My Way

Until a man sees his own argumentativeness as a distinctively male trait, he'll see >women as abnormally passive (departures from the norm) rather than thinking "I am >a male and therefore argumentative" (in the same way that women now identify >various parts of themselves as feminine).

you allude to the dangers that follow from this; i think one issue with making too much of distinctively gendered traits is that it sets up expectations that can be socially and professionally costly to violate. i'm female. i'm argumentative. i'm competitive. i would not describe myself as nurturing, although i think it's a very admirable quality. but as far as i can tell, i don't embody feminine qualities. if those are something i should take pride in, should their absence be shameful? and of course, the social expectations that accompany the biological state of being female are part of what keep women out of high-paying and high-powered jobs, etc. i think this is why many feminists are so reluctant to accept separate male and female norms. (the problem cuts both ways, of course. i've known a few non-masculine heterosexual men who've endured social problems because they didn't fit the male mold.)

saying it's OK for men and women to see themselves as inherently different on traits other than gross anatomy is a bit easier when you're a man or woman who has the qualities you're "supposed" to have.

This is where the martial arts analogy shows some of it's power.

I do Aikido. My dojo enjoys a nice diversity of genders, ages, and body types. We don't all practice the same; our styles are as diverse as our backgrounds.

However, it's not a free-for-all. Some people in the dojo are clearly better at this than others, and people find others to look up to, people to follow. And there is a very strong agreement on who the best people in the dojo are.

This strong agreement comes from the fact that Aikido is a martial art, and we train with each other. On a regular basis we throw each other around and this constant interaction is how we learn from each other.

So while my Aikido is probably a bit more male, I learn from the women every time I practice with them, and I can point to parts of my practice that are more feminine and even tell you which women I learned those bits from. And the converse for the women I practice with.

It's okay for a teacher or leader to express their identity in the practice of the art. It is up to the student to integrate that style into their own practice. This requires judgment, so we usually tell beginners "Don't try to interpret just yet. Just mimic Sensei as closely as you can. You'll branch out and improvise later". This is a common teaching in many practices, I think.

So then, ideal is a diversity of teachers, so students can see a diversity of styles, and integrate them into something suitable to them.

Your mention of the difficulty of men writing realistic fictional female characters reminds me very much of a passage from Virginia Woolfe's A Room of One's Own that is the most insightful exploration of the issue I have ever read:

'Chloe liked Olivia,' I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA would have been altered had she done so! As it is, I thought, letting my mind, I am afraid, wander a little from LIFE'S ADVENTURE, the whole thing is simplified, conventionalized, if one dared say it, absurdly. Cleopatra's only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. There is an attempt at it in DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. Hence, perhaps, the peculiar nature of woman in fiction; the astonishing extremes of her beauty and horror; her alternations between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity--for so a lover would see her as his love rose or sank, was prosperous or unhappy. This is not so true of the nineteenth-century novelists, of course. Woman becomes much more various and complicated there. Indeed it was the desire to write about women perhaps that led men by degrees to abandon the poetic drama which, with its violence, could make so little use of them, and to devise the novel as a more fitting receptacle. Even so it remains obvious, even in the writing of Proust, that a man is terribly hampered and partial in his knowledge of women, as a woman in her knowledge of men.

Ever since I read this, I have taken notice of the relationships between female characters in books I read, and I do think its a rare male author who captures them well.

You forgot the part where your way is incredibly American. If there is one not so positive and universal thing about your style it's he focus on the glory of the lone hero contained within a single human brain.

Then again, that's perhaps just because it's the most contrasting with my way, of being a cog within a hivemind that resembles an agent no more than a cut-out visual cortex does on it's own.

There is certainly a lot of Eliezer in the posts by Eliezer; yet that seems to part of what makes them so good to read. Taking out the Eliezer might not be desirable, if it produces posts that are that much less fun to read or easy to understand.

Part of my progress as a rationalist was learning to see past the writer and focus only the written. If the most prolific and oft-quoted figure of the community deliberately obfuscates himself from his posts, I fear the result may be an undesireable "easy mode" where that learning is not achieved.

Until more high-level rationalists have emerged and their Ways can be amalgamated, there is nothing wrong with having the Way be shaded by its walker.

"She was not Jeffreyssai."

Actually, I have a question: Why do there seem to be no Viharts in fiction? Admittedly, she herself is pretty unique and awesome that way, but I haven't come across even one character displaying that type of intelligent, feminine charisma in any vaguely consistent manner. In fact, there seem to be very few genuinely smart, curious and independent-thinking women in fiction, in contrast to very many who we are TOLD are smart and charismatic. (Some even have the balls to preach that, in reality, intelligence and charisma exclude each other. If I believed that, I'd "come out of the closet" as asexual.)

I hope this is due to my own inexperience. If not, I suspect this is mainly because, like in ancient cultures, over 90% of modern fiction consists of a handful of Great Themes worked and reworked into every story. And these "ready-made art powder, just add water" plot points only have roles reserved for traditional innocent types, self-righteous bitches who exist to force the author's vision of just norms down everyone's throats, their negative stereotypes, femme fatales, etc. However, I personally haven't discovered Vihart-like characters even in creative and original works; not that I've read many of those. I hope our culture, at large, isn't simply unconscious of (or insensible to :( ) this kind of beauty.

