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.