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.
I can't stand watching sports. I don't have a problem with that either.
I think if we lived in a world balanced between genders, where men thought of themselves as men and women thought of themselves as women to around the same degree, then women would have no more difficult a time departing from gender average than men do.
Within-group differences are larger than between-group differences in most of these domains, so I'd rather make it easier for both groups to deviate from their group tendencies than to try to identify more group tendencies that it will be hard to deviate from.
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 a
A more recent instantiation of the same idea is the Bechdel Test or Mo Movie Measure (it's named after a character called Mo in Alison Bechdel's comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For), which a movie passes if it
1. has at least two women in it
2. who talk to one another
3. about something other than a man.
Depressingly few movies pass this test. Of course it can be applied to things other than movies.
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.
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.
"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 char...
Accordingly, I have arranged my reading list in that order: Don't attempt Twilight till you have exhausted the best Jane Austen has to offer.
You may be interested in Gwern's marvellous essay Culture is not about Esthetics, which does the numbers on just how ridiculously unfeasible it is trying even to keep up with the best.
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.
you can choose your testosterone level on a daily basis, like choosing to get drunk or not. I can't imagine what that must be like.
You can do it. There are drugs that elevate your testosterone, and drugs that suppress it. I've tried both. I don't care for the suppression; it's like being tired. Elevation gives me insomnia. The effects of elevation probably depend largely on how quickly the drug you use is metabolized; androstenedione (the over-the-counter pro-testosterone in the US) breaks down quickly into DHT, and most of the bad effects of "testosterone" (baldness, aggression, prostate cancer) are directly caused by DHT.
Theoretically, a man could increase his health by taking an injectable synthetic anabolic steroid with a long half-life. This would suppress his natural testosterone, which has a half life around an hour, and replace it with something that gave him the benefits of testosterone without the harmful effects of DHT. AFAIK this is untested.
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.
You'll go crazy trying to figure out every downvote. Do like me, and just secretly take it as further evidence of rampant stupidity and your intellectual superiority.
(Upvotes are also evidence of your intellectual superiority. You can't lose.)
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?
The existence of different cultures keeps life interesting. Race is just the color-coded label for some such cultures, and it's got a low enough correlation given modern globalization that it's often more of an obstruction to cultural interchange than a help.
Just a minor nitpick: the cartoon you linked (boys vs. girls) was actually a satire. The cartoonist (Darrow) was a well-known satirist.
"...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.)
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.)
I shan't presume to answer for Eliezer, but for myself, I think it is valuable that in the course of a day, I encounter many people whose experiences are similar to mine along all these gender-related axes, and with whom I can discuss these commonalities, and that, at the same time, I encounter many people whose experiences are drastically unlike mine, whose ways of thinking I will have to exert effort in order to understand. Thus, having a few genders seems to me to be well-optimized for fun.
(It is, of course, possible that I'm just putting a happy gloss on the circumstances in which I already happen to exist)
...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 seein
But as recently as the 1970s this still passed for educational material, which makes me a bit more sympathetic.
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've never been certain what people actually meant by 'male' and 'female', beyond the obvious physiological differences.
There are certain associations with 'outgoing' and 'introverted', 'dominant' and 'submissive', certain roles (women do regenerative work, men do profitable work), and certain specific behavioral tendencies (boys tend to play at group conflict, girls tend to play at social interaction), but the vast majority of cultural associations seem to be fairly arbitrary.
Beyond the associations is the idea that there are two categories, and it's very important that things be known to belong to one or the other. That's the part I cannot empathize with.
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.
This perception seems far too easily biased by knowing the gender of the author. Does anyone know of blinded studies on determining the gender of an author based on how they write male vs. female characters? Lacking any hard evidence I am extremely skeptical of the effect being all that large.
A few notable female science fiction/fantasy authors wrote under male or gender-neutral names. There may be data that could be found from reactions to their work, but I wouldn't know where to start looking.
Look up James Tiptree Jr. (the pseudonym used by sf writer Alice Sheldon) for a great example of a female sf author who "passed" not only as male, but as manly (in the opinion of many men who read her work) until her true identity was revealed.
