Posts tagged: sex differences

Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles

It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one he could call to expose this thing and stop it—no superior anywhere on the line, from Colorado to Omaha to New York. They were in on …

If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them

"—but if one hundred thousand [normies] can turn up, to show their support for the [rationalist] community, why can't you?"

I said wearily, "Because every time I hear the word community, I know I'm being manipulated. If there is such a thing as the [rationalist] community, I'm certainly not a …

A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning

If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

—Zora Neale Hurston

Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, "Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems", I told the part about how I've "always" (since puberty …

Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer

I'm beginning to wonder if he's constructed an entire system of moral philosophy around the effects of the loyalty mod—a prospect that makes me distinctly uneasy. It would hardly be the first time a victim of mental illness has responded to their affliction that way—but it would certainly …

Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems

I'll write my way out
Write everything down, far as I can see
I'll write my way out
Overwhelm them with honesty
This is the eye of the hurricane
This is the only way I can protect my legacy

—"Hurricane", Hamilton

So, as I sometimes allude to, I've spent basically …

Survey Data on Cis and Trans Women Among Haskell Programmers

Stereotypically, computer programming is both a predominantly male profession and the quintessential profession of non-exclusively-androphilic trans women. Stereotypically, these demographic trends are even more pronounced in communities around "niche" or academic technologies (e.g., Haskell), rather than those with more established mainstream use (e.g., JavaScript).

But stereotypes can be …

Book Review: Charles Murray's Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

This is a pretty good book about things we know about some ways in which people are different from each other, particularly differences in cognitive repertoires (Murray's choice of phrase for shaving nine syllables off "personality, abilities, and social behavior"). In my last book review, I mentioned that I had …

Peering Through Reverent Fingers

Any evolutionary advantage must come from a feature affecting our behavior. Thus, there is no evolutionary advantage to simply having a belief about our identity. Self-identity can matter and could have mattered only if it affects behavior, in which case it is really a process of self-identification. Moreover, it is …

Does General Intelligence Deflate Standardized Effect Sizes of Cognitive Sex Differences?

Marco del Giudice1 points out2 that in the presence of measurement error, standardized effect size measures like Cohen's d will underestimate the "true" effect size.

The effect size d tries to quantify the difference between two distributions by reporting the difference between the distributions' means in standardized units …

Interlude XVI

"But like, maybe a better strategy than pretending not to notice that women are a different thing that I don't understand, might be to try to listen to them, and learn from them, and appropriate the good parts of what they have without literally insisting that we're instances of the …

The Dialectic

Growing up as a younger child in an atomized, low-fertility WEIRD world, I was until recently in the historically anomalous position of not really having any idea what children are actually like. (I have some memories of childhood, of course, but that's not the same as field observations with an …

Reply to The Unit of Caring on Adult Human Females

Thou shalt not strike terms from others' expressive vocabulary without suitable replacement.

Alicorn

The author of the (highly recommended!) Tumblr blog The Unit of Caring responds to an anonymous correspondent's observation that trans-exclusionary radical feminists tend to define the word woman as "adult human biological female":

Oh, yeah, sorry, I've …

The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions

I said, "The truth is whatever you can get away with."

"No, that's journalism. The truth is whatever you can't escape."

Distress by Greg Egan

In "The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories", the immortal Scott Alexander argues that proposed definitions of concepts aren't true or …

And Yet None More Blameable

Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men, Ch. 1, "Introduction: the Biological Connection":

In the end, the resolution of such controversy often depends upon one's standard of proof, a standard dictated in turn by political beliefs. I impose the highest standards of proof, for example, on …