LW Women: LW Online

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.

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.

I didn't notice that on a different level than, say, the parts about killing your friends if they don't believe in you

I don't see how it is.

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.

If all PUA said was those 4 things, it wouldn't be interesting or controversial, so I think it's pretty ridiculous to respond to a conversation about PUA mentioning the parts few people would disagree with. Trickery, lies, insults, treating people as things, these are the sorts of problems people have with PUA.

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 cultural-- wasn't more common for both men and women at least from the colonial era (US) to the Victorian era?

There was that discussion of ignoring good test results from a member of a group if you already believe that they're bad at whatever was being tested. (They were referred to as blues, but it seemed to be a reference to women and math.) It was a case of only identifying with the gatekeeper.

It was also an extremely straightforward application of Bayes's theorem.

That depends on how much you demand of your priors, and low quality priors is something that makes me nervous about Bayes.

For this particular case, there's no examination of how much variance on the high side people get on tests. In particular, it seems very unlikely that people will get scores much above their baseline on tests about any sophisticated subject, though various factors (illness and other distractions) could drive their scores below their baseline.

What's VHF Utilitarianism? Is there any utilitarian cost to some capable people giving up because they believe rightly that their accomplishments will be discounted?

I'm not sure how much anyone has been convinced that women have actual points of view

Where has anyone claimed they don't? At least beyond the general rejection of qualia?

My language may have been hyperbolic and/or vague. I was thinking of "creepiness = low status" which sounds to me like "it's so unfair that women don't want to spend time with men they're uncomfortable around". In this case, I was thinking "lack of point of view", but "preferences are irrelevant" might be more accurate.

Is this comment a satire?

In any case, the remark about the von Neumann-Morgenstern theorem is just wrong.

How do you reconcile this view with the way questions of tone have become entangled with gender issues in the very thread?

When the difference IS the topic, that tends to amplify the relevance of the differences.

There was that discussion of ignoring good test results from a member of a group if you already believe that they're bad at whatever was being tested. (They were referred to as blues, but it seemed to be a reference to women and math.) It was a case of only identifying with the gatekeeper.

It was also an extremely straightforward application of Bayes's theorem.

We have a population of 200 weasels, 100 blue and 100 red. 90% of blue weasels are programmers, and 10% of red weasels are programmers.

If we design a perfect test-of-being-a-programmer, we will have a pool of 100 programmers (90 blue, 10 red).

If our pool of programmers does NOT follow that distribution, it suggests that we're probably doing something wrong in our screening, like de-facto excluding all of the red weasels due to bigotry. This HURTS us, because we now have fewer programmers in our pool, and/or we have non-programmers in our pool.

If you go out and test all the weasels, and 50% of them pass, and it's 90% blue and 10% red, I don't see any rational reason to assume that the blue weasels are going to be superior to the red weasels, or that the red weasels are more likely to be because of test variance.

Now, if you get a pool that's 80 red weasels and 20 blue weasels, you're right to be suspicious that maybe this is not a very accurate test. But given the real-world job market, we should expect such outliers to occur. If everyone else is getting 90 blue and 10 red weasels from this test, you should assume you're such an outlier, since you have plenty of evidence towards the test being accurate.

And if we're getting that 90-10 ratio that we expect, there's no reason to assume that the red weasels are any less competent. If 10% of all weasels are super-programmers, we should expect 10% of our blue programming weasels and 10% of our red programming weasels to be super-programmers (so, on average, 9 blue super-programmers and 1 red super-programmer).

Seriously, where is this anti-red-weasel bias coming from? Nothing in the math seems to suggest it, unless you're using a seriously crappy test >.>

The problem is that the concept of "fairness" you are using there is incompatible with VNM-utilitarianism. (If somebody disagrees with this, please describe what the term in one's utility function corresponding to fairness would look like.)

First off, I have to say, just asking this sets off a serious, serious troll alert.

So, we have 5 players, and 50 utilions to divide between them. Players all value utilions equally, and utilions have linear value (i.e. 5 utilions is five times better than 1). Fairness says we give each player 10 utilions. Let's make our unfair distribution 8, 8, 10, 12, 12.