James Tiptree Jr, aka Alice Sheldon.
Robert Silverberg: "It has been suggested to me that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing."
Yes, I do believe that Orthodox Jewish cultural hardwiring is showing.
Okay. I've never seen a male author write a female character with the same depth as Phedre no Delaunay, nor have I seen any male person display a feminine personality with the same sort of depth and internal integrity, nor have I seen any male person convincingly give the appearance of having thought out the nature of feminity to that depth. Likewise and in a mirror for women and men. I sometimes wish that certain women would appreciate that being a man is at least as complicated and hard to grasp and a lifetime's work to integrate, as the corresponding fact of feminity. I am skeptical that either sex can ever really model and predict the other's deep internal life, short of computer-assisted telepathy. These are different brain designs we're talking about here.
I sometimes wish that certain men would appreciate that not all men are like them--or at least, that not all men want to be like them--that the fact of masculinity is not necessarily something to integrate.
Data point: I am physically (and I am figuring, genotypically) female but have never felt that I have an "internal feminine identity" of any kind. I used to think the whole idea of such an internal identity was a socially-imposed myth. It was not until I encountered trans women / trans men who very, very clearly had an internal identification that strongly differed from their sex phenotype that it became evident to me that some people (and possibly most cisgendered persons, even) really and truly did have an internal gender "sense".
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.
Previously in series: Bayesians vs. Barbarians
Followup to: Of Gender and Rationality, Beware of Other-Optimizing
There is no such thing as masculine probability theory or feminine decision theory. In their pure form, the maths probably aren't even human. But the human practice of rationality—the arts associated with, for example, motivating yourself, or compensating factors applied to overcome your own biases—these things can in principle differ from gender to gender, or from person to person.
My attention was first drawn to this possibility of individual differences in optimization (in general) by thinking about rationality and gender (in particular). I've written rather more fiction than I've ever finished and published, including a story in which the main character, who happens to be the most rational person around, happens to be female. I experienced no particular difficulty in writing a female character who happened to be a rationalist. But she was not an obtrusive, explicit rationalist. She was not Jeffreyssai.
And it occurred to me that I could not imagine how to write Jeffreyssai as a woman; his way of teaching is paternal, not maternal. Even more, it occurred to me that in my writing there are women who are highly rational (on their way to other goals) but not women who are rationalists (as their primary, explicit role in the story).
It was at this point that I realized how much of my own take on rationality was specifically male, which hinted in turn that even more of it might be specifically Eliezer Yudkowsky.
A parenthetical, at this point, upon my own gender politics (lest anyone misinterpret me here). Of much of what passes for gender politics in present times, I have very little patience, as you might guess. But as recently as the 1970s this still passed for educational material, which makes me a bit more sympathetic.
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.
But it seems to me that, as an inheritance from the dark ages, the concept of "normal" is tilted more toward male than female. Men are not constantly made aware that they are men in the same way that women are made constantly aware that they are women. (Though there are contexts where explicit masculinity is suddenly a focus.) It's not fun for women if female is defined as abnormal, as special. And so some feminists direct their efforts into trying to collapse gender distinctions, the way you would try to collapse racial distinctions. Just have everyone be normal, part of the same group. But I don't think that's realistic for our species—sex is real, it's not just gender—and in any case I prefer to live in a culture with (at least) two genders.
So—rather than obliterate the difference between genders into a common normality—I think that men should become more aware of themselves as men, so that being female isn't any more special or unusual or abnormal or worthy-of-remark than being male. 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).
And yes, this does involve all sorts of dangers. Other cultures already have stronger male gender identities, and that's not always a good thing for the women in those cultures, if that culture already has an imbalance of power. But I'm not sure that the safe-seeming path of trying to obliterate as many distinctions as possible, is really available; men and women are different. Moreover, I like being a man free to express those forms of masculinity that I think are worthwhile, and I want to live in a world in which women are free to express whatever forms of feminity they think are worthwhile.
