I'm ok with the general emotional tone (lack of tone?) here. I think I read the style of discussion as "we're all here to be smart at each other, and we respect each other for being able to play".
However, the gender issues have been beyond tiresome. My default is to assume that men and women are pretty similar. LW has been the first place which has given me the impression that men and women are opposed groups. I still think they're pretty similar. The will to power is a shared trait even if it leads to conflict between opposed interests.
LW was the first place I've been where women caring about their own interests is viewed as a weird inimical trait which it's only reasonable to subvert, and I'm talking about PUA.
I wish I could find the link, but I remember telling someone he'd left women out of his utilitarian calculations. He took it well, but I wish it hadn't been my job to figure it out and find a polite way to say it.
Remember that motivational video Eliezer linked to? One of the lines toward the end was "If she puts you in the friend zone, put her in the rape zone." I can't imagine Eliezer saying that himself, and I expect he was only noticing and making u...
Remember that motivational video Eliezer linked to? One of the lines toward the end was "If she puts you in the friend zone, put her in the rape zone." I can't imagine Eliezer saying that himself, and I expect he was only noticing and making use of the go for it and ignore your own pain slogans-- but I'm still shocked and angry that it's possible to not notice something like that.
My apologies for that! You're correct that I didn't notice that on a different level than, say, the parts about killing your friends if they don't believe in you or whatever else was in the Courage Wolf montage. I expect I made a 'bleah' face at that and some other screens which demonstrated concepts exceptionally less savory than 'Courage', but failed to mark it as something requiring a trigger warning. I think this was before I'd even heard of the concept of a "trigger warning", which I first got to hear about after writing Ch. 7 of HPMOR.
Generally speaking, I've noticed that mentioning rape tends to mind-kill people on the Internet much more than mentioning murder. I hypothesize this is due to the fact that many more people are actually raped than murdered.
And that people who have been raped are much (infinitely?) more likely to go one to participate in discussions on rape than people who have been murdered are likely to participate in discussions on murder. Also, that rape is more likely to bring in gender politics.
I think there's been a cultural shift-- mentions of rape are taken a lot more seriously than they were maybe 20 years ago. (I'm sure of the shift, and less sure of the time scale.)
I believe part of it has been a feminist effort to get rape of women by men taken seriously which has started to get rape of men by men taken seriously. Rape by women is barely on the horizon so far.
PTSD being recognized as a real thing has made a major contribution-- it meant that people could no longer say that rape is something which should just be gotten over. Another piece is an effort to make being raped not be a major status-lowering event, which made people more likely to talk about it.
As for comparison to murder, I've seen relatives of murdered people complain that murder jokes are still socially acceptable.
As far as I can tell, horrific events can be used as jokes when they aren't vividly imagined, and whether something you haven't experienced is vividly imagined is strongly affected by whether the people around you encourage you to imagine it or not.
I've seen relatives of murdered people complain that murder jokes are still socially acceptable.
That's the subject of the first couple minutes of This American Life episode 342.
[A]t the Parents of Murdered Children Conference, they have [a presentation on] murder mystery dinners. And the way that they always do it is they say, let's just pretend that you were going to have a rape mystery dinner and you were going to show up and the rule of the game was going to be that someone's been raped, and we're all going to find the rapist. That wouldn't go over. Nobody would do it. Everybody would feel that that was deeply distasteful.
As far as I can tell, horrific events can be used as jokes when they aren't vividly imagined, and whether something you haven't experienced is vividly imagined is strongly affected by whether the people around you encourage you to imagine it or not.
I'm not sure about that. It seems like in places and times where horrific events are much more common, people take an almost gallows humor attitude towards the whole thing (at least the violence part). Things like PTSD seem to happen when people in cultures where horrific events are rare temporarily get exposed to them.
Apology accepted. I hadn't thought about it that way, but I can see how you could have filed it under "generic hyperbolic obnoxious".
At the time, I was just too tired of discussing gender issues to be more direct about that part of the video.
Looking at the discussion a year and a half later, I was somewhat amazed at the range of reactions to the video. Apropo of a recent facebook discussion about the found cat and lotteries, there might be a clue about why people use imprecise hyperbolic language so much-- it's more likely to lead to action. I've also noticed that it doesn't necessarily feel accurate to describe strong emotions in outside view accurate language.
There ought to be something intelligent and abstract to say about filtering mechanism conflicts, but I can't think of what it might be right now. E.g., a mention once came up of os-tans on HN, someone said "What's an os-tan?", I posted a link to a page of OS-tans, and then replies complained that the page was NSFW and needed a warning. I was like "What? All those os-tans are totally safe for work, I checked". Turns out there was a big ol' pornographic ad at the top of the page which my eyes had probably literally skipped over, as in just never saccaded there.
That Courage Wolf video probably has a pretty different impact depending on whether or not you automatically skip over and mostly don't even notice all the bad parts.
And in another ten years a naked person walking down the street will be invisible.
Turns out there was a big ol' pornographic ad at the top of the page which my eyes had probably literally skipped over
Sometimes I fail to include NSFW tags because I use an adblocker, so NSFW ads don't appear for me.
LW was the first place I've been where women caring about their own interests is viewed as a weird inimical trait which it's only reasonable to subvert, and I'm talking about PUA.
It seems like in the best case, PUA would be kind of like makeup. Lots of male attraction cues are visual, so they can be gamed when women wear makeup, do their hair, or wear an attractive outfit. Lots of female attraction cues are behavioral, so they can be gamed by acting or becoming more confident and interesting.
As one Metafilter user put it:
If you want to understand the appeal of the PUAs, you have to remember that it does work. Mixed in with the cod psychology and jargon are some boring but sensible tips. I would say the big four are:
- Approach lots of women
- Act confident
- Have entertaining things to say
- Dress and groom well
There are quite a few guys who haven't really practiced those four things, which do take a bit of effort and experience. So when they start to follow the PUA movement, they absorb the nonsense, start doing the sensible, practical things, and find that they're getting a whole lot more sex. So they conclude that the nonsense is absolutely true.
Do you have ethical problems ...
I'm actually at the point when I think it is impossible to give men useful advice to improve their sex lives and relationships because of the social dynamics that arise in nearly all societies. Actually good advice aiming to optimize the life outcomes of the men who are given it has never been discussed in public spaces and considered reputable.
Same can naturally be said of advice for women. I think most modern dating advice both for men and women is anti-knowledge in that the more of it you follow the more miserable you will end up being. I would say follow your instincts but that doesn't work either in our society since they are broken.
Advice about how to look better seems trivially useful and reputable... Overall, I find your claim that the intersection of palatable dating advice and useful dating advice is empty extremely implausible. What else would Clarisse Thorn's "ethical PUA advice" be?
At the very least there should be some reasonably effective advice that's only minimally unpalatable or whatever, like become a really good guitarist and impress girls with your guitar skillz.
Regarding PUA and evolutionary psychology: I don't see how a self-selected population that's under the influence of alcohol, and has been living with all kinds of weird modern norms and technology, has all that much in common with the EEA.
