Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych

52 Post author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 01:53AM

Daniel Dennett has advanced the opinion that the evolutionary purpose of the cuteness response in humans is to make us respond positively to babies.  This does seem plausible.  Babies are pretty cute, after all.  It's a tempting explanation.

Here is one of the cutest baby pictures I found on a Google search.

And this is a bunny.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the bunny is about 75,119 times cuter than the baby.

Now, bunnies are not evolutionarily important for humans to like and want to nurture.  In fact, bunnies are edible.  By rights, my evolutionary response to the bunny should be "mmm, needs a sprig of rosemary and thirty minutes on a spit".  But instead, that bunny - and not the baby or any other baby I've seen - strikes the epicenter of my cuteness response, and being more baby-like along any dimension would not improve the bunny.  It would not look better bald.  It would not be improved with little round humanlike ears.  It would not be more precious with thumbs, easier to love if it had no tail, more adorable if it were enlarged to weigh about seven pounds.

If "awwww" is a response designed to make me love human babies and everything else that makes me go "awwww" is a mere side effect of that engineered reaction, it is drastically misaimed.  Other responses for which we have similar evolutionary psychology explanations don't seem badly targeted in this way.  If they miss their supposed objects at all, at least it's not in most people.  (Furries, for instance, exist, but they're not a common variation on human sexual interest - the most generally applicable superstimuli for sexiness look like at-least-superficially healthy, mature humans with prominent human sexual characteristics.)  We've invested enough energy into transforming our food landscape that we can happily eat virtual poison, but that's a departure from the ancestral environment - bunnies?  All natural, every whisker.1

It is embarrassingly easy to come up with evolutionary psychology stories to explain little segments of data and have it sound good to a surface understanding of how evolution works.  Why are babies cute?  They have to be, so we'll take care of them.  And then someone with a slightly better cause and effect understanding turns it right-side-up, as Dennett has, and then it sounds really clever.  You can have this entire conversation without mentioning bunnies (or kittens or jerboas or any other adorable thing).  But by excluding those items from a discussion that is, ostensibly, about cuteness, you do not have a hypothesis that actually fits all of the data - only the data that seems relevant to the answer that presents itself immediately.

Evo-psych explanations are tempting even when they're cheaply wrong, because the knowledge you need to construct ones that sound good to the educated is itself not cheap at all. You have to know lots of stuff about what "motivates" evolutionary changes, reject group selection, understand that the brain is just an organ, dispel the illusion of little XML tags attached to objects in the world calling them "cute" or "pretty" or anything else - but you also have to account for a decent proportion of the facts to not be steering completely left of reality.

Humans are frickin' complicated beasties.  It's a hard, hard job to model us in a way that says anything useful without contradicting information we have about ourselves.  But that's no excuse for abandoning the task.  What causes the cuteness response?  Why is that bunny so outrageously adorable?  Why are babies, well, pretty cute?  I don't know - but I'm pretty sure it's not the cheap reason, because evolution doesn't want me to nurture bunnies.  Inasmuch as it wants me to react to bunnies, it wants me to eat them, or at least be motivated to keep them away from my salad fixings.

 

1It is possible that the bunny depicted is a domestic specimen, but it doesn't look like it to me.  In any event, I chose it for being a really great example; there are many decidedly wild animals that are also cuter than cute human babies.

Comments (823)

Sort By: Controversial
Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 10:55:44PM 0 points [-]

Does anyone know how to contact this blogger so I can correct em on my gender?!

Comment author: wedrifid 24 February 2010 11:15:56PM 1 point [-]

How on earth did he get 'he' from 'Alicorn'?

Comment author: V_V 23 October 2012 09:26:25PM 1 point [-]

How in the earth did you get 'he' from 'Sharon'?

Comment author: wedrifid 24 October 2012 01:25:48AM 2 points [-]

How in the earth did you get 'he' from 'Sharon'?

I have no idea how the Wedrifid from nearly three years ago selected 'he'. It doesn't seem the kind of detail one would encode indefinitely in long term memory.

Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 11:19:35PM *  0 points [-]

I don't know how it keeps happening. How did you get "he" from the blog post? (Or is it indicated somewhere else?)

Comment author: wedrifid 24 February 2010 11:51:43PM *  3 points [-]

How did you get "he" from the blog post?

It (she) was a girl it is highly unlikely that (she) would have made the mistake. Apart from defaulting to writing 'she', she would have blogged since 2003 and would have had her own identity confused more than once.

But mostly I fell back on my prior for people who write blogs on these topics:

Isegoria - From the ancient Greek, equality in freedom of speech; an eclectic mix of thoughts on Policy, War, Economics, Business, Technology, Science, Fitness, Martial Arts, and more

This prior screens off my more general prior for the sex of bloggers in general. Beyond that I have a prior for the types of signalling that I expect to find humans engaging in based on their respective reproductive motivations.

At what odds would you bet against me if I was betting that the blogger in question was male?

Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 11:55:08PM 2 points [-]

Oh, the blogger is probably male. But from eir perspective, so was I: I blogged about "refining the art of human rationality" and ey could have been ever-so-responsibly screening off priors and making eir best guess and ey was wrong and I am pissed off. So, I decline to do the same thing.

Comment author: RobinZ 25 February 2010 12:05:47AM 3 points [-]

Singular they may be less distracting than Spivak, much as I like the latter.

Comment author: Alicorn 25 February 2010 12:06:49AM 1 point [-]

I use singular "they" sometimes, although I find it makes many sentences awkward, especially if I'm also talking about some plural items or persons.

Comment author: RobinZ 25 February 2010 12:10:30AM 1 point [-]

Fair enough - I only mentioned it because I happened to have a period where I avoided singular-they because I thought it was forbidden. I'll trust your judgement on style.

Comment author: wedrifid 25 February 2010 12:03:29AM *  7 points [-]

Meanwhile I find 'ey' just irritating so my approach is to sometimes just avoid pronouns while other times I randomly generate pronouns based on my prediction, biased towards 0.5. I don't recall being dramatically mistaken thus far and seem to have a reasonably good track record for guessing right based on writing style. At least, that is, in cases where I get later confirmation.

Comment author: Alicorn 25 February 2010 12:05:08AM *  1 point [-]

I'm sorry you find "ey" irritating; I promise not to refer to you a la Spivak. And I'm glad you're good at detecting gender from writing style. And someday you may piss someone off very badly.

Comment author: mattnewport 25 February 2010 12:36:00AM 10 points [-]

It doesn't appear to have occurred to you that some people find Spivak pronouns very annoying. They annoy me immensely because it feels like someone is deliberately obstructing my reading in an uncomfortable way to make some kind of political point almost entirely unrelated to the context of the post itself. I usually just stop reading and go elsewhere to calm down.

Comment author: Alicorn 25 February 2010 12:38:24AM 0 points [-]

I promise not to refer to you with Spivak pronouns either.

"I don't know what gender the person I'm talking about is and wouldn't care to get it wrong" is not a political point, though.

Comment author: mattnewport 25 February 2010 12:43:15AM 8 points [-]

It's not me being referred to with them that bothers me, it is them being used at all. I find it difficult and uncomfortable to read, like trying to read 1337 5p34k, and it breaks my reading flow in an unpleasant way. It's like bad grammar or spelling but with the additional knowledge that someone is doing it deliberately for reasons that I consider political.

Comment author: RobinZ 25 February 2010 12:05:00AM 8 points [-]

The singular they has a long and illustrious history. I know I've said it four or five times in the recent comments, but that's what I'd recommend.

Comment author: wedrifid 25 February 2010 12:16:52AM 2 points [-]

Really? I use 'they' quire frequenly but feel bad every time. I'll stop feeling bad now. Thanks. ;)

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 24 February 2010 11:47:14PM 2 points [-]

It is a reasonable default assumption, not adjusted with negative effect of a mistake in mind.

Comment author: RobinZ 24 February 2010 11:49:28PM 2 points [-]

But you don't need to invoke a default assumption here - the singular "they" is a perfectly well-established alternative.

Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 11:49:09PM 1 point [-]

As a rule of thumb, it's annoying to be talked about without being considered.

Comment author: Jack 24 February 2010 11:39:13PM 2 points [-]

People at this end of the internet tend to have 'male' as the default gender for everyone.

Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 11:43:13PM 1 point [-]

Yes. It's very annoying.

Comment author: mattnewport 24 February 2010 11:48:47PM 6 points [-]

On average, less annoying than the alternatives.

Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 11:49:52PM -1 points [-]

How do you even gauge this? Do you know how annoyed I am on some absolute scale so you can make such a comparison?

Comment author: mattnewport 24 February 2010 11:52:56PM *  4 points [-]

Based on what I think are reasonable assumptions: that it is at least as annoying for a male to be referred to as 'she' as vice-versa, that there are many more males than females posting at lesswrong, that the proportion of gender-indeterminate usernames is roughly equal between men and women.

Historically, 'he' has been more commonly used than 'she' when referring to gender indeterminate individuals in English so it doesn't even necessarily imply any gender assumption.

Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 11:59:00PM 1 point [-]

that it is at least as annoying for a male to be referred to as 'she' as vice-versa

Probably. But it gets more annoying the more it happens. I have become more annoyed every time it's happened to me. And it happens more to women than it does to men. So this assumption loses validity over time for any given person. And it is just not that hard to avoid guessing!

