Opinions expressed are my own and not endorsed by anyone.
Formerly @ ARC Evals aka METR
lukehmiles
Karma: 626
Like what exactly? That seems unlikely to me. I suppose we will have results from the ongoing gender transitions soon.
I only linked the U-shaped study to mention that someone had said something vaguely similar. Notice my words “people have posited a U-shaped curve...”. Study indeed seems like garbage. Perhaps i should’ve said that explicitly.
But it still doesn’t really prove the causality—lots of things presumably influence intelligence, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them influence T as well.
Yes so the experiment is that a million people are starting up in taking hormones/blockers now. I don’t think proper results are in but what I have myself observed seems like strong evidence that blocking T preserves or raises intelligence on the margin.
Is being a trans woman +20 IQ?
Pasteur had (also highly “counterfactual”) help I think! Ignaz Semmelweis worked in this maternity ward where the women & babies kept dying. The hospital had opened up some investigations over the years as to the cause of death but kept closing them with garbage explanations. He went somewhere else for a while and when he got back he noticed that the death numbers were down in his absence. Then he noticed his hands smelled like death after one of his routine autopsies and he was about to go plunge them in some poor mother! He had washed them but just with regular soap. If he put some bleach in the washwater then his hands didn’t stink. He connected the dots. He had killed hundreds of mothers & babies but wrote a book about it anyway and thereby popularized disinfection (and strongly suggested the root cause of disease).
Probably the main reason that germ theory took so long to work out is that the people with the right evidence were too guilty and ashamed to share it.
I wonder how much testosterone during puberty lowers IQ. Most of my high school math/CS friends seemed low-T and 3⁄4 of them transitioned since high school. They still seem smart as shit. The higher-T among us seem significantly brain damaged since high school (myself included). I wonder what the mechanism would be here...
Like 50% of my math/cs Twitter is trans women and another 40% is scrawny nerds and only like 9% big bald men.
I have a tremendously large skull (like XXL hats) - maybe that’s why I can still do some basic math after the testosterone brain poison during puberty? My voice is kind of high pitched for my body — related?? My big strong brother got the most brain damaged and my thin brother kept most of what he had.
Now I’m looking at tech billionaires. Mostly lo-T looking men. Elon Musk & Jeff Bezos were big & bald but seem to have pretty big skulls to compensate ¿
I guess this topic/theory is detested by cis women, trans women, lo-T men, and hi-T men all alike because it has something bad to say about all of them.
But here’s a recipe for success according to the theory:
be born with giant head (please don’t kill your mother, maybe suggest she get a C section)
delay your puberty until you’ve learned enough to get by, maybe age 22 or so
start slamming testosterone and amphetamines to get your workaholicism, betterThanEveryone complex, and drive for power
go to Turkey for a hair transplant
profit
Seems it is easier / more streamlined / more googlable now for a teenage male to get testosterone blockers than testosterone. Latter is very frowned upon — I guess because it is cheating in sports. Try googling eg “get testosterone prescription high school reddit -trans -ftm”. The results are exclusively people shaming the cheaters. Whereas of course googling “get testosterone blockers high school reddit” gives tons of love & support & practical advice.
Females however retain easy access to hormones via birth control.
How do cancer vaccines work?
Oh I have 0% success with any long conversations with an LLM about anything. I usually stick to one question and rephrase and reroll a number of times. I am no pro but I do get good utility out of LLMs for nebulous technical questions
I wonder how many recent trans people tried/considered doubling down on their sex (eg males taking more testosterone) instead first. Maybe (for some people) either end of gender spectrum is comfortable and being in the middle feels bad¿ Anybody know? Don’t want to ask my friends because this Q will certainly anger them
All games. Find where position is stored etc automatically i mean. It will certainly have failure cases. Easy to make a game that breaks it. The question is if an adversarial agent can easily break it in a regular (ie not adversarially chosen) game.
You may be right. Perhaps the way to view this idea is “yet another fuzzy-boundary RL helper technique” that works in a very different way and so will have different strengths and weaknesses than stuff like RLHF. So if one is doing the “serially apply all cheap tricks that somewhat reduce risk” approach then this can be yet another thing in your chain.
This is what I get for glossing over the math. RIP
Have you ever tried hiring someone or getting a job? Mostly lemons all around (apologies for the offense, jobseekers, i’m sure you’re not the lemon)
What about mediocre optimizers? Are they not worth fooling with?
What makes you say so? Seems like 25% chance possible to me. You can find where position is stored and watch for sudden changes. Same thing with score & inventory...
I do not propose one applies this method to a prepotence
I suspect that past therapists existed in your community and knew what you’re actually like so were better able to give you actual true information instead of having to digest only your bullshit and search for truth nuggets in it.
Furthermore, I suspect they didn’t lose their bread when they solve your problem! We have a major incentive issue in the current arrangement!
Andor is a word now. You’re welcome everybody. Celebrate with champagne andor ice cream.
Someone on a subreddit said “free testosterone” is what matters and they usually just measure uh “regular testosterone” in blood or something. I have no idea if that’s true. Know what those studies measured?
Wildly guessing here, but my intuition is that estrogen would have a greater impact on neuroticism than testosterone. Although I can’t even say which direction.