[SEQ RERUN] Of Gender and Rationality

I can only speak for myself, but the example used in this post decreased the affinity I feel for LW:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ro/2place_and_1place_words/

The details of the function chosen as an example are pretty gratuitous. Couldn't we just have made it about food, or something?

(And not just the example -- some of the comments! This is what you call rational? What goes on here? They're pretty entertaining though.)

I didn't cherry pick this example after combing through many. It's one of the first and few things I've read here so far.

And I have noticed some people here think being offended is, without exception, A Bad Thing. But I also noticed that there isn't consensus on this point. So the question of whether or not it is irrational remains open. I would concede that it's useful to avoid being offended as much as possible, but there are obviously limits to this.

Anyway, the relevant question here isn't, "Is it wrong to be offended?" but, "Will reasonable and intelligent people who are new visitors to LW be potentially discouraged by examples like this?" I think the answer is yes. It's perhaps worth finding the time to use more gender-neutral examples in your posts.

Footnote: The reason this is discouraging is because it sends the message that the author and his community view men as intellectual peers and women as things for looking at and fucking. I'd rather be places where I am an intellectual peer though. I thought this was a really nice, relevant discussion: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4vj/a_rationalists_account_of_objectification/

Men are the majority at the high end of the IQ / social success spectrum, and also the low end. At the low end are the homeless, the mentally ill, those in prison, those who drop out of school, and in each case the majority are men. If there is anything to be solved, it will be solved at both ends of the IQ / social success spectrum. I'd like to hear about efforts for gender equality at the low end as well as the high end. If I knew of even one, I'd mention it here. I don't.

I think that a downside of the karma system is that it is likely to put off people who have good ideas but are nervous about sharing them from commenting. I think these people are disproportionately women.

However, the karma system works really really well and massively contributes to the high quality of discussion here. So I don't have a solution!

I like this sort of attitude a lot more than other attitudes I see on gender here. If there are intelligence differences between different groups of people, I want to believe that so that I can help fix that and make everyone as intelligent as is right (once more important issues are solved, of course). But it seems to be more common for people to stop once they notice a difference, and just conclude that that group is inferior.

It is interesting to me that possibility 1 in this post (hypothesis: men and women are annoyed by different mistakes) manages to avoid giving the most obvious (to me) difference in what mistakes men and women are annoyed by, namely: in comparison to women, men tend to be much less sensitive to, and much less annoyed by, sexism in otherwise rational discourse. In fact, there's even a "mirror image" counterpart: men tend to be more annoyed than women by mention of sexism in situations where it is not clear that sexism is relevant, or where it is clear that no one was explicitly attempting to be sexist.

I suppose that this may have been a conscious omission, as part of the attempt to avoid making things worse merely by bringing up the topic for discussion. But for me it was very confusing, and somewhat alienating. Many male-dominated fields and communities stay that way (sometimes despite the explicit desires of the majority of the community) in part because members of the community engage in casual sexism, sometimes not noticing that they do so, and the other people present, who are mostly men, either don't notice or don't think it is important to point this out. Women who enter the community tend to notice the sexism, but may not address it directly (because they are insufficiently self-confident or disagreeable, or because addressing it directly has been a failure in the past) and instead allow it to prompt them to leave the community sooner than they otherwise would have. I don't know why there should be an assumption that "rationalists" would not share this problem to some degree, and not seeing it listed among possible causes of the gender imbalance here suggests to me that there is a taboo on discussing sexism here, even when doing so is necessary to understanding the phenomena we are discussing. That taboo, if it exists, certainly would make it harder for me to engage with this community. Since I don't know if there in fact is one, or what general rationalist principles it would follow from, though, I'm currently mainly confused.

One of the original commenters wrote:

You ask evo-psych why we have a problem, and evo-psych provides the answer. The gender that has a biological reason to pursue low risk strategies - shockingly! - tends to not show much interest in weird, high-risk, high-payoff looking things like saving the world.

Ask evo-psych how to solve the problem then. We already know that women tend to like doing highly visible charitable activities (for signaling reasons). Maybe we should provide a way for people to make little sacrifices of their time and then make it visible over the web. I am thinking of a rationalist social network that allowed people to very prominently (perhaps even with a publicly visible part here on LW) show off how many hours they had volunteered next to a picture of themselves. I once attended an amnesty international letter writing group that was 90% female, for example.

This brought up an anecdote that I experienced recently.

I'm part of the swing/blues dancing community in DC. At a dance a few weeks ago I noticed that all of the volunteers for helping out at the door taking cash were women. Considering that this is DC - a heavily politicized area - and the vast majority of the dancers are liberal/feminist, I wondered why that would be. I made a comment about it to someone and they noticed that it was weird as well, and then I mentioned (as a pretty obvious counterpoint to our liberal community) that the same phenomenon happens in churches; women volunteer a lot more than men do.

This may not even be evo-psych, but an overall Western/socialization thing, where women - liberal or conservative - are subliminally primed into being more helpful. If that's the case, then using the tools of Western socialization to encourage more women to join LW (as well as other male-dominated fields) might be a solution.

Regarding points 1) and 2) of the original article, I'm wondering how one would measure the 'perfectly-rational amount of disagreement'. Would you even have to in order to consider how likely those possibilities are?

I find it troubling how many of Eliezer's potential solutions basically boil down to trying to recruit fewer men until the gender ratios are more balanced.