How to express this mathematically? You could have a factor in your utility equation that is based on deviation from the mean (least-square immediately strikes me as elegant), or one which values the absolute difference between best and worst, or which averages against the lowest value.

For the first technique, the distribution 8,8,10,12,12, has 2^2 = 4 x 4 = -16 utility compared to ideal.

For the second technique, you lose -4 utility (12-8)

For the third technique, the utility for each player is 8, 8 (10+8/2 = 9), (12+8/2 = 10), (12+8/2 = 10), for a total penalty of -5 against ideal.

And that's all assuming that fairness is a terminal value, not something that generates utility. That's all assuming we're playing with Platonic Utilions with linear value, rather than money (which seems to fall in value the more you get).

I mean this sincerely: if you're not a troll, I am genuinely and deeply confused how you could possibly think this is the slightest bit incompatible with VNM utilitarianism.

The problem is that the concept of "fairness" you are using there is incompatible with VHM-utilitarianism. (If somebody disagrees with this, please describe what the term in one's utility function corresponding to fairness would look like.)

People care about fairness, and get negative utility from feeling like they are being treated unfairly.

Thanks, but I'm pretty sure that isn't it. The one I remember had an allegory and originated at LW.

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.

Could you give some examples? I'm having trouble thinking of any.

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.

Thank you. I found the thread about the video, but I'm not sure I replied to the discussion of discounting excellent results from people who aren't expected to produce them. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be a problem with not finding it since there's a consensus that it's the sort of thing which would be plausible to find at LW.

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 precision of the test, the end effect is probably small, but the size of the effect increases the more extreme the results are.

On math scores in particular, both the male mean and the male standard deviation are higher than the female mean and female standard deviation. The difference in standard deviations is discussed much less than the difference in means, but it turns out to be very important when calculating this effect. Thus, the chance that a female got an 800 on the Math SAT due to luck is higher than the chance that a male got an 800 on the Math SAT due to luck. Of course, the true ability necessary to get an 800 by luck is rather high, but could still be below some meaningful cutoff, and like Nancy points out, getting more evidence should make the posterior better reflect the true ability.

Sorry, but no. I was hoping that someone with a better memory and/or better search skills would be able to find the links.

This seems like the noncentral fallacy.

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 suspect that people who have a naturally nice voice underestimate how hard it is for people who don't have a naturally nice voice to talk nicely, even when they want to (this is based on super-high priors for this general form of fail happening any time the opportunity presents it self).

After two days, a discussion will die down to the point where it barely gets any responses. If you're going to make it ladies only, make it ladies only permanently. Make an identical male only counterpart. That would solve the problem "Where will the men post?" and give you a nice undiluted control for your observations about the women. It will also help keep things organized (Otherwise can you imagine the overhead in going through the thread trying to figure out who was male and who was female, and reading each time stamp to determine who was who? It's much much easier to make two threads.) If women know that men will reply to their comments later, this may inhibit them from saying certain things the same way that it will inhibit them if men are there right away. If they know the men are never supposed to reply to that comment, that would help maximize the women's comfort.

Is there a good solution which would not ignore either of these aspects? In my opinion, there is: having both discussions about "getting women" and "getting men" on the website. And having them only in articles on a given topic, not randomly anywhere else. But even if this would be acceptable to others (which I doubt), the problem remains how to get from here to there.

This does not strike me as a good solution; assuming each type of discussion is valuable to members of the gender engaged in it, but offensive to members of the gender under discussion, then this provides men and women both with a topic of discussion, but also a source of offense.

I think those assumptions are more favorable to the proposition than the reality is though. Women on Less Wrong could have been writing articles on "getting men" all along, but haven't, and I don't think that they're likely to start because of an official policy statement that "this is allowed." It always has been. This is a behavior that some women engage in, but I doubt it's a significant enticement to the women who're actually members here, or would want to be. So if that's the case then the assumption that both men and women are getting something valuable in exchange for the source of offense wouldn't hold. We already know that the level of offense many prospective female members are facing is considerable; if we as a community are going to keep that source of offense, and offer them something in exchange, it would have to be something they really want.