- Approach lots of women
- Act confident
- Have entertaining things to say
- Dress and groom well
...
If all PUA said was those 4 things, it wouldn't be interesting or controversial
This sounds reasonable until you actually think about the four points mentioned in Near mode. Consider:
What does approaching lots of women actually look like if done in a logistically sound way? How does this relate to social norms? How does this relate to how feminists would like social norms to be?
Observe what actually confident humans do to signal their confidence. Just do.
Observe what is actually considered entertaining in a club envrionment that most PUA is designed to work in.
You know most of the things considered disreputable that PUAs advocate are precisely the result of first observing how points one to three actually work in our society and then optimizing to mimic this.
Only dressing and grooming well is probably not inherently controversial and even then pick up artists are mocked for their attempts to reverse engineer fashion that signals what they want to signal.
My default is to assume that men and women are pretty similar.
How do you reconcile this view with the way questions of tone have become entangled with gender issues in the very thread?
I was surprised at how strongly some people (probably mostly women) are uncomfortable with the tone here, so I have a lot to update.
I don't like emoticons much-- I don't hate people who use them, but I use emoticons very rarely, and I'm not comfortable with them. I still find it hard to believe that if people do something a lot, there's a reasonable chance (if they aren't being paid) that they like it a lot, even though I can't imagine liking whatever it is.
I don't know what proportion of people are apt to interpret lack of overt friendliness as dislike, nor what the gender split is.
In the spirit of exploration, I took a look at Ravelry, a major knitting and crocheting blog. I haven't found major discussions there yet. I'm interested in examples of blogs with different emotional tones/courtesy rules/gender balances.
Now that I think about it, blogs that are mostly women may be more likely to have overt statements of strong friendship and support. I believe that sort of effusiveness is partly cul...
Is this comment a satire?
In any case, the remark about the von Neumann-Morgenstern theorem is just wrong.
The general idea that women not being attracted to men who are attracted to them is just some arbitrary wrongness in the universe that any sensible man should try to get the women to ignore.
Fixing the man (as opposed to confusing the woman) seems like a good intervention, if it's possible to a sufficient extent. The difficulty is that behavior and appearance are important aspects of a person, so fixing someone might involve fixing their behavior and appearance, which will be superficially similar to changing their behavior and appearance with the goal of confusion/deception. This apparently inescapable superficial similarity opens benevolent self-improvement in this area to the charge of deception, and it looks like it's often hard for both sides to avoid mixing up the categories.
I don't think I've seen that on LW, but I also haven't looked for it.
The version of the argument I'm familiar with boils down to 'regression to the mean.' Because tests provide imperfect estimates of the true ability, our final posterior is a combination of the prior (i.e. population ability distribution) and the new evidence.
Suppose someone scores 600 on a test whose mean is 500, and the test scores and underlying ability are normally distributed. Our prior belief that someone's true ability is 590 is higher than our prior belief that their true ability is 600, which is higher than our prior belief that their true ability is 610, because the normal distribution is decreasing as you move away from the mean. If the test was off by 10, then it's more likely to overestimate than underestimate. That is, our posterior is that it's more likely that their real ability is 590 than 610. (Assuming it's as easy to be positively lucky as negatively lucky, which is questionable.)
The same happens in the reverse direction: abnormally low scores are more likely to underestimate than overestimate the true ability (again, assuming it's equally easy for luck to push up and down). Depending on the pre...
So the better a woman does, the less you believe she can actually do it.
Not quite. (Saving assumptions for the end of the comment.) If a female got a 499 on the Math SAT, then my estimate of her real score is centered on 499. If she scores a 532, then my estimate is centered on 530; a 600, 593; an 800, 780. A 20 point penalty is bigger than a 7 point penalty, but 780 is bigger than 593, so if by "it" you mean "math" that's not the right way to look at it, but if by "it" you mean "that particular score" then yes.
Note that this should also be done to male scores, with the appropriate means and standard deviations. (The std difference was smaller than I remembered it being, so the mean effect will probably dominate.) Males scoring 499, 532, 600, and 800 would be estimated as actually getting 501, 532, 596, and 784. So at the 800 level, the relative penalty for being female would only be 4 points, not the 20 it first appears to be.
Note that I'm pretending that the score is from 2012, the SAT is normally distributed with mean and variances reported here, the standard measurement error is 30, and I'm multiplying Gaussian distributions as discus...
From what I've read, women are apt to do more housework and childcare than their spouses, so there might be a matter of total work hours-- or that one might be balanced out by men taking jobs with longer commutes.
I find it interesting that you site evidence that is exactly what traditionalist theories of gender would predict, and not even mention them as a possible explanation.
So the better a woman does, the less you believe she can actually do it.
Yes; "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but ordinary claims require only ordinary evidence." If a random person tells me that they are a Rhodes Scholar and a certified genius, I will be more skeptical than if they told me they merely went to Harvard, and more skeptical of that than if they told me they went to community college. And at some level of 'better' I will stop believing them entirely.
At what point do you update your prior about what women can do?
To go back to the multilevel model framework: a single high data point/group will be pulled back down to the mean of the population data points/group (how much will depend on the quality of the test), while the combined mean will slightly increase.
However, this increase may be extremely small, as makes sense. If you know from the official SAT statistics that 3 million women took the SAT last year and scored an average of 1200 (or whatever a medium score looks like these days, they keep changing the test), then that's an extremely informative number which will be hard to change since you already know of how millions of women have done in the past: so whatever you learn from a single random woman scoring 800 this year will be diluted like 1 in 3 million...
We already rarely discuss politics, so would it be terrible to also discuss sex/gender issues as little as possible?
Discussing politics is not productive. The political opinions held by most people don't affect actual politics. Discussing politics would be a waste of time even if it wasn't mindkilling. I make a point of never reading local political news and not knowing anything about my country's politics, as a matter of epistemical hygiene.
Gender relations and understanding, on the other hand, are important in everyone's lives. I can't ignore gender like I do politics, and I wouldn't want to. On the contrary, I want to become rational and virtuous about gender.
So I very much want to have discussions about gender, unless the consensus is that our rationality is too weak and we can't discuss this subject without causing net harm (or net harm to women, etc).
From the complaints (and not just here and now) it seems obvious that there is a problem we really should solve.
This said, it seems to me that people are complaining about multiple things. I think they should be analyzed separately. Maybe not all of them are a problem, or maybe the same solution would not work for all of them. Even if they have similar patern "reading A makes person X unhappy", it is still not the same situation. (For a trivial example, some people are unhappy when they read about atheism. While we should not offend religious people unnecessarily, there is only so far we can go, and even then some people will remain offended.) Specifically, from the article and also this linked comment, women complain when men do the following:
My opinions on these three topics:
1) There are two important aspects of talking about "getting women"; I guess one of them is more obvious for men and one for women, so I will write both explicitly.
a) For a typical heterosexual man, "getting women" is an important part of his utility function; perhaps so important that talking about instrumental rationality without mentioning this feels dishonest. There are tons of low-hanging fruit here (the whole PUA industry is about that); ignoring this topic would be like ignoring the topic of finding a good job or developing social skills. Seen from this perspective, I would say we speak relatively little about the topic; we already have kind of a taboo, it's just not absolute.
b) Discussing women as objects sends a strong message to women: "you do not belong here". We speak about you, but not with you. -- Ladies can describe their feelings better, I can only recommend imagining a reversed situation; a "rationalist website" with women discussing how to get handsome millionaires (or whatever would be the nearest equivalent), creating a feeling that if you are not a millionaire, you have no worth as a huma...