Tragically, I just realized that I've encountered no more than a handful of attractive women of any kind in fiction. And that includes none from HPMOR, which definitely isn't recycled gunk. I have read a few chapters of Luminosity. Bella may be an improvement on the original, which I haven't read and mean to keep it that way, but no, she's not particularly charismatic yet. (I must confess, I don't like her at all because she's way too stuffy. That's not a great failing or anything; most people are.)

The "S" word is banned until May, but may I bring up the "T" word? Transhumanism, and ultimately posthumanism, will not have the notion of gender--I am certain of that. I have been at varying levels of testosterone following castration, and I cannot say the difference leads to any insight. I prefer to be at low testosterone most of the time just like I prefer to be at low blood-alcohol level most of the time. OK, another short comment, but I can only hope I offered something insightful that most cannot.

Without getting into the meat of your post: this is the second or third time you've recommended Jacqueline Carey. The first time you recommended her, I checked out the Kushiel series because I've tended to agree with your taste about some other things. I don't think I ever thanked you for the recommendation, but I need to. Thank you.

Everyone else: get and read the Kushiel series. You won't regret it.

"...and in any case I prefer to live in a culture with (at least) two genders."

That specific formulation sounds appalling to me, actually. If they've done the self-realization thing right, each individual ought to constitute his or her own gender without needing to conform to the shallow norms of society, except where they have explicitly chosen otherwise. So in a sense, my ideal society would reflect infinite genders, filling out every available nook and cranny of human experience.

(Okay, now to reread The Sequences in sequence.)

So this about my gender politics: Unlike the case with, say, race, I don't think that an optimal outcome consists of gender distinctions being obliterated. If the day comes when no one notices or cares whether someone is black or white, any more than they notice eye color, I would only applaud. But obliterating the difference between male and female does not seem to me desirable, and I am glad that it is impossible using present-day technology; the fact that humanity has (at least) two sexes is part of what keeps life interesting.

Why the difference? Doesn't the existence of different races keep life interesting?

Just a minor nitpick: the cartoon you linked (boys vs. girls) was actually a satire. The cartoonist (Darrow) was a well-known satirist.

I prefer to live in a culture with (at least) two genders.

Would you mind explaining why? (I presume you consider a very large number of genders to be the same as zero/one gender.)

What would the corresponding female rationalist be like? I don't know. I can't say. Some woman has to pursue her art as far as I've pursued mine, far enough that the art she learned from others fails her, so that she must remake her shattered art in her own image and in the image of her own task. And then tell the rest of us about it.

I sometimes think of myself as being like the protagonist in a classic SF labyrinth story, wandering further and further into some alien artifact, trying to call into a radio my description of the bizarre things I'm seeing, so that I can be followed. But what I'm finding is not just the Way, the thing that lies at the center of the labyrinth; it is also my Way, the path that I would take to come closer to the center, from whatever place I started out.

When I first stumbled upon LessWrong, this is exactly what I expected it to become. I do not think it is there yet, but I do imagine this place as the place that the aspiring female rationalist can tell the rest of us about it. To use the SF labyrinth analogy, I see all of us wandering around in the same maze. Some of us are on connected paths and others are in completely different areas. But radioing our descriptions of these bizarre things back into a depository makes me feel like the journey is worth something more than simply finding a path and plodding along waiting for it to end. Personally, it makes me feel as if the path, my path, is valuable enough to actually look at and analyze and study.

As feel-goody as that sounds, it provides precious ammunition against the some of the horridly long hallways where everything starts looking the same and the feelings of traveling in circles is wearing me down. I will never see the entire maze. I find it highly unlikely that I will even find the end of the path I am on. (Does the end of this path reach the ultimate goal? Is it a dead-end?) I have come to realize that not seeing where this path leads is okay. My life is not about finding the end of the maze. My life is about studying the maze itself and the journey of documenting this particular path is valuable.

Is this ego-centric? Yes. But I think that this is pragmatically inevitable. I do not think it is realistically possible for me to eliminate all personal bias and all effects placed on me during my travels. I started at a gate labeled "male" and "American" and "middle-class." The gate holds hundreds (infinite?) of other labels that define the beginning of my life (I am white; my name is Adam). Some of these factors will effect me the rest of my life and this is okay. It is impossible to cheat this. Even if I were somehow able to possess the ability to perfectly understand a woman's perspective, there are impossible perspectives to encompass. Two rather blunt examples: my gate also held the labels "human" and "born in 1984."

I built my art out of myself, and it became tied into every part of myself, and it happens to be a fact that I'm male. And if a woman were to pursue her art far enough, and tie it into every part of herself, she would, I think, find that her art came to resemble herself more and more, tied into her own motives and preferences; so that her art was, among other things, female

Does this mean that my art, my path, is now tainted by "male, American, middle-class, white, named Adam, human, born in 1984"? I think, in a nit-picky and causal sense, the answer is yes. The key phrase in the quote above is that this art becomes "tied into every part" of ourselves. But if our paths are nothing more than the lives we lead, what is the point of radioing it back to the rest of us? What about our observations and analysis is valuable? What we learn about our own paths is valuable because we share a common goal.

