...which I am not yet prepared to believe... ...wildly inappropriate and offensive...
Alicorn, are you applying the virtue of evenness, and searching equally for evidence for and against your conclusions? I mean, is your aim solely to get an accurate answer?
For myself, I find that phrases like “not yet prepared to believe” are a tip-off, when I notice them in my own thinking, that… I’m looking for permission to keep believing a pleasant, socially useful, or otherwise convenient belief, rather than really trying to figure out what’s true. I’m thinking “but the evidence doesn’t yet force me to change my mind, or at least I can see it that way!” instead of asking “what’s most likely to be true? what clues can I draw from the evidence? what models are most likely to help me make accurate predictions in the future?”.
Ditto for terms like “offensive”, if applied to peoples’ anticipations about the world (matters of truth and falsity) rather than to peoples’ non-belief actions. If what you mean by “offensive” is that you suspect folks’ beliefs here are stemming from emotional biases, it is okay to say that, and to explain the causes of your beliefs about their biases. If what you mean by “offensive” is that having statements like this around may make women uncomfortable, it is okay to say that, to explore why, and to start a dialog on how (without ceasing to seek accurate beliefs, but while perhaps taking special pains to include other facets of the story) we can make LW a comfortable place for women. But a belief’s “offensiveness” isn’t directly relevant to its truth, and so it’s confusing to include it in an argument about what’s true, or in an argument about what we should say and believe.
I agree that women and men sometimes vary (though I’d love a better model of the details). It isn’t really your conclusions I’m trying to talk about here; it’s how to talk about potentially mind-killing topics, as a community, in a way that helps true conclusions come to the fore.
I don’t put a high priority on discovering the truth value of the proposition “women who are found at parties, in clubs, and patronizing bars are [insert pejorative here]”. I don’t currently have a belief about it (I’m ambivalent because my uninformed dislike for parties/clubs/bars and their patrons is in opposition to my equally uninformed general wish to think well of others), and I’m not looking for evidence either way because it’s not important to me in comparison to other things I could learn about as easily or more so. The information that I’ve stumbled across passively hasn’t pushed me to accept either conclusion, especially since my information is filtered by what happens to appear on my screen without any special looking. Regardless of whether women who are found in those places are [insert pejorative here], that doesn’t change my relevant opinions because I don’t think rights are a function of personal virtue, and all of the ethical claims I’ve made have been based on rights. It also doesn’t change whether I think the topic is appropriate, because among the reasons I find it inappropriate is that it makes me, personally, uncomfortable.
I think spending so much time talking about how men can sleep with/achieve success with/be more confident around/pick your favorite charming descriptor with women makes Less Wrong very gendered. It seems to be the pet topic of a few posters, who attribute specific characteristics unqualifiedly to “women” as an apparently undifferentiated group; this is alienating and stereotypifies us in what seems an obviously unwarranted way.
I’m ambivalent because my uninformed dislike for parties/clubs/bars and their patrons is in opposition to my equally uninformed general wish to think well of others.
So… wishes to think well of others aren’t actually evidence about what’s true. (I realize you probably know that, but you did cite it as a reason for belief.)
doesn’t change whether I think the topic is appropriate, because among the reasons I find it inappropriate is that it makes me, personally, uncomfortable.
Whether or not any given LW-er aims to believe something for a reason other than truth, it would be really nice if we could make LW a place where public conversation, at least, does aim for truth. If I want to go off and believe a convenient might-be-falsehood, fine, but other LW-ers shouldn’t have to censor themselves so as not to interfere with my belief. This is similar to my impressions on LW theists: yes, anyone should be welcomed here insofar as they help us learn rationality; no, we should not censor ourselves to avoid interfering with might-be-false beliefs folks want to preserve. And, no, LW shouldn’t be a forum in which people can take beliefs they hold for non-truth-related reasons, and try by non-truth-related arguments (e.g., arguments about social offensiveness) to get others to adopt those beliefs. There are plenty of other places to do that.
