The evolutionary explanation I thought was standard for sex differences in variability is that males (of most species) face way more potential upside—i.e. they can potentially mate with a whole lot of different females and have far more kids than any single female can. Females typically have a much lower ceiling on kid-count, so they face less potential fitness upside from high-variance strategies.
I liked the part of this post about X-inactivation a lot, even though it turned out wrong. It would be really interesting if most of the variability difference across sex turned out to share one simple mechanistic basis, though that doesn’t seem very likely on my current models of the underlying selection pressures.
David tries to punt things to LLMs at least once a day on average when we’re working. So far, they continue to work best when they can act as Google Search Plus Plus—i.e. when there’s some already-known fact relevant to what we’re doing, and they surface that fact to us. Occasionally they can complete a conceptually-simple-but-technically-dense proof by combining a few such facts, and very often they can write some useful code by combining a few already-known pieces.
For anything novel, they remain almost always useless in our experience; they string together words which sound relevant but the semantics don’t make any sense.