Daniel Silveyra dot com

In which I attempt to figure out why my tastes in people sort of make me a bad person even though I really, really want to be (seem like) a good one

Why I am doing this to you, dear reader

I have been called out by at least three friends (all of whom are better people than I am) for the things I look for in romantic partners. In trying to show them that they were wrong and that I am, in fact, morally perfect, I have discovered that they were even more right than they thought. I would like you to read this to validate that, though I am Bad, I am Bad in a thoughtful, cool way. And that most humans are in the same bucket.(But also critiques or comments would be helpful thank you).

Who we should like 

Why it matters

Who we choose as friends and partners is one of the most important aspects of human life. A significant part of human wellbeing and flourishing is dependent on whether we are able to form healthy relationships with others. Our preferences – and societal norms – over those relationships and people are therefore important. 

The rule

To like something is to encourage it, to incentivize more of it in yourself and the world; if the world is better for having that part of that person in it, then it’s morally good to like them for it. 

Here’s a rule to decide whether it’s morally good to like some attribute of a person: 

1. If a person’s attribute is the result of a choice…
2. And that attribute makes the world a better place, then it is morally good to like that attribute…
3. As long as you don’t breach someone’s dignity in the process.

With this rule, I’m combining a results-oriented definition that has a baseline set of rights to prevent “the ends justify the means”-type outcomes. 

We don’t need to get into which rights constitute dignity or what would make the world a better place – just fill in your own beliefs. 

Looks that kill

Here are two ways in which your preferences can cause harm:

1. Liking an attribute which directly causes harm: e.g. liking someone because they are ruthless and gain a lot of material wealth because of it. This is bad because it incentivizes people to continue to do harm. 

2. Liking an attribute which indirectly causes harm: e.g. liking someone for having generational wealth or a specific kind of body. This is bad because it makes something desirable which is not equally distributed, causing harm to those who do not have it for arbitrary reasons. 

First, do no harm. Second, fuck no harmful people

The first item is kind of straightforward at face value – try to not like people that choose to do harm directly. And if you spot things about people you like that are causing harm, try to convince yourself to not like those things.

Unfairness is pretty evenly distributed

The second item – liking attributes which indirectly cause harm, often by implicitly endorsing a social norm – is more difficult to adhere to.

It seems morally good to like attributes that people can develop through intention and hard work, such as being considerate of others’ needs, being a good listener, being responsive, being diligent, etc. At first glance, these attributes are mostly available to anyone who’s interested, and if many people develop these qualities the world will probably be more like we all want it to be. So far, so good.

(If you want another rabbit hole, consider the conditions necessary for people to develop these attributes; consider also where those conditions come from. Heck, consider whether free will makes sense to you and in which conditions it arises and what the implications of all that are.)

However, there are also a lot of attributes that people value that are not evenly distributed among people and have nothing to do with personal choice. The biggest ones I can think of are:

1. Mental and physical health
2. What skills and trauma they learned / got from from their family and upbringing
3. The many different kinds of intelligence
4. The many different kinds of sensitivity
5. Talent of any kind (artistic, athletic, etc.)
6. What they think is interesting and fun
7. Their sense of humour
8. Physical appearance (not just conventional attractiveness – any preference over others’ appearance)
9. Generational wealth and the opportunities they received from it
10. The country of their birth and the opportunities they received from it

These attributes are mostly not the basis of someone’s choices; really, they are preferences over people’s past circumstances, and that can be harmful for the unlucky. 

Is it really that harmful?

By valuing aspects that people don’t control, you are giving these things value in society and thus you are putting the people that didn’t get those things at a disadvantage. 

Sometimes we call this ableism, classism, lookism, or snobbism / elitism more generally. A big part of what we call meritocracy (the part that isn’t about effort) is also part of this. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that billions of people suffer from this harm every day.

Now, just because the system you’re perpetuating is harming billions of people every day does not mean you are responsible for all that harm. You are merely responsible for a tiny fraction, and then only if you make your preferences visible to other people. Talking about these preferences without acknowledging the harm they cause is harmful, but it is likely that our choices of friends and mates are much more impactful: only surrounding yourself with friends that have socially desirable and unequally distributed traits will reinforce these cultural norms much more strongly than how you talk about them.

