If I asked you to solve “2+2=x” for x and you answered “4″, that would be Bayesian evidence that you know how to do simple arithmetic.
It is also Bayesian evidence that you answer “4” whenever asked for number. It is even Bayesian evidence that you only ever say the word “four”, period.
See how these are not all equal? When an observation you make is correct, that very much lowers the additional probability that you are a misogynist, compared to if your observation had been incorrect.
You could say “well, why make the observation?” to which I’d reply “Because you’re an attentive chap, and you’re in a car and observing regularities in your environment. Other people are interesting, and their gender cannot not be seen when looking into other cars.”
you also don’t have to loudly describe parts of your map to everyone else in the car
If I ferried the kind of passengers who would appreciate pointing out a certain interesting geometric pattern of trees by the wayside, I wouldn’t want to treat observations about the identity of other drivers and how that predicts their behavior any differently.
edit: Can’t we just call the territory/reality misogynist in such cases, and when called out correctly say “I’m sorry reality offends you, ma’am.” :-)
I am female, and it’s taken me years to come to terms with the fact that reality probably does has a gender bias, and that some intellectual differences between men and women are likely to have a biological basis. It is really unfair and really difficult to deal with the fact that (on average) being born female means one is less likely to be good at certain things.
Saying “I’m sorry reality offends you ma’am” sounds snide to me, and I don’t think it would help anyone accept painful truths about gender differences.
Actually, I think that your analogy is apt. The only difference is that the priors on “someone says “four” whenever asked for a number” and “someone only says the word “four” are really low and the prior for “someone has some misogynist beliefs” is much higher.
(Note that I am definitely not saying that shminux is a misogynist.)
See how these are not all equal? When an observation you make is correct, that very much lowers the additional probability that you are a misogynist, compared to if your observation had been incorrect.
Disagree; part of what is being updated on is the fact that shminux decided to make the observation at all. Also, a typical female outside observer looking at the LW community is not going to know that an observation like shminux’s is correct (if indeed it is correct; as another commenter pointed out, there’s an obvious possible issue with confirmation bias here). What she might instead do is take the outside view about what kind of attitude towards gender produces observations like shminux’s (and then upvotes them six times).
You could say “well, why make the observation?” to which I’d reply “Because you’re an attentive chap, and you’re in a car and observing regularities in your environment. Other people are interesting, and their gender cannot not be seen when looking into other cars.”
Yes, but a typical female outside observer looking at the LW community does not know that about you, and moreover may not trust that your introspection about this issue is reliable.
If I ferried the kind of passengers who would appreciate pointing out a certain interesting geometric pattern of trees by the wayside, I wouldn’t want to treat observations about the identity of other drivers and how that predicts their behavior any differently.
The point I’m making is not about what inferences you would draw, it is about what inferences a typical female outside observer would draw.
edit: Can’t we just call the territory/reality misogynist in such cases, and when called out correctly say “I’m sorry reality offends you, ma’am.” :-)
I’m not calling the territory misogynist. I’m calling shminux’s decision to look at and then say that he’s looking at a particular part of the territory (weak) Bayesian evidence of misogyny. I would also call your decision to use the phrase “I’m sorry reality offends you, ma’am” (stronger) Bayesian evidence of misogyny.
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.
You could say “well, why make the observation?” to which I’d reply “Because you’re an attentive chap, and you’re in a car and observing regularities in your environment. Other people are interesting, and their gender cannot not be seen when looking into other cars.”
“Why make that observation?” is a bad question. Whether or not you have a reason that morally justifies you to make that observation has little to do with the issue of whether making that observation and telling other people about it, correlates with having misogynist tendencies.
You can measure misogynist tendencies with an implicit association tests. Misogynist tendencies are something real that you can measure in the lab.
The test doesn’t care about whether you can provide some intellectual justification for your observations.
You can measure misogynist tendencies with an implicit association tests. Misogynist tendencies are something real that you can measure in the lab. The test doesn’t care about whether you can provide some intellectual justification for your observations.
So by that definition it’s perfectly possible for lack of “misogynist tendencies” to constitute a bias.
If I asked you to solve “2+2=x” for x and you answered “4″, that would be Bayesian evidence that you know how to do simple arithmetic.
It is also Bayesian evidence that you answer “4” whenever asked for number. It is even Bayesian evidence that you only ever say the word “four”, period.
See how these are not all equal? When an observation you make is correct, that very much lowers the additional probability that you are a misogynist, compared to if your observation had been incorrect.
You could say “well, why make the observation?” to which I’d reply “Because you’re an attentive chap, and you’re in a car and observing regularities in your environment. Other people are interesting, and their gender cannot not be seen when looking into other cars.”
If I ferried the kind of passengers who would appreciate pointing out a certain interesting geometric pattern of trees by the wayside, I wouldn’t want to treat observations about the identity of other drivers and how that predicts their behavior any differently.
edit: Can’t we just call the territory/reality misogynist in such cases, and when called out correctly say “I’m sorry reality offends you, ma’am.” :-)
I am female, and it’s taken me years to come to terms with the fact that reality probably does has a gender bias, and that some intellectual differences between men and women are likely to have a biological basis. It is really unfair and really difficult to deal with the fact that (on average) being born female means one is less likely to be good at certain things.
Saying “I’m sorry reality offends you ma’am” sounds snide to me, and I don’t think it would help anyone accept painful truths about gender differences.
Upvoted for “reality probably has a gender bias”. :-)
We could certainly do that, but I think that would be rather counter to the goal of building a correct map while not incurring avoidable social costs.
Actually, I think that your analogy is apt. The only difference is that the priors on “someone says “four” whenever asked for a number” and “someone only says the word “four” are really low and the prior for “someone has some misogynist beliefs” is much higher.
(Note that I am definitely not saying that shminux is a misogynist.)
Disagree; part of what is being updated on is the fact that shminux decided to make the observation at all. Also, a typical female outside observer looking at the LW community is not going to know that an observation like shminux’s is correct (if indeed it is correct; as another commenter pointed out, there’s an obvious possible issue with confirmation bias here). What she might instead do is take the outside view about what kind of attitude towards gender produces observations like shminux’s (and then upvotes them six times).
Yes, but a typical female outside observer looking at the LW community does not know that about you, and moreover may not trust that your introspection about this issue is reliable.
The point I’m making is not about what inferences you would draw, it is about what inferences a typical female outside observer would draw.
I’m not calling the territory misogynist. I’m calling shminux’s decision to look at and then say that he’s looking at a particular part of the territory (weak) Bayesian evidence of misogyny. I would also call your decision to use the phrase “I’m sorry reality offends you, ma’am” (stronger) Bayesian evidence of misogyny.
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.
“Why make that observation?” is a bad question. Whether or not you have a reason that morally justifies you to make that observation has little to do with the issue of whether making that observation and telling other people about it, correlates with having misogynist tendencies.
You can measure misogynist tendencies with an implicit association tests. Misogynist tendencies are something real that you can measure in the lab. The test doesn’t care about whether you can provide some intellectual justification for your observations.
So by that definition it’s perfectly possible for lack of “misogynist tendencies” to constitute a bias.