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I'm curious which modifications EY has proposed (specifically) that you don't want made, unless it's just generically the suggestion that people could be improved in any ways whatsoever and your preference is to not have any modifications made to yourself (in a "be true to yourself" manner, perhaps?) that you didn't "choose".
If you could be convinced that a given change to "who you are" would necessarily be an improvement (by your own standards, not externally imposed standards, since you sound very averse to such restrictions) such as "being able to think faster" or "having taste preferences for foods which are most healthy for you" (to use very primitive off-the-cuff examples), and then given the means to effect these changes on yourself, would you choose to do so, or would you be averse simply on the grounds of "then I wouldn't be 'me' anymore" or something similar?
Being able to think faster is something I try for already, with the means available to me. (Nutrition, sleep, mental exercise, I've even recently started trying to get physical exercise.) I actually already prefer healthy food (it was a really SIMPLE hack: cut out junk food, or phase it out gradually if you can't take the plunge all at once, and wait until your taste buds (probably actually some brain center) start reacting like they would have in the ancestral environment, which is actually by craving healthy food), so the only further modification to be done is to my environment (availability of the right kinds of stuff). So obviously, those in particular I do want.
However, I also believe that here lies the road to ableism. EY has already espoused a significant amount. For instance, his post about how unfair IQ is misses out on the great contributions made to the world by people with very low IQs. There's someone with an IQ of, I think she said, 86 or so, who is wiser than I am (let's just say I probably rival EY for IQ score). IQ is valid only for a small part of the population and full-scale IQ is almost worthless except for letting some people feel superior to others. I've spent a lot of time thinking about and exposed to people's writings about disability and how there are abled people who seek to cure people who weren't actually suffering and appreciated their uniqueness. Understanding and respect for the diversity of skills in the world is more important than making everyone exactly like anyone else.
The above said, that doesn't mean I'm opposed in principle to eliminating problems with disability (nor is almost anyone who speaks out against forced "cure"). Just to think of examples, I'm glad I'm better at interacting with people than I used to be and wish to be better at math (but NOT at the expense of my other abilities). Others, with other disabilities, have espoused wishes for other things (two people that I can think of want an end to their chronic pain without feeling that other aspects of their issues are bad things or need fixed). I worry about EY taking over the world with his robots and not remembering the work of Erving Goffman and a guy whose book is someplace where I can't glance at the spine to see his name. He may fall into any number of potential traps. He could impose modification on those he deems not intelligent enough to understand, even though they are (one person who strongly shaped my views on this topic has made a video about it called In My Language). I also worry that he could create nursing homes without fully understanding institutionalization and learned helplessness and why it costs less in the community anyway. And once he's made it a ways down that road, he might be better than most at admitting mistakes, but it's hard to acknowledge that you've caused that much suffering. (We see it all the time in parents who don't want to admit what harm they've caused disabled children by misunderstanding.) And by looking only at the optimal typical person, he may miss out on the unique gifts of other configurations. (I am not in principle opposed to people having all the strengths and none of the weaknesses of multiple types. I'm becoming a bit like that in some areas on a smaller scale, but not fully, and I don't think that in practice it will work for most people or work fully.)
Regarding what EY has proposed that I don't want, on the catperson post (in a comment), EY suggested that we would have some sort of compromise where we lowered male sex drive a little and increased female sex drive a little, which doesn't appeal to me at all. (Sorry, but I don't WANT to want more sex. You probably won't agree with this argument, but Jesus advocated celibacy for large swaths of the population, and should I be part of one of those, I'd rather it not be any harder. Should I NOT be in one of those swaths, it's still important that I not be too distracted satisfying those desires, since I'll have far more important things to do with my life.) But in a cooperative endeavor like that, who's going to listen to me explaining I don't want to change in the way that would most benefit them?
And that's what I can think of off the top of my head.
Welcome!
This directly contradicts the mainstream research on IQ: see for instance this or this. If you have cites to the contrary, I'd be curious to read them.
That said, glad to see someone else who's found In My Language - I ran across it many years ago and thought it beautiful and touching.
