How do you personally ground your abstractions?

[AshRyan]

Unfortunately, that's not because he's a man.  That's because he's really really smart!

The contrapositive would be that Betsy isn't really really smart, because she can't remember all of those things. That makes me wonder about the validity of your causal identification!

[AshRyan]

Perhaps attribute it to ignorance of sex with rationalists :-P

Rationalists have sex?

(Oh, right--they do, they just rationalize it as a means to some higher end, a la Plato, or his Christian followers who view sex as an "animalistic" and low bodily pleasure that must not be enjoyed but only endured for the sake of the duty of reproduction.)

[AshRyan]

I've found that girls retain details much better than guys (or me, at least) - my ex had the magical power to remember my exact words from a year earlier, and used this ability to great effect.

It was the exact opposite between me and my ex-girlfriend in my last relationship. I somehow had a great memory for things that she said and tended to use her exact words to great effect sometimes months later (perhaps more than I should have!).

I typically don't have a great memory for events and things from my personal life. But I think that's just because there's not a lot from my childhood that I found worth remembering. I think all of this has a lot to do with the idea that memory is a function of valuing. This is not to deny that some people just have better or worse memories than others (or a smaller or bigger "crow" than others, but I think that is basically a separate issue), but it is relevant.