Opinions expressed are my own and not endorsed by anyone.
Formerly @ ARC Evals aka METR
lukehmiles
Karma: 652
What monster downvoted this
Hmm I think the damaging effect would occur over many years but mainly during puberty. It looks like there’s only two studies they mention lasting over a year. One found a damaging effect and the other found no effect.
The “love minus hate” thing really holds up
This is inspiring
Thanks for posting. I would not have seen this otherwise.
I like the rough thoughts way though. I’m not here to like read a textbook.
This seems correct and important to me.
Then where are the smart trans men hiding?
There are plenty of stupid and/or distracting behaviors testosterone can push you for without any kind of “chemical brain damage”, not only sex. Testosterone is likely to make you seek social status and status-seeking is notoriously incompatible with intellectual pursuits.
This is the strongest alternative explanation by far. I wonder what to look for to check this...
Yes my point is the low T did it before the transition
Did any of them have big muscles before the transition?
seems in tension with your smarter friends transitioning after high school.
They seemed low-T during high school though!
Yeah could be a third factor though. Maybe you are right.
Someone on a subreddit said “free testosterone” is what matters and they usually just measure uh “regular testosterone” in blood or something. I have no idea if that’s true. Know what those studies measured?
Wildly guessing here, but my intuition is that estrogen would have a greater impact on neuroticism than testosterone. Although I can’t even say which direction.
Like what exactly? That seems unlikely to me. I suppose we will have results from the ongoing gender transitions soon.
I only linked the U-shaped study to mention that someone had said something vaguely similar. Notice my words “people have posited a U-shaped curve...”. Study indeed seems like garbage. Perhaps i should’ve said that explicitly.
But it still doesn’t really prove the causality—lots of things presumably influence intelligence, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them influence T as well.
Yes so the experiment is that a million people are starting up in taking hormones/blockers now. I don’t think proper results are in but what I have myself observed seems like strong evidence that blocking T preserves or raises intelligence on the margin.
Is being a trans woman (or just low-T) +20 IQ?
Pasteur had (also highly “counterfactual”) help I think! Ignaz Semmelweis worked in this maternity ward where the women & babies kept dying. The hospital had opened up some investigations over the years as to the cause of death but kept closing them with garbage explanations. He went somewhere else for a while and when he got back he noticed that the death numbers were down in his absence. Then he noticed his hands smelled like death after one of his routine autopsies and he was about to go plunge them in some poor mother! He had washed them but just with regular soap. If he put some bleach in the washwater then his hands didn’t stink. He connected the dots. He had killed hundreds of mothers & babies but wrote a book about it anyway and thereby popularized disinfection (and strongly suggested the root cause of disease).
Probably the main reason that germ theory took so long to work out is that the people with the right evidence were too guilty and ashamed to share it.
I wonder how much testosterone during puberty lowers IQ. Most of my high school math/CS friends seemed low-T and 3⁄4 of them transitioned since high school. They still seem smart as shit. The higher-T among us seem significantly brain damaged since high school (myself included). I wonder what the mechanism would be here...
Like 40% of my math/cs Twitter is trans women and another 30% is scrawny nerds and only like 9% big bald men.
Seems it is easier / more streamlined / more googlable now for a teenage male to get testosterone blockers than testosterone. Latter is very frowned upon — I guess because it is cheating in sports. Try googling eg “get testosterone prescription high school reddit -trans -ftm”. The results are exclusively people shaming the cheaters. Whereas of course googling “get testosterone blockers high school reddit” gives tons of love & support & practical advice.
Females however retain easy access to hormones via birth control.
How do cancer vaccines work?
Original post that introduced the technique is best explanation of steering stuff. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5spBue2z2tw4JuDCx/steering-gpt-2-xl-by-adding-an-activation-vector