Historically, 'he' has been more commonly used than 'she' when referring to gender indeterminate individuals in English so it doesn't even necessarily imply any gender assumption.

AAAAAAAAAAAUGH

Ahem. I mean:

No.

Comment author: wedrifid 25 February 2010 12:11:47AM 1 point [-]

AAAAAAAAAAAUGH

Ahem. I mean:

No.

Assuming history to be unswayed by politics and the meaning of common words to be determined by their usage wouldn't this be "Yes. But I vehemently object and anyone using pronouns in this way should be punished with unimaginable hoards of dust specks and furthermore be socially disapproved of"?

I actually think 'AAAAAAAAAAAUGH' fits better! :)

Comment author: RobinZ 25 February 2010 12:03:34AM 3 points [-]

Historically, 'he' has been more commonly used than 'she' when referring to gender indeterminate individuals in English so it doesn't even necessarily imply any gender assumption.

If nothing else, priming would put the lie to that.

Comment author: ata 01 March 2010 02:21:34PM *  3 points [-]

Historically, 'he' has been more commonly used than 'she' when referring to gender indeterminate individuals in English so it doesn't even necessarily imply any gender assumption.

If you are talking about a hypothetical or gender-unknown person, using "he" will make it much more likely that people will imagine this person as male. How it's historically been used, and even how it's conventionally used now, are irrelevant if we're talking about its actual cognitive effects.

(For what it's worth, I think this is the best exposition of sexist language I've read. It's fascinating (yet not all that surprising) how some commonplace linguistic patterns become immediately and intuitively appalling to most people if they are simply applied to a different personal attribute.)

Comment author: thomblake 25 February 2010 01:45:21PM 7 points [-]

Historically, 'he' has been more commonly used than 'she' when referring to gender indeterminate individuals in English so it doesn't even necessarily imply any gender assumption.

Perhaps interestingly, J.S. Mill tried to argue that "Man" is historically gender-neutral, and so women already have the right to vote in England, since the law refers to "man". He did not win that battle.

Comment author: Jack 25 February 2010 08:29:04PM *  8 points [-]

My understanding is that "man" is historically gender neutral. Old English used wer (wereman) for adult males and wif (wifman) for adult females. Wif is etymologically related to wife and eventually changed into woman (from wimman). Wer got dropped and all we have left of it is "werewolf".

The use of "man" to refer to only adult males is relatively late, like 1000 A.C.E. -ish.

Comment author: wedrifid 25 February 2010 12:14:22AM 2 points [-]

that it is at least as annoying for a male to be referred to as 'she' as vice-versa

(Probably somewhat more so given that referring to each other as 'girls' is a common form of insult among males given that it asserts traits that while rewarded in females are easy targets of abuse in males.)

Comment author: Alicorn 25 February 2010 12:19:57AM 1 point [-]

You don't think females are socially punished for exhibiting "male" traits, or you think it's comparatively insignificant?

Comment author: RobinZ 24 February 2010 11:54:51PM 4 points [-]

There are few good reasons to object to the singular they - the usual ones make less sense than objecting to the word "giraffe". Were I writing a style guide for LessWrong...

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 04:34:41AM 4 points [-]

I find the opposition to singular they baffling -- I don't know who started it, but whoever they are, they have a funny sense of what sounds awkward.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 February 2010 02:28:26AM *  8 points [-]

I've gotten 'she' from 'Eliezer Yudkowsky' no less.

Interestingly, over the course of some time monitoring blog trackbacks for Overcoming Bias, I never saw Robin Hanson mistaken for a female Robin.

So... um... I realize that this isn't really what the whole point is about at all, but I didn't feel particularly insulted to be called a girl; what does it say about your opinion of men that you're insulted to be mistaken for male? :)

(And yes, I know, it probably wouldn't be annoying if it was only happening to you personally and no one else, it's the background social assumptions that are annoying.)

Comment author: Alicorn 25 February 2010 03:42:12AM *  1 point [-]

It says nothing about my opinion of men (I think) - it just signifies to me that the person so profoundly does not even care. I don't want to be talked about without being considered. This is probably more of a pet peeve for me than for others. It would still be annoying even if it never happened to anyone else.

Comment author: wedrifid 25 February 2010 09:28:28AM *  5 points [-]

it just signifies to me that the person so profoundly does not even care.

About gender pronouns, your gender, gender politics in general or something more esoteric?

Comment author: Alicorn 25 February 2010 06:04:20PM *  1 point [-]

About me.

In person, I'm fairly obviously girl-shaped. No one has ever made this mistake when interacting with me in person, and I don't have to do Obvious Girl Things™ to get that accuracy - don't have to swish around in crinoline, don't have to conveniently quote third parties who refer to me as "she", don't have to carry my purse everywhere I go, or even say my name (which is a girls' name). People don't assume based on where I am or what I'm doing or how surprising it would be for me to be a girl before they figure out that I am one anyway and pronoun me accordingly.

And - in person, when people can't tell what gender someone is, they don't guess, unless they feel able to rely on visual cues or maybe being married to someone of a known gender (and when they are wrong they are mortified). People will bend over backwards to avoid using the wrong pronoun for someone who's in the room with them. They'll ask third parties or construct their sentences to avoid making the assumption or learn the person's name to get a clue. It's just not socially acceptable to get it wrong.

Online, people feel free to guess, and on the geeky parts of the Internet I frequent this is most likely to affect women negatively. (I also frequent various anti-prejudice parts of the Internet, but there a) I generally lurk and b) under the circumstances they take the trouble to be careful about that sort of thing!)

Now, I recognize this disparity is because it's considered insulting to say that someone looks like the opposite gender, and not so with writing like the opposite gender... except that when people talk about third parties one of them knows in person and the other doesn't, the one who doesn't know doesn't casually hurl pronoun caution to the wind even though someone is right there to correct them should they be wrong without any implications about anyone's looks having been made. When there is a mechanism to find out a real person's gender, it gets taken advantage of. With real people, you don't guess, you find out, and if you're wrong, that's not okay.

Getting my gender wrong when it would have been pretty easy to get it right (for crying out loud, ask me! Or someone else! Or do the most cursory of searches for "alicorn gender" on this very site - it's in the second result!) signifies that I am not a "real person" in the above sense. It's okay to guess. It doesn't matter if you get it wrong. He won't care, and if she does, it's about eir politics or something dismissible like that, not about whether you took four seconds to fact-check. Not about identity, or consideration, or the fact that this happens about once a week and the blogger, unlike most people who make the mistake, doesn't even have a way for me to correct em.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 March 2011 12:56:43PM 1 point [-]

And - in person, when people can't tell what gender someone is, they don't guess, unless they feel able to rely on visual cues or maybe being married to someone of a known gender (and when they are wrong they are mortified). People will bend over backwards to avoid using the wrong pronoun for someone who's in the room with them. They'll ask third parties or construct their sentences to avoid making the assumption or learn the person's name to get a clue. It's just not socially acceptable to get it wrong.

I'm pretty sure that's a function of where you hang out.

My impression is that transgendered people have a hard time getting their choices taken seriously in most social circles.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 04:25:57AM *  1 point [-]

Your impression is accurate. It's frequently an issue in gatherings of trans people, let alone in mixed groups or majority-cis spaces.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 26 February 2010 01:49:53AM 10 points [-]

It seems somewhat unreasonable to get so upset over the fact that a random person on the Internet doesn't care about you. I wonder what you think about this quote from my post The Nature of Offense:

On the other side of this interaction, we should consider the possibility that our offensiveness sense may be tuned too sensitively, perhaps for an ancestral environment where mass media didn’t exist and any offense might reasonably be considered both personal and intentional.

But I admit that I'm still quite confused about the proper relationship between rationality, values, and emotions. "Too sensitively" above makes some sense to me intuitively, but if someone asks "too sensitive compared to what?" then I can't really give an answer. I'd be interested in any insights you (or anyone else) might have.

Comment author: Alicorn 26 February 2010 02:09:00AM 1 point [-]

I wouldn't mind if the person had chosen not to blog about me at all. But having made the choice to a) blog about my article and b) couch this entry in terms of what puzzles me, etc., not checking up on my gender places the entire thing in a sort of uncanny valley of care. The blogger basically tried to order up my content a la carte, and there is a limit to how modular my contents are.

Comment author: Unknowns 26 February 2010 10:24:48AM 6 points [-]

I tend to agree with Wei Dai, and it seems to me that your analogy between the way people behave on the internet and the way people behave in person is flawed. To illustrate this:

The internet behavior in question: the blogger didn't care enough about you to find out your gender, but did care enough about what you said to comment on it, also not realizing that you would read the blog post.

Real world behavior that would be actually analogous: two men (more likely to be uncaring) are walking down a street in a large city. Two other persons pass them, walking in the other direction and speaking with one another. The two men overhear something, but it is difficult for them to be sure of the gender of the two persons. Then, one of the two men comments to the other on what they overheard. He uses whatever gender pronoun seems to him slightly more likely, even while knowing that there is a good chance he is wrong, and he doesn't care.

Note the real analogy here: the two men don't care about the two persons they pass, but are interested in what they overhear, and so say something about it. They have no reason to expect that the persons will hear what they say, so, in their view, it doesn't matter whether they are right or not.

Of course, people may well underestimate the probability that other people will read blog posts about them, so maybe they should be more careful.