I would enjoy having a more friendly discussion environment, but I don't want to make it a duty. I mean, offenses are bad, but mere "lack of warmth" is normal, although it is nice to do better than this. Among men, this is often the normal mode of speech; among women it's usually otherwise... I think it would be nice to let everyone speak in their preferred voice. We should encourage men to display more warmth (and it would be an interesting topic on how to do it without feeling awkward), but not criticize them for failing to reach the level convenient for women.
I think it would be useful for someone who finds niceness natural to do a post how the average LW can build affordance for being nice, preferably in a way that doesn't add to much noise. I also think it would be good if people were motivated to use some of these affordances due to genuine niceness/to help build the community.
On the other hand I strongly agree that having a "nice" voice should not be even quasi-required. Fake/forced niceness often feels phony in an unpleasant way, furthermore forcing people to change their conversational voice seems like making them jump though hoops. Also, I suspec...
In some male-dominated spaces, there's a weird chivalry dynamic where I get attention for being a reasonably attractive woman but not a lot of cred for ideas, etc. I appreciate that at Less Wrong meetups, I feel my ideas are judged as ideas and not as "girl ideas which men must be polite about."
There also seems to be quite a lot of knee-jerk up-voting of poorly researched armchair ev-psych.
Indeed, and I am sad to say that I have seen this even in the top-level posts and blog as well. I'm actually doing a write-up about evo-psych and why a rationalist community should maybe try to avoid it. I might post it to this forum if there's interest.
Indeed, and I am sad to say that I have seen this even in the top-level posts and blog as well. I'm actually doing a write-up about evo-psych and why a rationalist community should maybe try to avoid it. I might post it to this forum if there's interest.
I'm not just interested, I'm fascinated. Please do.
So, apparently LessWrong feels unfriendly. This is something I've heard several times, so I'll accept it as correct. (I don't get that feeling myself, but I wouldn't expect to notice it anyway.) What are some Internet forums that don't feel unfriendly, and what do they do there that we don't do on LessWrong? Talk about ourselves and our lives - "small talk", in other words?
It is- I've been on here for ~2 years (lurking, then signed up) and often refrain from commenting, simply because I fear being thought of as a complete idiot. I am slowly getting more comfortable, but I still feel (mildly) anxious when posting. Yes, even this post.
On another note, I have noticed that this anxiety has dropped pretty dramatically in the last two years (the thought to post barely even crossed my mind, back then), and this is due in part to being exposed to this community. I've also noticed, though this may or may not be related, that my (female) friends think I've become more "cold" (their words) in the last year or so, but my male friends say they can more easily relate to me, now. It could just be maturity, but LW has been a major influencing factor in my life.
Yes, I have been lurking for a similar amount of time, but I still am very reluctant to make comments or posts. I think the reason for me is that I am unsure of my rationality skills, and don't like feeling the status lowering that would come from potential comments criticizing or correct me.
Yes, this is a problem with myself, but yes, more friendliness would make it easier for me to comment.
The discussions on e.g. Flickr often consist solely of comments like "Awesome pic! Great colours, looking forward to your next contribution." or "I like your style, please post more!"... To me, this represents the prototype of internet friendliness - not that I would like it to see it here, not that it couldn't be easily faked, but one just cannot deny that it sounds encouraging. There is even no need to talk about ourselves or to say anyting substantial at all, just signal friendliness the most obvious way, it works.
(It's interesting to note how dramatically Flickr differs from Youtube in the commenter culture.)
Worth noting that in my little anchoring experiment the mindless critical comments were downvoted much more harshly than the mindless positive comments.
I do feel like LW is cold, and I'd rather not say "unfriendly", which to me sounds explicitly hostile, but it's non-friendly. Commenting here feels like Coming to Work, not like hanging out with friends. You know, where I need to remember to mind all of my manners. Seeing the orange envelope fills me with panic, as I am sure there is someone there just waiting to chew me out for violating some community norm or just being Wrong.
Truthfully, I think it is the lack of "small talk" that makes it feel unfriendly to me. It has the air of, "we're not interested in you personally, we're here to get things done". I want things to be personal. I want to make friends.
What are some Internet forums that don't feel unfriendly
Ravelry, mentioned above. It primarily serves as a place for swapping info about needlework patterns. There's some criticism inherent in such a project (e.g. "I found a mistake in the pattern you posted") but it's mostly about mutual admiration and support. It's not especially comparable to LW, though, since it doesn't aim to be about writing or discussion.
I value the honest truth-seeking and argument that happens here, but I don't think that has to exclude warmth.
My first-ever LW comment was not well-thought-out, and I got a curt "That makes no sense because ___" response. Currently that kind of thing wouldn't affect me as much, but at the time it stung. Someone else stepped in with the "Welcome to Less Wrong" post that made it feel friendlier, which was good.
Another early experience that had me thinking "These people are jerks" was reading the Bayesian Judo post from the Sequences, which seemed to be about how to embarrass people at parties by proving your superior intellect even after they tried to disengage from the conversation.
I try to practice Rekcorc's Rules myself, starting sentences with "Yes, "Good," "You're right," "Thanks," and other words with little content other than an (honest) recognition of the value of the person's statement.
Oddly, I've been trying to break exactly that habit in real life -- too many people seize on it as surrendering all points under discussion, and then respond to further argument like you're shooting from a white flag. The reaction is something along the lines of: "What the hell is your problem? You just said I was right!"
LW seems too sane for that, thankfully.
This is something I've heard several times, so I'll accept it as correct.
Selection effects. Those who have an issue with the status quo are far more likely to complain than those who like it are to praise it.
Did you do it?
Yes.
I will openly second that the LW style feels rude to me, and the style that I've learned to write in while posting on here also feels rude.
For the person who asked for an example of a "nice" forum: The comments on TED talks always struck me as nice but instructive.
Brief data point: I am female and I don't have a problem with the tone as such. I don't post much because I am put off by the high standards of thinking and argumentation required, but in general I approve of those standards being there and would hate to read the warm-fuzzy version of LW where bad/boring threads proliferate because people are worried about coming across as cold.
A semi-related point is that I like the general air of emotional detachment around here because in in the real world I often see expression of negative emotional reactions used as a relatively cheap form of manipulation, and I worry that encouraging open expression of emotions here (which is definitely a component of 'warmness' as I understand it) would cause a slippery slope effect where that kind of manipulation would become much more common.