Don’t worry, it gets even more depressing!

Who we like

Friendship is easy(er)

If you ask ChatGPT “What attributes does the research literature suggest people most value in a friend?”, here’s what it lists, its sources¹, and what our rule says about their moral value:

• Trustworthiness and Reliability: MIXED: :people can choose to be trustworthy, though lots of people struggle with reliability for various reasons they can’t control.
• Loyalty: GOOD: it’s a choice, mostly! And it leads to good things, for the most part.
• Supportiveness: GOOD: it’s a choice, mostly! And it leads to good things.
• Similarity in Interests and Values: GOOD: it’s good to encourage good values (assuming your values are good!) in the world. Even if people’s interests are somewhat arbitrary, most people can develop a new interest. That is unless you are interested in very expensive/exclusive things in which case BAD.
• Empathy and Understanding: GOOD: it’s a choice, mostly! And it leads to good things.
• Good Communication: MIXED: to the extent it’s a choice, GOOD. To the extent it is due to talent or privilege, BAD.
• Fun and Enjoyment: BAD: people don’t choose whether they’re fun for you or whether it’s enjoyable to spend time with them! Social skills are not evenly distributed, and are hard / impossible to learn for some people.
• Intellectual Stimulation: BAD: people don’t choose whether they’re interesting or stimulating to you! Often this is about intelligence which is not a choice.

It’s looking pretty good! For the most part, it seems pretty feasible to like our friends for the right reasons.

Romance is hard

If you ask ChatGPT “What attributes does the research literature suggest people most value in a romantic partner?”, here’s what it lists, the sources², and what our rule says about their moral value:

• Physical Attraction: BAD: people don’t choose how they look, and societal norms about looks causes harm to billions of people.
• Kindness and Understanding: GOOD: mostly a choice, good for the world.
• Intelligence: BAD: not a choice, can be ableist.
• Emotional Stability: BAD: not a choice, can be ableist.
• Socioeconomic Status and Resources: BAD: often not a choice, perpetuates materialism.
• Shared Values and Beliefs: GOOD: as long as they are good values! And to the extent people chose those values.
• Humor: BAD: people don’t choose their sense of humour, they certainly can’t just “become funnier” to someone by working on it, nor is it clear that it is tied to good values or a better world.
• Physical Health: BAD: not a choice, can be ableist.

This looks…less good. This looks very bad, actually. It seems like most people’s preferences for romantic partners cause harm indirectly. Well, shit.

Birds of a feather

It gets worse. From the Wikipedia entry on assortative mating:

Assortative mating (also referred to as positive assortative mating or homogamy) is a mating pattern and a form of sexual selection in which individuals with similar phenotypes or genotypes mate with one another more frequently than would be expected under a random mating pattern.

Assortative mating in humans has been widely observed and studied, and can be broken down into two types of human assortative mating. These are:

• genetic assortative mating (assortative mating with mate choice based on genetic type and phenotypical expression); and
• social assortative mating (assortative mating with mate choice based on social, cultural, and other societal factors)

If you read the section on assortative mating in humans you’ll see that there’s ample current and historical evidence of people selecting mates that are similar to them in socio-economic status (BAD!), physical characteristics (BAD!), and personality traits (MIXED). There’s also evidence of humans doing the opposite – for example, seeking out folks with odors that are different from their own (BAD).

We seem to be pretty bad at making mate choices based on the content of their character as opposed to things they can’t control.

What to do

Focusing on individual choices: If you care about the harms your preferences are causing, it’s most important to stop expressing those preferences. (I say a little about systemic change in the appendix)

If you mostly care about outcomes, then “fake it ‘til you make it” should be good enough. Don’t talk about your harmful preferences and don’t act on them. It’s a good idea to try to change internally as well, though – most of us can’t sustain faking it for very long.

Simple.

Wait, I don’t control what I like!

Not in the short term, but over the long term you kind of do. There’s lots of advice out there on how to build habits, and through those, you can change your preferences. Not all of them and not all the way, but some.

You might not be responsible for what you like today, since you don’t control it. But you are responsible for what preferences you “feed”, and you are certainly responsible for the preferences you express through action.

But what if I need these things?