Comment author: wedrifid 26 February 2010 10:35:45AM 3 points [-]

I tend to agree with Wei Dai, and it seems to me that your analogy between the way people behave on the internet and the way people behave in person is flawed.

The other difference when calling a 'she' a he' in real life is: If you can actually see her with your eyes and you call her a 'he' then it probably means you haven't noticed her breasts, don't consider her facial features to be differentiated and don't even have a polite, respectful appreciation for her feminine form. That makes the situation extremely embarrassing for both parties.

Comment author: andreas 26 February 2010 02:09:10AM *  0 points [-]

"Too sensitively" above makes some sense to me intuitively, but if someone asks "too sensitive compared to what?" then I can't really give an answer.

Too sensitive compared to how you would want to feel if you knew more about your preferences (how low worlds rank where the offense was made) and more about what the world is like, e.g. the state of mind of those making the perceived offense?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 February 2010 01:17:33PM *  8 points [-]

What did the person who mistook me for a woman not care about with respect to me? What were they not considering about me that constitutes disrespect to me? If it's not an annoying social background assumption then I genuinely don't understand what's so terrible about this.

Comment author: RobinZ 25 February 2010 01:24:54PM *  3 points [-]

Do you remember whoever-it-was that was talking about not having the kind of attachment to sexual identity that other people claimed? (She - I believe it was she - mentioned that she would be more likely to report but not as emotionally traumatized by rape.)

I think this is an inverse of this. Some people - me, for example - are unperturbed by being assigned the wrong gender. Not everyone.

Comment author: arundelo 25 February 2010 02:12:26PM 2 points [-]
Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 25 February 2010 09:17:56AM 9 points [-]

It says nothing about my opinion of men (I think) - it just signifies to me that the person so profoundly does not even care.

It also signifies that you care a lot, more than is normally expected, and so more than people normally adjust their behavior to accommodate.

Comment author: Sniffnoy 25 February 2010 07:52:06AM 8 points [-]

I automatically assumed Yvain was female for a while, because the name looks like "Yvonne".

Comment author: RichardKennaway 25 February 2010 08:54:20AM 2 points [-]
Comment author: [deleted] 25 February 2010 04:48:06AM *  4 points [-]

Am I mistaken for female on here because of my username often, I wonder. It does look like it has the word "gal" embedded in it. Darn orthography not reflecting pronunciation.

(The pronunciation is /ˈwɔrɨɡl̩/ in IPA, uorygl in Lojban. Also, it took me ages to figure out a way to get the word "female" within five words of the beginning of that sentence.)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 March 2011 12:58:19PM 2 points [-]

It's easy for me to see your name as Warriorgal.

Comment author: RobinZ 25 February 2010 05:02:40AM 1 point [-]

I believe I was agnostic on the question, for one.

Comment author: mattnewport 25 February 2010 02:29:02AM 2 points [-]

Is that from someone reading it as 'Eliza'?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 March 2011 11:36:43AM 2 points [-]

Alicorn ends with a consonant. This doesn't guarantee that it will be seen as male, but I think it increases the odds.

Comment author: Bindbreaker 24 February 2010 11:26:14PM *  3 points [-]

The user name "Alicorn" seems gender-indeterminate to me.

Comment author: Unknowns 25 February 2010 07:22:54AM 5 points [-]

Maybe, but I certainly assumed she was female the first time I heard the name, and I had never heard it before... maybe associations with Alice or Allison or whatever. Anyway it sure seems determinately female to me.

Comment author: Bindbreaker 25 February 2010 09:52:42AM 1 point [-]

Ali can be short for several female names, but it can also be a male name.

Comment author: Kevin 25 February 2010 11:02:51AM 2 points [-]

This is a cultural norm kind of thing, but in the cultural norms where Alicorn chose her name, I think it really was intended to be a feminine username. I think women do have a tendency to try and choose somewhat feminine usernames, because otherwise a lot of the time on the internet they will be mistaken for men which gets annoying quickly.

I think something that would allow us to definitely solve this problem is profile pictures (which don't have to be your actual picture) or user profiles.

Comment author: komponisto 25 February 2010 05:51:19PM *  7 points [-]

I think something that would allow us to definitely solve this problem is profile pictures (which don't have to be your actual picture) or user profiles.

User profiles good, pictures bad.

Frankly, the "problem" here really isn't very hard to solve: just don't assume you know a person's sex unless you actually know it!

Comment author: wnoise 25 February 2010 05:39:57PM 1 point [-]

I think women do have a tendency to try and choose somewhat feminine usernames, because otherwise a lot of the time on the internet they will be mistaken for men which gets annoying quickly.

This is undoubtedly the case. However, the opposite choice is also quite popular -- choosing masculine usernames to avoid being harassed for being female.

Comment author: Rain 25 February 2010 04:56:23PM *  7 points [-]

Edit: this comment has been rewritten; please see wnoise's comment below for original context.

I feel that the topic of gender identity is not as important as this discussion and others like it on LW seem to make it. In a text based environment, using pseudonyms, we are genderless until we reveal ourselves. And unless we intend to employ mating signals between posters here, it has little relevance even after it has been revealed.

I have operated for years in communities where the gender of participants is highly relevant, but where there were taboos against attempts to discover true genders (online, text-based roleplaying). In such environments, I've developed a severe lack of concern for the topic at large, and instead read what the person has to say and contribute without a gender filter. Many times, I don't even read the name of a poster except as a pattern that allows me to place the comment in context with those around it.

Alicorn's focus on gender identity has, several times now, generated very large discussion threads and at least one top level post. I do not understand why this is accepted by the rest of the LW community as important and relevant to the topic of rationality.

Comment author: thomblake 25 February 2010 05:59:04PM *  0 points [-]

Alicorn's focus on gender identity has, several times now, generated very large discussion threads and at least one top level post. I do not understand why this is accepted by the rest of the LW community as important and relevant to the topic of rationality.

Questions of appropriate standards for our community are on-topic to a limited extent. If you disagree, please refrain from making comments like this one, on pain of contradiction.

Comment author: Rain 25 February 2010 06:33:40PM *  3 points [-]

As pointed out by Kevin, this discussion has been had several times before on LW, and community norms should have already been established, in which case continued large threads on the topic are likely unproductive.

I also do not see why contradiction should be painful.

Comment author: thomblake 25 February 2010 07:08:43PM *  1 point [-]

I also do not see why contradiction should be painful.

I can't tell if you meant this humorously, so I'll take it as a serious statement of confusion...

"On pain of X" is an idiom in English which roughly means, "or else you will experience X", where X is something bad.

example

Comment author: Rain 25 February 2010 07:41:14PM *  0 points [-]

I would categorize it as 10 percent humor, 60 percent temporary interest in the vague threat implied by the "don't do this... or else" definition and why that context was appropriate when applied to the topic of contradiction, and 30 percent etymological interest, as I have "on pain of death" as the most-associated thought when hearing the phrase (Google agrees, with that as the top suggestion to complete "on pain of"), and was curious as to how the permutation may have originated.

ETA: I disagree with the sentiment that contradiction is a negative, undesirable, or potentially painful event; instead, I view it as an opportunity to update maps, assuming that the contradiction is supported by the weight of the evidence.

Comment author: komponisto 26 February 2010 01:10:58AM *  3 points [-]

"Pain" in this expression means "penalty". Though I haven't looked it up to confirm, I'm pretty confident the word "pain" itself comes from Latin poena via French peine, meaning just that.

(The first time I heard this idiom, the phrase was "on pain of imprisonment".)

Comment author: Rain 25 February 2010 05:13:57PM 3 points [-]

If you downvoted this comment, please explain why you feel that the topic of gender identity is so important as to merit top level posts and long discussions in many other posts.

Comment author: Kevin 25 February 2010 06:00:22PM *  0 points [-]

I downvoted it. This was already discussed in depth on the site a while ago. See the fall-out posts and discussion related to the PUA stuff (googling for PUA site:lesswrong.com should give you most of it) Basically, the answer to your statement (and then some!) is contained in that thousands of words worth of discussion, and I thought your comment was little more than being a likely trigger for a discussion that's already been beaten into the ground here, even though that wasn't your intention and your intention was in fact exactly opposite.

I will state that summarizing this discussion for postery's sake (in the wiki) so we can stop having it is a good idea.

Comment author: Rain 25 February 2010 06:07:08PM *  4 points [-]

Yes, I read those discussions, and those posts, which is why I'm surprised it's still generating threads this large on unrelated articles.

When reading, I noticed that this particular thread had a button labeled "load more comments (106 replies)", and that struck me as very wrong for a comment I would have labeled "off-topic" at best.

Comment author: brazil84 25 February 2010 05:50:32PM 2 points [-]

I didn't downvote your comment; I think you actually make an interesting point.

For me, it's not just that people obsess over issues of gender (and race, and sexual preference). It's that their gender (or race) sometimes becomes like the team they are on and (arguably) warps their views.