Yes, you're right. That was a blatant example of availability bias-- the tiny subset of the population for which IQ is not valid makes up a disproportionately large part of my circle. And I consider full-scale IQ worthless for people with large IQ gaps, such as people with learning disabilities, and I don't think it conveys any new information over and above subtest scores in other people. Thank you for reminding me again how very odd I and my friends are.
But I also refer here to understanding, for instance, morality or ways to hack life, and having learned one of the most valuable lessons I ever learned from someone I'm pretty sure is retarded (not Amanda Baggs; it's a young man I know), I know for a fact that some important things aren't always proportional to IQ. In fact, specifically, I want to say I learned to be better by emulating him, and not just from the interaction, lest you assume it's something I figured out that he didn't already know.
I don't have any studies to cite; just personal experience with some very abnormal people. (Including myself, I want to point out. I think I'm one of those people for whom IQ subtests are useful-- in specific, limited ways-- but for whom full-scale IQ means nothing because of the great variance between subtest scores.)
Her points on disability may still be valid, but it looks like the whole Amanda Baggs autism thing was a media stunt. At age 14, she was a fluent speaker with an active social life.
The page you link is kind of messy, but I read most of it. Simon's Rock is real (I went there) and none of the details presented about it were incorrect (e.g. they got the name of the girls' dorm right), but I've now poked around the rest of "Autism Fraud" and am disinclined to trust it as a source (the blogger sounds like a crank who believes that vaccines cause autism, and that chelation cures it, and he says all of this in a combative, nasty way). Do you have any other, more neutral sources about Amanda Baggs's allegedly autism-free childhood? I'm sort of tempted to call up my school and ask if she's even a fellow alumna.
Less messy link.
If ever there was a candidate for an impartial and probing documentary, it is Amanda Baggs.
EDIT: According to a friend I emailed who was at Simon's Rock with Amanda, she generally behaved bizarrely, but "walked and talked like anyone else."
She couldn't be called a neutral source by any stretch of the imagination, but Amanda herself (anbuend is Amanda Baggs) confirms that she went to college at 14 and that she was considered gifted. She also has a post up just to tell people that she has been able to speak.
Those posts put the allegations in more perspective and now I don't feel like I ought to make a phone call. Thanks! I hate phones!
This might interest you.
Certainly the author of that page seems very biased. Whether the writer of the letter is too, or whether the letter is real, I don't know.
That would be very interesting.
By the middle of the second paragraph I was thinking "Whoa, is everyone an Amanda Baggs fan around here?". Hole in one! I win so many Bayes-points, go me.
I and a bunch of LWers I've talked to about it basically already agree with you on ableism, and a large fraction seems to apply usual liberal instincts to the issue (so, no forced cures for people who can point to "No thanks" on a picture board). There are extremely interesting and pretty fireworks that go off when you look at the social model disability from a transhumanist perspective and I want to round up Alicorn and Anne Corwin and you and a bunch of other people to look at them closely. It doesn't look like curing everyone (you don't want a perfectly optimized life, you want a world with variety, you want change over time), and it doesn't look like current (dis)abilities (what does "blind" mean if most people can see radio waves?), and it doesn't look like current models of disability (if everyone is super different and the world is set up for that and everything is cheap there's no such thing as accommodations), and it doesn't look like the current structures around disability (if society and personal identity and memory look nothing like they started with "culture" doesn't mean the same thing and that applies to Deaf culture) and it's complicated and pretty and probably already in some Egan novel.
But, to address your central point directly: You are completely and utterly mistaken about what Eliezer Yudkowsky wants to do. He's certainly not going to tell a superintelligence anything as direct and complicated as "Make this person smarter", or even "Give me a banana". Seriously, nursing homes?
