OK, look, literally a five-year-old would say "but what about my friends who are girls". That the author writes a 'superintelligence' who does not address this objection, and a main character who does not mention any, say, coworkers, board-game-playing rivals, or recreational hockey team members who are women, gives an overwhelming, and overwhelmingly unpleasant, impression that women are solely romance and sex objects. That's not only gross, it's a very common failure mode of "we're too smart to be sexist" male tech geeks. And, indeed, downthread you can see other commenters talking about how great a utopia this sounds like.
This story, as well as other gender-related issues within the Sequences, mean that despite them containing what seems to be to be a lot of value, I definitely would not recommend them to anyone else without large disclaimers, in a similar fashion to how Eliezer refers to Aumann.
This story irresistibly reads to me as the author endorsing or implicitly assuming:
1) There are exactly two genders, and everyone is a member of exactly one; 2) Everyone is heterosexual; 3) Humans have literally 0 use for members of the other gender other than romance.
1) There are exactly two genders, and everyone is a member of exactly one; 2) Everyone is heterosexual; 3) Humans have literally 0 use for members of the other gender other than romance.
As a general aesthetic rule, avoiding works of literature that do not contain explicit evidence of these facts doesn't sound particularly fun.
In particular, however, notice that we were told a story about a single protagonist who is an apparently-heterosexual male with an apparently-heterosexual female partner. The other characters aren't human. How exactly do you make it relevant to the plot that all of us homosexual males live in pleasure domes on the terrraformed shores of Titan?
Registered to post this.
I was linked to the Sequences and was going through them, mostly impressed, when I hit this post.
Eliezer's assessment that the human species can be clearly divided into exactly two sexes, and that dealing with the one you are not a member of is like dealing with an alien species, struck me in an extremely analogous way to how Robert Aumann's Orthodox Judaism struck Eliezer: a usually intelligent person buying wholeheartedly into a local cultural construct that, to my fairly simple observation and deduction, should be assigned very ...
Hello and goodbye.
I'm a 30 year old software engineer with a "traditional rationalist" science background, a lot of prior exposure to Singularitarian ideas like Kurzweil's, with a big network of other scientist friends since I'm a Caltech alum. It would be fair to describe me as a cryocrastinator. I was already an atheist and utilitarian. I found the Sequences through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
I thought it would be polite, and perhaps helpful to Less Wrong, to explain why I, despite being pretty squarely in the target demographi... (read more)
Thanks for writing this. It's true that LW has a record of being bad at talking about gender issues; this is a problem that has been recognized and commented on in the past. The standard response seems to have been to avoid gender issues whenever possible, which is unfortunate but maybe better than the alternative. But I would still like to comment on some of the specific things you brought up:
I think I know the post you're referring to, I didn'... (read more)