For example, let's suppose you did a poll and asked people if they think women should have the right to vote. I'm pretty confident that the percentage which says "yes" would be higher among women than among men. So it seems likely that peoples' group membership colors their judgments.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 08:38:29PM 0 points [-]

Pragmatically: It's important because the fact that this keeps coming up again and again suggests it's not going to go away just because it's annoying to many when it happens, and a mechanism to channel, redirect or settle the matter in the form of community norms hasn't yet been found. Meanwhile, there's clearly people who find it relevant, both to their participation in LW and not infrequently to life experiences that have bearing on what they can contribute to refining the art of rationality. Some of those people are major contributors here; some of them may still be lurking. Some of them haven't even found te site yet. A global norm that rejects the topic altogether seems like a great path to evaporative cooling in an area where LW has real potential for PR issues, and which may be a long-term impediment to its success. Restricting the topic to Discussion only (regardless of the potential quality of the post and ensuing discussion) or attempting to limit the length of threads directly seems like a bad idea.

You can always downvote it if you don't want to see it.

Comment author: wnoise 25 February 2010 05:29:12PM 2 points [-]

I have not downvoted it. But the original phrasing "You are too focused on the topic of gender identity; I suggest that the topic is not nearly so worthy of concern." differs from the one here in that it suggests concern to oneself, rather than the concern to the community that this post makes clear. The first is telling other people what they should be concerned with, violating a clear norm, and helping no one.

Comment author: komponisto 25 February 2010 06:08:12PM 5 points [-]

Alicorn's focus on gender identity

I don't perceive Alicorn as "focusing" on "gender identity". I perceive Alicorn as getting annoyed when people (out of carelessness) get her gender identity wrong.

Comment author: Rain 25 February 2010 06:14:52PM *  11 points [-]

Annoyance is one thing, and I have no problem with it; expressing that annoyance in such a way as to fuel a 118 post thread (and growing) on the topic in an otherwise unrelated article is what I disagree with.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 08:26:44PM 1 point [-]

Surely if the thread's grown unwieldy, that's not simply because Alicorn expressed her annoyance? There's a whole bunch of other people involved here, whose contribution matters even if it all stems off of one of her comments.

Comment author: Kevin 25 February 2010 06:02:52PM *  10 points [-]

It's because we want more women to post here so we need to listen to Alicorn and keep her happy!!! We respect her opinions. Diversity is good. If we can't keep Alicorn happy, we're generally screwed as far as attracting (and subsequently not alienating) more women to this site.

See Eliezer's post on this topic. http://lesswrong.com/lw/13j/of_exclusionary_speech_and_gender_politics/

Comment author: V_V 23 October 2012 09:20:40PM *  0 points [-]

Being non-anglo-saxon, I'm in a minority here. So you need to listen to me and keep me happy!!! You have to respect my opinions. Diversity is good. If you can't keep me happy, you're generally screwed as far as attracting (and subsequently not alienating) more non-anglo-saxons to this site.

Comment author: Kevin 23 October 2012 09:31:37PM -1 points [-]

Are you happy?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 February 2010 04:00:07AM 6 points [-]
Comment author: Wei_Dai 26 February 2010 10:02:50AM 1 point [-]

Why did Eliezer tell everyone here about another blogger who doesn't care enough about Alicorn to find out and use her preferred pronoun, instead of, say, just contacting that blogger directly? And why did people vote it up? Do they want to see more instances of such lack of caring to be reported here? I think I'm missing something here...

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 February 2010 03:15:27PM 3 points [-]

I think I'm missing something here...

Er... a sense of humor? I regret only that I didn't get to see the look on her face in person, but I was kind of hoping for an AAAAAAAHHH in reply.

Comment author: Alicorn 26 February 2010 04:53:48PM 7 points [-]

Oh, I didn't realize my frustration was so entertaining. Should I stop exhibiting it, to create better incentives?

Comment author: thomblake 26 February 2010 06:13:03PM 0 points [-]

Perhaps you should at least stop exhibiting it so amusingly. Lately it's sounded like something out of Peanuts.

Comment author: Alicorn 26 February 2010 06:13:50PM 1 point [-]

What would be a clear, non-amusing, ideally empathy-inspiring expression of frustration?

Comment author: Kevin 27 February 2010 03:53:34AM 2 points [-]

A :( probably wouldn't hurt

Comment author: Alicorn 27 February 2010 03:54:29AM *  10 points [-]

People keep mistaking my gender and it makes me sad :(

Comment author: Raemon 14 March 2011 01:49:16AM *  1 point [-]

I think it's an unfortunate but inescapable fact that people are unlikely to assume a given poster on a rationality site is female unless said poster has an obviously-female-name (and honestly, I don't think "Alicorn" counts. I had no idea what it meant until you explained).

But I AM genuinely offended by the Isgoria blogger proclaiming that male pronouns were "neutral", even when applied to a specific person. I'm not sure it was the optimal use of my time given the year old status of this discussion, but I sent an e-mail saying so. It gave me warm fuzzies, at least.

I think the male bias in the english language is a ridiculously obvious problem, and I am extremely frustrated whenever a someone says "hey, it'd be cool if you made a small effort to use gender neutral language" and the response is "dude, what's YOUR problem?"

(Originally I used male pronouns to refer to the Isgoria blogger, then realized I didn't actually know for sure. I'm 90% sure the blogger is male, and I don't think it's necessarily wrong to guess someone's gender wrong. But it also didn't take much effort to avoid the use of pronouns in the first place, and if we had an official actually neutral pronoun it wouldn't have been an issue.)

Comment author: Dufaer 01 March 2010 10:01:48PM 6 points [-]

How is it even reasonable to expect some arbitrarily visitor to notice (or guess correctly) your gender?

Do you evaluate your writing style or your expressed thoughts to be so typically female as to yield to no other conclusion? Or do you count on the “obvious” connotations of a name like “Alicorn” - for it is surely obvious that anyone naming oneself thus must be thinking about some fluffy, girly sparkling unicorn instead of, for example, making a reference to the Invisible Pink Unicorn - or something (especially on a rationality website!).

There is no personal information on the user pages here on LS, and decidedly no gender marks on top of the posts themselves. Also, you are obviously not willing to provide any info to make you identifiable in RL and yet expect all people to infer that you are female anyway, even given the prior probability distribution (“there are no girls on the internet”, “a contributor on some intellectual/academia website”)?

Even when one does not think of people on the internet strictly as male, it is simply usually a better guess to refer to them as “he”, given that i) one is unwilling to use “he/she” or a similarly artificial form, and ii) there is no other information one is willing to look up.

Thus I conclude that as long as you do not change your nickname into something like “Alicorn(female!)” or change your expectations, you will be sad like this time and time again. [ :( ]

Comment author: JoshuaZ 12 March 2011 04:05:34PM 8 points [-]

I'm a little curious why you care so much about people getting your gender correct online.

Speaking personally, I generally use my actual name in my screen name which to native English speakers shows my gender clearly. But even then, some non-native speakers see a name ending in "a" and apparently conclude that that's female.

Also, I have a very high-pitch voice for a male, so I regularly get mistaken for a female over the phone. But this isn't really that annoying except when it becomes an actual inconvenience (as in "I'm sorry ma'am, but I need to speak to your husband about this." and then refusing to believe that they really are speaking to Joshua Zelinsky).

So I'm curious why this preference issue is one that you place so much emphasis on.

Comment author: Bugmaster 22 October 2012 06:19:47PM -1 points [-]

I mistook your gender as well, initially. In my defence, I had no idea what "Alicorn" meant, except that it sounded like "Unicorn". Unicorns are male more often than not, and the word "Unicorn" is male-gendered in my native language, which tipped my gender assignment all the way toward "male".

My point is, the people who are mistaking your gender may not be making any assumptions about you. They may just be making assumptions about unicorns.

Comment author: ciphergoth 26 February 2010 06:21:03PM *  8 points [-]

I think we should steer a lot further from high-school tropes. Right now you seem a whisker away from grabbing her stuff, offering it back to her, then throwing it to a mate when she reaches for it. I don't think that's exactly the atmosphere we're aiming for, do you?

Comment author: SilasBarta 26 February 2010 06:30:16PM *  2 points [-]

Agreed, and voted up.

With that said, note that the scienceblogs author and most of the commenters were female, and didn't make the inference, "alicorn = unicorn-related = probably female".

Comment author: ciphergoth 26 February 2010 06:28:36PM *  4 points [-]

While I generally get pissed off when people find my frustration entertaining, I'm not sure that's the correct inference here. I can be amused by my friends frustration in a way that, far from diminishing my sympathy for them, is actually borne of it. This is part of what amuses us about the Bill Hicks of this world.

Comment author: ciphergoth 26 February 2010 10:34:11AM 5 points [-]

The blog post is of independent interest aside from the gender mixup.

Comment author: wedrifid 26 February 2010 10:10:03AM 3 points [-]

Do they want to see more instances of such lack of caring to be reported here? I think I'm missing something here...

I found the mere fact that a lesswrong post got that much external reference was interesting.

I don't think my personal vote should be taken as support of any 'lack of caring' about Alicorn, as that is not an inference I have made about the state of the mind of the blogger based on the evidence available. That is, I reject the framing of the question.

Comment author: RobinZ 26 February 2010 04:09:22AM 2 points [-]
Comment author: Alicorn 26 February 2010 04:19:35AM 0 points [-]

Thank you!

Comment author: Kevin 26 February 2010 06:56:18AM 2 points [-]

Go go feminism police!

Comment author: CronoDAS 25 February 2010 07:39:50PM 4 points [-]

Wow, that's quite a discussion thread that's hanging below this comment; interesting, but completely unrelated to the top-level post. I want to jump in with a few words about anger but I'm completely at a loss as to where to put them.