Warning- Submitters were told to not hold back for politeness. You are allowed to disagree, but these are candid comments; if you consider candidness impolite, I suggest you not read this post
I find this warning ironic given the nature of the complaints that are subsequently expressed.
The statements posted above were solicited by a third party, somebody who asked for candid responses,
Yes, but it was understood that the responses candor was not directed at the solicitor.
I understand that you're probably just making a light-hearted throwaway comment.
Actually I had a serious point, that the statement constituted a tacit admission of the importance of candor to a rational discussion. If the above sentence was your attempt at a disclaimer, it back-fired horribly.
I have suddenly acquired some sympathy for the 'keep it simple and blunt' contingent.
The transcript is incomplete, but has a fair amount about cordiality escalation and trying to decipher the possible meaning of the absence of a usual cordial signal. The audio includes a woman saying that she's apt to use an ellipsis rather than a period because she's concerned that a period is too blunt.
Can we discuss how LW's lack-of-niceness relates to the topic of men-and-women? I feel a little confused, and this insanely long comment is my attempt to ferret out that confusion.
I expect that most people who come to LW for the first time probably find the community somewhat threatening. The karma system does make you feel like you're being judged, everyone seems extremely smart and meticulous about being right, and there's a whole lot of background knowledge to absorb before you even feel qualified to open your mouth. This is exactly what I experienced when I first came here, so I agree with the OP entirely. But I'm a male, and nothing about this seems to have anything to do with sex or gender. My response to this feeling was to read the sequences, read comments, and become knowledgeable enough (about both rationality and community norms) to participate. The OP doesn't seem to complain that the community is only cold towards women, so if there's a difference here it would seem to be at the level of how this coldness is perceived or reacted to (no, I'm not about to conclude that women are at fault for being overly sensitive).
The sort of obvious, stereotype-driven interpretation he...
women who are on LW still tend to be more put off by the hostility.
Unless we have some availability bias here. Such as, people who dislike something, speak more in discussions about disliking it. And if those people are women, they are more likely to attribute their dislike to male behavior, than if they are men.
In other words, a reversed form of this. A man: "Wow, I dislike how people behave on LW." A woman: "Wow, I dislike how men behave on LW."
My personal guess is that the truth is somewhere in between. Some things that men do here, are unpleasant for women. But also, sometimes women attribute to "male behavior" something that actually is not a specifically male behavior... but because majority of LW users are male, it is very easy to assign every frustration from LW to them. For example, discussing PUA stuff and "getting women" may be really repulsive for many women. But a lack of smiling faces, disagreeing with someone's self-description, or feeling threatened by very smart people, that can be (at least partially) just a gender-independent consequence of having a website focused on rationality.
Why Our Kind can't Cooperate is relevant here. No one else has posted a link yet, so here it is. Anyone who hasn't read it should read it before getting involved in the discussion here, as it deals with what seems to be the very same issue.
Question: What is it exactly that is meant by "warmth" or "coldness?" I've heard those terms used to describe myself, I've heard them used to describe other people, but when my brain tries searching for an example, it comes up blank. Generally, I try to be specific. (<- Yes, that was a joke.)
"Warmth" means at least two things:
The tendency to openly show one's emotional reactions to other people, whether with explicit words, or voice tone, or body language. Someone can be called "cold" if they speak in a monotone and rarely make clear facial expressions, or if they never acknowledge their emotional states.
The tendency to recognize and (to some degree) reflect the emotional states of the people around oneself. The person who's usually first to ask someone else if they're all right when they're behaving oddly, for instance, is displaying warmth. A person who fails to notice that someone else is upset, or pretends to ignore it, is being cold.
Your friend complains that her boyfriend forgot to get her something for Valentine's day. A cold response:
This is consistent with both your current boyfriend's previous actions and your previous boyfriends' actions. You should spend some time thinking about why you seek out romantic partners that consistently disappoint you.
A warm response:
Aww, that sucks, I'm sorry. Hug? Wanna go look at pictures of kittens on the internet?
You can find another great example of a cold response in lukeprog's rational romance post.
The mistake goes like this:
I'd say something about myself.
They'd disagree with me.
I agree this can be annoying, on the other hand someone with an outside view can notice things about us that we ourselves might not. Remember, the fundamental attribution error goes both ways.
Actually, it was helpful. Rereading my comment I noticed it sounds like I'm trying to say that on the whole the boyfriends' behavior is positive; whereas, I meant to imply that it's mostly negative, but occasionally has redeeming features.
I annoy my partner with this sort of thing regularly. Perhaps I should stop. On the other hand, there have been several times in my life when other people (therapists, relatives, friends) more accurately assessed my behavior than I did at the time. Just because this behavior is annoying doesn't mean that the person doing it is incorrect. I don't buy the "How could you possibly know me better than I know myself" argument.
I agree with this. I find about 50% (very rough estimate) of the time when I say "I think this is what is going on in my head" and my OH disagrees, he's right and I'm wrong. I usually to have a strong tendency to rationalise, and I don't think I'd be close to how successful I am with Alicorn-style luminosity without that sort of outside input (though admittedly I'm still pretty bad - that stuff is hard!). I reciprocate when he introspects as well.
I do still find it annoying and instinctively argue back, but results spoke for themselves when I turned out to be wrong, and now I welcome it as an overall positive-utility interaction even though it still annoys me on an instinctive level.
I'm going to pre-emptively tap out from all discussions about gender of LW for a while (as I mostly used to do until a while ago) because I feel that, for a series of reasons, I'm unusually out of my depth when I participate in them.
(I'm so freakin' gender-blind that when last night I was in a flash mob against violence on women and I was the only male who actually danced and people pointed that out to me, I was like “Er... Was I? [looks around] Huh. I hoped there would be at least a couple more” and no I'm not making this up.)
A friend of mine read this thread-- she has long experience as a Quaker, a religion where at least a lot of people do substantial work to figure out how to deal well with each other and get work done.
Unfortunately, she doesn't want to post here because she hates scoring systems. They make her feel like she's being graded. I'm seriously hoping that other rationality blogs with different structures and populations evolve.
Anyway, she made a couple of points that I haven't seen in the discussion-- the definition of niceness that she grew up with included gifts and mutual aid. She said that women talk/post differently when they're away from men-- directly and without emoticons. I haven't spent enough time in all-women groups to have an opinion about this.
I assume she doesn't trust people to be benevolent.
I'm not going into the details of her emotional background, but I strongly recommend you read some of the Dysfunctional Family material at Making Light.
It's a good short course (or medium length course) in the variety of how people's families can affect their reactions to other people. Aliefs about how you're going to be treated are strong stuff.
Hi, I am Berna, and I am a 'people pleaser', a.k.a. a wuss. You're too right, it does mean you're in for a rough time to have this almost pathological need to be liked. Conflict, in any way, shape or form, scares me terribly. I often wish I didn't need to be nice all the time. You know, I really like being nice, but occasionally I'd like to have a choice about it. I'd like to be nice because, well, it's nice, not because I'm scared not to. And yet, I dare to comment on LessWrong sometimes, isn't that amazing?
