Just as men lack uteruses and women lack testicles, so too, there are differences of psychological machinery as well.
It seems that for pretty much all cognitive differences not directly related to sexuality, the difference between the male average and the female average is less than the standard deviation within each gender, though.
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.
ISTM that ease of understanding depends on complexity rather than just similarity. My brain is like my brain, and my guitar is not like my brain, and yet I can understand how the latter
works way better than how the former works. As for empathy, I feel I can empathize with typical people of the other sex way more easily than with typical people of the same sex (though it may be partly because I am heterosexual and so I’m subconsciously more motivated to do the former than the latter). As for brainware gaps, I feel that those due to software hinder me much more than those due to hardware, at least among three-digit-IQ humans.
Despite everything I’ve read on evolutionary psychology, and despite having set out to build an AI, and despite every fictional novel I’d read that tried to put me into the life-experience of a woman, when I tried to use that “knowledge” to guide my interactions with my girlfriend, it still didn’t work right.
What did you try to do and how did you expect it to work?
(I hear everyone saying that romance is hard, and yet I feel that my interactions with my girlfriend actually come out more effortlessly than those with most other people. But this is hardly surprising—if that weren’t the case, she wouldn’t be my girlfriend. Maybe people who think romance is hard should break up with their current partners and find someone else?)
I am skeptical that any of them could write Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series as well as Jacqueline Carey did.
I probably couldn’t possibly ever convincingly write from the perspective of a Chinese person or an anti-intellectual jock, either, for that matter.
For example, if you think that women don’t take the initiative enough in sex, or that men are afraid of intimacy, then you think that your own brainware is the law of the universe and that anything which departs from it is a disturbance in that essential ghost.
So what? Men and women are humans, they aren’t logically omniscient, and they aren’t perfectly reflectively consistent. What would be wrong with concluding that certain people take the initiative in sex or are comfortable with intimacy less than would be optimal with their CEV, if that was what the evidence one has encountered shows?
(For the record, I don’t agree with either of those statements.)
Still, I’m glad that different minds exist; I wouldn’t want to have sex with men.
Me neither—but doesn’t that have to do with bodies rather than minds? Plenty of straight guys wouldn’t want to have sex with a pre-op trans woman either.
In modern 21st-century First World culture, there is a special and unusual cultural taboo against men speaking of women as a stereotyped class…
What? I see Internet memes doing exactly that pretty much every day. And of course there are people who are offended by them, but then again there are people who are offended by women speaking of men as a stereotyped class too.
As for empathy, I feel I can empathize with typical people of the other sex way more easily than with typical people of the same sex (though it may be partly because I am heterosexual and so I’m subconsciously more motivated to do the former than the latter).
Do you feel this is also true for typical people of the same and opposite sex? This looks consistent to me with your personality being unusually close to the typical personality of the opposite sex and empathic difficulties caused by personality distances.
I hear everyone saying that romance is hard, and yet I feel that my interactions with my girlfriend actually come out more effortlessly than those with most other people. … Me neither—but doesn’t that have to do with bodies rather than minds? Plenty of straight guys wouldn’t want to have sex with a pre-op trans woman either.
My experience has been that most of the straight guys I know would be happier dating a straight guy than a straight girl, because they would have similar wants and thought patterns and so on, but that the idea is physically repulsive (or, at least, not physically compelling).
As a gay guy, I find it hard to empathize with someone who is romantically attracted to feminine personalities over masculine personalities. To use My Little Pony examples, I would be fine dating a guy with the personality of Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, or Applejack, and can empathize with why someone else would want to, but would have trouble dating a guy with the personality of Fluttershy, and don’t have the mental machinery that generates “d’aww” in response to her. I can solve the classification problem of “will this character make a typical guy d’aww?”, but that seems very distinct.
But that means I can imagine someone else who does only want to date Fluttershy-esque people, regardless of their physical sex, and that may be true of Eliezer.
This looks consistent to me with your personality being unusually close to the typical personality of the opposite sex and empathic difficulties caused by personality distances.
That’s most likely also cause of part of the effect, though possibly not of it. (FWIW, IIRC on some online test (based on the BSRI?) I scored very slightly above average on both masculinity and femininity, and very slightly higher on the latter than on the former, which sounds kind-of right (but then again...).)
It seems that for pretty much all cognitive differences not directly related to sexuality, the difference between the male average and the female average is less than the standard deviation within each gender, though.
ISTM that ease of understanding depends on complexity rather than just similarity. My brain is like my brain, and my guitar is not like my brain, and yet I can understand how the latter works way better than how the former works. As for empathy, I feel I can empathize with typical people of the other sex way more easily than with typical people of the same sex (though it may be partly because I am heterosexual and so I’m subconsciously more motivated to do the former than the latter). As for brainware gaps, I feel that those due to software hinder me much more than those due to hardware, at least among three-digit-IQ humans.
What did you try to do and how did you expect it to work?
(I hear everyone saying that romance is hard, and yet I feel that my interactions with my girlfriend actually come out more effortlessly than those with most other people. But this is hardly surprising—if that weren’t the case, she wouldn’t be my girlfriend. Maybe people who think romance is hard should break up with their current partners and find someone else?)
I probably couldn’t possibly ever convincingly write from the perspective of a Chinese person or an anti-intellectual jock, either, for that matter.
So what? Men and women are humans, they aren’t logically omniscient, and they aren’t perfectly reflectively consistent. What would be wrong with concluding that certain people take the initiative in sex or are comfortable with intimacy less than would be optimal with their CEV, if that was what the evidence one has encountered shows?
(For the record, I don’t agree with either of those statements.)
Me neither—but doesn’t that have to do with bodies rather than minds? Plenty of straight guys wouldn’t want to have sex with a pre-op trans woman either.
What? I see Internet memes doing exactly that pretty much every day. And of course there are people who are offended by them, but then again there are people who are offended by women speaking of men as a stereotyped class too.
Do you feel this is also true for typical people of the same and opposite sex? This looks consistent to me with your personality being unusually close to the typical personality of the opposite sex and empathic difficulties caused by personality distances.
My experience has been that most of the straight guys I know would be happier dating a straight guy than a straight girl, because they would have similar wants and thought patterns and so on, but that the idea is physically repulsive (or, at least, not physically compelling).
As a gay guy, I find it hard to empathize with someone who is romantically attracted to feminine personalities over masculine personalities. To use My Little Pony examples, I would be fine dating a guy with the personality of Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, or Applejack, and can empathize with why someone else would want to, but would have trouble dating a guy with the personality of Fluttershy, and don’t have the mental machinery that generates “d’aww” in response to her. I can solve the classification problem of “will this character make a typical guy d’aww?”, but that seems very distinct.
But that means I can imagine someone else who does only want to date Fluttershy-esque people, regardless of their physical sex, and that may be true of Eliezer.
That’s most likely also cause of part of the effect, though possibly not of it. (FWIW, IIRC on some online test (based on the BSRI?) I scored very slightly above average on both masculinity and femininity, and very slightly higher on the latter than on the former, which sounds kind-of right (but then again...).)