Anyway, said blogger has now changed his post.

Comment author: Epiphany 23 October 2012 01:43:02AM *  0 points [-]

Different explanation from what I saw in the comments:

Maybe it isn't that cuteness causes us to care for children, but that it stops us from destroying all other life in the vicinity. Considering that a lot of males have an aggressive instinct (testosterone is connected with violent behaviors in both genders, but males are more likely to have high levels), what would uncivilized people with no sense of cuteness do to animal populations? I have practically no aggressive instincts myself, being female and having the stereotypically low testosterone, but here's how I think that might go:

They might think it's a good idea to practice hunting skills by killing everything in sight.

When they're angry would they shoot the first thing they see even if it's a baby deer? In contrast, if they go out into the forest to shoot something in anger a few times and encounter cute baby deer, which calms them down and makes them feel bad for wanting to shoot them, this may condition them not to develop a habit of shooting things when angry.

When a cave person with no cuteness instinct feels ambitious, do they set out to kill everything they see for a week as a way of showing dominance over the jungle?

If a non-cute experiencing cave person sees a family of bears, do they launch their spear at the mother, not caring whether all of the cubs die or do they feel concern about orphaning cubs and wait to find a lone male? This is very important because if the cave person allows the first scenario, their hunting practices will reduce the edible bear population substantially. In the second, the cave person has minimized their impact. (Few male bears are can impregnate many females, meaning that the bears can reproduce at a similar pace even after losing most of them, while fewer female bears will certainly mean less reproductive capacity for the bears.)

When a cave man meets a cave woman he finds sexy, does he catch every animal he can find to show her how good he is at catching animals? Do the other men kill even more in order to compete? If she has an instinctive respect for life, then lots of dead bunnies and baby deer will upset her. This may encourage them to channel their urges to compete for her into a "quality over quantity" strategy by finding one really good trophy instead.

I might question here whether cuteness was necessary if they had empathy. However, empathy is triggered for things like verbal explanations, tears and certain facial expressions - behaviors that animals are very disadvantaged at accomplishing. Also, these would be difficult to detect from the distance at which you'd start stalking them, and they would be very brief, as they'd start running as soon as they notice you, so after that, all you'd see was the back of them. Also, cuteness works even after the animal is dead - it can trigger "Oh no! I killed something cute!" remorse when an empathetic equivalent might not be triggered because expressiveness isn't a likely characteristic of an inanimate face.

This might also explain why babies are less cute - we spend enough time close up to them to notice their facial expressions and empathize with them, and they have various advantages in being able to trigger specific empathetic reactions, so since empathy is frequently triggered, cuteness is less important.

Though, a much simpler explanation is also possible: Maybe your notions about how common it is for humans to find animals cuter than babies is based on a biased sample. I bit, just now, not even thinking about it, because I agreed with your idea that most people find animals cuter but then it dawned on me: maybe it's not that common for people to find babies less cute than animals. There could be some other reason our cuteness websites seem to focus on animals - parents don't like putting up pictures of babies for security reasons, they're concerned they'll look like braggarts, and on a website dominated by animals they don't want to upload pictures of a child because it makes the dehumanizing implication that their baby is just an amusing little animal.

Also, it could have to do with the supply and demand of cute little animals to cute human babies. There are 300 million Americans and probably only a few million of them are babies. To contrast, Americans probably have millions of cats and dogs and gerbils, etc plus there must be many times more bunnies and squirrels and such that they might see in their lawns than there are human babies. Also, animals are cute for longer - many of them are cute as adults - whereas cute babies are, by definition, only cute while they're babies.

And we can add goofy words to animal pictures without worrying about it humiliating them, or take dozens of videos of them jumping into boxes (like with Maru cat, my personal favorite) without anyone worrying about it damaging their future reputations or near-term mental health. That we can take more pictures of animals and do more things with them may increase the ratio of animal pictures to baby pictures by quite a bit.

Come to think of it, how often do you see cute animals in real life vs. how often do you see cute babies? I work in front of a window that looks out into a garden. I see cute birds and squirrels all day. I probably see at least a hundred times as many cute animals as babies in my daily life. Multiply this by a lot because I think bumblebees are cute. When I see people carrying their babies around at the supermarket, I might smile at them, but I don't stare at them the way I might watch a cute birdie because that's rude. I spend a lot less time appreciating cute babies than animals for this reason.

If my mind fills with images of cute animals and leaves me at a loss when coming up with cute baby images when I think about whether animals or babies are cuter, maybe that's why.

Comment author: Bugmaster 23 October 2012 02:15:52AM 0 points [-]

These are all interesting ideas, but are they true ? That is, is there any evidence to support any of them ?

Comment author: mwaser 14 March 2011 10:57:24AM 0 points [-]

Actually, eating a baby bunny is a really bad idea when viewed from a long-term perspective. Sure, it's a tender tasty little morsel -- but the operative word is little. Far better from a long-term view to let it grow up, reproduce and then eat it. And large competent bunnies aren't nearly as cute as baby bunnies, are they? So maybe evo-psych does have it correct . . . . and maybe the short-sighted rationality of tearing apart a whole field by implication because you don't understand how something works doesn't seem as brilliant.

Comment author: DavidAgain 14 March 2011 12:32:55PM 2 points [-]

It's only a bad idea if there's a decent chance of you getting to eat that bunny or its offspring AND if there would otherwise be a shortage. Otherwise a small bunny in the hand is worth dozens of big ones in the bush. As a tribe, or better still a species, there might be benefits to not eating what you catch, but there's unlikely to be real benefits to the individual, so you'd need group selection here.

Even in modern society we can see this: look at the problem of over-fishing for instance. 'Fishermen' and indeed 'humankind' would benefit from more careful fishing, but you need strong international enforcement to try to make indivduals follow this route. As an individual, the food you get from a sprat is more on average than the miniscule chance of you getting bigger fish later because you release it.

Comment author: CronoDAS 22 February 2010 03:18:24AM 3 points [-]

Cats are cuter than bunnies.

Comment author: CannibalSmith 22 February 2010 11:52:14AM 1 point [-]

Catgirls are cuter than cats.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 February 2010 08:07:12PM 12 points [-]

Male tentacle monsters perceive Japanese schoolgirls as a superstimulus relative to female tentacle monsters. It probably has something to do with the tie on the sailor uniforms.

Comment author: arundelo 22 February 2010 12:21:51PM 7 points [-]

I think that's a different meaning of "cute".

Comment author: CannibalSmith 22 February 2010 12:06:15PM *  4 points [-]

Hey, let's play a game! Pick any comment in this comment tree and reply to it with a picture you consider cuter than it. The markup is ![](http://www.blabla.com/picutre.jpg) . Please do not reply to yourself. One picture per post please.

I'll start with the first Google Images result for "cute":

Comment author: ata 23 February 2010 02:19:53PM 3 points [-]

Comment author: [deleted] 23 February 2010 12:26:21AM 4 points [-]

Comment author: CannibalSmith 23 February 2010 09:55:36AM 1 point [-]

Comment author: Kevin 23 February 2010 01:19:09PM 3 points [-]

Comment author: ata 23 February 2010 02:20:43PM 3 points [-]

Comment author: Pfft 22 February 2010 05:47:20PM 0 points [-]

Not fair, there's no way we could compete with the chipmunkula.

Comment author: Kutta 24 February 2010 02:11:09PM *  8 points [-]

I'm appalled that Less Wrong came to have a "Post cute kittens" thread this soon. Still, I wouldn't call it an unfortunate turn of events.

Comment author: CronoDAS 25 February 2010 10:55:57PM 5 points [-]

As an Internet forum grows older, the probability of a thread devoted to posting pictures of cute kittens approaches one. ;)

Comment author: Kevin 26 February 2010 11:22:40AM *  1 point [-]

I will bet 500 karma (1:1, terms fully negotiable) that there will be a "funny picture" thread within one year.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 February 2010 03:52:20AM 4 points [-]

1) The baby is far cuter than the rabbit.

2) There's nothing wrong with a stimulus having a superstimulus.

Comment author: James_K 22 February 2010 09:13:55AM 0 points [-]

The baby is far cuter than the rabbit.

Cuteness actually disgusts me a little, and I find the baby more off-putting than the rabbit, so I guess I think the baby cuter too.

Comment author: Clippy 22 February 2010 12:05:21PM 11 points [-]

This is far cuter than all of them put together.

Comment author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 05:16:06AM 16 points [-]

Superstimuli are typically artificial. I don't have this problem with Dennett's explanation of the sweet tooth just because cake exists - the cake is explained. And I wouldn't be complaining about the cuteness explanation if the only thing cuter than the baby were an idealized drawing of a baby.

Comment author: zslastman 22 October 2012 05:27:15PM 1 point [-]

Why are we all assuming that finding animals cute represents an evolved trait and isn't, for instance, a freak consequence of all the books and cartoons we're exposed to which anthropomorphize animals? (No points for guessing the other candidate for that etiology).