I am a woman, and until now, I've always thought LW was just fine. Sure, when I comment here, I am even more careful than anywhere else I write, because the standard of writing here is so high. And sometimes, when I write something that I think might in the least be controversial, I wonder if I really don't have time to read LW just now, or is it that I might have gotten downvotes? But that's all about me, it isn't a problem with LW.
LW is a haven of sanity and civility to me. Just compare it to the comments on YouTube, or any news site, the WoW forums... well, just about anywhere on the Internet. I was seriously amazed when I discovered this place a few years ago.
Even if your emotional reaction to online discussions is generally better than that of thin-skinned people, it doesn't matter for purposes of this discussion.
Thin-skinned people exist. Some of them can write things worth reading. Some of them are interested in rationality. Some of them will become thicker-skinned, but it's a slow process. You don't have to like them, but they're part of the situation you're living in. It looks to me as though your focus is on how you'd like them to be different rather than the fact that they (as a category rather than as individuals) just aren't going to be different.
On Submitter A
You can expect that attractive people to get more attention from those attracted to them, including sexual attention, anywhere you go, including LW meetings.
I agree that sneering comments about those with low status, particularly status based on physical health and beauty, are unnecessary and harmful.
On male/female generalizations, just as a matter of language generalizations are generally taken as statistical generalizations, not as statements holding true for absolutely every member of the group.
I realize that's probably not so helpful, since there is no discernible difference between 51% and 99.999%. Wouldn't it be helpful if people tossed out a number to indicate an estimated sort rate of a generalization? Men are more X than women. Some kind of mutual relative entropy measure on their ranks? Area of the receiver operator curve? Jefrey's divergence! But I digress.
you don't convert people to rationality by talking about such emotive topics.
I don't think you hold the interest of people interested in rationality by saying "we like rationality, but we're not rational enough to discuss particular topics that happen to be ones you're likely to find important, so we taboo those topics".
Thanks for posting this! I agree with Submitter B that LW can be cold and unfriendly and that this seems to be a general failure mode of the kind of people who post on LW. I think people feel like they shouldn't post a comment unless it either contains an insight or a counterargument to someone else's argument and that to counter this we should cultivate a norm of upvoting nice comments.
I think people feel like they shouldn't post a comment unless it either contains an insight or a counterargument to someone else's argument
Users who feel this way are one of the best features of the community.
I think people feel like they shouldn't post a comment unless it either contains an insight or a counterargument to someone else's argument and that to counter this we should cultivate a norm of upvoting nice comments.
While I am personally actively trying to become more warm and friendly in my personal demeanor, and think that nicer comments are, ceteris paribus, more effective comments, I worry about seeking to institute niceness as a terminal rather than instrumental value. If one comes to LW for refined insights, they want to see insights and counterarguments, and posts and comments that are nice but not insightful are not particularly useful.
But it does seem like niceness as a terminal value is strongly linked to a more balanced gender ratio. Increased niceness will attract more women, and attracting more women will increase the amount of niceness.
It seems that the current population of LW undervalues niceness relative to the general population, but I can't tell if that's necessary or contingent. How would we know?
Good points! I also find it difficult to balance niceness with usefulness in textual comments.
One thing that may be on some folks' mind is that expressions of appreciation that don't also add something empirical or logical to the discussion are not likely to themselves be appreciated. If you post something I appreciate, and I comment to say merely "I'm glad you posted that!" I would expect that hardly anybody but you would be glad that I posted that.
I suppose that I could send a private message instead, but I would feel a little bit creepy sending a private message of appreciation to someone I don't know. I think I'd be more reluctant to send one to someone I thought of as a woman than someone I thought of as a man, too. (I don't endorse that behavior, but I suspect I have it.)
I wonder if the existence of voting as a way of expressing "mere" approval or disapproval disproportionately affects expressions of approval. Downvoting as an expression of mere disagreement is somewhat frowned upon; so do people upvote to agree and comment to disagree?
I agree with your second paragraph completely, and I would be averse to comments whose only content was "niceness". I'm on LW for intellectual discussions, not for feel-goodism and self-esteem boosts.
I think it's worth distinguishing niceness from respect here. I define niceness to be actions done with the intention of making someone feel good about him/herself. Respect, on the other hand, is an appreciation for another person's viewpoint and intelligence. Respect is saying "We disagree on topic X, but I acknowledge that you are intelligent, you have thought about X in detail, and you have constructed sophisticated arguments which took me some thought to refute. For these reasons, even though we disagree, I consider you a worthwhile conversation-partner."
When I began this comment with "I agree with your second paragraph", I wasn't saying it to be nice. I wasn't trying to give fubarobfusco warm fuzzy happiness-feelings. I was saying it because I respect fubarobfusco's thoughts on this matter, to the point where I wanted to comment and add my own elaborations to the discussion.
There's not much purpose to engaging in an intellectual discussion with...
Your comment has me wondering whether some folks expect niceness and respect to correlate. I've noticed some social contexts where fake niceness seems to be expected to cloak lack of respect. I wouldn't be surprised if some people around here are embittered from experiences with that.
It sounds like part of what Submitter B is complaining about is lack of respect. The guys she dated didn't respect her intellect enough to believe assertions she made about her internal experiences. I suspect this is a dearth of respect that no quantity of friendliness can remedy.
No kidding.
(And I'm having difficulty responding to the rest of this without using unhelpful words such as "normals" or "mundanes", so I'll leave it at that.)
How about a third option:
In other words, consider that the other person possesses evidence that you do not, and invite them to update you instead of trying to update them.
A non-gender example:
Atheist: Pentecostal, my model predicted that people would go home from church feeling bored, guilty, or self-righteous, because former church people I know talk about those experiences, and church people who are active in politics seem to be big on guilt and self-righteousness. But your experience sounds like church is a fun party, that you go home from feeling giddy and high. I was surprised and want to update. Tell me more about your religious experiences!
FWIW, one of the things that caught my attention about this community, and encouraged me to stick around, was the emphasis on valuing accuracy and precision (which I value) without the "barbs are part of the fun/putting relish into a debate" style you describe here (which I dislike intensely).
There are lots of "nice is more important than true" spaces on the net, and lots of "being unpleasant to people is part of the fun" spaces; and an astonishing number of spaces that are both. A space that manages to even approximate being neither is rare.
Personally, I find the niceness-padding to be perfectly well-calibrated for dealing with disagreements because people are thoughtful and respectful. I find it to be insufficient when dealing with people talking past each other. It's really frustrating! This is a community full of interesting, intelligent people whose opinion I want to know ... that sometimes aren't bothering to carefully read what I wrote. And then not bothering to read carefully when I politely tell them that they misread what I wrote and clarify. So then I start thinking that this isn't a coincidence, so maybe they don't want to read what I write... ? So then I feel like they don't like me even though I like them. Nooooo, sadness.
Currently, the community has a low-niceness-padding standard, which is great for people who prefer that style of interaction, but which sucks for people who would prefer more niceness-padding, and those people are either driven away from the community or spend much of their time here feeling alienated and upset.