If tech had happened to be easier, we might have gotten a superintelligence in the 16th century in Europe. Surely we wouldn't have told it to care about the welfare of black people. We need to build something that would have done the right thing even if we had built it in the 16th century. The very rough outline for that is to tell it "Here are some people. Figure out what they would want if they knew better, and do that.". So in the 16th century, it would have been presented with abled white men; figured out that if they were better informed and smarter and less biased and so on, these men would like to be equal to black women; and thus included black women in its next turn of figuring out what people want. Something as robust as this needs to be can't miss an issue that's currently known to exist and be worthy of debate!
And for the celibacy thing: that's a bit besides the point, but obviously if you want to avoid sex for reasons other than low libido, increasing your libido obviously won't fix the mismatch.
How do you identify what knowing better would mean, when you don't know better yet?
The same way we do, but faster? Like, if you start out thinking that scandalous-and-gross-sex-practice is bad, you can consider arguments like "disgust is easily culturally trained so it's a poor measure of morality", and talk to people so you form an idea of what it's like to want and do it as a subjective experience (what positive emotions are involved, for example), and do research so you can answer queries like "If we had a brain scanner that could detect brainwashing manipulation, what would it say about people who want that?".
So the superintelligence builds a model of you and feeds it lots of arguments and memory tape from others and other kinds of information. And then we run into trouble because maybe you end up wanting different things depending on the order it feeds you it, or it tells you to many facts about Deep Ones and it breaks your brain.
Those of us who endorse respecting individual choices when we can afford to, because we prefer that our individual choices be respected when we can afford it.
If you think it will work for some people, but not most, are you in principle opposed to giving whatever-it-is-that-distinguishes-the-people-it-works-for for to anyone who wants it?
More broadly: I mostly consider all of this "what would EY do" stuff a distraction; the question that interests me is what I ought to want done and why I ought to want it done, not who or what does it. If large-scale celibacy is a good idea, I want to understand why it's a good idea. Being told that some authority figure (any authority figure) advocated it doesn't achieve that. Similarly, if it's a bad idea, I want to understand why it's a bad idea.
Whatever-it-is-that-distinguishes-the-people-it-works-for seems to be inherent in the skills in question (that is, the configuration that brings about a certain ability also necessarily brings about a weakness in another area), so I don't think that's possible. If it were, I can only imagine it taking the form of people being able to shift configuration very rapidly into whatever works best for the situation, and in some cases, I find that very implausible. If I'm wrong, sure, why not? If it's possible, it's only the logical extension of teaching people to use their strengths and shore up their weaknesses. This being an inherent impossibility (or so I think; I could be wrong), it doesn't so much matter whether I'm opposed to it or not, but yeah, it's fine with me.
You make a good point, but I expect that assuming that someone makes AI and uses it to rule the world with the power to modify people, it will be Eliezer Yudkowsky, so whether he would abuse that power is more important than whether my next-door neighbors would if they could or even what I would do, and so what EY wants is at least worth considering, because the failure mode if he does something bad is way too catastrophic.
What makes you think that?
For example, do you think he's the only person working on building AI powerful enough to change the world?
Or that, of the people working on it, he's the only one competent enough to succeed?
Or that, of the people who can succeed, he's the only one who would "use" the resulting AI to rule the world and modify people?
Or something else?
He's the only person I know of who wants to build an AI that will take over the world and do what he wants. He's also smart enough to have a chance, which is disturbing.
Have you read his paper on CEV? To the best of my knowledge, that's the clearest place he's laid out what he wants an AGI to do, and I wouldn't really label it "take over the world and do what [Eliezer Yudkowsky] wants" except for broad use of those terms to the point of dropping their typical connotations.
I can virtually guarantee you that he's not the only one who wants to build such an AI. Google, IBM, and the heads of major three-letter government agencies all come to mind as the kind of players who would want to implement their own pet genie, and are actively working toward that goal. That said, it's possible that EY is the only one who has a chance of success... I personally wouldn't give him, or any other human, that much credit, but I do acknowledge the possibility.
Thank you. I've just updated on that. I now consider it even more likely that the world will be destroyed within my lifetime.
