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lmm comments on Noticing something completely absurd about yourself - Less Wrong Discussion
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Long hair is a reasonably common fetish, with a good evolutionary justification (if someone has long, healthy hair you can be assured they've been healthy for a while).
My money here is on illusory correlation.
It does seem to be commonly fetishized, and at least one major fantasy novelist transparently has such a fetish based on his writing which may have also made it more common among geeks. But the health explanation seems like a bit of a just-so story. Plausible, but very hard to test. And we don't really have any evidence that this trait is genetic. Meanwhile, it is just as plausible that the fetishization occurs the same way many objects, clothings or the like become fetishized even when those things did not exist in our ancestral environment. No need to posit multiple mechanisms.
I thought the fantasy novelist was going to be Laurell Hamilton.
why would healthy people motivate me, that is the question that remains baffling.
The only-posited-after-the-fact explanation is that healthy people are more important to please (since you can get more out of allying with them, since they'll be around longer). Or in other words, they're worth more resources.
Because it is a good heuristic to do what healthy people are doing? (Except when they are doing something stupid to costly signal their health.)
Does expressing it as "why would attractive people motivate me" make it less baffling?
sure it does, but it is also false. Unless my brain is literally overriding all other attractiveness information with this one thing. Hurley (the fat nonattractive character in Lost) would be more motivating to me than Jack (the hot main actor) or her http://images.starpulse.com/news/media/Ciara-short-hair.jpg
Andrew Looney von LoonieLabs ( http://www.looneylabs.com/games/aquarius great games for nerds by the way) has long hair fetish for example: http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Andy/BrainNodes/shrine.html