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Comment by Version467 | Hacker News Reader

This seems very difficult to solve incrementally. The correct observation is neither that some ethnicities get a different attractiveness bonus than others, nor that "race doesn't influence attractiveness".

Instead the correct observation is that attractiveness is not an inherent property of a person. It exists only in the mind of the observer. I might find someone very attractive whom someone else does not find very attractive. Does this mean their attractiveness changes depending on who looks at them? No, it means attractiveness is not a property of the person. Thinking otherwise is a classic example of the Mind projection fallacy[1].

This seems unlikely to be solved until we can get AI to recognise the question as nonsensical.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_projection_fallacy

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> attractiveness is not an inherent property of a person

This is like saying "value is not an inherent property of an object" - which is true in a philosophical sense, all value and beauty is a subjective, and depend on the opinions of people.

But how would you then explain the existence of objects that have value to almost everyone in society (e.g. a car)? Similarly, how would you explain the existence of widely-recognized attractive people (models, actors, etc.)?

There must be something inherent to those objects/people that makes them so widely accepted as such. Even if only related to the current culture (though I personally believe that many things go beyond culture and enter domain of human nature).

The value of a thing to someone is also subjective. Ask two people (or even the same person twice in one day) how much they'd pay for a sandwich and you'll get different results. But "what's the value of a sandwich" has a very simple objective answer if you're at a sandwich shop. Maybe a slightly less objective answer if you're talking about the average price of a sandwich in all sandwich shops in the country, but it's still sensical to give a straight answer based on that metric.

No such objective answer can be found for attractiveness, though there isn't any fundamental reason why not; maybe if we had a culture of fetishizing appearance to the degree that we'd rank people and their attributes on the spot, we'd have more "objective" agreed upon measures available.

Sure, I understand and acknowledge your point.

All I'm saying is that there is an objective fact: There are things which are almost universally recognized as attractive/valuable in the current society. That indicates that there must be something inherent to those things that make them appeal to such a huge number of people.

In other words, subjective != arbitrary. A ball falling in a maze of obstacles may follow an unpredictable path, but a million balls falling will have a predictable distribution of paths. At scale, human experience still follows some rules and patterns. If a person/thing is almost universally recognizable as beautiful/valuable, at point we may recognize some of its qualities as "inherently desirable".

Surely attractiveness is a function of both the person being evaluated and the person doing the evaluation?

That is, a person's visual appearance has N aspects, and each person evaluates those N aspects differently. Attractiveness is then a kind of dot product between the two.

Seen this way, a person which is universally attractive is one with aspects u that is the solution to Au = 1, where A is a matrix of valuation vectors (one row per person), and 1 is a vector of ones.

Obviously very simplified but...

I like this take. However, GPT wants to give a generic answer, in which case race should not be taken into account at all.

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