Although I do care that the topics make you uncomfortable. I liked your last two posts, and many of your comments, and I very much hope we’re able to form a community in which you’d like to stick around.
and I’m not looking for evidence either way because it’s not important to me in comparison to other things I could learn about as easily or more so.
It might be useful to distinguish two senses of “not looking for evidence” here. There are many topics on which it’s not worth one’s time/energy to go out and seek evidence, which is I think what you’re saying. But sometimes people “don’t look for evidence” in a different sense: they actively close their minds against the evidence, avert their eyes, and look for excuses not to let the evidence upset their beliefs. This sort of not looking is more costly; I find it can clog my head up, and make it harder for me to acknowledge truths elsewhere as well (including in areas where I do need accurate beliefs). I hope this isn’t what you mean.
Regardless of whether women who are found in those places are [insert pejorative here], that doesn’t change my relevant opinions because I don’t think rights are a function of personal virtue, and all of the ethical claims I’ve made have been based on rights.
Okay. But other people are trying to build accurate models of how various groups of women actually act—either because we’re intrinsically interested in how people work, or because it’s practically useful to understand how people work. And for these inquiries, information helps. I don’t think my or various others’ interest stems from trying to find out whether these groups of women are bad or pejorative-worthy. I’m also a bit skeptical of trying to form one’s ethics about how to treat people in isolation from empirical data on what makes people happy or unhappy and on what people in fact prefer—but I’m ignorant of the empirical details here, and I haven’t yet read most of your exchanges on those other threads, so maybe you really can ignore how people work as you form your ethics.
makes Less Wrong very gendered.
I agree that info on how to pick up women is likely to be of more direct relevance to LW men than to LW women. It might be good to create some articles that are of strong interest to LW women and/or that would help women feel more comfortable here, although our numbers make that more difficult. If you have thoughts on e.g. how to be comfortable being both intellectual and in at least some ways feminine (something I have trouble with, despite organically wanting both), I’d love to hear it, and, if it’s good, I could imagine referring other smart women I know to LW though the post.
Anna, not sure if you meant to paste in Alicorn’s entire comment at the top of yours, but the fact there’s no quote bar made me think you might not’ve—hence this comment =)
So… wishes to think well of others aren’t actually evidence about what’s true. (I realize you probably know that, but you did cite it as a reason for belief.)
I did no such thing. I cited it as something that contributed to my lack of a belief on this topic. I recognize that it would not suitably motivate any belief; it’s just competing with an equally unsuitable intuition to make me have no particular interest in the answer to the question. If I had a belief on this topic, I would not cite my optimism about human nature as evidence.
Whether or not any given LW-er aims to believe something for a reason other than truth, it would be really nice if we could make LW a place where public conversation, at least, does aim for truth...
Of course; I agree completely. That doesn’t mean we can’t have a narrowed, less creepy topic set; there are several subjects that don’t get much attention here that nonetheless can have truths about them, and I think seduction might do better in that category.
It might be useful to distinguish two senses of “not looking for evidence” here. There are many topics on which it’s not worth one’s time/energy to go out and seek evidence, which is I think what you’re saying.
You read me correctly. I did mention passively absorbing information on the subject; I’m not sticking my fingers in my ears and humming show tunes when I read things about seduction.
If you have thoughts on e.g. how to be comfortable being both intellectual and in at least some ways feminine (something I have trouble with, despite organically wanting both), I’d love to hear it, and, if it’s good, I could imagine referring other smart women I know to LW though the post.
The only characteristically feminine thing I have any special knowledge about is cooking. Would that be a suitable subject, if I can figure out how to make it on-topic? (Drawing a blank, but perhaps something would come to me in a dream.)
Cooking’s a great place to talk about where to add, where to multiply, where to pay attention to ratios, and above all where to pay attention to diminishing marginal utility of returns to X. These are core rationalist skills that haven’t been adequately discussed.