Comment author: pelius 07 March 2010 12:12:10PM 1 point [-]

Psychological conditioning, rather than simple evolutionary instinct, is a major factor in our modern Western viewpoint concerning baby human vs. baby animal cuteness. We must consider the impact a century of books, cartoons, movies, and teddy bears has on our perception of this matter. This programming begins at infancy before we are even conscious of it, familiarizing and humanizing creatures that our ancestors not far back in time would have slaughtered, eaten, or killed for sport without guilt.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 08:22:08PM 1 point [-]

There's probably something to that. While pets are kept all over the world, there definitely seems to be a big difference made by culture. I imagine socioeconomic status has something to do with it as well. I've had friends, both continental European and from various other parts of the world, who thought American society, having so many pets so visibly, was weird and possibly a bit disturbingly neotenic. Working class folks and people from early-generation diaspora families seem to rate especially likely to be weirded by it, in my experience. One of my Somali friends found the fact that I keep a cat weird, and kept worrying she was going to bite her randomly (to be fair, reading cat body language is a skill not everyone possesses). They have cats in Somalia, of course, and she was raised in North America, but the position and frequency of pets in Somali culture is just not the same...it's different enough that a lot of Somali people I talk to will profess that Somali people just don't keep pets. Not because it's a true universal statement, just because white American norms around pets seem odd.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 25 February 2010 01:57:41PM -1 points [-]

Here's a pop evo-psych possibility:

Baby animals appear cute to us so that we prefer to eat the adults instead of the babies. Eating the babies would destroy the population, whether domesticated or in the wild.

Possibly human groups who never domesticated animals would feel differently about bunnies.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 12 March 2011 03:55:53PM 3 points [-]

Here's a pop evo-psych possibility:

Baby animals appear cute to us so that we prefer to eat the adults instead of the babies. Eating the babies would destroy the population, whether domesticated or in the wild.

This seems to smell a bit too much of group selection. Remember, extremely large selection pressures are needed for group selection to work.

Comment author: jimrandomh 12 March 2011 04:13:03PM 1 point [-]

No group selection is necessary if the animals in question are a herd of livestock. The same effect would apply to wild animals only because our reflexes can't distinguish the two cases.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 12 March 2011 04:21:23PM 2 points [-]

Destroying a population of livestock is a group problem that gives its negative selection on the local tribe. For wild animals this is even worse since the selection pressure is then spread over at least all humans in the region and probably over other species that would be using those wild species as prey. Worse, there's a clear individual negative to not eating a young wild animal when one has a chance; it is easy food that won't fight back.

Comment author: jimrandomh 13 March 2011 04:08:37AM 1 point [-]

Destroying a population of livestock is a group problem that gives its negative selection on the local tribe.

Not in societies that have a notion of property ownership, and not for herders that travel alone or with a group composed only of genetic relatives. That there would be group selection too does not matter much.

Comment author: MatthewB 23 February 2010 11:03:21AM 2 points [-]

I have a very adverse reaction to human babies... I want to pop them. Or something similar. They look like you could just stick a big pin in them and they'd go POP.

Bunnies are way cuter than human babies (at least to humans I think).

Comment author: wedrifid 22 February 2010 07:50:03AM 1 point [-]

I just search google images for 'cute baby' and 'cute bunny'. The only baby I saw that wasn't cuter than a bunny was one that was photoshopped to have rabbit teeth.

Comment author: Unnamed 22 February 2010 07:10:53AM *  4 points [-]

I believe that Konrad Lorenz was the first one to advance the evolutionary theory of cuteness. Stephen Jay Gould wrote an article about it (pdf) using Mickey Mouse as an example (don't be dissuaded by the author's identity). Lorenz argued that we respond with awwwws and nurturing behavior to features that distinguish infant humans from adults, like large round heads, large eyes, small pudgy limbs, and clumsy movements, even if they belong to another animal or a nonliving thing.

There has been research on why animals are cute, again going back to Lorenz, and I think it's generally accepted that the young of many species are cute to us because they share cute-inducing features that are common to that developmental stage, some species (like pandas) seem cute just because out of the wide variety of species some of them happen to have cute-inducing features, and some species (like dogs) seem cute because humans have bred them that way. I'm not sure if there is research on whether adults of other species find their own young to be cute.

Human infants are unusually helpless for an unusually long period of time, which helps explain why humans are so attuned to cuteness (and why there would be a bias towards over-identifying instances of cuteness, which evolutionarily is the less costly error). That doesn't explain why bunnies are cuter than babies, though, or why non-humans dominate the top of our cutest list. Perhaps they just have more of the cute-inducing features. Humans occupy a small portion of body-space, and if you move from the region occupied by adult humans to the region occupied by human infants and then go even further along the same dimensions, you could run into regions occupied by other animals. But why would this happen for cuteness but not sexiness?

Comment author: knb 24 February 2010 02:25:08AM *  3 points [-]

So what is the alternative explanation for cuteness? Cuteness is a universal response that is very similar in all human beings. People all over the world find the same things cute. Did the phenomenon of cuteness just emerge, culturally, ex nihilo, and spread to every country in which the subject has been studied?

This universal human phenomenon must be explained somehow. The only explanation is that the phenomenon of cuteness is an evolved response.

And, I can't emphasize this enough, Dennett's hypothesis might have been idle speculation, but this issue has been thoroughly studied by psychologists and neouroscientists.

http://www.journals.elsevierhealth.com/periodicals/bps/article/S0006-3223%2807%2900482-9/abstract

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/200803/cute-the-brain

The theory of cuteness as evolved psychological adaptation is supported by mountains of empirical evidence, by reason, and by evolutionary theory.

My evolutionary psychology professor just discussed cuteness in some detail a few weeks ago. She was very convincing. I have absolutely no idea how you consider all of this to be "cheaply wrong".

Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 02:26:25AM 5 points [-]

I'm sure there is an evolutionary explanation for cuteness. I just don't think it's this one.

Comment author: fmuaddib 23 February 2010 03:00:29PM *  7 points [-]

Here is the final, most likely explanation for the cuteness paradox:

1 - Cuteness genes are positively selected by many things, but the main filter, at least in mammals, is THE MOTHER INVESTMENT. Puppies (humans, bunnies, all of them..) compete for the investment of the mother, because she is the one that feeds them. They cannot feed themselves until they are adults. Cuteness is a deceivement device and (because it costs physical resources) an honest signal for communicating the mother that the deceiver is the puppy most worth of the maternal investment. Even non mammals use cuteness (i.e. birds and other oviparous species) but their cuteness is rarely perceived as so because of the huge physical differences with the mammals, differences that our mammalian brain cannot see as cute but as deformities.

2 - The selective pressure is bigger when the number of puppies is greater, because the competition is more tight.

3 - Female bunnies bears more children. A litter of rabbit kits (baby rabbits) can be as small as a single kit, ranging up to 12 or 13; however there have been litters as big as 18. So the competition is harsh, and consequently the selective pressure on the cuteness genes is bigger.

4 - Women give birth to 1 or 2 children at once on average, consequently the competition and the selective pressure on cuteness genes is greatly inferior to the selective pressure on the bunnies.

5 - Assuming that cuteness is an universal estetic trait (big facial elements, head bigger than the body, small arms, etc.), developed at the same way in all mammalian brains, it is then reasonable to conclude that human babies display cuteness traits, but are not as cute as the bunnies, because those are subject to a much more tight competition.

Findings that can falsify this hypothesis: - the existence of a species of mammals that bears many children at once that are not cuter than those that bears few, provided that those are normally competing for a shortage of resources from the mother. We need to take in consideration other factors as well, like shortage severity, likeness of the mother to drop some of his puppies if attacked or in extreme hostile environments, and so on.

Comment author: SilasBarta 23 February 2010 04:16:54PM 0 points [-]

What about the fact that most people here didn't find the bunny cuter than the baby? And that this is probably true in general?

Comment author: TuviaDulin 25 October 2012 08:47:25AM 2 points [-]

This may not be the best place to ask, but is Evolutionary Psychology actually falsifiable?

Comment author: ikrase 09 January 2013 10:19:35PM 1 point [-]

Probably depends on what you mean. It does make predictions, but it is very difficult to get away from what is already known.

Comment author: TruePath 24 February 2010 12:44:07AM 0 points [-]

I don't see the tension. Remember evolution doesn't guarantee the perfect rule only a useful one.

For instance it might very well be the case that the cuteness response functions via certain general mechanisms shared by all mammals. Indeed to support this view is the fact that humans will often find small versions of inanimate objects cute as well. My HS chemistry teacher used to hold up a teeny tiny beaker and invariably many of the female (and a few male) students would go "awww."

Indeed the cost to finding small bunnies cute is virtually nill (how many hungry hunter gathers do you think choose to go hungry rather than eat bunnies). Thus it's actually far more efficient to have this general cuteness response that need not be modified as evolution changes the external appearance of the species.


Yes, one has to be wary of potential inconsistent evidence but that makes this no different than any other scientific field. I mean it's really pretty much exactly the same as climate science.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 22 February 2010 02:14:19AM *  4 points [-]

IAWYC, but I wonder how human-universal the cuteness response to bunnies is (constantly being told "these are cute!" might increase it in our culture). I also wonder how many animals look cute that would have been likely prey in the African EEA.

Comment author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 02:16:59AM *  2 points [-]

I'm not sure what all critters people ate in the African ancestral environment, but I'd be really, really surprised if none of them were cute, at least as juveniles. (Which are easier to catch than healthy adults.)