I think it's also worth noting that we don't have many typical heterosexual men here; the member base of Less Wrong is overwhelmingly atypical. I don't know how many are atypical in this particular respect, but I can attest that I personally don't talk about "getting women," not because I'm observing a taboo, but because it makes me uncomfortable. I'd like a satisfying relationship, but treating finding a partner like an acquisition of goods feels distasteful.

Is the tendency of the sort of men who treat "getting women" as an inalienable part of their utility function something innate and unalterable? I don't know, it feels implausible to me given how hard it is for me to personally relate to it. But given that this is a community specifically focused on adjusting our own cognitive biases, it seems to me that we should give serious consideration to the perspective of treating it as an outlook in need of adjustment.

I originally voted in favor because it sounded like an interesting experiment, but there's a difficulty, not just with people who don't think of themselves as male or female, but with people who don't want to reveal their gender.

I would vote for “Interesting idea”, if it was an option (i.e., ‘let's try this for a while and see how it goes, and switch back if it doesn't go well’).

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."

I'm nonbinary (that is, I do not identify with either gender), and I feel that my social experience is somewhat in-between that of most men and that of most women. Would it be acceptable for me to vote on these questions, or would that distort the data?

Note: Women can only see how other women voted, and men can only see how other men voted.

we don't have enough high-status men to enforce sensible standards on it

I dunno if "enforcement" is the most compassionate approach. Personally, the most effective way I've found to counter negative attitudes towards women is to have positive social and romantic interactions with them... applying self-control can prevent me from expressing my resentment, but it doesn't seem to fix the resentment itself. Maybe we could have compassion for sexually inexperienced guys (being a male virgin can really suck, although I suspect men contribute to this fact more than women do) and try to help them overcome their problem (e.g. this has been really useful for me).

Do you behave differently in mixed groups compared to male only groups?

I voted “no”, but “ADBOC”/“it depends” would be more accurate. The male-only groups I'm likely to be found in are usually unusual in ways other than the absence of women, and for any two groups A and B such that A is a subset of B, A doesn't contain women, and I'm non-negligibly likely to be in either of them, there's no substantial difference between the way I behave in A and the way I behave in B.

(Assuming we have sensible community norms like "mentally flip the genders in your post before you post to check this is normal objectifying rather than super-offensive objectifying", which I think we can do.)

Most feminists believe that the objectification of women is harmful not merely because it is objectification per se, but because is embedded in/contributes to a culture in which objectification is heavily asymmetric between genders, both in its frequency and in its impact. If this is right, then mentally flipping genders in a post isn't a reliable guide to whether the objectification in that post is a problem.

The fact that some women complain, is not a big evidence per se. Some men complain, too. The evidence is that the complaining seems coherent, is persistent, and there are no women saying: "actually, I think it is completely the other way."

Also, I would agree that it is important to maximize the number of rationalists, regardless of their demographics. But I would not be surprised if a small change of rules could make this site more attractive for many women, and still attractive enough for 95% of the men which are currently here. On the other hand I also would not be surprised if we will never have enough rational women here (or anywhere else), regardless of what we will do. Sorry, my model simply does not contain the information about what kind of a website can be best for rational women (with emphasis on both of these words). To be fair, before LW I also did not know what kind of a website would be best for rational men; I could not imagine rationality surviving in a group of more than five people. More data need to be gathered by an experiment.

I'm having trouble understanding the first part of your comment. It sounds like you're saying that the quoted portion of Viliam_Bur's comment assumes LW is a sealed environment, but I'm not seeing where that assumption comes in. It reads to me like just a straightforward summary of and response to what was in the original post.

Are you saying that his suggestion that we can solve these issues by discussing them is overly optimistic?

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.

Thank you for speaking up.

It is- I've been on here for ~2 years (lurking, then signed up) and often refrain from commenting,

I believe that's more-or-less the desired behavior for newbies.

I worry sometimes that I may be reinforcing this sort of problem. I can be welcoming when I'm mindful, but a number of times I've found myself posting comments (such as here,) which would be culturally acceptable in an exchange between established members, but may be too hard on someone who can't fall back on the knowledge that they're still accepted and respected as a community member.

On the one hand, we don't want to drive down our standards as a community, but on the other hand, if we expect newcomers to be up to at least the average level of established members here, we'll be filtering out a lot of the people who stand to actually learn from participating.