For what it's worth, I disagree with many (if not most) LessWrongers (LessWrongites ? LessWrongoids ?) on the subject of the Singularity. I am far from convinced that the Singularity is even possible in principle, and I am fairly certain that, even if it were possible, it would not occur within my lifetime, or my (hypothetical) children's lifetimes.
EDIT: added a crucial "not" in the last sentence. Oops.
I also think the singularity is much less likely than most Lesswrongers. Which is quite comforting, because my estimated probability for the singularity is still higher than my estimated probability that the problem of friendly AI is tractable.
Just chiming in here because I think the question about the singularity on the LW survey was not well-designed to capture the opinion of those who don't think it likely to happen at all, so the median LW perception of the singularity may not be what it appears.
Yeah... spending time on Less Wrong helps one in general appreciate how much existential risk there is, especially from technologies, and how little attention is paid to it. Thinking about the Great Filter will just make everything seem even worse.
A runaway AI might wind up being very destructive, but quite probably not wholly destructive. It seems likely that it would find some of the knowledge humanity has built up over the millenia useful, regardless of what specific goals it had. In that sense, I think that even if a paperclip optimizer is built and eats the world, we won't have been wholly forgotten in the way we would if, e.g. the sun exploded and vaporized our planet. I don't find this to be much comfort, but how comforting or not it is is a matter of personal taste.
As I mentioned here, I've seen a presentation on Watson, and it looks to me like its architecture is compatible with recursive self-improvement (though that is not the immediate goal for it). Clippy does seem rather probable...
One caveat: I tend to overestimate risks. I overestimated the severity of y2k, and I've overestimated a variety of personal risks.
"I see that you're trying to extrapolate human volition. Would you like some help ?" converts the Earth into computronium
Soreff was probably alluding to User:Clippy, someone role-playing a non-FOOMed paperclip maximiser.
Though yours is good too :-)
Don't worry. We are in good hands. Eliezer understands the dillemas involved and will ensure that we can avoid non-friendly AI. The SI are dedicated to Friendly AI and the completion of their goal.
I'd never heard of Amanda Baggs. Thanks, her blog is now bookmarked.
If your curiosity about non-neurotypicality is fully general, you might also find this interesting.
Look at it this way - would you agree to trade getting a slightly higher sex drive, in exchange for living in a world where rape, divorce, and unwanted long-term celibacy ("forever alone") are each an order of magnitude rarer than they are in our world?
(That is assuming that such a change in sex drive would have those results, which is far from certain.)
This is an unfair question. If we do the Singularity right, nobody has to accept unwanted brain modifications in order to solve general societal problems. Either we can make the brain modifications appealing via non-invasive education or other gentle means, or we can skip them for people who opt out/don't opt in. Not futzing with people's minds against their wills is a pretty big deal! I would be with Aspiring Knitter in opposing a population-wide forcible nudge to sex drive even if I bought the exceptionally dubious proposition that such a drastic measure would be called for to fix the problems you list.
I didn't mean to imply forcing unwanted modifications on everybody "for their own good" - I was talking about under what conditions we might accept things we don't like (I don't think this is a very plausible singularity scenario, except as a general "how weird things could get").
I don't like limitations on my ability to let my sheep graze, but I may accept them if everyone does so and it reduces overgrazing. I may not like limits on my ability to own guns, but I may accept them if it means living in a safer society. I may not like modifications to my sex drive, but I may be willing to agree in exchange for living in a better society.
In principle, we could find ways of making everybody better off. Of course, the details of how such an agreement is reached matter a lot - markets, democracy, competition between countries, a machine-God enforcing it's will.
Since when is rape motivated primarily by not getting laid? (Or divorce, for that matter?)
But never mind. We have different terminal values here. You-- I assume-- seek a lot of partners for everyone, right? At least, others here seem to be non-monogamous. You won't agree with me, but I believe in lifelong monogamy or celibacy, so while increasing someone's libido could be useful in your value system, it almost never would in mine. Further, it would serve no purpose for me to have a greater sex drive because I would respond by trying to stifle it, in accordance with my principles. I hope you at least derive disutility from making someone uncomfortable.
