It looks like we’re not in the same boat, I’m not arguing about perceptions of a typical female outside observer looking at the LW community, I’m answering shminux’
Does this stereotyping make me sexist? (...) If this is a bias, which one is it?
What’s the goal here? Instrumentally, “how do we give new people of group X the fuzziest feelings when encountering this website?” We’re both in agreement on a lot of proposals then, probably.
Or is it “does making this observation—whether internally or externally—constitute a bias?”, in which case the answer is “no” in the same sense as it is “no” to “Qiaochu_Yuan’s first word in a comment is seemingly always ‘Observing’ or ‘Disagree;’”
edit:
(if indeed it is correct; as another commenter pointed out, there’s an obvious possible issue with confirmation bias here)
No there is not, he said “which is the case probably 80% of the time or more, when I get to check this assumption.” Unless you think he forgets the times his assumption turned out wrong, which is quite uncharitable.
Making this observation constitutes weak evidence of a bias (namely male privilege), and it is easier for a typical female outside observer to see this than for you or shminux.
Unless you think he forgets the times his assumption turned out wrong, which is quite uncharitable.
Making this observation constitutes weak evidence of a bias (namely male privilege), and it is easier for a typical female outside observer to see this than for you or shminux.
Male privilege? Wait what?
I’d be delighted if someone could explain to me how it’s even in the hypothesis that schminux could be considering himself privileged or having some sort of advantage for making or that lets him make the observation “slow/cautious drivers are 80%/mostly female”.
Sure the selection of that particular observation and gender as the category of all things seems odd and is evidence of something about the observer’s thoughts on gender, with a slight tinge of evidence that the observer might have more negative opinions specifically on the female gender because the observation is made against them, but… privilege? Wha...? Where does the above lead to male privilege?
I feel like this whole thread also somewhat derailed. I notice schminux originally didn’t say he makes the observation aloud, only that he observes and thinks. Now the claim is apparently that he says this in public and that typical outside female observers immediately run this through misogyny filters and take it as evidence of gender bias? I’d be tempted to first think that the typical female observer is clearly the more biased and in-the-wrong one here, not to mention that schminux probably wasn’t talking about announcing statistical gender differences in public as The Truth to all Unbelievers so that typical unspecific gender observers can spin it however they want. A question was made with a tentative, low-confidence claim, to LessWrong. Not the Daily Opinions Column.
Also, base rate your typical observers. To the typical male observer, this conversation isn’t what we’re all doing here. To the typical male observer, “LOLOLOL YALL ARE CRAZY BITCHEZ STOP BEIN FAGS IMA GO GET A BEER”… but is that the kind of people we’re looking for? The kind that go “lololol bitchez” or “such a bunch of jerks, all patriarchy-infested egocentric pretenders” at the first sight of any discussion on LessWrong that is even partially about gender differences?
I’d be delighted if someone could explain to me how it’s even in the hypothesis that schminux could be considering himself privileged or having some sort of advantage for making or that lets him make the observation “slow/cautious drivers are 80%/mostly female”.
Sure. Take the outside view. Male commenters on the internet have some distribution of attitudes towards gender. Some of those attitudes are more or less likely to lead to comments like “most slow drivers are female.” One of those attitudes (simplifying considerably) is having and being unaware of male privilege, call it M. A comment C on the internet is Bayesian evidence for M if and only if M-commenters are more likely to make comments like C than non-M commenters. My claim is that a comment like shminux’s is more likely to come from someone who has and is unaware of their male privilege than from someone who is at least aware of their male privilege.
In this particular case, you have inside view reasons to believe that shminux’s statement was generated via some other process than the one I’m suggesting that shminux’s statement provides weak evidence for (emphasis on the weak). There’s no contradiction here.
Forget what I said about the typical outside female observer. The point of that device was to 1) enforce outside view and 2) make gender issues more salient.
I notice schminux originally didn’t say he makes the observation aloud, only that he observes and thinks. Now the claim is apparently that he says this in public
He did say it in public. It’s right here on LessWrong.
