Maybe this should just look like supplementary Statistics Details brushed over some basic facts of human existence that everyone knows? I'm a pretty weird guy, in more ways than one. I am not prototypically masculine. Most men are not like me. If I'm allowed to cherry-pick what measurements to take, I can name ways in which my mosaic is more female-typical than male-typical. (For example, I'm _sure_ I'm above the female mean in [Big Five Neuroticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits).) ["[A] weakly negative correlation can be mistaken for a strong positive one with a bit of selective memory."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences) But "weird" represents a much larger space of possibilities than "normal", much as [_nonapples_ are a less cohesive category than _apples_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2mLZiWxWKZyaRgcn7/selling-nonapples). If you _sum over_ all of my traits, everything that makes me, _me_—it's going to be a point in the _male_ region of the existing, unremediated, genderspace. In the course of _being myself_, I'm going to do more male-typical things than female-typical things, not becuase I'm _trying_ to be masculine (I'm not), and not because I "identify as" male (I don't—or I wouldn't, if someone could give me a straight answer as to what this "identifying as" operation is supposed to consist of), but because I literally in-fact am male in the same sense that male chimpanzees or male mice are male, whether or not I like it (I don't—or I wouldn't, if I still believed that preference was coherent), and whether or not I _notice_ all the little details that implies (I almost certainly don't).
-Okay, maybe I'm _not_ completely over my teenage religion of psychological sex differences denialism?—that belief still feels uncomfortable to put my weight on. I would _prefer_ to believe that there are women who are relevantly "like me" with respect to some fair (not gerrymandered) metric on personspace. But, um ... it's not completely obvious whether I actually know any? When I look around me—most of the people in my robot cult (and much more so if you look the core of old-timers from the _Overcoming Bias_ days, rather than the greater Berkeley "community" of today) are male. Most of the people in my open-source programming scene are male. These days, [most of the _women_](/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/) in [my open-source programming scene](/2017/Aug/interlude-vii/) are male. Am I not supposed to _notice_? I could _assert_ that it's all down to socialization and stereotyping and self-fulfilling prophecies—and I know that _some_ of it is. (Self-fulfilling prophecies [are coordination equilibria](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/).) But I still want to speculate that the nature of my X factor—the things about my personality that let me write the things I do even though I'm [objectively not that smart](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) compared to some of my robot-cult friends—is a pattern of mental illness that could realistically only occur in males. (Yudkowsky: ["It seems to me that male teenagers especially have something like a _higher cognitive temperature_, an ability to wander into strange places both good and bad."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality)) I can't assert _with a straight face_ that all the gaps _must_ vanish after the revolution, because _I've read the literature_ and can tell you several observations about chimps and [congenital adrenal hyperplasia](/images/cah_diffs_table.png) that make that seem _relatively unlikely_.
+Okay, maybe I'm _not_ completely over my teenage religion of psychological sex differences denialism?—that belief still feels uncomfortable to put my weight on. I would _prefer_ to believe that there are women who are relevantly "like me" with respect to some fair (not gerrymandered) metric on personspace. But, um ... it's not completely obvious whether I actually know any? (Well, maybe two or three.) When I look around me—most of the people in my robot cult (and much more so if you look the core of old-timers from the _Overcoming Bias_ days, rather than the greater Berkeley "community" of today) are male. Most of the people in my open-source programming scene are male. These days, [most of the _women_](/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/) in [my open-source programming scene](/2017/Aug/interlude-vii/) are male. Am I not supposed to _notice_? I could _assert_ that it's all down to socialization and stereotyping and self-fulfilling prophecies—and I know that _some_ of it is. (Self-fulfilling prophecies [are coordination equilibria](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/).) But I still want to speculate that the nature of my X factor—the things about my personality that let me write the things I do even though I'm [objectively not that smart](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) compared to some of my robot-cult friends—is a pattern of mental illness that could realistically only occur in males. (Yudkowsky: ["It seems to me that male teenagers especially have something like a _higher cognitive temperature_, an ability to wander into strange places both good and bad."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality)) I can't assert _with a straight face_ that all the gaps _must_ vanish after the revolution, because _I've read the literature_ and can tell you several observations about chimps and [congenital adrenal hyperplasia](/images/cah_diffs_table.png) that make that seem _relatively unlikely_.
I was once told by a very smart friend (who, unlike me, is not a religious fantatic), "Boys like games with challenges and points; girls like games with characters and stories."
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff