[SEQ RERUN] The Opposite Sex

Men look at other men and see people of various sorts and types; when they look at women they see women of various sorts and types. Likewise women looking at women and men.

Robin Hanson committed no sin greater than openly talking about women as if they were a strange incomprehensible unsympathetic Other that he was trying to figure out. Which is just the same way that most women talk about men, and the way that most men think about women. This breaks no pockets, picks no legs, sells no wives and mutilates no genitalia, so I have to question whether this is womankind's most urgent problem.

This kind of othering is not symmetric. If we were in the state of nature, it might have been. But we're actually part of a culture in which the male perspective has been regarded as the default for millennia. There has been a huge outpouring of work in various media that reduces the cognitive distance of men for women. It is only recently that any work has been produced that reduces the cognitive distance of women for men, and men are still often discouraged from consuming this work. So while I think it is probably true that men see different kinds of people when they see men and different kinds of women when they see women, I don't think this can be symmetrically extrapolated to women. There are messages embedded throughout our culture that the default person is male, and I would be surprised if these messages had not been absorbed by women as well as men. I haven't really looked at research in this area, but I suspect if you asked men and women to imagine an average person, most of them, regardless of gender, would imagine a man.

On a completely unrelated note: A few days ago I was filling out an application form for a visa. There were a number of multiple choice questions on the form (such as "Reason for visit?"), and in each case the options were listed in alphabetical order. With one exception. Any guesses about which question didn't have the options in alphabetical order?

A man's attitude towards other men vs. women differs from a woman's attitude towards other women vs. men. Among men and women, the way they relate to the opposite sex and each other has to do with their cultural background. I've met men who I can relate to very well, and who can relate to me easily. I've also met men who I have a very hard time understanding, and who seem to have a very hard time understanding me. In addition I've met women who I can relate to easily, and others who I cannot relate to at all.

I will say that the number of men I can relate to well is much smaller than the men I cannot relate to at all, though the same goes for women.

Because humans are a sexually reproducing species, human brains are nearly identical. All human beings share similar emotions, tell stories, and employ identical facial expressions. We naively expect all other minds to work like ours, which cause problems when trying to predict the actions of non-human intelligences. 24 June 2008 [1]

Four days later:

Understanding the opposite sex is hard. Not as hard as understanding an AI, but it's still attempting empathy across a brainware gap: trying to use your brain to understand something that is not like your brain. [2]

Perhaps not incompatible claims, if the difference in men's and women's brains is small but significant. 'Nearly identical' is the point where the claims could be incompatible.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/d1j/seq_rerun_the_psychological_unity_of_humankind/

[2] http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/d54/seq_rerun_the_opposite_sex/

Registered to post this.

I was linked to the Sequences and was going through them, mostly impressed, when I hit this post.

Eliezer's assessment that the human species can be clearly divided into exactly two sexes, and that dealing with the one you are not a member of is like dealing with an alien species, struck me in an extremely analogous way to how Robert Aumann's Orthodox Judaism struck Eliezer: a usually intelligent person buying wholeheartedly into a local cultural construct that, to my fairly simple observation and deduction, should be assigned very negative log odds.

I've assigned a considerably lower weighting to my Bayesian updates from the Sequences since. I very nearly stopped reading but realized that wasn't the right plan (since, after all, Aumann's agreement theorem is still true).

• Understanding the opposite sex is hard. Not as hard as understanding an AI, but it's still attempting empathy across a brainware gap: trying to use your brain to understand something that is not like your brain.

As Eliezer so often asks, could you be more specific?

I'm having trouble thinking of specific examples of the opposite sex being harder to understand than my own and thus I don't really understand EY's statement.

I have read today a good article about a male privilege. I link it here because in my opinion it is much better written that all other articles I read about the same topic; and it's relevant to our topic of understanding the people of opposite sex. But I still have some questions about the whole thing.

The article suggests that as a man I simply cannot imagine the situation of women, because some things either don't happen to me, or I wouldn't mind them because of my different preferences, or both of that. If I try to estimate the impact of those things on a woman's utility function, I am almost certainly wrong. Thus the best cognitive strategy is, if a woman tells me something hurts her so much, just trust her, even if it does not make much sense to me.

This strategy would work great for a man who only ever communicates with women that have absolutely no cognitive biases and would never lie to gain unfair advantage. Because I don't expect such perfection from men around me, I also don't expect it from women. Any information I get can be wrong, whether intentionally or unintentionally, even if it comes from a woman.

So what should I do as a rationalist that cares about other people's utility functions? Perhaps I could assign a high prior probability that I am wrong about things related to male privilege. (How high? 90%? 99%) Also I should discount opinions of other men (unless they already discounted it themselves, in which case I will not count the same evidence twice). But there is still a chance that considering this I will come to a conclusion that a woman is wrong.

By the way, perhaps there is a female privilege, too. (I do not think that it has the same magnitude as the male privilege and that things are somehow fair and balanced. No. I just say that it exists.) If you are a woman and you think I am wrong, I would like to remind you that if such things exist, by definition you wouldn't recognize it, neither would other women, so you should trust me. As a rationalist I admit that you can still get enough evidence against this hypothesis.

Back to the original topic; what should I do if two women disagree with each other? One of them says: "You shouldn't do this, because it is bad for women," and the other says: "There is nothing wrong about that; she is probably oversensitive or making things up." As I am not able to judge it directly, should I assign equal weight to both evidence, or should I always treat the complaining woman more seriously?

I know that for a perfect Bayesian reasoner all these suggestions would be irrelevant, because they would look at the available evidence and draw the most probable conclusion. However as a human, I need a heuristic.

Just as an exercise, and mostly motivated by the IRC channel: Can anyone find a way to turn this post into a testable prediction about the real world?

In particular, it would be nice to have a specific way to tell the difference between "understanding the opposite sex is impossible" and "understanding the opposite sex is harder than the same sex" and "understanding types of people you haven't been in enough contact with is hard/impossible"

This doesn't seem to me to be a "sequences" post; it's a response to a particular incident on Overcoming Bias ...

This breaks no pockets, picks no legs

That's a pretty low bar.

Is it just me, or has that article disappeared? I always get a "Forbidden" page: "You aren't allowed to do that."

PS: The Wayback Machine still has it.

Maybe that's just my incompetence... but I am skeptical that any man fully understands women or vice versa

Does this include people who change gender?