What has been said on LW about seduction is the aggregate state of the evidence. The discussions about seduction on OB and LW are the most unbiased summary on the topic I know. Take an intersection of Robin’s signaling theory, Eliezer’s essays on gender, and the skeptical-empirical knowledge of pickup artists. That is the truth insofar approximable.
For one thing, no blog is large enough to contain the aggregate state of the evidence about anything. For another, don’t you suppose some women might know something about this topic that you and your sources have missed? It may help to meditate on “Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence”—even if some critics irrationally discount the domain knowledge of PUAs, this is no excuse for irrationally discounting the critics’ domain knowledge.
Now AFAICT you refuse to accept OB and LW as ‘extraordinary institutions’.
Argument screens off authority. I agree that this is a wonderful blog, but it doesn’t mean that you should expect people to just accept the majority opinion here simply on the grounds that it’s such a wonderful blog. Especially on a mind-killing topic like gender, about which I fear no one’s rationality can simply be trusted. The authority of biologists derives from massive amounts of empirical evidence and many years of intense study, and even then, I do not think you should automatically trust everything a biologist says about anything to do with biology; you may have domain knowledge of your own that bears on some particular question. A comment thread full of smart people who profess truthseeking has still less authority.
You can afford to do this because inaccurate beliefs may cost you little in this area.
Isn’t this a fully general counterargument? It might similarly be said that you can afford to hold the opinions you do because inaccurate beliefs may cost you little in this area. And it gets us nowhere, either way.
A rational/scientific approach to cooking is the inspiration behind quite a few books and websites. I don’t really like to follow recipes so I’m quite interested in explanations of cooking that let you improvise by deriving from first principles rather than blindly following a rule book.
I haven’t read that book (I independently developed my style) but I’m thinking of buying it. Still, “how to cook without a recipe” is the premise of Improvisational Soup proper; I’d need some way to connect it more tightly to Less Wrong-worthy subjects to turn it into a post here that wouldn’t just serve as an excuse to plug Improv Soup. Maybe I could relate intuitions about food to the stuff about control theory (I don’t always know what I need to do to make my food turn out how I want it, so I guess, and with experience cooking all the ingredients, it’ll often work).
You could potentially make an interesting article illustrating common biases and failures of rationality with culinary examples.
One that springs to mind is browning meat to ‘seal in the juices’ when making stews or casseroles. As I’ve heard the story, a famous cookbook from many years ago explained the importance of browning meat to producing good stews and explained it as ‘sealing in the juices’ and that was the standard explanation for many years. At some point it was realized that the actual value of browning the meat is that the caramelization of sugars in the meat improves flavour and that the original explanation was nonsense. The process is still called ‘sealing’ however and many chefs will still try to avoid leaving any part of the meat ‘unsealed’. This seems like a pretty good example of how people come to believe a spurious explanation because it produces a good outcome and are reluctant to abandon the original explanation even when a better explanation comes along.
I’m sure there must be many more examples of this kind of thing in cooking—there seems to be a lot of pseudo science and poorly understood ritual in the culinary arts.
Anecdotal, perhaps, but I always found that the complicated method of “making a roux” seems totally pointless to me.
The point is to mix in a starchy flour-like substance to a sauce, then heat it up to make the starches go glutinous… this can be done much easier by mixing the flour into a little bit of cold water—then stirring it into the sauce while the heat is on it.
All this frigging about with putting it in butter in a pan and heating it up while madly stirring it to make sure it doesn’t burn or clump and only then adding it to the sauce seems totally unnecessary complication. It’s much more difficult than just dissolving it in water and stirring.
The point is to mix in a starchy flour-like substance to a sauce, then heat it up to make the starches go glutinous… this can be done much easier by mixing the flour into a little bit of cold water—then stirring it into the sauce while the heat is on it.
If you prefer to thicken things this way, use cornstarch: that’s exactly how you do it. The point of roux is partly to cook the flour so it doesn’t taste so floury. (Although if you find you have to “madly stir” your butter and flour you may have the heat up too high.)