Here is how I see the difference: the people who think there's too much niceness-padding feel annoyed that they have to sift through it. The people who think there is insufficient niceness-padding are getting hurt.
This makes me personally err on the side of niceness. And while I understand that excessive niceness turns into clutter, I think that even the lowest of the four levels that you demonstrated doesn't happen as often as it should in some discussions.
I suppose that I could send a private message instead, but I would feel a little bit creepy sending a private message of appreciation to someone I don't know.
I have sent several messages like that; to the best of my knowledge, they have always been taken well. Every message I've received like that has made my day; I suggest lowering your estimate of how creepy it actually is.
I do agree with you that such messages are murkier when at least one party could interpret it as romantic, and while that murkiness can be resolved it takes additional effort.
Downvoting as an expression of mere disagreement is somewhat frowned upon; so do people upvote to agree and comment to disagree?
That tends to be the pattern I notice for posts/comments that seem to be well-made; generally, more disagreeing / correcting comments than downvotes, and many more upvotes than comments that only express approval.
I've long wanted a 'me too!' facility in forum posts - where you actually get to put your name down as agreeing, rather than just voting. It'd be compact enough to avoid the waste of devoting an entire post to it, and would lend the personal touch of knowing who approved.
It could even coexist with votes, being reserved for cases of total agreement - 'I'd sign that without reservation"
Usenet old hand speaking: Me too!
The norm I've noticed around here is to upvote for agreeing and general warm fuzzies, but not to downvote for disagreement alone. Downvoting seems to be reserved for thoughts that are not merely incorrect, but broken in some way. (logically fallacious, for example)
For my own posts, I find I appreciate an upvote as if it were explicit encouragement. I'm wondering if this mental reaction is common, and if so, whether it's limited to the males here. (as a pseudo-"score", I could see this being the case) Perhaps the karma system produces more warm fuzzies for the average man and little-to-nothing for the average woman. With karma being the primary form of social encouragement, that could make for a very different experience between genders.
Request for anecdotal evidence here.
For my own part, I like the karma system precisely because it provides a way to indicate appreciation without cluttering threads with content-free approval posts. That is probably the usenetter in me speaking. (tangent: I miss the days when usenet was where all the interesting conversations happened. Oh well.)
Personally I feel quite strongly that 'niceness' is way too vague a concept to in any way promote, no matter the social context.
I'd like to talk instead about the value of comments that are specific, positive (+ hopefully warm, without gushing), and cooperative. In short, creating a norm of definite, positive, 'working together to work out what's true' attitudes. I think it is fine to make comments that only express approval, as long as it is approval of a specific behaviour / characteristics and not blanket 'good job'. These kinds of specific comments help people evaluate themselves and encourage them to continue doing what works.
LessWrong is not a debate club -- we're trying to approach the truth, not merely win the argument. That means that things which keep us working together on that are a net win, providing they do not obscure the truth.
I've posted a lot of messy examples all over this thread, but I think I've finally gathered my thinking now.
I would like to make a simple case that niceness clarifies communication. This is because not all disagreements are perfectly rational and sometimes contain defensiveness and other stuff that is difficult to filter out. Furthermore, even disagreements that are balanced and rational often fail to engage the original comment, and thus they come off as dismissive -- therefore, they unintentionally communicate "I don't respect you" or "I don't like you." Therefore, if it is difficult to predict whether your comment will unintentionally communicate "I don't like" you to the other person, then adding "but nevertheless I still like you" into what you said in some socially accepted way does increase the likelihood that what you wrote is perceived as what you meant to write.
Sometimes, this can be as small as a smiley. Or an exclamation mark. It doesn't have to be a crazy stream of niceties and smalltalk and hugs that them mundanes engage in on a daily basis in conversations of no substances because they're not cool like we are.
Hmm, so I'm thinking about smileys and exclamation points now. I don't think they just demonstrate friendliness - I think they also connote femininity. I used to use them all the time on IRC, until I realized that the only people who did so were female, or were guys who struck me as more feminine as a result. I didn't want to be conspicuously feminine on IRC, so I stopped using smileys/exclamation points there.
It never bothered me when other people didn't use smileys/exclamations. But when I stopped using them on IRC, everything I wrote sounded cold or rude. I felt like I should put the smileys in to assure people I was happy and having a good time (just as I always smile in person so that people will know I'm enjoying myself). But no one else was using them, and they didn't strike me as unfriendly, so I decided to stop using them.
Until I saw this comment, I had forgotten that I had adjusted myself in this way! In light of this, I may have to take back some of my earlier comments, as it really does seem like culturally enforced gender differences are getting in the way here, and that LW has little tolerance for people who sound feminine (perhaps because of an association bet...
Do other people associate smileys and exclamations with femininity, or is it just me?
Apparently! I started talking to someone about this and he just told me this exact thing independently of you. He said men can only use smileys with women because it's flirting. (??) Which is weird to me because I've met men who are WAY more animated than I am in meatspace. Do they also not use exclamation marks? I don't think I'd be able chat with them online if they didn't; my brain would explode.
But actually, I think this whole issue comes up because we subconsciously communicate a lot of those "I still like you! I'm not hostile! I'm still having a good time!" messages in meatspace through non-verbal things like smiles and pats and vocal tone, etc. So people that resist adding those into their text think they're being asked to do something extra that they never do, but I think, they do do it and just don't realize it because it comes more naturally.
A positive affirmation has almost no generalized information content useful for the reader.
With the important exception that it reinforces the behavior in question, which is actionable and useful information. The trouble is that this is mostly useful for the recipient, and not as useful for bystanders, and it is much more useful if the affirmation identifies the specific behavior it seeks to reinforce.
Schelling point for metacontrarian replies of the sort I currently don't feel like making but probably need to be made despite bad signalling.
I'm curious if Submitter B has similar experiences to the "creepy behavior" that they would describe as discussions, or if every similar experience has come across as an argument. That is, the line between putting forward differing interpretations and denying the data may not be a crisp one, and there may be communication techniques both B and the people B converses with could use to make that line clearer.
One of the things that I've noticed about myself is that for quite some time, unless it was something frequently discussed so I had good calib...
I'd rather encourage everyone to do a better job interpreting "you're wrong for these reasons" as well-intentioned, potentially correct input, than encourage everyone to beat around the bush.
Seeing examples of deeply nested obviously emotional defensiveness (especially devolving into tit-for-tat time-wasting posturing) surely makes me feel "I'd like to avoid that!" (by not participating in general).
This can be avoided not only with less aggressive "you're wrong!" deliveries, but also with more receptive/honest/vulnerable list...
After reading this post, I wondered if there was anything I could do to improve the local marketplace-of-ideas, such as trying to encourage more members by being more respectful of comments. Then I recalled that one of my standard rules-of-thumb is 'stay classy', which covers trying to use an appropriate amount of respect; so I then wondered if adding even further politeness would actually reduce the signal-to-noise ratio.
At present, I'm wondering if it's at all possible to figure out, to even a single deciban of evidence, how I should update, based on wha...
