+But if Keltham _does_ know this stuff, why is he talking like a UC Berkeley graduate? ["Strength is an _externally visible and measurable_ quality that determines who you want in your army; you don't need to go by the presence of penises,"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817422#reply-1817422) he says. When his interlocutor objects that strong women would get drafted, which would be terrible, Keltham asks how it would be _more_ terrible than men getting drafted. When the interlocutor replies that the woman's marriage prospects would be damaged by a history living in close quarters with men in the army, Keltham muses that it sounds like she's implying that ["the army would need strong enough internal governance to prevent women in it from being raped, but you could do that with cheaper truthspells?"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1817432#reply-1817432)
+
+There's just _so much_ wrong with this exchange from the perspective of anyone who knows anything about humans and isn't playing dumb for a religious American audience.
+
+Firstly, if you decided that strength is the quality that determines who you want in your army, you should notice that you're going to be drafting almost all men _anyway_. (Again, a sex difference of _2.6 standard deviations_ and a selection threshold 1 standard deviation below the male mean gives you a male:female ratio of (1 − Φ(−1))/(1 − Φ(1.6)) ≈ 15.4:1, where Φ is the [cumulative distribution function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_distribution_function) of the normal distribution.)
+
+To this, the Berkeley graduate might reply, "So then the optimal army has 15 men for every woman; what's the problem with that? Surely you don't want to make your army _less strong_ just to satisfy some weird æsthetic that all your soldiers should have the same kind of genitals?"
+
+A minor counterreply would be that, if people's sex is public information but there are administrative costs associated with strength-testing everyone, you probably wouldn't _bother_ testing the women, for the same reason that, if you were mining for spellsilver ore, and one mine had fifteen times as much ore as the other, you wouldn't even set up your tools at the poorer mine until you had completely exhausted the first.
+
+But more fundamentally, even if you assume strength-testing is free, we haven't yet taken into account all _other_ sex differences that are relevant to military performance. It's not just that any other individual traits (_e.g._, aggression) that you select for will stack multiplicatively, resulting in even more extreme ratios. There are also group-level effects that aren't captured by measuring the traits of individual soldiers: the social dynamics of a squad of fifteen men and one woman are going to be different from those of a squad of sixteen men. Even if you've selected the woman for strength and every martial virtue to equal any man, do the _men_ know that in their subconscious, or are they going to be biased to want to protect her or seek her favor in a way that they wouldn't in an all-male environment?
+
+You could command them not to—but does that actually _work_? People don't have conscious access to or control of the way their brain takes demographic base rates into account. [Nelson _et al._ 1990](/papers/nelson_et_al-everyday_base_rates_sex_stereotypes_potent_and_resilient.pdf) gave people photographs of women and men and asked them to estimate the photo-subjects' heights. The estimates end up reflecting sex as well as actual-height—which is, again, the correct Bayesian behavior given uncertainty in sex-blind estimates. But furthermore, when the researchers prepared a special height-matched set of photos where for every woman of a given height, there was a man of the same height _and_ told the participants about the height-matching _and_ offered cash rewards for accuracy, more than half of the base-rate adjustment _still_ remained! People don't know how to turn it off!
+
+And if they _could_ turn it off, such that you could order your male soldiers not to treat a woman among them any differently than they would a man, and have the verbal instruction have exactly the desired effect on their brain's subconscious quantitative decisionmaking machinery—who is this even _helping_, exactly?
+
+Keltham expresses doubt whether it's worse for a woman to be conscripted than a man, and when his interlocutor gestures at harms to a woman from living among men (not trusted family members, but men unselected from the general public), Keltham understands that she's talking about the possibility of intercourse, including rape (!), and he immediately generates "cheap truthspells" as a way to mitigate that problem while maintaining sex-integrated military units.
+
+And, sure, I agree that truthspells would help, given the settled assumption that you need to have sex-integrated military units. But—why is that a decideratum? We're told that dath ilan's beliefs about evolutionary psychology [include the idea that](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508?page=14):
+
+> The untrained male has an instinct to seize and guard a woman's reproductive capacity, instinctively using violence to stop her from interacting with other men at the same that he instinctively displays other forms of commitment to try to earn her acquiescence. The untrained female has adaptations that assume an environment in which men will try to pressure her into more sex than is optimal for her own reproductive fitness, so her adaptations push her to instinctively resist that pressure while also instinctively trying to increase the number and quality of men who'll be interested in her.
+
+And just—if you _actually believe that_, it seems like there's this very obvious policy of _not forcing females to fight in close quarters alongside the people with an instinct to sieze and guard female reproductive capacity_?! (Come to think of it, the "instinctively trying to increase the number and quality of men who'll be interested in her" part seems like it could cause other kinds of problems, too??) Even if you have cheap truthspells, there's this concept of 'securitymindset', where you want to design systems that are robust against unexpected things happening, and the "Just don't conscript women in the first place" policy neatly sidesteps entire classes of potential social pathologies that you don't want to have to deal with at all in the organization you're using to keep your country from getting conquered?! If someone asks whether it's worse for a woman or a man to be put in the situation of having to fight in close quarters alongside the people with _an instinct to sieze and guard female reproductive capacity_, I don't think it should be hard to admit the obvious correct answer that that's worse for a woman?!
+
+I mean, it's not worse _with Probability One_.
+
+[TODO: okay, we want to accomodate exceptions; that's important. (We also want to accomodate exceptions like people without college degrees: college _or_ have an awesome portfolio is fine.) If there are women who really want to fight to defend their homeland, then either induct them or set up a special women's company depending on the empirical social design trade-offs (lower cohesion _vs._ lost skills due to no cross-sex mentorship). But "draft men, but accept women volunteers" is a _Pareto improvement_ over "Draft everyone based on strength"; it's not ilani to _ignore Pareto improvements_ because of American taboos.]