I am terrible at remembering names. This is bad in itself, but exacerbated by a few factors:

• I regularly have lengthy conversations with random strangers, and will be able to easily summarize the conversation afterwords, but will have no recollection of their name.

• I am fairly noticeable and memorable, so even people whose names I have no reason to know will know mine.

• I am not particularly good with faces either.

This isn't a memory problem, I can quote back conversations or remember long strings of numbers. I often cope by confessing to my weakness in a self-deprecating manner, or by simply not using names in direct address (it's generally not necessary in English), but these don't actually help me learn names. If I remembered to ask their name early on, I sometimes pause mid-conversation to ask "Are you still x?" but that is somewhat awkward and I'm wrong half the time anyway. The only time I can reliably remember is if they share the name of an immediate family member.This is bad enough that I'll sometimes be five or six classes into the semester and have to check the syllabus to figure out the professor's name, or will have been in multiple classes with someone and shared several conversations and still not know their name.

Perhaps I should further specify just what sort of spaces I'm clear and unclear on. (All "maybe"s, "probably"s refer to my own uncertainty, of course - for simplicity I'm doing writing this as if I hadn't read any of the cousin posts yet.) The examples listed here are whatever I think of, mostly relevant ones but not all - I don't think there's a zoo anywhere around here and I haven't been to one in quite some time, but the example occurred to me while I was writing this so I threw it in. I expect I'm right about the things I'm certain of but should that not be the case corrections would be appreciated!

1. Definitely OK to approach people: "Private public spaces" - anywhere where a person you don't know can be assumed to be a friend of a friend - small parties, common rooms in dorms or co-op houses

2. OK to join existing conversations, maybe not OK to approach people initially: "Purposed public spaces" - anywhere where a person you don't know can be assumed to share a common interest - a common room in a school department building, e.g. Game stores probably fit here too. Also probably competitions of any sort.

3. Probably OK but currently avoided by me: Outside - on the street, on the quad, in the park. Here the location doesn't let you infer much of anything. (Unless something unusual is occurring, then clearly OK as people gather around it.)

4. ???: Fast-food places or food courts. Non-quiet spaces where people go to get work done (but which are too general to fall under #2.) Zoos, museums, other similar places. Bookstores.

5. Probably not OK: Libraries.

6. Definitely not OK: Anywhere where you shouldn't be talking in the first place. Most restaurants.

Again, thanks! The sibling posts have already clarified things some.

The SAT doesn't seem to be calibrated to make sure average scores are the same for math, at least. At least as late as 2006, there's still a significant gender gap.

Does anyone know of a good graph that shows this? I've seen several (none citing sources) that draw the crossover in quite different places. So I'm not sure what the gender ratio is at, say, IQ 130.

And after skimming the paper, the only thing I could find in response to your point is:

Coercion detection. Since our aim is to prevent users from effectively transmitting the ability to authenticate to others, there remains an attack where an adversary coerces a user to authenticate while they are under adversary control. It is possible to reduce the effectiveness of this technique if the system could detect if the user is under duress. Some behaviors such as timed responses to stimuli may detectably change when the user is under duress. Alternately, we might imagine other modes of detection of duress, including video monitoring, voice stress detection, and skin conductance monitoring [8, 16, 1]. The idea here would be to detect by out-of-band techniques the effects of coercion. Together with in-band detection of altered performance, we may be able to reliably detect coerced users.

And it's exasperating to see highly intelligent men make the rookie mistake of saying "women are stupid" or "most women are stupid" because they happen to be high-IQ. There's an obvious selection bias - intelligent men probably have intelligent male friends but only average female acquaintances - because they seek out the women for sex, not conversation.

Another possible explanation comes to mind: people with high IQs consider the "stupid" borderline to be significantly above 100 IQ. Then if they associate equally with men and women, the women will more often be stupid; and if they associate preferentially with clever people, there will be fewer women.

(This doesn't contradict selection bias. Both effects could be at play.)

"All men are created equal" is false insofar as looking at the atom configurations: every human is unique (by Quantum Indistinguishability, any non-unique humans are the same human). On the other hand it is probably true insofar as the CEV Morality Computation says.

"The lottery is a waste of hope" is true by an expected capital gain calculation (net loss) and putting mental energy into something that is a net loss is worse by utilitarianism than something that is a net gain (working hard and hoping you get rich) because at the very least, having money allows you to donate more to charity.

"Religious people are intolerant," largely depends on the religion how much of the scripture is "boo for unbelievers," but it seems to almost always incite ingroup-outgroup dichotomies in the psychology of the believers, and that I think is pretty much what intolerance springs from.

"Government is not the solution; government is the problem" is false, because humans generally need more than 'fairness' to avoid defection on the iterated prisoners dilemma. Many don't realise that bureaucracy is fair, if often slow and bloated. A real chance of punishment decided by fair trial is very effective at deterring defectors.

"George Washington was a better president than James Buchanan," depends solely on the criterion. Peoples opinion? Historical attitude? GDP growth rates? Precentage of votes won at election? Your own boo/yay rating? Mix and match as you like.

"The economy is doing worse today than it was ten years ago," depends on whether you look at GDP growth or GDP, global economic crisis means lower growth, but we are still richer than ten years ago.

"God exists," very unlikely, courtesy of Solomonoff Induction.

"One impulse from a vernal wood can teach you more of man, of moral evil, and of good than all the sages can," bluh? Is this some sort of pop culture reference? Depends on what vernal wood is: if it is something akin to the Akashic record granting omniscience, then it is true. If it is anything else, probably not.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge," false, the more knowledge you have, the more your lawful creativity can search, the better your imagination, the better you can use what you have gained with the eleventh virtue. Both are roughly equally important.

"Rationalists should win," mathematical tautology. Perfectly rational bayesian expected utility maximizers do just that. As humans, it is a good heuristic to avoid privileged rituals of thought.

I had to face the fact that mere biology may have systematically biased my half of the population against greatness. And it hurt. I had to fight the urge to redefine intelligence and/or greatness to assuage the pain.

Consciously keeping your identity small and thus not identifying with everyone who happens to have the same internal plumbing might be helpful there.

I further learned that my brain was modular, and the bits of me that I choose to call "I" don't constitute everything. My own brain could sabotage the values and ideals and that "I" hold so dearly. For a long time I struggled with the idea that everything I believed in and loved was fake, because I couldn't force my body to actually act accordingly. Did I value human life? Why wasn't I doing everything I possibly could to save lives, all the time? Did I value freedom and autonomy and gender equality? Why could I not help sometimes being attracted to domineering jerks?

It took me a while to accept that the newly-evolved, conscious, abstractly-reasoning, self-reflecting "I" simply did not have the firepower to bully ancient and powerful urges into submission. It took me a while to accept that my values were not lies simply because my monkey brain sometimes contradicted them. The "I" in my brain does not have as much power as she would like; that does not mean she doesn't exist.

I've been through this kind of thing before, and Less Wrong did nothing for me in this respect (although Less Wrong is awesome for many other reasons). Reading Ayn Rand on the other hand made all the difference in the world in this respect, and changed my life.

I know that it's not particularly rational to feel more affiliation with women than men, but I do. It's one of the things my monkey brain does that I decided to just acknowledge rather than constantly fight. It's helped me have a certain kind of peace about average IQ differentials. The pain I described in the parent has mellowed. Still, I have to face the fact that if I want to major in, say, applied math, chances are I might be lonely or below-average or both. I wish I had the inner confidence to care about self-improvement more than competition, but as yet I don't.

ETA: I characterize "idealism" as a hope for the future more than a belief about the present.