I am a great fan of Ted Chiang. Many see Understand as his weakest story. I love it, as it is the finest work of intelligence porn ever written. And one of the funniest things I have ever seen on the internet involved it.

When I was young I used to read a nootropics message board, a mostly male folly of a forum whose members would have Chinese labs synthesize drugs with some claimed positive effect on IQ. As a rule, they didn't do much of anything. But every time someone tried a new one, there was an excitement. One prankster claimed to have gotten a hold of some synaptogenic drug that was currently in clinical trials and then began posting excerpts from Understand, such as the following:

With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.

Some seemed to believe he had achieved our collective dream. And I have never laughed harder at any other internet prank. Given I love Understand, what is my least favorite Ted Chiang story? That would be Liking What You See: A Documentary.

Its central conceit is a technology that induces a condition called calliagnosia, which eliminates a person's ability to feel the valence associated with perceiving physical beauty. He describes the condition as follows:

The condition is what we call an associative agnosia, rather than an apperceptive one. That means it doesn't interfere with one's visual perception, only with the ability to recognize what one sees. A calliagnosic perceives faces perfectly well; he or she can tell the difference between a pointed chin and a receding one, a straight nose and a crooked one, clear skin and blemished skin. He or she simply doesn't experience any aesthetic reaction to those differences.

He then meditates on "lookism" through various lenses. But I feel he never quite gives beauty its due, nor discusses the truly horrible consequences of discarding it.

Let's start with the horrible consequences. What is beauty? I can't quite answer that in full. But much of beauty is a collection of health and youth markers that signal fertility. The long-term equilibrium of a society of calliagnosics is one of ill-health and retarded fecundity. Though Chiang's calliagnosics see markers of ill health and age, they are not motivated by them. Physical attraction is eliminated in favor of personality. In the short term, things would be "fine." In the long term, we would drift into ugly places. We would lose beauty not just in perception but in actuality.

Human beauty is a grab-bag of proxies for youth and genetic fitness. If we were to become unmoved by it, we would make choices less aligned to the pursuit of these correlates. Absent compensating technology, it's hard to see how a society of calliagnosics could avoid becoming something that would disgust even the sort of person who would agree to such a procedure.

One might argue that Chiang states the calliagnosic can comprehend all these features. And could then select on these traits consciously. But I doubt any would argue this was Chiang's intention. His calliagnosic lovers care for the mind not the body. This being so, in the long term the body would drift away from beauty. And most departures from the beautiful are going to be unhealthy, infertile, and (redundantly) ugly.

The fact that none in his story makes such an argument, strikes me as a sort of cowardice. It surely occurred to him. In his meditation on human beauty, he leaves as a lacuna the very reason beauty evolved in the first place. Having lobotomized oneself to this degree, why meditate at all? There is some fascination, I suppose, in watching someone think around his ice pick wound.

If the naive calliagnosic subculture is dysfunctional and so self-limiting, you can imagine, of course, compensating technologies. One could create some high-level centralized system to do what beauty does today in its decentralized form, inventing a grotesque dictator of sexual appeal. A standard dating market with such a thing would look much the same in terms of who couples with who. But their qualia would be diminished from our perspective. Their inner lives would be less rich. Sacrificing fairness for fairness, they lose the former and gain nothing of the latter.

Another thing he under-explores is sex. We get hints of it here:

For me, one of the things that attracts me to a guy is if he seems interested in me. It's like a feedback loop; you notice him looking at you, then he sees you looking at him, and things snowball from there. Calli doesn't change that. Plus there's that whole pheromone chemistry going on too; obviously calli doesn't affect that.

But there should have been more. And what of recollection? What happens to one who has the procedure reversed and now is disgusted by recollections that once enchanted them? And the opposite circumstance is just as tragic. Memories, once precious, stripped of their lustre. To gloss over such things is to ignore another huge dimension of beauty.

There is also a more embodied critique of the technology which Chiang does mention but again doesn't give its full due:

Some people have been quick to dismiss the whole calliagnosia debate as superficial, an argument over makeup or who can and can't get a date. But if you actually look at it, you'll see it's much deeper than that. It reflects a very old ambivalence about the body, one that's been part of Western civilization since ancient times. You see, the foundations of our culture were laid in classical Greece, where physical beauty and the body were celebrated. But our culture is also thoroughly permeated by the monotheistic tradition, which devalues the body in favor of the soul. These old conflicting impulses are rearing their heads again, this time in the calliagnosia debate.

There is a bias, always, towards the chattering classes. And the chattering classes prize cleverness. A rich inner life. They disregard other virtues. They call physical beauty shallow. But how shallow is shallowness? Uncountable eons of sexual selection fine-tuned your "shallow" desires. N years of reading, conversation, and flirting created your rich inner lives. It is not really obvious one is less shallow than the other.

We are always biased to those aspects of ourselves that can articulate themselves. The chattering part of our mind thinks itself the only thing of value, thinks the world would be better if there was selection only for chattering. Here, it is talking its own book. And we should be suspicious.

One of the virtues of calliagnosia is its salutary effects on the ugly and the marred:

Saybrook has a higher than normal number of students with facial abnormalities, like bone cancer, burns, congenital conditions. Their parents moved here to keep them from being ostracized by other kids, and it works. I remember when I first visited, I saw a class of twelve-year-olds voting for class president, and they elected this girl who had burn scars on one side of her face. She was wonderfully at ease with herself, she was popular among kids who probably would have ostracized her in any other school. And I thought, this is the kind of environment I want my daughter to grow up in.

I have great sympathy here. But this would not outweigh the harm of its universal adoption. Still, it does seem like possibly a net win in the small. But it is just not very good compared to just making everyone beautiful and granting everyone complete morphological freedom.

And we see in the world Chiang limns that such a thing is near possible:

And these students, they might never even lose the beauty of youth. With the gene therapies coming out now, they'll probably look young for decades, maybe even their entire lives. They might never have to make the adjustments I did, in which case adopting calli wouldn't even save them from pain later on. So the idea that they might voluntarily give up one of the pleasures of youth is almost galling. Sometimes I want to shake them and say, "No! Don't you realize what you have?"

I suspect Chiang, though obviously conflicted, has major sympathy for Students for Equality Everywhere (SEE). Towards them, I have almost none. And maybe this is my true objection. Regardless, I hope he would agree that the true solution is to make everyone beautiful. And his calliagnosia is, even in the most sympathetic reading, a very costly bandaid.

On re-reading the story for this whatever-this-is, I found it much more nuanced than it was in my memory. But it still misses much that is interesting and profound about human beauty. Chiang looks at beauty shallowly. He ignores its hidden depths. And for this reason, though not even close to a failure, it is my least favorite Ted Chiang story - the one narrated by a parrot is a close second.