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.

On the other hand, people who're put off by the atmosphere and leave immediately (and I've spoken to a number of whom this was the case) are going to be saying far less, at least within the community, than people who stick around.

I was once told that someone would upvote me iff I got rid of the smiley in my comment. (or perhaps it was an "lol")

While I favor more mindfulness of being welcoming and considerate here, I am heavily opposed to the use of smilies.

The person daenerys is referring to in her comment is not me, but I just don't like them.

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.

Upvoted for agreement despite the last sentence.

That's dismissive of their complaints without actually addressing anything. Do you think the complaints are wrong?

Who are they supposed to have learned that from? They sure as hell didn't learn that from me. And every man I know wishes women were more to the point. The stereotype criticism is "blah blah blah", not abruptness. If you're in charge, make decisions, and give orders. I'll salute, and we'll get something done.

No citations, but I've heard a lot of times that women in business positions are punished for being assertive or aggressive in situations where men are expected to do the same. I don't know if this is true (I think it probably is), but either way I've definitely heard it enough times that it doesn't surprise me that women would think they should try not to seem abrupt or bossy.

Agonizing over a period versus an ellipsis? I recoil in horror at the thought of having such feelings routinely intrude into my consciousness.

It's always interesting to see how the other half lives, even when it's appalling.

I'm not sure who exactly "the other half" is here, but I'll note that this is a completely relatable experience to me. If I'm writing a message where I expect the recipients to be highly connotation-sensitive, in a context where I have anything important riding on the impression I create, I'll agonize over getting exactly the right phrasing and punctuation for ideal signaling effect.

I certainly don't do it because I prefer it that way, but I can't decide how seriously to have other people take the signaling content of my messages, so if I suspect it may be serious, I'll invest a commensurate level of attention.

On Less Wrong, thankfully, I generally don't feel compelled to do this, and I can focus most of my effort on managing my denotation.

women who are on LW still tend to be more put off by the hostility.

Unless we have some availability bias here.

Robin Hanson has also speculated about differing payoffs for complaining.

I think a lot of things are getting conflated on the "emotional" side.

1 The ability to sense the emotion of others.
2 The ability to feel the emotions of others in yourself.
3 The likelihood of feeling an emotional reaction to the statements of others.
4 The people skills to effectively manipulate the emotions of someone else.

Psychopaths are very good on 1 and 4 but not on 2 and 3.

I would argue that being sensitive is something one has to at least partially overcome in order to be rational, i.e., one has to be able to ignore the social pressure to conform to popular irrational beliefs.

Yeah you're right. I think part of what I was wondering was whether it does make sense to group those 2 things under one heading, or just how strongly they're correlated.

Now that you mention it, I seem to recall reading on Yvain's blog that he's also hyper-sensitive to negative criticism, so there's another data point for it not being tied all that strongly to gender.

Edit: Aforementioned Yvain blogpost

The important question is whether this interpretation is true.

Fair point. I think I was using this as a proxy for truth, the same way you might ask "do economists believe X?" instead of "is X true about the economy?". But also I was up late.

Why? All you've shown is that this correlation doesn't fully screen off gender.

True. It is possible that empathic ability is affected by both gender and analytical disposition directly, rather than gender by-way-of analytical disposition. Or more realistically, that empathic ability is affected by analytical-ness as well as other, orthogonal personality traits, and that these might be gender-correlated as well. This interpretation seems messy from a complexity standpoint, but such is the subject matter.

I wonder what other personality traits we'd have to account for before we could explain the gender difference. Also, there's the question of just how much of the difference is left over once we've screened off however much analytical disposition screens off. Again, I'm just hashing out confusion here, not claiming to have solutions.

It's at least interesting that the most extensive (and probably the most useful) discussion we've had about the tone here used "what are problems women have with LW?" as the entry point, even though some men have a lot of the same problems.

Is there anything to be concluded from this, other than that damned hard to find your own blind spots?

I'd agree with this, and add a point that the interaction between 1 and 2 is also important - a little signalling of empathy injects a lot of warmth into a comment or interaction.

I'll take a look.

