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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

"even in fields in which looks have no obvious relationship to professional duties. … For lawyers"

For trial lawyers, looks definitely have a relationship to professional duties.

"I was in The City and out of The Suburbs. It is always startling how much better looking people are in The City, and how much looks matter there. These same good-looking people are left-wing Democrats"

I'm guessing "The Suburbs" you're talking about are (very) lower middle class at best. Also, you're probably confusing youth with attractiveness; the percentage of attractive people declines significantly with age. A pretty solid majority of the really attractive women in their 20s I know or work with lean pretty solidly democrat; the ratio reverses dramatically for really attractive 45+ women.

"We aren’t much interested in banning looks-based discrimination, though the evidence for bias there is as strong as anywhere"

I don't know whether that can ever happen, but you'd need to give it time in any case. Explicit racial discrimination was only outlawed fairly recently, and even now we live in one of the few cultures that regards racial discrimination as wrong or even abnormal.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I don't think that's what he said. He said:

" Instead it seems more likely that recent cultural [i.e., media, academic, law] elites preferred to discourage the types of discrimination that favored their cultural/political rivals, while retaining the types that favored them, their existing allies, or natural “enemy of my enemy” allies. "

Which would be more accurately translated to: "cultural elites consider black and gay people to be their allies." Which is certainly true, and good! I don't think this post is advocating that they shouldn't; rather that they should, by their own logic, also consider unattractive, fat, short, asymmetrical people their allies as well, since they too experience extensive discrimination.

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