Seriously, the more I hear on LessWrong, the more I anticipate having to live in a savage reservation a la Brave New World. But pointing this out to you doesn't change your mind because you value having most people be willing to engage in casual sex (am I wrong here? I don't know you, specifically).
I can't speak for Emile, but my own views look something like this:
Thus, I would say that I value "most people being able to engage in casual sex". I make no judgement, however, whether "most people should be willing to engage in casual sex". If you value monogamy, then you should be able to engage in monogamous sex, and I can see no reason why anyone could say that your desires are wrong.
(*) As well as many of our most prominent politicians. Heh.
I'm glad I actually asked, then, since I've learned something from your position, which is more sensible than I assumed. Upvoted because it's so clearly laid out even though I don't agree.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I am still interested in hearing why you don't agree, but I understand that this can be a sensitive topic...
Oh, sorry, I thought that was obvious. Illusion of transparency, I guess. God says we should be monogamous or celibate. Of course, I doubt it'd be useful to go around trying to police people's morals.
In addition to what APMason said, I think that many Christians would disagree with your second statement:
Some of them are campaigning right now on the promise that they will "police people's morals"...
Sorry, where does God say this? You are a Christian right? I'm not aware of any verse in either the OT or NT that calls for monogamy. Jacob has four wives, Abraham has two, David has quite a few and Solomon has hundreds. The only verses that seem to say anything negative in this regard are some which imply that Solomon just has way too many. The text strongly implies that polyandry is not ok but polygyny is fine. The closest claim is Jesus's point about how divorcing one woman and then marrying another is adultery, but that's a much more limited claim (it could be that the other woman was unwilling to be a second wife for example). 1 Timothy chapter 3 lists qualifications for being a church leader which include having only one wife. That would seem to imply that having more than one wife is at worst suboptimal.
That is a really good point. (Actually, Jesus made a stronger point than that: even lusting after someone you're not married to is adultery.)
You know, you could actually be right. I'll have to look more carefully. Maybe my understanding has been biased by the culture in which I live. Upvoted for knowledgeable rebuttal of a claim that might not be correct.
I don't really know if I should say this - whether this is the place, or if the argument's moved well beyond this point for everyone involved, but: where and when did God say that, and if, as I suspect, it's the Bible, doesn't s/he also say we shouldn't wear clothing of two different kinds of fibre at the same time?
Yes. That applies to the Jews but not to everyone else. You're allowed to ignore Leviticus and Exodus if you're not Jewish. EY probably knows this, since it's actually Jewish theology (note that others have looked at the same facts and come to the conclusion that the rules don't apply to anyone anymore and stopped applying when Jesus died, so take into account that someone (I don't think it's me) has done something wrong here, as per Aumann's agreement theorem).
Hmm, that doesn't sound right. I don't want to make celibate people uncomfortable, I just want to have more casual sex myself. Also I have a weaker altruistic wish that people who aren't "getting any" could "get some" without having to tweak their looks (the beauty industry) or their personality (the pickup scene). There could be many ways to make lots of unhappy people happier about sex and romance without tweaking your libido. Tweaking libido sounds a little pointless to me anyway, because PUA dogma (which I mostly agree with) predicts that people will just spend the surplus libido on attractive partners and leave unattractive ones in the dust, like they do today.
Well, some are. From the last survey:
Nope! I don't have any certainty about what is best for society / mankind in the long run, but personally, I'm fine with monogamy, I'm married, have a kid, and don't think "more casual sex" is necessarily a good thing.
I can, however, agree with Eliezer when he says it might be better if human sex drives were better adjusted - not because I value seeing more people screwing around like monkeys, but because it seems that the way things are now results in a great deal of frustration and unhappiness.
I don't know about rape, but I expect that more sex drive for women and less for men would result in less divorces, because differences in sex drive are a frequent source of friction, as is infidelity (though it's not clear that different sex drives would result in less infidelity). That's not to say that hacking people's brains is the only solution, or the best one.
