rationalists discuss: does testosterone make you stupid?
2 years ago by sc_griffith to c/sneerclub
saw this posted by @sailor_sega_saturn at https://awful.systems/comment/3871697
op has a simple question:
Why are trans women so intellectually successful? They seem to be overrepresented 5-100x in eg cybersecurity twitter, mathy AI alignment, non-scam crypto twitter, math PhD programs, etc.
and a skull shaped answer:
My theory is that too much testosterone makes you dumber, particularly during adolescence. You need a little for your cells & organs to work, but past a certain point it does more harm than good (for intelligence specifically — motivation & happiness etc aside). Apparently this is not a new theory and people have posited a U-shaped curve for how testosterone affects IQ. The key (sad) claim is that the vast majority of men are on the too-much-T side of the curve. Maybe trans women get the best of both worlds intellectually — a male skull with female chemistry.
our researcher sets about fending off possible objections:
Why didn't evolution give females big heads if it would make them all geniuses? Another anecdote. My sister has a big head. She was valedictorian in high school I think. She hit her head one day in middle school during gym class by running into a wall. She also fell off a bike and hit her head in high school. I have never hit my head and I think the main reason is that my arms are strong enough to catch myself. So maybe the big headed women would-be-ancestors fell and hit their heads.
cites chatgpt for this:
Do trans men get the worst of both worlds intellectually — female skulls and male chemistry? Yes.
demonstrates the exceptional explanatory power of his hypothesis:
Why are really good tech founders so rare? You have to have very high power-seeking/initiative (T) and very high IQ. This is an incredibly rare combination because the testosterone murders your IQ. You have to be a genius before puberty hits. Helps if your brain/head is giant. Look at eg Elon Musk & Jeff Bezos.
describes the potential impact of his research:
I suspect that some simple electrical stimulation in the womb could make infant females' skulls bigger and result in lots of genius women. If they don't fall off their bikes and hit their heads.
all time great footnotes:
Thought of some more potential evidence. The smartest cis women I've known almost all had lack of butt (women's most visible muscle -- so low testosterone?)
Later that day: i asked my sister. She said all her smart friends (men and women) lack butts too! She and I both have the butt, so we are speaking against our own kind here.
a commenter has an epistemically rigorous counterpoint:
I don't understand why you need to invoke testosterone. Transgender brain is special, for example, transgender women have immunity to visual illusions.
another commenter objects to that, based on a deep dive into the literature:
Can you source this claim? I've never heard it and GPT-4 says it has no scientific basis.
"well admittedly I made it up, but it seems plausible"
Whoops, it's really looks like I imagined this claim to be backed more than by one SSC post. In my defense I say that this poll covered really existing thing like abnormal illusions processing in schizophrenics (see "Systematic review of visual illusions schizophrenia" Costa et al., 2023) and I think it's overall plausible.
archive: https://web.archive.org/...
honestly I just couldn't bring myself to copy paste that. easily the worst part
EDIT: have they considered offering a huge cash prize to anyone who proves them wrong
EDIT: have they considered offering a huge cash prize to anyone who proves them wrong
My mind's saying they aren't gonna give away the money no matter what, my heart wants to see transgirls bully these nerds mercilessly
trans men have high rates of suicide too
The ability of transphobes to pretend like trans men don't exist never ceases to baffle me. They absolutely hate that trans men disprove half of their claims by just existing, so they pretend they just aren't real I guess?
every single bathroom bill requires that the most masc, bearded trans guys legally have to use the women's toilets because they were AFAB. It has never not boggled my mind.
(Except that what it actually means, obviously, is that those trans guys are prohibited from peeing and perforce existing in public, because anywhere with bathroom bills is somewhere where a trans guy is sure as hell putting his life at risk by using the women's toilets. Goddammit.)
(Edited to add: I know this is obvious to everyone. But it's still enraging.)
Why did evolution give most males so much testosterone instead of making low-T nerds
Dude needs to crack open a biology textbook and read up on the rest of the animal kingdom. The Winestein-ian attempts to explain every facet of human behavior and physiology in terms of it helping humans survive is just dead wrong.
it's the opposite, he says his ass being big indicates he is stupid. zero points to you for scientific rigor my friend
it's risk reward. you can pull bigger claims out but you have to pull harder. very interesting from an evolutionary perspective... can recommend ssc, colin wright, etc articles about this (and ofc ask chatgpt)
Nick Land claimed that trans women were the Jews of gender in response to some technofascist commenting about average trans femme IQ. I wonder if this idea is just in the air amongst LessWrongites and so you have many instances of parallel evolution or whether there was some actual direct adoption. I also half remember an AI-booster claiming that estradiol might be a life extension drug.
Someone really should do a dissertation about gender and race in the TESCREAL subculture. The results would be fascinating.