Human beings need each other to survive and to thrive. We can’t do it all on our own. If our preferences didn’t cause harm indirectly, it would be fine to appreciate others for what benefit they bring us. That doesn’t seem to be the case, though, so we’re now pitted between our practical needs and wants and the harm they cause.

The issue gets worse with scarcity: the fewer resources we have, the more we need each other, and the more it seems we can’t afford to stick to our high moral standards. The tradeoff questions are endless: 

• What if you want your kids to be healthy/tall/smart/conventionally attractive/have resources while growing up/etc.? Isn’t it OK to act out my harmful preferences because it’ll give my child a better chance at happiness and positive impact in the world?

• What if you don’t want to have kids and you want to be able to travel often with your partner but can’t afford travel for both? Or you want to share the costs of buying a house in an overpriced housing market so you can have housing security? What if you like collecting first edition books or furbys or something else and need someone else to help pay rent and enable your addiction?

• What if you really like short men? Other men can’t be short. Are you supposed to give up on short kings because it’s exclusive to do so? Maybe it’s OK because other people foolishly don’t appreciate a short leg as much as you do? Is it OK to harm a group by excluding them as long as they are favored by the majority?

• What if you had a difficult childhood and you are easily triggered by someone who has the same mood disorder as your parent? Is it OK to be ableist in this sense?

How about if we don’t talk about it so much?

Maybe the problem is all this talking about preferences. If we don’t create all these abstractions and just connect to other human beings in a less intellectual and more embodied way, we might not run into these issues.

I think there’s great wisdom in not letting ideas get in the way of what our bodies and our intuition want. On the other hand, this approach suggests that what our bodies and intuitions want is always ethical. I think there’s lots of examples of that not being the case.

What’s the point of feeling bad about it, just like what you like

As tempting as this is, I call it nihilism. No.

To quote David Deutsch: problems are endless, but problems are soluble. I don’t know if human beings will ever be able to have perfect ethical alignment – I suspect not. But I think we can improve consistently if we try, and I think it’s our job to do so. 

You want me to fake it? Really?

You might want to lie about your harmful preferences in an attempt to avoid perpetuating those norms. It seems like it would work, but the problem is that people can observe your actual choices – if you’re out there saying that lookism is bad and harmful but all the people you hang out with are supermodels, you’re going to get called a hypocrite. Even worse, people might dismiss the whole notion that those preferences cause harm because they’re being said by a hypocrite to seem morally superior.

Honesty might just be the best policy here: admit that you have some preferences which are harmful, that you regret the harm they cause, and that you would like to be better. In essay form.

Accept and nudge

Try this: Today, you like what you like. There’s no changing that. And some of what you like is harmful. You are causing harm, every day. Shame is not helpful here beyond motivating you to move forward.

If you try to make decisions based on the preferences you would like to have as opposed to the preferences you do have, you will be unhappy and you will give up. There needs to be alignment, or at the very least a workable compromise, between what the different parts of you want for change to be sustainable – and we need sustained personal change to have an impact.

Maybe it’s better to nudge yourself forward, making small steps towards a better set of preferences. Maybe start by examining the most harmful ones, try engaging with people who are different from what you think you like on those fronts and seeing what arises. Rinse and repeat, one step at a time. 

Or just accept

If you’re trying to be a good person – i.e. to have as much positive impact on the world as you can – maybe this isn’t the best place to put your energy into. Maybe that energy would have a better outcome in some other area of your life than in trying to only be attracted to people in a non-objectionable way. Maybe you should be curing cancer or working at a soup kitchen or just being nicer to the people at work. Maybe all of this is just trying to be pure and perfect, which, let me tell you, is not going to happen. 

Maybe in the big scheme of things, the harm that you cause for liking or not liking someone for the wrong reasons can be pretty small relative to other harms you cause. Maybe you should go for the biggest moral return on effort and accept the rest.   

All this can be a copout! Maybe you’re just not really trying hard enough on any front in your life, you piece of shit! Get back to the morality mines!

Appendix 1: Why we like

The things that most people look for in a friendship or a romantic partner listed in the “What we like” section beg the question: why do we like those things? Are they a cultural artifact or are they related to our biology and evolutionary history, or both?