I'm saying all this, because I look over my accumulated essays and see that I am a distinctively male rationalist. Meanwhile, in another thread, a number of my fellow rationalists did go to some length to disidentify themselves as "female rationalists". I am sympathetic; from having been a child prodigy, I know how annoying it is to be celebrated as "having done so much while so young" rather than just "having done neat stuff in its own right regardless of age". I doubt that being singled out as an "amazing female rationalist" is any less annoying. But still: 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.
It's hard to pin down this sort of thing exactly, because my own brain knows only half the story. My understanding of what it means to be female is too much shallower than my understanding of what it means to be male, it doesn't ring as true. I will try, though, to give an example of what I mean, if you will excuse me another excursion...
The single author I know who strikes me as most feminine is Jacqueline Carey. When I read her book Kushiel's Avatar, it gave me a feeling of being overwhelmingly outmatched as an author. I want to write characters with that kind of incredible depth and I can't. She is too far above me as an author. I write stories with female characters, and I wish I could write female characters who were as female as Carey's female characters, and so long as I'm dreaming, I also want to sprout wings and fly.
Let me give you an example, drawn from Kushiel's Avatar. This book—as have so many other books—involves, among its other plot points, saving the world. A shallow understanding of sex and gender, built mostly around abstract evolutionary psychology—such as I myself possess—would suggest that "taking great risks to save your tribe" is likely to be a more male sort of motivation—the status payoff from success would represent a greater fitness benefit to a man, and in the ancestral environment, it is the men who defend their tribe, etcetera. But in fact, reading SF and fantasy books by female authors, I have not noticed any particularly lower incidence of world-saving behavior by female protagonists.
If you told me to write a strongly feminine character, then I, with my shallow understanding, might try to have her risk everything to save her husband. The protagonist of Kushiel's Avatar, Phèdre nó Delaunay, does realize that the world is in danger and it needs to be saved. But she is also, in the same process, trying to rescue a kidnapped young boy. Her own child? That's how I would have written the story, but no; she is trying to rescue someone else's child. The child of her own archenemy, in fact, but no less innocent for all that. When I look at it after the fact, I can see how this reveals a deeper feminity, not the stereotype but a step beyond and behind the stereotype, something that rings true. Phèdre loves her husband—and this is shown not by how she puts aside saving the world to save him, but by how much it hurts her to put him in harm's way to save the world. Her feminity is shown, not by how protective she is toward her own child, but toward someone else's child.
It is this depth of writing that makes me aware of how my own brain is only regurgitating stereotypes by comparison.
I do dare say that I have developed my art of rationality as thoroughly as Carey has developed her thesis on love. And so my art taps into parts of me that are male. I cultivate the desire to become stronger; I accept and acknowledge within myself the desire to outdo others; I have learned to take pride in my identity as someone who faces down impossible challenges. While my own brain only knows half the story, it does seem to me that this is noticeably more a theme of shōnen anime than shōjo anime. Watch Hikaru no Go for an idea of what I mean.
And this is the reason why I can't write Jeffreyssai as a woman—I would not be able to really understand her motivations; I don't understand what taps female drives on that deep a level. I can regurgitate stereotypes, but reading Jacqueline Carey has made me aware that my grasp is shallow; it would not ring true.
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.
(Perhaps a woman would phrase the above, not as "Bayes's Theorem is the high pure abstract thing that is not male or female", but rather, "Bayes's Theorem is something we can all agree on". Or maybe that's only my own brain regurgitating stereotypes.)
Someone's bound to suggest, "Take the male parts out, then! Don't describe rationality as 'the martial art of mind'." Well... I may put in some work to gender-purify my planned book on rationality. It would be too much effort to make my blog posts less like myself, in that dimension. But I also want to point out that I enjoyed reading Kushiel's Avatar—I was not blocked from appreciating it on account of the book being visibly female.
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. To say that the path is individualized, is not to say that we are shielded from criticism by a screen of privacy (a common idiom of modern Dark Side Epistemology). There is still a common thing we are all trying to find. We should be aware that others' shortest paths may not be the same as our own, but this is not the same as giving up the ability to judge or to share.
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.
Part of the sequence The Craft and the Community
Next post: "The Sin of Underconfidence"
Previous post: "Of Gender and Rationality"
