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.

I think using the universal prior again is more natural. It's simpler to use the same complexity metric for everything; it's more consistent with Solomonoff induction, in that the weight assigned by Solomonoff induction to a given (world, claw) pair would be approximately the sum of their Kolmogorov complexities; and the universal prior dominates the inverse square measure but the converse doesn't hold.

If you want to pick out locations within some particular computation, you can just use the universal prior again, applied to indices to parts of the computation.

If you're running on the non-time-penalized solomonoff prior[...]a bunch of things break including anthropic probabilities and expected utility calculations

This isn't true, you can get perfectly fine probabilities and expected utilities from ordinary Solmonoff induction(barring computability issues, ofc). The key here is that SI is defined in terms of a prefix-free UTM whose set of valid programs forms a prefix-free code, which automatically grants probabilities adding up to less than 1, etc. This issue is often glossed over in popular accounts.

certain aspects of MWI theory (like how you actually get the Born probabilities) are unresolved

You can add the Born probabilities in with minimal additional Kolmogorov complexity, simply stipulate that worlds with a given amplitude have probabilities given by the Born rule(this does admittedly weaken the "randomness emerges from indexical uncertainty" aspect...)

Having briefly looked into complexity science myself, I came to similar conclusions -- mostly a random hodgepodge of various fields in a sort of impressionistic tableau, plus an unsystematic attempt at studying questions of agency and self-reference.

That is, I think humans generally (though not always) attempt to avoid death when credibly threatened, even when they're involved in a secret conspiracy to overthrow the government.

This seems like a misleading comparison, because human conspiracies usually don't try to convince the government that they're perfectly obedient slaves even unto death, because everyone already knows that humans aren't actually like that. If we imagine a human conspiracy where there is some sort of widespread deception like this, it seems more plausible that they would try to continue to be deceptive even in the face of death(like, maybe, uh, some group of people are pretending to be fervently religious and have no fear of death, or something)