Hmm—I guess I do tend to use cornflour. However—even when I use normal flour—I’ve never had it taste that floury. Cooking it in the sauce also cooks the flour… just afterwards instead of before.
At some point it was realized that the actual value of browning the meat is that the caramelization of sugars in the meat improves flavour and that the original explanation was nonsense.
Actually, if memory serves me, the primary benefit comes from the Maillard reaction, a heat-driven process involving amino acids. Not that this changes your point, of course.
I don’t know enough about how other people cook to have a collection of myths like that on hand, although I guess I could consult my mother (a more traditional cook) and see what she has to say.
I did no such thing. I cited it as something that contributed to my lack of a belief on this topic. I recognize that it would not suitably motivate any belief; it’s just competing with an equally unsuitable intuition to make me have no particular interest in the answer to the question. If I had a belief on this topic, I would not cite my optimism about human nature as evidence.
The confusion comes from ambiguity between lack of belief as disbelief, and lack of belief as not looking for evidence and thus lacking strong opinion either way.
No specific word belongs in the brackets. It represents a variety of things that have been said that appear to me to convey negative attitudes about women, some simply by virtue of saying anything about “women” without a qualifier like “many” or “in my experience” or “as a general tendency”.
In against disclaimers Robin argues against the idea that those qualifiers should be included
The idea is that among aspiring rationalists, it is silly to assume that “Any general claim about human behavior is an absolute law without exception unless it includes qualifiers like “tends” or “often.”″. Since there are always exceptions, you can drop the qualifier without losing any information.
I disagree with that part of that article. In spite of the fact that it may be safe to make charitable assumptions of most people on this site, the fact remains that people do make general statements about groups, including women, without deliberately intending to leave room for abundant exceptions. Also, qualifiers can convey different information about how general a tendency is being claimed. If I say “women have two X chromosomes”—am I making a definitional statement that excludes the transgendered, or am I just mentally classifying them as exceptions and hoping everyone knows what I mean? If I say “diamonds are the favorite gem of women”, am I unaware that plenty of women think moissanite is prettier or am I just saying that I think, if all women voted, diamonds would win? Qualifiers do change the information in many cases. Even when they don’t (less often, I suspect, than Robin thinks), they’re polite.
Hanson’s post certainly does come off a bit strong, and I agree that there are times to use disclaimers.
However, in this case, I assumed the disclaimer and (correct me if I’m wrong Yvain), but I think my interpretation was more accurate because of that.
I added the “among aspiring rationalists” qualifier for a reason; it makes less sense for those with no mental “sub buckets” within the “women” one.
If the disclaimer goes as far as to specify the size/location of the exception then yes, it adds more information. This may be not be useful information if the point is just that it’s a general trend. I see it like saying “The probability of a meteorite striking my house tomorrow is 0” (with the implied disclaimer “almost”)
Alicorn, are you applying the virtue of evenness, and searching equally for evidence for and against your conclusions? I mean, is your aim solely to get an accurate answer?
For myself, I find that phrases like “not yet prepared to believe” are a tip-off, when I notice them in my own thinking, that… I’m looking for permission to keep believing a pleasant, socially useful, or otherwise convenient belief, rather than really trying to figure out what’s true. I’m thinking “but the evidence doesn’t yet force me to change my mind, or at least I can see it that way!” instead of asking “what’s most likely to be true? what clues can I draw from the evidence? what models are most likely to help me make accurate predictions in the future?”.
Ditto for terms like “offensive”, if applied to peoples’ anticipations about the world (matters of truth and falsity) rather than to peoples’ non-belief actions. If what you mean by “offensive” is that you suspect folks’ beliefs here are stemming from emotional biases, it is okay to say that, and to explain the causes of your beliefs about their biases. If what you mean by “offensive” is that having statements like this around may make women uncomfortable, it is okay to say that, to explore why, and to start a dialog on how (without ceasing to seek accurate beliefs, but while perhaps taking special pains to include other facets of the story) we can make LW a comfortable place for women. But a belief’s “offensiveness” isn’t directly relevant to its truth, and so it’s confusing to include it in an argument about what’s true, or in an argument about what we should say and believe.