It’s now obvious to me that the outside viewer does see P(M|C) > P(M|¬C), and why.
However, what schminux gave is not C, but R(C) + Q, and to any attentive reader I assume that P(M|R(C)+Q+C) < P(M|¬C) < P(M) < P(M|C); where R(C) is a meta-observation about one’s own (past?) observations/comments C¹ , and Q is a question about the evidence carried by C and R(C).
Any external reader who misses this is, as far as I can tell, simply wrong. They were most likely themselves taken by confirmation bias or some other undesirable effect.
Confirmation bias among self-proclaimed feminists is actually something I have a rather high prior for, since they train themselves to see gender bias everywhere in many cases.
(and R(C) does include C as a component once unwrapped, but for clarity I added C in the chain above; assume appropriate anti-double-counting measures are taken)
Would I be a misogynist (or a gynophile) if I pointed out that (for cultural and other reasons) many women fare better in social situations? Would you dispute any such difference, or would you assume some sort of hidden agenda whenever such a difference is stated?
Miso this, miso that, miserere more like.
Given the differences (on average) between gender groups, for nearly any given topic it would be highly unexpected for the distribution to be strictly uniform. Same applies for different age groups.
Is me saying that ‘bad’?
(I would have a similarly strong reaction if discussions about, say, foresting strategies, were overlain with highly charged political terms.)
Would I be a misogynist (or a gynophile) if I pointed out that (for cultural and other reasons) many women fare better in social situations? Would you dispute any such difference, or would you assume some sort of hidden agenda whenever such a difference is stated?
Essentially, gender discussions are constructed to penalize half of the discussion. That’s pretty much exactly why I file gender discussion as a strictly political issue; it’s built on an us-versus-them dynamic.
Doesn’t matter what gender you are. I didn’t say half the participants, I said half the discussion. The us-versus-them isn’t constructed on gender lines, but ideological lines.
And the half which you just explicitly stated you penalize (however weakly), and which I broadly see penalized in the majority of gender discussions.
I have always subconsciously assumed that you are male, probably based on the overall LW gender distribution. Unfortunately I have no intuitions relating gender to Chinese names.
Essentially, gender discussions are constructed to penalize half of the discussion. That’s pretty much exactly why I file gender discussion as a strictly political issue
In most of my social circles, gender discussions are the most in your face examples of arguments as soldiers. Knowing that politics is the mind-killer, I usually keep my mouth shut.
It looks like we’re not in the same boat, I’m not arguing about perceptions of a typical female outside observer looking at the LW community, I’m answering shminux’
What’s the goal here? Instrumentally, “how do we give new people of group X the fuzziest feelings when encountering this website?” We’re both in agreement on a lot of proposals then, probably.
Or is it “does making this observation—whether internally or externally—constitute a bias?”, in which case the answer is “no” in the same sense as it is “no” to “Qiaochu_Yuan’s first word in a comment is seemingly always ‘Observing’ or ‘Disagree;’”
edit:
No there is not, he said “which is the case probably 80% of the time or more, when I get to check this assumption.” Unless you think he forgets the times his assumption turned out wrong, which is quite uncharitable.
Making this observation constitutes weak evidence of a bias (namely male privilege), and it is easier for a typical female outside observer to see this than for you or shminux.
Yes, I think this, or at least I think it’s a hypothesis worth entertaining. This is absolutely a part of confirmation bias.
Male privilege? Wait what?
I’d be delighted if someone could explain to me how it’s even in the hypothesis that schminux could be considering himself privileged or having some sort of advantage for making or that lets him make the observation “slow/cautious drivers are 80%/mostly female”.
Sure the selection of that particular observation and gender as the category of all things seems odd and is evidence of something about the observer’s thoughts on gender, with a slight tinge of evidence that the observer might have more negative opinions specifically on the female gender because the observation is made against them, but… privilege? Wha...? Where does the above lead to male privilege?