A bit of me wishes that the "no mindkiller topics" rule was enforced more strictly, and that we didn't discuss sex/gender issues ... We already rarely discuss politics, so would it be terrible to also discuss sex/gender issues as little as possible?
I agree - I think the weakening of the taboos against discussing politics and gender has been a seriously bad thing. The arguments used to establish these taboos are in retrospect unsatisfying (for example, the explicit argument used for the politics taboo did not support nearly as strong a taboo as...
I am of two minds about a taboo on gender issues. On the one hand, it seems tiresome and ineffectual to try and fix other people's mistaken conclusions on empirical questions if they hold them for political reasons. If someone thinks that the height distributions for men and women are equal because that's what they feel is the morally correct answer, then it seems unlikely that showing them the evidence will change their mind. They could have found it themselves if they had been interested, and so discussing it on-site is likely going to be a waste of the time of everyone involved. (For example, I wrote a long takedown of the piece you mentioned, which I've deleted and relegated to a few sentences at the end of this comment.)
But on the other hand, part of the reason why the politics taboo is helpful is because it extends into other parts of life. If you're an Apolitical Alan, you can be happier and focus your attention on more important things. One of the things that excited me when I first came to LW was that here was a bunch of fun things to think and talk about with a bunch of clever people, and those things were more exciting and useful than politics. If the politics taboo is j...
Technically, if we had a "taboo on gender issues", then even this article would not be allowed.
Which would be a pity. I like having information I would have problems getting otherwise, even if I don't know how to act on that information. I agree with descriptions of the problems. I just disagree with typical solutions, which seem to involve one-sided taboos (e.g. linking to PUA articles or speaking about differences between men and women is taboo, because that's political, but linking to non-radical feminist articles or asserting that there are no differences is OK, because that's, uhm, a consensus of some people).
And so if we have a gender taboo, I would much rather it be a "your opinion on gender politics really doesn't matter, and to the extent you have one, you should be curious rather than idealistic" than a "let's not talk about gender politics because it might upset X." The first is dissolving politics; the second is surrendering to X.
Thing is, given the gender stuff in the sequences previously mentioned, it seems to me that communications intended to say the former would be likely to come across as "let's not talk about gender politics — and therefore, Eliezer's stuff about verthandi, boreana, catgirls, and the like, and various folks' side comments on ev.psych, are all allowed to stand unquestioned."
But the primary substance of her claim should have been about the epistemic role that stereotypes should play as evidence.
Eh? That seems rather unrelated.
FWIW, I am a man, but I too find the Less Wrong community to be emotionally detached and unfriendly. That's why I like it. If my beliefs are wrong, then it's critical that I discover this as soon as possible, and it's refreshing to know that at least some of the thoughts I post will be combed through by unfriendly people who are determined to tear them apart -- on an intellectual rather than emotional level.
Furthermore, if I told people, "I'm more of a thinker than a feeler" (or vice versa), and they consistently responded with, "no dude, y...
I would like to second the "clamoring for demonstrating awesomeness" attitude. I've had a few
What is your subjective experience?
It is this.
Psh, that's because you are clearly rationalitying wrong. You should rationality like this.
exchanges. Sometimes the original question wasn't even about overcoming brainflaws! I would love to see people be more okay with others demonstrating flaws/vulnerability -- that's friendliness!
It's good to hear these complaints. I'm not sure if they'll stop soon, though. Most of the objectionable gender-related material is collecting dust deep in the LW archives... it feels like we've gotten better since then to me, probably as a result of complaints like these, but that stuff is going to be an ongoing karma leak as people stumble across it. (Maybe link to the LW Women series at the top and make it clear that it's there for historical purposes only? Or link to the series from here or the sequences page or something? If we aren't linking to ...
I think learning how to constructively criticise whilst signalling that one intends to constructively criticise a very worthy skill. If one knows how some thing critical, and perhaps other things not critical could be said more nicely, it would be to the benefit of all for one to share their knowledge or opinion of that tact.
...A lot of guys I've dated in the last year have made the same creepy mistake. I think this is likely to be relevant because they're so much like LW members (most of them are programmers, their personalities are very similar and one of them had even signed up for cryo), and because I've seen some hints of this behavior on the discussions. I don't talk enough about myself here to actually bring out this "creepy" behavior (anticipation of that behavior is inhibiting me as well as not wanting to get too personal in public) so this could give you an i
It feels like people are ten thousand times more likely to point out my flaws than to appreciate something I said. Also, there's >next to no emotional relating to one another.
I'm sorry, that sucks. I think you're right and hope this changes. I don't post very often, but when I do in the future, I'll be more aware of this.
I'm a young female and like some other women in the comments, I'd like to say that I in general approve of high barriers to entry for a community like Less Wrong. Well, that might be too much of a simplification - I prefer optimal barriers of entry, and in the case of LW, I think it should be pretty high, and if that can be achieved purely psychologically, then that's great. But I think warmth/fun/kindness (which we're seeing a lot more of recently and which Eliezer always had to begin with IMO) isn't going to bring down that barrier enough to justify bein...
While I would encourage civility at every turn, I don't think any amount of friendliness will ever completely remove the negative emotional jolt when pointed out you're wrong. Positive punishment* is important, and I'd rather preventively experience it in a safe place such as this (or in a relationship, for that matter), than in the real world.
I don't know of a more civil discussion forum than lesswrong, so from my perspective some people are setting the bar unrealistically high.
For some people the positive punishment seems to be associated with commenting in general instead of just being wrong. I wonder if anything can be done about that...
*I really wish the connotation was something else...
Apparently, RationalWiki scores surprisingly well on friendliness to women compared to large chunks of the skepticsphere of late. I was both surprised and pleased, and somewhat disconcerted that the bar was quite so low. Here's an excerpt from the post that says that (written by a female regular contributor, and RWF board member - two women on the board out of six):
...Go to any site that hosts modern intellectual discussions, especially around the sciences, atheism, skepticism, and freethought, and one topic that will be shared across all of them is “the ro
I have a few links that just keep giving on two prevalent and contrasting forms of discussion, often labeled as male/female styles, starting from a LW discussion that brought them up.
The comments about tone, friendliness, sharing yourself, etc., from Submitter B are what I would expect of people with the "female" mode in a forum dominated by the "male" mode.
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/fvf/link_two_modes_of_discours
http://alastairadversaria.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/of-triggering-and-the-triggered-part-4/
The following section will be at the top of all posts in the LW Women series.
Several months ago, I put out a call for anonymous submissions by the women on LW, with the idea that I would compile them into some kind of post. There is a LOT of material, so I am breaking them down into more manageable-sized themed posts.
Seven women submitted, totaling about 18 pages.
Standard Disclaimer- Women have many different viewpoints, and just because I am acting as an intermediary to allow for anonymous communication does NOT mean that I agree with everything that will be posted in this series. (It would be rather impossible to, since there are some posts arguing opposite sides!)