Comment author: jimrandomh 22 February 2010 02:40:59AM 7 points [-]

Perhaps the cuteness response is tied to domestication - ie, evolution wants us to take the bunny with us until it gets old enough to stop being cute, and then eat it.

Comment author: JulianMorrison 22 February 2010 11:38:33AM 3 points [-]

Then it fails again. People get attached to pets. They tend not to eat them, even if they're edible.

Comment author: prase 22 February 2010 05:56:51PM *  4 points [-]

Not during famines. We can afford to have pets, but if you are an often hungry member of a hunter-gatherer tribe, cuteness may be a good measure to compensate your desire to eat the bunny on the spot.

Also, we don't eat all domestic animals. Dogs or horses are quite important examples.

Comment author: Cyan 22 February 2010 02:38:54AM 5 points [-]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the bunny is about 75,119 times cuter than the baby.

You're wrong. That baby is way cuter than the bunny.

Comment author: RobinZ 22 February 2010 02:53:41AM 4 points [-]

For people with cutoffs for low karma comments: Poll on relative cuteness of babies and bunnies - karma balance.

Comment author: Nominull 25 February 2010 09:09:19PM 4 points [-]

problem with the poll: the karma changes have left me several hundred karma points in the red to downvote anything.

Comment author: Jack 22 February 2010 03:37:19AM *  19 points [-]

How come everyone is missing the obvious answer? The human ancestor that first developed attachment to babies may be an ancestor we share with rabbits.

(Edit, Also: Human babies may have evolved to be uglier for other reasons -less hair, bigger heads- and those features may have been selected for more than cuteness.)

Edit 2: Metaphorically, our cuteness program is like running Netscape Navigator 1.0 or something. It sort of does the trick but isn't exactly adapted for modern uses

Comment author: RobinZ 22 February 2010 03:51:56AM 1 point [-]

"An". "An" obvious answer. There's at least one other which has been proposed in other replies to this post: social conditioning.

I have to say that yours is quite interesting, however. What else does it predict?

Comment author: gwern 22 February 2010 03:10:43PM 1 point [-]

What else does it predict?

How about, the closer something is to human, the more cute? Since there will be 2 million years of pressure honing 'cuteness' to primate needs, and counteracting the x million years of pressure about rabbits.

Comment author: komponisto 22 February 2010 04:00:22AM 7 points [-]

What else does it predict?

That lots of other animals should share our opinions about cuteness.

Comment author: wedrifid 22 February 2010 07:27:37AM *  4 points [-]

How come everyone is missing the obvious answer? The human ancestor that first developed attachment to babies may be an ancestor we share with rabbits.

Because I don't consider it plausible. The 'cuteness' response is just far more malleable than the, you know, bit where you aren't a rabbit. See, for example, all the other sensory preferences that are are finely honed per species.

EDIT: I will add that it is slightly more plausible to me that rabbits are cute because they look more like baby ancestral primates than baby humans do on some key features (little and fury). Even so I would be reluctant to assign too much confidence to such a theory.

Comment author: djcb 25 February 2010 06:47:00AM *  2 points [-]

I'm not sure the answer is so obvious.

For example, baby pinguins and other birds can be very cute; baby lizards usually aren't. I think the theory goes that we've evolved from something that looks somewhat lizardy, but definitely not like a bird.

Comment author: mattnewport 25 February 2010 07:13:56AM 5 points [-]

cute lizard

I rest my case.

Comment author: Jack 25 February 2010 07:05:25AM 1 point [-]

Yeah, it definitely isn't a perfect theory. It is obvious in the sense that it is the logical conclusion to come to if you held the Dennet theory and then had alicorn's evidence presented to you. The main thing is that there is no reason to think that the cuteness instinct is a product of recent evolution.

Comment author: Leafy 22 February 2010 01:47:49PM 3 points [-]

Is it not worth considering "cuteness" to be defined in terms of threat levels. It seems to me that in most cases there is a direct correlation between cuteness and perceived threat.

By threat I am referring not just to physical (claws versus soft paws, large vs small, dominant versus meek, hard versus soft) but even biological (messy / unhygenic looking creatures versus fluffy / cuddly looking ones) or social (flawed versus flawless).

This may explain why some people perceive cuteness differently. One person may look at a human baby and see no possible threat, others may be more inclined to be considering health implications or even the threat of embaressment / fear it is associated with.

With this association in mind it would seem that selection towards lower threat is prevalent - babies looking cute leads to lower abandonment or attack by other parties, animals allowed to come close to humans without fear and benefiting from shelter / food / care etc.

Comment author: Tiiba 22 February 2010 06:53:36AM *  26 points [-]

I wanted to say this for a long time: human babies aren't cute. Certainly not newborns. If I didn't know better, and saw a newborn, I would perform an exorcism. They look like creatures from the Uncanny Valley.

Edit: Seventeen points? Maybe I should make this a top-level post. Opinions?

First I lose about that many from a very thoughtful post because of my unusual sense of humor. Then I gain them back on... this? People, start making sense.

Comment author: MichaelHoward 11 March 2010 02:07:17PM 7 points [-]

This study suggests looking at kitten pictures makes you more careful, improving performance in fine-motor dexterity tasks such as mock surgery.

I wonder if this could lower the error rate of computer programmers, and whether I should buy Eliezer a kitten.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 March 2011 01:09:26PM 2 points [-]

You'd have to give Eliezer a sequence of kittens unless you're hoping that the cuteness of the kitten will have an imprinting effect which will affect Eliezer's reaction to the eventual cat.

Comment author: DSimon 14 March 2011 01:23:55PM 2 points [-]

It would probably be more efficient (and less cruel to the kittens who would eventually lose importance) to just have Eliezer look at a filtered-for-cuteness lolcats picture stream each morning.

Comment author: DaFranker 23 October 2012 04:35:04PM 0 points [-]

Has this been tested and/or implemented? I'd totally volunteer to do the filtering. Some unknown odds of possibly improving Eliezer's efficiency by up to 2% up to a third of the time still sounds like a hell of a lot more expected utility than other stuff I happen to be doing.

Comment author: DSimon 24 October 2012 01:10:28AM 1 point [-]
Comment author: Sticky 22 February 2010 06:04:44PM 7 points [-]

We find bunnies in general cute, but not humans in general -- so it makes sense that a baby bunny would be cuter than a baby human. It combines babyness and bunnyness, as compared to a human baby who only has babyness. We care about the human baby more than the bunny baby because we value humanness quite apart from cuteness.

Comment author: Jack 22 February 2010 06:30:58PM *  -1 points [-]

This just rephrases the question as "why are bunnies cute?"

Comment author: Wei_Dai 22 February 2010 09:00:36AM 7 points [-]

Our sense of cuteness may be tuned to respond optimally to young children, instead of newborns. (I'm guessing here based on the fact that humans look like young children for a much longer period of time than like newborns. My personal sense of cuteness is extremely insensitive for some reason.)

What causes the cuteness response? Why is that bunny so outrageously adorable? Why are babies, well, pretty cute? I don't know - but I'm pretty sure it's not the cheap reason, because evolution doesn't want me to nurture bunnies.

I'm not convinced that you should be "pretty sure", but I'm more interested in why you used the word "cheap". What does that mean in this context?

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 March 2011 06:57:45PM *  9 points [-]

Alicorn:

In fact, bunnies are edible.

Babies are edible too. Cannibalistic infanticide is a fairly common phenomenon throughout the animal world. It is widely practiced by chimpanzees, some of the closest evolutionary relatives of humans. (It's mostly done by male chimpanzees, but sometimes also females; see the linked paper for more details and references.)

Unless some group-selection mechanism is in operation (and such explanations are always controversial), there is no straightforward reason why one should care about unrelated babies. Killing them may well be adaptive behavior. Infanticide is thus unsurprisingly a widespread phenomenon in nature -- and once you kill a baby, you might as well eat it too; hence cannibalistic infanticide. Even when it comes to one's own kids and relatives, there are situations where killing them may be cost-effective in selfish gene terms, and parental and kin infanticide is also far from nonexistent among animals. All these behaviors are a regular subject of study in evolutionary biology, including evolutionary psychology.

Therefore, noting that babies can look less cute than other things whose only relevant characteristics are nutritional is hardly an argument against state-of-the-art evolutionary psychology. It is certainly a good argument against dilettantish dabbling in it, which is indeed all too common, even by otherwise formidable intellectual figures such as Dennett. Of course, the real academic evolutionary psychology has its own problems with sorting out well-substantiated theories from just-so stories, but they are at wholly different levels.

Comment author: bgrah449 22 February 2010 03:46:46PM *  9 points [-]

It seems very oversimplified to say, "We think babies are cute because we have to." "Cuteness" casts a pretty wide net when you start thinking of all the things we say are "cute." A sample list of things I've heard described as cute:

  • Babies
  • Bunnies
  • Targets of sexual attraction
  • Small consumer goods, such as tiny containers of shampoo, small forks, etc.
  • Some old men
  • Targets of sarcastic comments ("That's real cute, but .. ")

It seems like we reserve the word for "things that are vulnerable/harmless/ineffective and don't realize it, which then triggers an urge to keep the thing's inaccurate self-perceptions about its own effectiveness intact."

Comment author: Blueberry 24 February 2010 02:04:18AM 6 points [-]

This is confusing the map with the territory. We use the word "cute" for all those things, but we don't feel the same way about them all, and we don't mean the same thing by that word in most of those cases.

