There is also the immediate, irresistible desire to have sex with yourself and the consequent shame afterwards. 

Suppose you're a billionaire and you want to get married. However, gold-digging people of the gender you prefer target you. They are good enough at faking attraction that you cannot tell. How should you act? One idea I had was this: pick 10000 random people and then select from there. You will at the very least likely remove most of the world-class dissemblers. Armstrong proposes a similar scheme in Siren worlds and the perils of over-optimised search.

Yeah. I prefer not fighting the thought experiment though and thinking of beauty qua beauty. Though perhaps what remains of beauty once it is stripped of all its correlates is perverse. 

Tallness is zero sum. But I suspect beauty isn't. If everyone was more beautiful but the relative differences remained, I think people would be happier. Am I wrong in this? This has policy implications, as once genetic engineering gets better taxing height is likely wise to avoid red-queens races into unhealthy phenotypes. Taxing beauty seems very horrible to me. As beauty is quite beautiful. 

Yes. It did a lot of CoT. I don't recall how long. 

I am mostly surprised at the humor being more humory and less humor-like-substancy.

Normative claims describe desired world states. To the extent they are coherent and possible, they cannot be argued against. They are merely a shape the world could be. Descriptive statements make neutral claims about features of the world. Toy examples of each mistake:

"Having no legs is not good; I bet that crippled man has invisible legs."

"That crippled man has no legs; this must be the way of things and so just and right"

In practice, this tends to be done with themes and processes and not at such a crude, silly level. The stereotypical reactionary might identify selective processes, themselves, as ends. The stereotypical liberal might pretend selective processes don't exist. The reactionary may be right about his values, and then is not making a mistake here. But in many cases I think they are confusing the descriptive for the normative and do not value what they think they value. 

I moved it into my drafts. I published it again for you. I figured it was unlikely to be referenced again and I tend to take stuff down I don't want people reading as one of the first things on my author's page.

There is the classic error of conflating the normative with the descriptive, presuming that what is good is also true. But the inverse is also a mistake I see people make all the time: conflating the descriptive for the normative. The descriptive is subject to change by human action, so maybe the latter is the worse of the two mistakes. Crudely, the stereotypical liberal makes the former mistake and the stereotypical reactionary makes the latter. 

Yeah. I think you can post anything as a personal post, and the gods of LW may take a fancy to them, as is their preview, and put them on the front page.