Do women like “bad guys” or do they actually prefer “powerful good guys”?

October 25, 2023

People often talk about how women are attracted to "bad guys" and don't actually like the "nice guys." In my opinion, this is based on misunderstandings of what is attractive. It's definitely true that some women are attracted to traits like narcissism, callousness, and manipulativeness (and some unusual women even go so far as to write letters to serial killers to get to know them). In my experience, though, attraction to traits like these is actually quite rare (I can only think of two fri...

Important (present and future) real-world applications of academic philosophy

August 10, 2021

Many people think that academic philosophy is irrelevant to the real world. But it has increasingly important applications. Here's my list of some of the really interesting ones. Here's hoping philosophers will make further progress on some of these! 1. The Trolley Problem: self-driving cars will be put in situations where there is a choice between sacrificing the passenger to save two pedestrians. Or they might have to choose between killing a 5-year-old pedestrian vs. killing a 70-year-...

Bias based on facial attractiveness

July 2, 2020

There's a deeply-rooted, incredibly superficial aspect of human nature that is rarely discussed: our obsession with small variations in bone structure/skin smoothness on a person's face. At extremes, people are desired or shunned due to tiny, otherwise almost meaningless facial details. In the attached image, there are two non-existent women (generated by a face generation AI set to generate "brown hair white adult female"). If these were real people, they would likely be treated differently...