More sex does not have to mean more casual sex. There are lots of people in committed relationships (marriages) that would like to have more-similar sex drives. Nuns wouldn't want their libido increased, but it's not only for the benefit of the "playahs" either.
Also, I think the highest-voted comment ("I don't think that any relationship style is the best (...) However, I do wish that people were more aware of the possibility of polyamory (...)") is closer to the consensus than something like "everyone should have as many partners as much as possible". LW does assume that polyamory and casual sex is optional-but-ok, though.
I'm a married, monogamous person who would love to be able to adjust my sex drive to match my spouse's (and I think we would both choose to adjust up).
The Twilight books do an interesting riff of the themes of eternal life, monogamy, and extremely high sex drives.
If enough feel similarly, and the discrepancy is real, the means will move toward each through voluntary shifts without forcing anything on anyone, incidentally.
What "voluntary shifts" do you mean? I agree that small shifts in sex drive are possible based on individual choice, but not large ones. Also, why do the means matter?
Ah, misunderstanding. I did not mean "shifts by volition alone", but "voluntary as opposed to forced" as pertains to AspiringKnitter's earlier worry about Yudkowsky forcing "some sort of compromise where we lowered male sex drive a little and increased female sex drive a little."
If interpreted as a prediction rather than a recommendation, it might happen through individual choice if the ability to modify these things directly becomes sufficiently available (and sufficiently safe, and sufficiently accepted, &c) because of impulses like those you expressed: pairings that desire to be monogamous and who are otherwise compatible might choose to self modify to be compatible on this axis as well, and this will move the averages closer together.
Got it, thanks.
Yeah, this is Eliezer inferring too much from the most-accessible information about sex drive from members of his tribe, so to speak -- it's not so very long ago in the West that female sex drive was perceived as insatiable and vast, with women being nearly impossible for any one man to please in bed; there are still plenty of cultures where that's the case. But he's heard an awful lot of stories couched in evolutionary language about why a cultural norm in his society that is broadcast all over the place in media and entertainment reflects the evolutionary history of humanity.
He's confused about human nature. If Eliezer builds a properly-rational AI by his own definitions to resolve the difficulty, and it met all his other stated criteria for FAI, it would tell him he'd gotten confused.
Well, there do seem to be several studies, including at least one cross-cultural study, that support the "the average female sex drive is lower" theory.
These studies also rely on self-reported sexual feelings and behavior, as reported by the subset of the population willing to volunteer for such a study and answer questions such as "How often do you masturbate?", and right away you've got interference from "signalling what you think sounds right", "signalling what you're willing to admit," "signalling what makes you look impressive", and "signalling what makes you seem good and not deviant by the standards of your culture." It is notoriously difficult to generalize such studies -- they best serve as descriptive accounts, not causal ones.
Many of the relevant factors are also difficult to pin down; testosterone clearly has an affect, but it's a physiological correlate that doesn't suffice to explain the patterns seen (which again, are themselves to be taken with a grain of salt, and not signalling anything causal). . The jump to a speculative account of evolutionary sexual strategies is even less warranted. For a good breakdown, see here: http://www.csun.edu/~vcpsy00h/students/sexmotiv.htm
These are valid points, but you said that there still exist several cultures where women are considered to be more sexual than men. Shouldn't they then show up in the international studies? Or are these cultures so rare as to not be included in the studies?
Also, it occurs to me that whether or not the differences are biological is somewhat of a red herring. If they are mainly cultural, then it means that it will be easier for an FAI to modify them, but that doesn't affect the primary question of whether they should be modified. Surely that question is entirely independent of the question of their precise causal origin?
Actually it's entirely possible to miss a lot of detail while ostensibly sampling broadly. If you sample citizens in Bogota, Mumbai, Taibei, Kuala Lumpur, Ashgabat, Cleveland, Tijuana, Reykjavik, London, and Warsaw, that's pretty darn international and thus a good cross-cultural representation of humanity, right? Surely any signals that emerge from that dataset are probably at least suggestive of innate human tendency?