I say all this because I want to convey this important idea, that there is the Way and my Way, the pure (or perhaps shared) thing at the center, and the many paths we take there from wherever we started out.

Our paths converge. Our ways will cross and bump into each other and we will have the opportunity to walk each other's paths. When I reach a section of my life that aligns itself with Eliezer's path I can tune into his radio and listen. I know that his goal is my goal and that I happen to share this path.

The labyrinth is an analogy and I think this is where the analogy begins to break down. A more apt analogy would be one where I have more than one marble in the same labyrinth. I am controlling all of these marbles and am moving them simultaneously along the various turns and alleys. The path that each marble takes represents one aspect of my life or one way of thought or one belief I hold. These marbles are extremely difficult to maintain and control all at the same time. If I focus on one particular marble for too long the others may stray from the path I wanted them to follow. The laziest of all approaches is to simply let go of the controls and let the labyrinth itself guide the marbles. To beat the labyrinth, however, I cannot do that. To win I must learn how to control as many marbles as I can and to guide them the best I can.

Say that in my attempts at this, one marble touches a path that one of Eliezer's has and Eliezer radioed the right information back to me. I can set that marble on Eliezer's path and this allows me to move that portion of my life in a safer manner. The effort required to do this is significantly less than if I were to redo all of Eliezer's experience on this same path. Even more so, once I have followed Eliezer's path and know it to work, I can start asking about other paths that may be very near to where my other marbles are. I can guide those marbles toward other paths traveled by Eliezer. But I can never replicate Eliezer's entire life. My way is not his way. I can never get all of my marbles lined up with his so as to essentially let him guide my every action and choice. There are some marbles that belong to me that are on a path so unique it will likely never see another marble's history. This is what defines my path and my way. This is what I radio back for the person entering from a gate near my own gate who may have a marble on a path that I managed to conquer.

In this analogy, my way is not a singular path through the labyrinth. My way is the collective paths of each facet of my life as it progresses toward the common object we are trying to find. Even if we find it there is still the great task of getting all of our marbles into the proper little holes. Ideally, this will get easier the more people we have communicating in the maze. Ideally, this is what I see in LessWrong's future.

Even so, you should be aware that I have radioed back my description of the single central shape and the path I took to get closer. If there are parts that are visibly male, then there are probably other parts - perhaps harder to identify - that are tightly bound to growing up with Orthodox Jewish parents, or (cough) certain other unusual features of my life.

I think there will not be a proper Art until many people have progressed to the point of remaking the Art in their own image, and then radioed back to describe their paths.

But as recently as the 1970s this still passed for educational material, which makes me a bit more sympathetic.

May have been satire.

You say that it's worth talking about sex-based gender differences because they exist, but I'm not sure I buy it. Is sex more of a determinant than other factors in personality? Should I expect that my ideas are "male" more than that they are "brown-haired" or "grew up watching thundercats" or "ate too much peanut butter today"?

I remain skeptical that there's a good reason to make a big deal out of gender.

ETA: was this downvoted to oblivion because you think these questions aren't relevant, or because you disagree with my conclusion?

I'm not sure arts have to be based to this extent on a single individual (though I'm not sure they don't, either). Pjeby, as a possible counter-example, seems to change his art based on experimental data he gathers from a largish number of students.

I've read this and "On gender and rationality", and I still have to ask - is there any rational reason for you preferring multiple-gender-society, as opposed to, say, Asari-like guys (ahem, gals) or women with parthenogenesis (suppose it is actually really truly possible, and the problems of imprinting and insufficient DNA reparation are solvable) or eunuch-like people reproducing by cloning/cell combining/whatever?

The second Kushiel trilogy has a male lead. Carey isn't quite as proficient at writing men as she is writing women; the character felt somewhat "off" to me, when compared to my own experiences as a male. Then again, I didn't suffer through horrible abuse that made me terrified of my own sexuality, so I don't know what it's like to be Imriel either.

I don't understand women, but I'm not all that much better at understanding men, either. Heck, I don't even have that good of a model of myself. I'm pretty good at understanding fiction, though; I've read an awful lot of it.

I can picture Jeffeysai as a woman. Doing so gives me a better sense of J-sensei's pain.

This perception would probably not lead to as much active discouragement as the perception of J-sensei as an arrogant bitch, but it could easily lead to concern and a different kind of social discouragement.

I sometimes think of myself as being like the protagonist in a classic SF labyrinth story, wandering further and further into some alien artifact, trying to call into a radio my description of the bizarre things I'm seeing, so that I can be followed.

That's not a happy thought - the protagonist of that story ("Rogue Moon") was knowingly committing suicide; no one ever followed him; and everyone concluded in the end that it had been pointless.

A friend of mine has offered to lend me the Kushiel series on a number of occasions. I'm starting to think I should take her up on that.