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.
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 negative log odds.
I’ve assigned a considerably lower weighting to my Bayesian updates from the Sequences since. I very nearly stopped reading but realized that wasn’t the right plan (since, after all, Aumann’s agreement theorem is still true).