point.

>No, it extends further than that. Even judging people on moral grounds is condemned as "judgmental".

Not in my experience. I hear people judging others all the time without being called out on it.

People are ontologically equal, we all have the same fundamental ability to make free moral decisions, which is what makes us human.

However, people are not equal in the gifts they've been given.

But, I agree with your fundamental point. True relationships aren't based on our external qualities, but on the soul. Today's evolutionary stupidity completely blinds many to deeper relationships.

Maybe you've misread the post he's responding to? 'fun to be around' did not figure, it starts out with clothes, make-up, hair, looking 'sexualized' and after a self-congratulatory bit about imposing his idea of style on some woman, it goes right to the cattle market to outline the preferences in walk, skin, hips, musculature, shoulders and diet. That tone is not 'nerd', it's 'obliviously misogynist clod'.

To have strong feelings about what you want in a partner makes you misogynist?! This is too much.

Did I say that? It really makes discussion a lot more interesting if you reply (however indignantly) to something that was actually said rather than something that merely makes you indignant.

Would you also assume that botanists - upon hearing them discuss microsporangia, nectary, and calyx - are unable to also find beauty in a flower?

I might if they didn't display any appreciation of the flower's beauty, yes.

However, I'm not sure if this is a very good analogy. I don't think many people here have anything more than a passing interest in the evolutionary biology of mate selection. It seems to function more as an excuse to avoid talking about dating in more personal terms.

Hmm...if I were a botanist, I think I'd get a bit weary of always having to interrupt a high-bandwidth dialogue with a peer to insert sufficient fawning to appease those who might otherwise judge us for the things we did not say.

About the merits of the analogy: professional versus passing interest is not really relevant. The salient point is that anything can be discussed on multiple, distinct levels of abstraction, and speaking of it on one level of abstraction does not invalidate or denigrate another level. Have you read Douglas Hofstadter's classic Godel, Escher, Bach? I recommend it highly.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Yes, there are multiple levels of abstraction. Yes, from the fact that someone hasn't said X, you cannot infer with 100% certainty that they do not believe X. I doubt anyone could disagree with these banal statements, but they don't have anything to do with this discussion.

>Have you read Douglas Hofstadter's classic Godel, Escher, Bach?

Yes, I've read it. Thanks for the recommendation.

His point is the important thing about people is themselves, not their qualities. If the relationship is based on "quality" and not on love, he (and myself) thinks it is missing something much more deeper.

> tolerant of weekly board game night.

Ooo, that's a good idea.

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