…ew
The lesswrong community never quite manages to live up to its name.
inorite, it's legit amazing
like there's 2 mangas about being a receptionist in a magical guild
"you can be anything you want in another world, why not settle for being an office lady like IRL"
Reminds me of that dude who's obsessed with opera's fuck huge head and is convinced that she's a modern day Yakub because of it.
this is so fucking rational
By the way, are there any archive services besides internet archive? They've excluded this domain and idk how I feel about giving this dude direct traffic
archive.ph is usually my go-to (and I’m hoping they don’t secretly suck). here’s their archive for that page
(and I’m hoping they don’t secretly suck)
relatable mood
That image may be one of the funniest things I've read in my entire life
Yakub as in the evil scientist who created the white devil in the Nation Of Islam mythology?
I think it's closer to the arr blockedandreported brand of race science. I took a glance at Koanic soul and he seems spiritually aroused by whitness, seems a lil different.
Y'know, kind of like a Caroline Ellison type where they're definitely and severely into scientific racism, but less venomous than a blue check.
Are these supposed to be hyper-rationalists, because what the actual fuck? "Perhaps women evolved smaller heads because the clumsy dears kept bonking big ones on rocks."
"Why are good tech founders like Bezos so rare?" Is it because you have to have combination mid IQ, the sociopathy to take exploit millions of plebs, and wealthy parents funding you during the gold rush of moving basic-as-fuck commerce ideas to the internet? "No, it must be some manifest destiny magic that allows high T to mix with high IQ without them canceling each other out."
So the rationalists* got this weird idea that good thinkers can deduce everything from first principles. Not just from experiments or literature review or looking at evidence, but by thinking real hard and LARPing at bayesian statistics.
Thought leader Yudkowsky once wrote that a super-intelligence** could deduce general relativity from three photos of a falling apple. They call themselves the cult of Bayes. There's lots of talk about epistimology, and updating priors after seeing evidence reading eachother's blog posts.
In short: you are looking into the abyss. Do take care.
* Self-named
** A god AI; they want to invent a nice one and avoid an evil one.
It turns out if you reframe "embracing cognitive bias" as "bayesian inference," you can write whole-ass pseudo-academic essays about whatever you want to be true and somehow have people take you seriously.
"embracing cognitive bias" in the "hell yeah I'm down for quadrupling stakes! BRING OUT THE ADDERALL*" sense
(* otherwhere it'd be blackjack, hookers, and blow. but these nerds would get thrown out of such smokey rooms fairly immediately - if they ever even got in)
Oh my god, I can't stop laughing out loud at "women evolved small heads because they kept falling over and hitting their big heads on rocks," based on the fact that his sister hit her head when she was younger. What's his explanation for why men didn't do this then?? Absolutely next-level moon logic I love it so much
places on twitter you had no idea about because they don't exist
it's an empty paper bag left in an empty parking garage
His initial premise is so damned stupid that there's probably nothing to salvage so I'm not reading it. He gives zero credence to the idea that whatever metric he grabbed for men should be a linear correlation to IQ might... not be? Then ploughs on with an explanation that allows him to do Trans discourse. Fuck off with that.
Here's an alternate theory: you only know about out trans folks. Trans folks will only come out if they think they're likely to not be beaten to death. Therefore you will see more trans folks at IT jobs and fewer at construction sites, because IT workers sit in chairs all day and many couldn't beat someone to death even if they tried. Plus having lots of money helps insulate you from the risk of ending up living on the fucking street. Seriously if this guy just thought about it for like ten seconds he'd realize his data was skewed.
Also, anyone who's ever experienced being a teenage boy probably understands exactly how dumb Testosterone makes you firsthand, complete with specific stories.
Discussed earlier in this thread.
Dear lord.
You have to be a genius before puberty hits. ... Look at eg Elon Musk & Jeff Bezos.
lmao
I suspect that some simple electrical stimulation in the womb could make infant females’ skulls bigger and result in lots of genius women. If they don’t fall off their bikes and hit their heads.
???
Cartoon mad scientist level science going on here
@awful.systems
Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
See our twin at Reddit
go to feed...
@awful.systems
Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
See our twin at Reddit
go to feed...
i started to read and just about choked when i got here
congrats on the most baffling, condescending explanation for the epidemic of suicidality among trans women. silly transes, it's not the persistent and systemic transphobia that makes you want to kill yourself, it's actually the fact that you have lower testosterone now. it's just science! wait what? "trans men have high rates of suicide too"? nah probably not
it was gross enough to watch this person try to prop up dead trans people to prove their point but even more bizarre to watch them do the same for their own older brother. not gonna even comment on the retroactive diagnoses based on "had small muscles" and "seemed suicidal to me"
and later in the footnotes
"nobody proved me wrong yet" is peak crank
save