Well, actually, no. Those are all major cities deeply influenced and shaped by the same patterns of mercantile-industrialist economics that came out of parts of Eurasia and spread over the globe during the colonial era and continue to do so -- and that influence has worked its way into an awful lot of everyday life for most of the people in the world. It would be like assuming that using wheels is a human cultural universal, because of their prevalence.
An even better analogy here would be if you one day take a bit of plant tissue and looking under a microcoscope, spot the mitochondria. Then you find the same thing in animal tissue. When you see it in fungi, too, you start to wonder. You go sampling and sampling all the visible organisms you can find and even ones from far away, and they all share this trait. It's only Archeans and Bacteria that seem not to. Well, in point of fact there are more types of those than of anything else, significantly more varied and divergent than the other organisms you were looking at put together. It's not a basal condition for living things, it's just a trait that's nearly universal in the ones you're most likely to notice or think about. (The break in the analogy being that mitochondria are a matter of ancestry and subsequent divergence, while many of the human cultural similarities you'd observe in my above example are a matter of alternatives being winnowed and pushed to the margins, and existing similarities amplified by the effects of a coopting culture-plex that's come to dominate the picture).
It totally is, but my point was that Eliezer has expressed it's a matter of biology, and if I'm correct in my thoughts he's wrong about that -- and in my understanding of how he feels FAI would behave, this would lead to the behavior I described (FAI explains to Eliezer that he's gotten that wrong).
An addendum: There's also the "Ecological fallacy" to consider -- where a dataset suggests that on the mean, a population A has property P and population B has P+5, but randomly selecting members of each population will give very different results due to differences in distribution.
As I mentioned the last time this topic came up, there is evidence that giving supplementary testosterone to humans of either sex tends to raise libido, as many FTM trans people will attest, for example. While there is a lot of individual variation, expecting that on average men will have greater sex drive than women is not based purely on theory.
The pre-Victorian Western perception of female sexuality was largely defined by a bunch of misogynistic Cistercian monks, who, we can be reasonably confident, were not basing their conclusions on a lot of actual experience with women, given that they were cloistered celibates.
I don't dispute the effects of testosterone; I just don't think that sex drive is reducible to that, and I tend to be suspicious when evolutionary psychology is proposed for what may just as readily be explained as culture-bound conditions.
It's not just the frequency of the desire to copulate that matters, after all -- data on relative "endurance" and ability to go for another round, certain patterns of rates and types of promiscuity, and other things could as readily be construed to provide a very different model of human sexual evolution, and at the end of the day it's a lot easier to come up with plausible-sounding models that accord pretty well with one's biases than be certain we've explored the actual space of evolutionary problems and solutions that led to present-day humanity.
I tend to think that evolutionary psychological explanations need to meet the threshold test that they can explain a pattern of behavior better than cultural variance can; biases and behaviors being construed as human nature ought to be based on clearly-defined traits that give reliable signals, and are demonstrable across very different branches of the human cultural tree.
I think people's intuitions about sex drives are interesting, because they seem to differ. Earlier we had a discussion where it became clear that some conceptualized lust as something like hunger - an active harm unless fulfilled - while I had always generalized from one example and assumed lust simpliciter pleasant and merely better when fulfilled. Of course it would be inconvenient for other things if it were constantly present, and were I a Christian of the right type the ideal level would obviously be lower, so this isn't me at all saying you're crazy and incomprehensible in some veiled way - I just think these kinds of implicit conceptual differences are interesting.
« EY suggested that we would have some sort of compromise where we lowered male sex drive a little and increased female sex drive a little, which doesn't appeal to me at all. Sorry, but I don't WANT to want more sex. » Ok, but would you agree to lowering males sex drive then ? Making it easier for those who want to follow a "no sex" path, and lowering the different between males and females in term of sex drive in the process ? Eliezer's goal was to lower the difference between the desires of the two sex so they could both be happier. He proposed doing it by making them both go towards the average, but aligning to the lower of the two would fit the purpose too.
kilobug, Y U No quote using > ?!
Hrm... didn't pay attention, sorry, I should indeed. Thanks for reminding me.