It’s evolution, baby

Most of the attributes in the friends list are self-evidently helpful if you are a weak, hairless ape trying to survive in a fairly hostile environment. Loyal, supportive, and caring allies that you have a good mutual understanding with make for more effective teams, and more effective teams make life easier and better. Even though our environment has changed, these attributes are still really helpful. It’s no surprise, then, that most cultures agree on these ideas of what makes a good friend. 

Some of that same thinking carries over to romantic partner traits (i.e. you and your mate should be a good team), but it seems much less straightforward; societal expectations of what a mate/romantic partner should be vary dramatically across cultures and through time.

Reproduction and child rearing are the other obvious biological motivators for what we like in potential romantic partners / mates. 

We are very complicated monkeys (cultural evolution)

Beyond the direct benefits of surrounding yourself with good allies with whom you have good connections, there are other, more complicated reasons for what cultures value in friends and partners:

• Arm candy: The people you surround yourself with say a lot about who you are to other people – this can be an additional layer of motivation for who people surround themselves with. There are good versions of that (“I’m proud to be associated with my friends and my partner(s)”) and less good versions of that (e.g. “Starfucking”). 

• Caste: There are many instances of caste / class systems (explicit and implicit) that regulate who you can be friends and partner with. These systems generally serve the more powerful classes to maintain their relative positions of power; since relative power is zero-sum, control of who enters the powerful group is necessary to maintain the system.

• Aesthetics / Ideology: Marxists and post-structuralists might argue that aesthetics and ideology are just tools of power and class, but I think they deserve their own category. Cultures really do evolve different ideas of what a good friend and a good partner is, what is attractive in people and what isn’t, and they can vary quite a bit, and sometimes the norms that emerge do not necessarily benefit ruling classes. 

Stacked against us 

Our preferences for friends and partners were shaped by natural and sexual selection over the course of millions of years. This is relevant because evolution is notably pro-inequality: it would be surprising if the norms and preferences that emerged from this process favoured egalitarianism.

So this is another case in which our biology will not necessarily help us in building the egalitarian society we want.

Biology isn’t destiny, nor is culture

We can’t change biology quickly (yet), but we work around it with culture all the time. And we change culture all the time. 

Appendix 2: Where to go

The “What to do” section above is essentially advocating for you to drive the culture towards a less exclusive and harmful place with your personal actions. You can also organize and advocate in a collective way for change. 

Here are some ideas for we you can work on the problem of harmful social norms around what is desirable in friends and partners:

1. Participate in movements to eliminate ableism, lookism, sexism, etc.: it doesn’t matter whether it’s in the workplace, in public institutions or elsewhere – the success of these movements drives home the cultural norm that you should assess people for the content of their character, which is basically the essence of the cure for most of the indirect harms of preferences.

2. Advocate for income and wealth inequality-reducing policies: distributing wealth and income more evenly is (in my view) a more effective way of addressing materialism than simply trying to change everyone’s views about the importance of material wealth. It will be much easier to convince everyone to get off the rat race for more money if everyone has enough money (I think it will still be very hard).

3. Advocate for policies that foster economic growth: it is much, much easier to foster egalitarianism when there is abundance. 

Strange utopias

The above are good things to do on the margin. But where are we going with all of this? I can think of two cartoon extremes of utopias that would massively reduce the harm caused by these preferences – enlightenment or cyberpunk.

Enlightenment

Humans discover plant medicine or a meditation practice that makes all your preferences ethical: you instantly and permanently stop valuing anything in people that is harmful or that the person didn’t choose themselves. You see all people as chains of causes and conditions, with only a tiny node of agency at the end – and you only care about that node.

Cyberpunk 

Humans continue to be monkeys and have harmful monkey preferences, but we develop wealth and technology advanced enough to make those harms go away through abundance: 

• Physical Attraction: a world where everyone has access to perfectly effective body modification (like in some video RPGs) and so everyone can change how they look exactly how they want, however many times
• Intelligence, Emotional Stability, Physical Health: a world where every human is genetically engineered to be equally intelligent/emotionally stable/physically healthy OR a world where everyone can choose to modify those traits at will.  
• Socioeconomic Status and Resources: (actual working) communism, baby!
• Humor: I think this one (and personal aesthetics generally) will always be sort of exclusive. Not sure how you would fix this one without erasing individuality. Probably not a big deal if you have a lot of people and as much abundance as is required for the above worlds, though!)