Warning- Submitters were told to not hold back for politeness. You are allowed to disagree, but these are candid comments; if you consider candidness impolite, I suggest you not read this post
To the submitters- If you would like to respond anonymously to a comment (for example if there is a comment questioning something in your post, and you want to clarify), you can PM your message and I will post it for you. If this happens a lot, I might create a LW_Women sockpuppet account for the submitters to share.
Please do NOT break anonymity, because it lowers the anonymity of the rest of the submitters.
(Note from me: I've been procrastinating on posting these. Sorry to everyone who submitted! But I've got them organized decently enough to post now, and will be putting one up once a week or so, until we're through)
I think this is all true. Note that that commenter hasn't commented since 2009.
Objectifying remarks about attractive women and sneery remarks about unattractive women are not nice. I worry that guys at less wrong would ignore unattractive women if they came to meetings. Unattractive women can still be smart! I also worry that they would only pay attention to attractive women insofar as they think they might get to sleep with them.
I find the "women are aliens" attitude that various commenters (and even Eliezer in the post I link to) seem to have difficult to deal with: http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/. I wish these posters would make it clear that they are talking about women on average: presumably they don't think that all men and all women find each other to be like aliens.
I find I tend to shy away from saying feminist things in response to PUA/gender posts, since there seems to be a fair amount of knee-jerk down-voting of anything feminist sounding. There also seems to be quite a lot of knee-jerk up-voting of poorly researched armchair ev-psych.
Linked to 3, if people want to make claims about men and women having different innate abilities, that is fine. However, I wish they'd make it clear when they are talking on average, i.e. "women on average are worse at engineering than men" not "women are worse at engineering than men."
A bit of me wishes that the "no mindkiller topics" rule was enforced more strictly, and that we didn't discuss sex/gender issues. I do think it is off-putting to smart women - you don't convert people to rationality by talking about such emotive topics. Even if some of the claims like "women on average are less good at engineering than men" are true* they are likely to put smart women off visiting less wrong. Not sure to what extent we should sacrifice looking for truth to attract people. I suspect many LWers would say not at all. I don't know. We already rarely discuss politics, so would it be terrible to also discuss sex/gender issues as little as possible?
I agree with Luke here
*and I do think some of them are true
***
My experience of LessWrong is that it feels unfriendly. It took me a long time to develop skin thick enough to tolerate an environment where warmth is scarce. I feel pretty certain that I've got a thicker skin than most women and that the environment is putting off other women. You wouldn't find those women writing an LW narrative, though - the type of women I'm speaking of would not have joined. It's good to open a line of communication between the genders, but by asking the women who stayed, you're not finding out much about the women who did not stay. This is why I mention my thinner-skinned self.
What do I mean by unfriendly? It feels like people are ten thousand times more likely to point out my flaws than to appreciate something I said. Also, there's next to no emotional relating to one another. People show appreciation silently in votes, and give verbal criticism, and there are occasionally compliments, but there seems to be a dearth of friendliness. I don't need instant bonding, but the coldness is thick. If I try to tell by the way people are acting, I'm half convinced that most of the people here think I'm a moron. I'm thick skinned enough that it doesn't get to me, but I don't envision this type of environment working to draw women.
Ive had similar unfriendly experiences in other male-dominated environments like in a class of mostly boys. They were aggressive - in a selfish way, as opposed to a constructive one. For instance, if the teacher was demonstrating something, they'd crowd around aggressively trying to get the best spots. I was much shorter, which makes it harder to see. This forced me to compete for a front spot if I wanted to see at all, and I never did because I just wasn't like that. So that felt pretty insensitive. Another male dominated environment was similarly heavy on the criticism and light on niceness.
These seem to be a theme in male-dominated environments which have always had somewhat of a deterring effect on me: selfish competitive behavior (Constructive competition for an award or to produce something of quality is one thing, but to compete for a privilege in a way that hurts someone at a disadvantage is off-putting), focus on negative reinforcement (acting like tough guys by not giving out compliments and being abrasive), lack of friendliness (There can be no warm fuzzies when you're acting manly) and hostility toward sensitivity.
One exception to this is Vladimir_Nesov. He has behaved in a supportive and yet honest way that feels friendly to me. ShannonFriedman does "honest yet friendly" well, too.
A lot of guys I've dated in the last year have made the same creepy mistake. I think this is likely to be relevant because they're so much like LW members (most of them are programmers, their personalities are very similar and one of them had even signed up for cryo), and because I've seen some hints of this behavior on the discussions. I don't talk enough about myself here to actually bring out this "creepy" behavior (anticipation of that behavior is inhibiting me as well as not wanting to get too personal in public) so this could give you an insight that might not be possible if I spoke strictly of my experiences on LessWrong.
The mistake goes like this:
I'd say something about myself.
They'd disagree with me.
For a specific example, I was asked whether I was more of a thinker or feeler and I said I was pretty balanced. He retorted that I was more of a thinker. When I persist in these situations, they actually argue with me. I am the one who has spent millions of minutes in this mind, able to directly experience what's going on inside of it. They have spent, at this point, maybe a few hundred minutes observing it from the outside, yet they act like they're experts. If they said they didn't understand, or even that they didn't believe me, that would be workable. But they try to convince me I'm wrong about myself. I find this deeply disturbing and it's completely dysfunctional. There's no way a person will ever get to know me if he won't even listen to what I say about myself. Having to argue with a person over who I am is intolerable.
I've thought about this a lot trying to figure out what they're trying to do. It's never going to be a sexy "negative hit" to argue with me about who I am. Disagreeing with me about myself can't possibly count as showing off their incredible ability to see into me because they're doing the exact opposite: being willfully ignorant. Maybe they have such a need to box me into a category that they insist on doing so immediately. Personalities don't fit nicely in categories, so this is an auto-fail. It comes across as if they're either deluded into believing they're some kind of mind-reading genius or that they don't realize I'm a whole, grown-up human being complete with the ability to know myself. This has happened on the LessWrong forum also.
I have had a similar problem that only started to make sense after considering that they may have been making a conscious effort to develop skepticism: I had a lot of experiences where it felt like everything I said about myself was being scrutinized. It makes perfect sense to be skeptical about other conversation topics, but when they're skeptical about things I say about myself, this is ingratiating. This is because it's not likely that either of us will be able to prove or disprove anything about my personality or subjective experiences in a short period of time, and possibly never. Yet saying nothing about ourselves is not an option if we want to get to know each other better. I have to start somewhere.
It's almost like they're in such a rush to have definitive answers about me that they're sabotaging their potential to develop a real understanding of me. Getting to know people is complicated - that's why it takes a long time. Tearing apart her self-expressions can't save you from the ambiguity.
I need "getting to know me" / "sharing myself" type conversations to be an exploration. I do understand the need to construct one's own perspective on each new person. I don't need all my statements to be accepted at face value. I just want to feel that the person is happily exploring. They should seem like they're having fun checking out something interesting, not interrogating me and expecting to find a pile of errors. Maybe this happens because of having a habit of skeptical thinking - they make people feel scrutinized without knowing it.