This seems like a reasonable set of examples, though I'm not someone who was concerned by a lack of warmth, so not ideal to judge who well you've understood their critique.

My only concern is that you might have been unfair to the warmth side, as your cold responses look much better - I'd much rather have them, efficient, information dense and clear as they are.

I upvoted you for giving the examples. Though, given that I mostly share Michelle's... let's say difficulty with the concepts, I can't quite tell if they're correct examples :-)

Hmm, I kind of agree with Larks, I think I tend to prefer "colder" discussions (in general, not just your examples). I like jokes, and the occasional affectation (like the "'twas" you used there), and I love people mixing seriousness and funny stuff as long as the serious part remains mostly correct (like that formal ecological analysis of the prey-predator dynamics in Buffy that circulated at one point on the net), but few people can keep that up all the time, and I get really off-put when things become wordy just to avoid "touchy-feely"(x) people getting offended.

(x: I don't mean that deprecatingly, that's just the label my brain attaches to some things. It's weird, I sort of theoretically agree with what (seems to me) is the general-population idea that coldness is bad and warmth is nice, it's just that in practice it often annoys me. Though I'm also annoyed by intentional cold comments (acid sarcasm and the like), which get the "bad touchy-feely" label.)

I can't tell what practical lessons to draw from this. Personally, other than adding a smiley or an exclamation mark now and then I don't really know how to make myself not sound cold.

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.

He probably did find it annoying, though I can't imagine that comment working the way you intended. His main justification for "biting the bullet" is going to be that biases could hinder a useful analysis. In this case, useful analysis is the thing that lets a person pause and think "this person isn't just against me., he's trying to tell me something". Since you didn't provide a useful analysis of why he didn't actually believe that, you managed to annoy him without actually demonstrating that annoyance is a valid response.

The disregard of annoyance as a valid response can be attributed to people at LW being encouraged to ignore their own emotions in situations like above, based on the idea that most misunderstandings are based on emotional biases that cloud proper thinking.

I don't think I'd be close to how successful I am with Alicorn-style luminosity without that sort of outside input

This nicely dovetails with Alicorn's luminosity origin story: people in her life refused to believe claims about her own mental states, and this experience was so intolerable that she resolved to become an obvious expert on mental states. Now the circle is... complete?

I can't speak for your experience in this case, but this is, after all, a rationality/unbiasing site. If they think you're Doing It Wrong, then it's not exactly offtopic to point it out.

Well... That kind-of sort-of illustrates my point. Or does it?

Jokes aside, I've already mentioned that I am unusually psychologically feminine for a man, but I would have guessed that my frequent steelmanning of stuff that many people strawman into rape apologia (e.g. pick-up artists or a series of articles on the Good Men Project) would give my gender away. But then again, I'm always steelmanning all sorts of stuff that many people strawman; I guess that's what happens when you grow up as a Catholic (read e.g. this to get an idea of what I'm talking about).

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.

It's at least worth finding out what the premises are behind your reaction.

I don't think her reaction makes a tremendous amount of sense, at least as she explains it. Nonetheless, she's an intelligent, interesting, and well-informed person, and I don't think the world would be a worse place if there were a rationality blog without a scoring system.

I've spent a fair amount of time in venues with and without scoring, and I don't see any correlation with the quality of the discussion.

it's probably not good that whenever I hear about people like that I feel a flash of contempt and a thought of "Good riddance" goes through my head.

Why not?

A discussion board seems to me like a very strange place to have that kind of rigorous discussion. It seems like it belongs in a wiki (or similar) where only the talk/discussion page has historical arguments, counterarguments, and contextual comments, but the main article is just the finished argument. I find it hard to follow a discussion thread where individual portions of an argument appear in different comments (sometimes entirely different articles) with little or no context. Perhaps I am misinterpreting the degree to which you think extraneous comments should be excluded. Or perhaps there is too little re-posting of improved arguments once the discussion has finished. Or too little use of the existing wiki.

The best example I can think of is the metamath.org proof explorer. It's composed mostly of rigorous derivations of theorems that (conveniently for mathematical arguments) can be checked for correctness by a computer, but with clarifying comments where necessary and a history of abandoned theorems and definitions with explanations.

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?

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.