Parking lot of reader objections and criticisms

• Liking a particular quality in others is not discriminatory against people who lack that quality 

• People that lack some traits that are valued by social convention are not harmed by this lack: they are able to find fulfilling friends and partners despite this.
  • This is because the distribution of desirable traits in the population is such that the vast majority of people will be able to find friends and partners they are happy with and who appreciate them.
  • Also, people choose mates and partners mostly on the basis of their individuality, not their collection of socially desirable traits. Most people choose the people in their lives on the basis of who those people are on the inside, they don’t assemble character traits like baseball cards.

• You can’t do affirmative action on friendship and partnerships. There is no moral duty to distribute your energy and affection equally among humanity.

• Deciding that you’re going to exclude categories of people (“wealthy people”, “conventionally attractive people”, “people belonging to a privileged group”) to avoid perpetuating harmful social norms is to not see people as individuals but just as part of groups, and is thus dehumanizing. 

• Your approach is sensible only in the case of direct harms (i.e. don’t date dictators or rapists) but not indirect harms. 

• Advocating for people to self-police their own preferences is unrealistic and too much to ask – although well-intentioned, you will only achieve alienating the people you are trying to convince and will have no impact on reducing harmful social conventions. It’s more effective to focus on solving this problem systemically, as you note in the Appendix 2

1. The below papers were cited as evidence of these attributes being broadly valued across different cultures. I didn’t give every paper a thorough read, so I wouldn’t stand behind the cross-cultural aspect for this exact list, though it seems to check out intuitively.
   
   Trustworthiness and Reliability: The significance of trust in social relationships, including friendships, is discussed in John Helliwell and Robert Putnam’s paper, “The Social Context of Well-Being”.
   
   Loyalty: Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary’s “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation” (1995) discusses loyalty as part of the broader human need for stable social relationships.
   
   Supportiveness: A key reference for the role of supportiveness in friendships is Shelley Taylor’s work on social support, particularly her book “Social Support: A Review”.
   
   Similarity in Interests and Values: The concept of homophily in social relationships is explored in depth in Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James Cook’s paper, “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks”.
   
   Empathy and Understanding: “Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases” by Stephanie D. Preston and Frans B. M. de Waal (2002), 
   
   Good Communication: “The Development and Maintenance of Friendship” (1993) by Rosemary Blieszner and Rebecca G. Adams
   
   Fun and Enjoyment: Martin Seligman’s works on positive psychology, such as “Positive Psychology, Positive Prevention, and Positive Therapy” (2002)
   
   Intellectual Stimulation: “Intellectual Intimacy in Friendship” by Jan Yager (1997).  ↩︎
2.  Physical Attractiveness: David Buss’s seminal work, “The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating” (1994), although not a single paper, provides extensive cross-cultural research on mate preferences, including the importance of physical attractiveness.
   
   Kindness and Understanding: The paper “What Do People Want? A Personality Perspective on the Pursuit of Social Value and Interpersonal Success” by Murray, Holmes, and Collins (2006) discusses the importance of kindness and understanding in relationship satisfaction.
   
   Intelligence: Geoffrey Miller’s work on sexual selection, such as his book “The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature” (2000), delves into how intelligence and other traits are valued in mate selection.
   
   Emotional Stability: The relevance of emotional stability can be found in literature on the Big Five personality traits, such as the paper “The Big Five Personality Traits and the Life Course: A 45-Year Longitudinal Study” by Soldz and Vaillant (1999).
   
   Socioeconomic Status and Resources: Buss’s research often touches on this, such as in his study “Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures” (1989).
   
   Shared Values and Beliefs: For the importance of shared values, one can refer to the paper “Marital Satisfaction and Breakups Differ Across Online and Offline Meeting Venues” by Cacioppo et al. (2013), which discusses the role of shared interests and values in relationship formation and satisfaction.
   
   Humor: A relevant paper is “The Role of Humor in Human Mate Selection” by Bressler, Martin, and Balshine (2006), which examines humor as a factor in mate selection.
   
   Physical Health: Physical health as a factor in mate selection is often discussed in the context of evolutionary psychology, as seen in Buss’s works.
   
   ↩︎