Although I agree it's odd, it does in fact seem that there is gender information transferred / inferred from grammatical gender.

From Lera Boroditsky's Edge piece

Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key" — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny," and "tiny." To describe a "bridge," which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said "beautiful," "elegant," "fragile," "peaceful," "pretty," and "slender," and the Spanish speakers said "big," "dangerous," "long," "strong," "sturdy," and "towering." This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers.

My understanding of the relevant research* is that it's a fairly consistent finding that masculine generics (a) do cause people to imagine men rather than women, and (b) that this can have negative effects ranging from impaired recall, comprehension, and self-esteem in women, to reducing female job applications. (Some of these negative effects have also been established for men from feminine generics as well, which favours using they/them/their rather than she/her as replacements.)

* There's an overview of some of this here (from p.26).

Isn't the main difference just that they have a bigger sample. (e.g. "4x" in the hardcore group).

Isn't the claim in 6 (that there is a planning-optimal choice, but no action-optimal choice) inconsistent with 4 (a choice that is planning optimal is also action optimal)?

Laying down rules for what counts as evidence that a body is considering alternatives, is mess[y]

Agreed. But I don't think that means that it's not possible to do so, or that there aren't clear cases on either side of the line. My previous formulation probably wasn't as clear as it should have been, but would the distinction seem more tenable to you if I said "possible in principle to observe physical representations of" instead of "possible in principle to physically extract"? I think the former better captures my intended meaning.

If there were a (potentially) observable physical process going on inside the pebble that contained representations of alternative paths available to it, and the utility assigned to them, then I think you could argue that the pebble is a CSA. But we have no evidence of that whatsoever. Those representations might exist in our minds once we decide to model the pebble in that way, but that isn't the same thing at all.

On the other hand, we do seem to have such evidence for e.g. chess-playing computers, and (while claims about what neuroimaging studies have identified are frequently overstated) we also seem to be gathering it for the human brain.

FWIW, the exact quote (from pp.13-14 of this article) is:

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise. [Emphasis in original]

Your paraphrase is snappier though (as well as being less ambiguous; it's hard to tell in the original whether Tukey intends the adjectives "vague" and "precise" to apply to the questions or the answers).

all of the above assumes a distinction I'm not convinced you've made

If it is possible in principle, to physically extract the alternatives/utility assignments etc., wouldn't that be sufficient to ground the CSA--non-CSA distinction, without running afoul of either current technological limitations, or the pebble-as-CSA problem? (Granted, we might not always know whether a given agent is really a CSA or not, but that doesn't seem to obviate the distinction itself.)

The Snoep paper Will linked to measured the correlation for the US, Denmark and the Netherlands (and found no significant correlation in the latter two).

The monopolist religion point is of course a good one. It would be interesting to see what the correlation looked like in relatively secular, yet non-monopolistic countries. (Not really sure what countries would qualify though.)

We already have some limited evidence that conventionally religious people are happier

But see Will Wilkinson on this too (arguing that this only really holds in the US, and speculating that it's really about "a good individual fit with prevailing cultural values" rather than religion per se).

Thanks for the explanation.

The idea is that when you are listening to music, you are handicapping yourself by taking some of the attention of the aural modality.

I'd heard something similar from a friend who majored in psychology, but they explained it in terms of verbal processing rather than auditory processing more generally, which is why (they said) music without words wasn't as bad.

I'm not sure whether it's related, but I've also been told by a number of musically-trained friends that they can't work with music at all, because they can't help but analyse it as they listen: for them, listening seems to automatically involve processing work that it doesn't (seem to) for me, precisely because I'm not capable of such processing. (This was part of the reason I was originally wondering about individual variation; the point you make at the end is really interesting in this regard too.)