To me I see it the other way. People are treating you better because they are using “attractiveness” as a crude proxy for “what is my EV for interacting with that person”.
Hence why an AR device that let’s you know that ugly homeless man is a billionaire in disguise, and that good looking man in a suit has been convicted of running a pyramid scheme, would be examples of BETTER information than a crude proxy.
People are treating you better because they are using “attractiveness” as a crude proxy for “what is my EV for interacting with that person”.
I don’t really think that’s the whole story, I think that people are doing both. They associate with the well-dressed partly because they like the style, and partly because of other things they intuitively associate with the style. Insofar as they are happy about the fact that a guy wears a nice suit because they’re treating it as a crappy proxy for another piece of info they truly care about like his wealth, then yes by definition it would be nice to just know the thing rather than having to read the tea leaves.
But insofar as they are enjoying the suit because it’s pleasing to their eye, then that’s just kind of a raw fact of what they enjoy. There might be reasons that they have come to just intrinsically enjoy the look of nicely dressed people by the lights of their own culture, but it’s like we say about AI—we’re all trained to pursue/be rewarded by these proxies, and now it really is just about pursuing the proxies for their own sake because we’re just not that goal oriented.
It’s like house plants. What do they signal? That you can keep plants alive, that you aren’t so busy you can’t find time to water them (could be good or bad), that you have money to spend on plants, that you might be kind of a hippie, all sorts of things. But also, maybe I just happen to enjoy plant-filled environments, so if I’m friends with you, I get to hang out in your plant-filled house which is pleasant.
I think that second part is a big important part of why people choose to associate with people. For mysterious reasons they’ve been trained/endowed with instincts to feel pleasure when they behold certain attributes, and so they gravitate toward them without having a particular goal or caring much about the other forms of information the thing may convey.
Like if I had my lab mates over for a dinner party and my house was full of gorgeous art and plants (it is more like a monk’s cell in fact), I expect they’d just enjoy that a lot and find it more memorable, but wouldn’t necessarily start trying to form all kinds of new insights about my character and what I might be good for based on that. I think they’d just enjoy the plants and art and then go home with a nicer memory of the evening. Partly that’s because a lot of the information about me that they could pick up from those plants is information they also will be able to get from me in other ways. “Conscientious enough to keep plants alive” they can largely get from “has good work ethic in the lab,” “has enough money to spend on plants” they can get from “eats takeout lunch a couple days a week,” etc. The information signaling value of plants seems to me distinctly secondary to the visceral enjoyment aspect, and I think the same is true of clothes in many circumstances.
To me I see it the other way. People are treating you better because they are using “attractiveness” as a crude proxy for “what is my EV for interacting with that person”.
Hence why an AR device that let’s you know that ugly homeless man is a billionaire in disguise, and that good looking man in a suit has been convicted of running a pyramid scheme, would be examples of BETTER information than a crude proxy.
I don’t really think that’s the whole story, I think that people are doing both. They associate with the well-dressed partly because they like the style, and partly because of other things they intuitively associate with the style. Insofar as they are happy about the fact that a guy wears a nice suit because they’re treating it as a crappy proxy for another piece of info they truly care about like his wealth, then yes by definition it would be nice to just know the thing rather than having to read the tea leaves.
But insofar as they are enjoying the suit because it’s pleasing to their eye, then that’s just kind of a raw fact of what they enjoy. There might be reasons that they have come to just intrinsically enjoy the look of nicely dressed people by the lights of their own culture, but it’s like we say about AI—we’re all trained to pursue/be rewarded by these proxies, and now it really is just about pursuing the proxies for their own sake because we’re just not that goal oriented.
It’s like house plants. What do they signal? That you can keep plants alive, that you aren’t so busy you can’t find time to water them (could be good or bad), that you have money to spend on plants, that you might be kind of a hippie, all sorts of things. But also, maybe I just happen to enjoy plant-filled environments, so if I’m friends with you, I get to hang out in your plant-filled house which is pleasant.
I think that second part is a big important part of why people choose to associate with people. For mysterious reasons they’ve been trained/endowed with instincts to feel pleasure when they behold certain attributes, and so they gravitate toward them without having a particular goal or caring much about the other forms of information the thing may convey.
Like if I had my lab mates over for a dinner party and my house was full of gorgeous art and plants (it is more like a monk’s cell in fact), I expect they’d just enjoy that a lot and find it more memorable, but wouldn’t necessarily start trying to form all kinds of new insights about my character and what I might be good for based on that. I think they’d just enjoy the plants and art and then go home with a nicer memory of the evening. Partly that’s because a lot of the information about me that they could pick up from those plants is information they also will be able to get from me in other ways. “Conscientious enough to keep plants alive” they can largely get from “has good work ethic in the lab,” “has enough money to spend on plants” they can get from “eats takeout lunch a couple days a week,” etc. The information signaling value of plants seems to me distinctly secondary to the visceral enjoyment aspect, and I think the same is true of clothes in many circumstances.