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?