I feel like this whole thread also somewhat derailed. I notice schminux originally didn’t say he makes the observation aloud, only that he observes and thinks. Now the claim is apparently that he says this in public and that typical outside female observers immediately run this through misogyny filters and take it as evidence of gender bias? I’d be tempted to first think that the typical female observer is clearly the more biased and in-the-wrong one here, not to mention that schminux probably wasn’t talking about announcing statistical gender differences in public as The Truth to all Unbelievers so that typical unspecific gender observers can spin it however they want. A question was made with a tentative, low-confidence claim, to LessWrong. Not the Daily Opinions Column.
Also, base rate your typical observers. To the typical male observer, this conversation isn’t what we’re all doing here. To the typical male observer, “LOLOLOL YALL ARE CRAZY BITCHEZ STOP BEIN FAGS IMA GO GET A BEER”… but is that the kind of people we’re looking for? The kind that go “lololol bitchez” or “such a bunch of jerks, all patriarchy-infested egocentric pretenders” at the first sight of any discussion on LessWrong that is even partially about gender differences?
Sure. Take the outside view. Male commenters on the internet have some distribution of attitudes towards gender. Some of those attitudes are more or less likely to lead to comments like “most slow drivers are female.” One of those attitudes (simplifying considerably) is having and being unaware of male privilege, call it M. A comment C on the internet is Bayesian evidence for M if and only if M-commenters are more likely to make comments like C than non-M commenters. My claim is that a comment like shminux’s is more likely to come from someone who has and is unaware of their male privilege than from someone who is at least aware of their male privilege.
In this particular case, you have inside view reasons to believe that shminux’s statement was generated via some other process than the one I’m suggesting that shminux’s statement provides weak evidence for (emphasis on the weak). There’s no contradiction here.
Forget what I said about the typical outside female observer. The point of that device was to 1) enforce outside view and 2) make gender issues more salient.
He did say it in public. It’s right here on LessWrong.
Okay. That makes it much clearer.
It’s now obvious to me that the outside viewer does see P(M|C) > P(M|¬C), and why.
However, what schminux gave is not C, but R(C) + Q, and to any attentive reader I assume that P(M|R(C)+Q+C) < P(M|¬C) < P(M) < P(M|C); where R(C) is a meta-observation about one’s own (past?) observations/comments C¹ , and Q is a question about the evidence carried by C and R(C).
Any external reader who misses this is, as far as I can tell, simply wrong. They were most likely themselves taken by confirmation bias or some other undesirable effect.
Confirmation bias among self-proclaimed feminists is actually something I have a rather high prior for, since they train themselves to see gender bias everywhere in many cases.
(and R(C) does include C as a component once unwrapped, but for clarity I added C in the chain above; assume appropriate anti-double-counting measures are taken)
Would I be a misogynist (or a gynophile) if I pointed out that (for cultural and other reasons) many women fare better in social situations? Would you dispute any such difference, or would you assume some sort of hidden agenda whenever such a difference is stated?
Miso this, miso that, miserere more like.
Given the differences (on average) between gender groups, for nearly any given topic it would be highly unexpected for the distribution to be strictly uniform. Same applies for different age groups.
Is me saying that ‘bad’?
(I would have a similarly strong reaction if discussions about, say, foresting strategies, were overlain with highly charged political terms.)
Weak evidence of misogyny. Emphasis on the weak.
What?
Essentially, gender discussions are constructed to penalize half of the discussion. That’s pretty much exactly why I file gender discussion as a strictly political issue; it’s built on an us-versus-them dynamic.
I am extremely curious what gender everyone in this discussion thinks I am. (Also, I agree, but which half were you thinking of?)
Doesn’t matter what gender you are. I didn’t say half the participants, I said half the discussion. The us-versus-them isn’t constructed on gender lines, but ideological lines.
And the half which you just explicitly stated you penalize (however weakly), and which I broadly see penalized in the majority of gender discussions.
I have always subconsciously assumed that you are male, probably based on the overall LW gender distribution. Unfortunately I have no intuitions relating gender to Chinese names.
In most of my social circles, gender discussions are the most in your face examples of arguments as soldiers. Knowing that politics is the mind-killer, I usually keep my mouth shut.