Seconded.

Makes sense. But I think the OP is using the term to mean something different than you(centrally math and puzzle solving)

Hmm, but don't puzzle games and math fit those criteria pretty well?(I guess if you're really trying hard at either there's more legitimate contact with reality?) What would you consider a central example of a nerdy interest?

I wonder if "brains" of the sort that are useful for math and programming are neccessarily all that helpful here. I think intuition-guided trial and error might work better. That's been my experience dealing with chronic-illness type stuff.

I think she meant he was looking for epistemic authority figures to defer to more broadly, even if it wasn't because he thought they were better at math than him.

Tangentially related: some advanced meditators report that their sense that perception has a center vanishes at a certain point along the meditative path, and this is associated with a reduction in suffering.

performance gap of trans women over women

The post is about the performance gap of trans women over men, not women.

I don't know enough about hormonal biology to guess a specific cause(some general factor of neoteny, perhaps??). It's much easier to infer that it's likely some third factor than to know exactly what third factor it is. I actually think most of the evidence in this very post supports the 3rd-factor position or is equivocal - testosterone acting as a nootropic is very weird if it makes you dumber, that men and women have equal IQs seems not to be true, the study cited to support a U-shaped relationship seems flimsy, that most of the ostensible damage occurs before adulthood seems in tension with your smarter friends transitioning after high school.

I buy that trans women are smart but I doubt "testosterone makes you dumber" is the explanation, more likely some 3rd factor raises IQ and lowers testosterone.