I think defining psychological abuse as that which is done passively (behind someone's back, through subtly in a conversation, etc.) and physical abuse as that which is done actively (aggressive contact, screaming, heated insults) would suffice.
I can see how asking, "... and by which sex?" can privilege the hypothesis that the most common type of abuse would be used by one sex more than the other. I think fixing it to saying, "... and by what sex?" solves it, though; what other answers could the data reflect besides male, female, DSD (intersex), or some combination of the three?
I meant something like this: Imagine that there is a thing T that you want to study. Correlation between T and X is 0.9. Correlation between T and Y is 0.6. Let's assume that there are no other known factors besides X and Y which would correlate significantly with T.
If you start your research by asking (if you are primed to ask) "is there a significant correlation between T and Y?", your research will continue like this "yes, we have measured that correlation between T and Y is 0.6, end of story" and you will publish this. There is a ri...
The other day, someone did something I didn't expect. It was something many people have done before; something that I thought of as very normal, but that I in no way understood and had not predicted.
As I said, this had happened many time before, so I wrote it off as "me not understanding people" or "people are weird" for a second, like I usually do, before realizing that "bad at" really means "lacking basic knowledge", which I had never realized before.
And then I thought "I should ask someone who is different from me why people do that, and eventually someone will have an answer."
But many people will have many more questions like this. So, what have you observed people doing time and time again, but never understood? Or something that you only understood after a long time or asking someone about it?
And can Less Wrong tell us, not necessarily why (I for one can make up evolutionary psychology fairy tales all day if I want) but what conscious thought process occurs behind these events?