Comment author: ikrase 09 January 2013 11:08:44PM 1 point [-]

Let me break that down

Targets of sexual attraction: I think that most people (Moderate confidence) see different targets of sexual attraction with wildly varying levels of cuteness, and I know that for myself, cuteness is inversely correlated with how directly, physically sexual my attraction is. Furthermore, after I inadvertently modified myself to be attracted to power, cuteness became a bit of horns rather than a halo.

Targets of sarcastic comments: I think that is clear and simple insulting for childishness.

Inanimate objects: I tend to feel protective of quaint equipment, even if it is unlikely to be a valuable historical artifact in the future, but it doesn't seem related to the cuteness response to those objects.

I think that the most important distinction in your list is between cute adult humans and all the others except for sarcasm, which doesn't belong with the rest of them.

Comment author: MichaelVassar 22 February 2010 07:50:36PM 30 points [-]

I agree that evolutionary psychology is very prone to abuse and should probably usually be avoided, but this seems like a terrible example to me. The hypothesis that cuteness is our evolved response to baby-like features does NOT predict that babies will be the cutest thing.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 February 2010 08:23:47PM 5 points [-]

Very compactly put. The data simply do not contradict the theory in the first place.

Comment author: David_J_Balan 23 February 2010 04:07:26AM 0 points [-]

What does the hypothesis predict?

Comment author: MichaelVassar 23 February 2010 04:49:41AM 2 points [-]

That organisms which don't have offspring that look like human babies will not experience the same things as cute as humans do.

Comment author: David_J_Balan 23 February 2010 03:33:11PM 0 points [-]

I don't think I understand. The hypothesis says that we evolved to find human babies cute because people who find babies cute are more likely to take care of them and then they'll reproduce and propagate those genes. I guess there's no strong reason why that necessarily means that we have to find human babies cuter than anything else: if the "appreciating cuteness" faculty happened for some random reason to glom extra hard onto bunnies there probably there wouldn't be any very strong selective pressure against it (though as Alicorn points out, there would probably be some slight pressure). Is that what you mean?

Comment author: ChrisPine 22 February 2010 03:44:01PM 24 points [-]

Don't any of you have children?? Newborn babies are one thing, but there's a cuteness of seeing small, perfect little versions of yourself or your mate... I don't think a bunny could really compete.

No, other people's babies aren't that cute, but mine sure as hell are.

And in any case, I don't really see how this relates to... whatever it is you are saying about ev-psych (or the deeper mystery of cuteness). Why would you expect evolution to make us only find human babies cute? Evolution only has to work hard enough to keep us from abandoning our babies, and to hell with the (bunny-related) side-effects. Why would evolution care how cute you think bunnies are, as long as it's not so much that you start eating your babies and raising rabbits?

Comment author: JulianMorrison 22 February 2010 11:45:59AM 15 points [-]

Maybe the bunny has evolutionarily converged on the mammal shared cuteness pattern, but the baby has been forced to diverge by other pressures? Human babies are born very underdeveloped relative to other species. I've read speculation that this is due to the upright walking, hip shape, head size, brain size compromise, and that seems sensible to me. Cuteness optimization may have been shoved aside as lower priority.

Comment author: HughRistik 22 February 2010 07:39:19PM 0 points [-]

Excellent observation. I was thinking the same thing.

Comment author: joaolkf 05 March 2010 01:05:45PM *  16 points [-]

A cognitive module for cuteness only needs to make us find babies a nice thing and enhance the probability of parental care. It simply doesn’t matter if, besides doing that, the same cognitive module make us find bunnies or orthorhombic sulfur crystals at low temperature cute, so long this doesn’t have any deleterious effects. Probably a cognitive module that can find cute only human babies and not bunnies is more evolutionary improbable and developmental costly having the same relevant behavioral results of a more cheap and universal cognitive module for cuteness. Evolution only needs to shape cognition in order to generate, more or less, the right type of behavior. It DOESN’T have to, and in most cases it doesn’t, shape cognition nicely, in a way we would look at it and say “nice work”.

Comment author: johnsonmx 24 October 2012 10:55:38PM 2 points [-]

Yes, and I would say finding bunnies cuter than human babies isn't a strong argument against Dennett's hypothesis. Supernormal Stimuli are quite common in humans and non-humans.

I think this argument could be analogously phrased: "The reason why exercise makes us feel good can't be to get us to exercise more, because cocaine feels even better than exercise." Seems wrong when we put it that way.

Comment author: adamisom 15 January 2012 12:48:23AM 1 point [-]

Upvoted for a better understanding of ev psych.

That's kind of the whole point of ev psych, at least for me: our minds are kluges, and side effects hardly factor in if they have little survival disadvantage.

Comment author: ikrase 09 January 2013 10:35:43PM 2 points [-]

Yeah, that's really odd. Personally I have no awwwww response to human babies - in fact they actually disgust me a little - but I do have an awwwww response to human children and a sometimes-sexualized awwww response to some adult humans. In all cases my awwwww response is opposed to (although it can coexist with) an awe response.

It was mentioned that people are socialized to find bunnies cute, but I think that looking at gender differences in the same culture might reveal something since I don't think men are socialized that strongly.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 04:46:57AM 1 point [-]

It is possible that the bunny depicted is a domestic specimen, but it doesn't look like it to me.

Definitely not domestic. That's a wild cottontail of some kind.

In any event, I chose it for being a really great example; there are many decidedly wild animals that are also cuter than cute human babies.

I wonder what the distribution of cuteness-responsiveness as a trait looks like. I notice that some people just don't get much from pictures like that bunny, but they'll react much more "as expected" to the baby. Speaking personally, I routinely coo over moths, spiders and bees.

Comment author: first_fire 29 May 2011 06:41:50AM 1 point [-]

One possible explanation for finding babies and other small fluffy things cute is their vulnerability; babies are extremely vulnerable, and require protection. A cuteness reaction from caretakers would lead to a better standard of care and higher survivability. The caretakers find babies cute not because of any inherent cuteness of the baby, but because babies need to be taken care of and caretakers need to find ways to not find the caretaking onerous. We know we need babies to propagate the species, and we need to create reasons for ourselves to put up with the screaming and poop. Evolutionarily, thinking of babies as cute provides this reason.

It also provides a reason to find small fluffy animals cute: adult animals are a better food source, so it is advantageous for us to wish to nurture the small fluffy animals into large delicious animals.

Comment author: chaosmosis 22 October 2012 09:52:59PM *  2 points [-]

I agree that cuteness highly correlates with vulnerability, at least for me.

I'd also like to note that babies bring my cuteness meter into clash with my ugliness meter. Babies are simultaneously cute and repulsive, because they look like human beings who have been in an accident or who have been deformed. They're more cute than repulsive, though.

Comment author: DSimon 14 March 2011 01:19:33PM 5 points [-]

To the baby picture, my response is "aw, that's cute".

When I saw that bunny picture, my entire face scrunched with joy up for a good 15 seconds, no exaggeration. My hands rose to my face and covered my cheeks in the "Home Alone" configuration, although my expression was I'm quite sure one of joy rather than fear. I had to employ a fair amount of willpower to stop myself from saying "D'awwwww" out loud.

Consider me a data point in favor of your counter-hypothesis.

Comment author: Swimmer963 12 March 2011 02:53:36PM 6 points [-]

Actually, I find the baby about 75 000 cuter. This might have something to do with the fact that I'm a) a girl, and b) right at the age when, biologically speaking, I should be having kids. I see babies in the street and get warm fuzzy feelings. My (female) friends and I at work talk about how much we want to take home every baby in the Parent & Tot swimming classes. We show each other pictures of friends' babies and go completely gaga. Just wanted to point out that this may be something that varies with sex. (Although not for everyone, of course.)

Comment author: Alicorn 12 March 2011 03:43:20PM 4 points [-]

I'm a girl too, and I'm 22 (was 21 when I wrote the article) - I'm not sure if you categorize that as the biological age where I should be having babies, but it's not just a sex thing, although that might factor in weakly somehow.

Comment author: rabidchicken 12 March 2011 08:43:25PM 4 points [-]

Trying to determine what effect if any sex has is difficult, because the reaction of males / females to young children is highly influenced by exposure. Anecdotally, when families I know have had children, any girls who have some relation to the family are often encouraged to play with them / babysit them, or are given tutorials on things like changing diapers. I can only think of one guy who had the same treatment, although males may also just try to hide that they are good at dealing with babies. I have worked in a nursery with children around age 5 and up, and this is when it actually becomes possible for me to find them cute, I don't think its a coincidence.

Instead of getting taught from an early age, the general trend seems to be that men are just expected to pick it up on the spot when they get married. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds, and may account for the large number of guys who worry about commitment in the first place. When I hold a baby, I feel the same as i did when I first started playing an expensive instrument, or installed an OS on my computer, paranoid because I was worried I was going to break something. If it wasn't for that, then the odds of me finding babies cute would go up considerably.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 03:42:55AM 1 point [-]

I'm trans (assigned male at birth, female now) and can say that there's not the same kind of pressure on young men to react well to babies and young children and take an interest in them. I happen to have a fairly strong caretaker/teacher/playful interaction drive where kids are concerned; it was often seen as a bit weird, although once people saw me establishing a rapport with a child, they'd usually re-sort me into the "exception" box.