I’ve read all the “LW Women” posts now, and I still don’t see that anything useful has come from them. The submissions never really add up to more than a series of often contradictory anecdotes. Due to the small number of submissions overall and the obvious selection effects, there is little reason to think of generalizing any kind of lesson from them. Since the posts are anonymous, they aren’t even useful for generalizing to one person.
Was there something in particular you were hoping to learn from them? I don’t think the point of the exercise was to get an accurate profile of the female demographic on LessWrong, but to give people who wanted to speak up, a chance/incentive to do so. The submitters would probably not have posted the submissions on their own without the prompt, but they did submit these when they saw were prompted.
The anecdotes may be more useful when you consider that someone felt like she should say it. If nothing else, the contradiction in the anecdotes hints that there is no universal element among women that drives them away from LW.
I think they’re all useful. People rarely really share their full opinions on social matters, and seeing them and discussing them together has been instructive, IMO. We discussed generally taboo subjects, and I found it useful.
I’ve read all the “LW Women” posts now, and I still don’t see that anything useful has come from them. The submissions never really add up to more than a series of often contradictory anecdotes. Due to the small number of submissions overall and the obvious selection effects, there is little reason to think of generalizing any kind of lesson from them. Since the posts are anonymous, they aren’t even useful for generalizing to one person.
Falsifying most or all simple hypotheses is extremely useful.
They can still point at certain regions in hypothesis-space that certain people may have never thought of before.
Was there something in particular you were hoping to learn from them? I don’t think the point of the exercise was to get an accurate profile of the female demographic on LessWrong, but to give people who wanted to speak up, a chance/incentive to do so. The submitters would probably not have posted the submissions on their own without the prompt, but they did submit these when they saw were prompted.
The anecdotes may be more useful when you consider that someone felt like she should say it. If nothing else, the contradiction in the anecdotes hints that there is no universal element among women that drives them away from LW.
I think they’re all useful. People rarely really share their full opinions on social matters, and seeing them and discussing them together has been instructive, IMO. We discussed generally taboo subjects, and I found it useful.