I agree that women and men sometimes vary (though I’d love a better model of the details). It isn’t really your conclusions I’m trying to talk about here; it’s how to talk about potentially mind-killing topics, as a community, in a way that helps true conclusions come to the fore.
I don’t put a high priority on discovering the truth value of the proposition “women who are found at parties, in clubs, and patronizing bars are [insert pejorative here]”. I don’t currently have a belief about it (I’m ambivalent because my uninformed dislike for parties/clubs/bars and their patrons is in opposition to my equally uninformed general wish to think well of others), and I’m not looking for evidence either way because it’s not important to me in comparison to other things I could learn about as easily or more so. The information that I’ve stumbled across passively hasn’t pushed me to accept either conclusion, especially since my information is filtered by what happens to appear on my screen without any special looking. Regardless of whether women who are found in those places are [insert pejorative here], that doesn’t change my relevant opinions because I don’t think rights are a function of personal virtue, and all of the ethical claims I’ve made have been based on rights. It also doesn’t change whether I think the topic is appropriate, because among the reasons I find it inappropriate is that it makes me, personally, uncomfortable.
I think spending so much time talking about how men can sleep with/achieve success with/be more confident around/pick your favorite charming descriptor with women makes Less Wrong very gendered. It seems to be the pet topic of a few posters, who attribute specific characteristics unqualifiedly to “women” as an apparently undifferentiated group; this is alienating and stereotypifies us in what seems an obviously unwarranted way.
Um, hmm.
So… wishes to think well of others aren’t actually evidence about what’s true. (I realize you probably know that, but you did cite it as a reason for belief.)
Whether or not any given LW-er aims to believe something for a reason other than truth, it would be really nice if we could make LW a place where public conversation, at least, does aim for truth. If I want to go off and believe a convenient might-be-falsehood, fine, but other LW-ers shouldn’t have to censor themselves so as not to interfere with my belief. This is similar to my impressions on LW theists: yes, anyone should be welcomed here insofar as they help us learn rationality; no, we should not censor ourselves to avoid interfering with might-be-false beliefs folks want to preserve. And, no, LW shouldn’t be a forum in which people can take beliefs they hold for non-truth-related reasons, and try by non-truth-related arguments (e.g., arguments about social offensiveness) to get others to adopt those beliefs. There are plenty of other places to do that.
Although I do care that the topics make you uncomfortable. I liked your last two posts, and many of your comments, and I very much hope we’re able to form a community in which you’d like to stick around.
It might be useful to distinguish two senses of “not looking for evidence” here. There are many topics on which it’s not worth one’s time/energy to go out and seek evidence, which is I think what you’re saying. But sometimes people “don’t look for evidence” in a different sense: they actively close their minds against the evidence, avert their eyes, and look for excuses not to let the evidence upset their beliefs. This sort of not looking is more costly; I find it can clog my head up, and make it harder for me to acknowledge truths elsewhere as well (including in areas where I do need accurate beliefs). I hope this isn’t what you mean.
Okay. But other people are trying to build accurate models of how various groups of women actually act—either because we’re intrinsically interested in how people work, or because it’s practically useful to understand how people work. And for these inquiries, information helps. I don’t think my or various others’ interest stems from trying to find out whether these groups of women are bad or pejorative-worthy. I’m also a bit skeptical of trying to form one’s ethics about how to treat people in isolation from empirical data on what makes people happy or unhappy and on what people in fact prefer—but I’m ignorant of the empirical details here, and I haven’t yet read most of your exchanges on those other threads, so maybe you really can ignore how people work as you form your ethics.
I agree that info on how to pick up women is likely to be of more direct relevance to LW men than to LW women. It might be good to create some articles that are of strong interest to LW women and/or that would help women feel more comfortable here, although our numbers make that more difficult. If you have thoughts on e.g. how to be comfortable being both intellectual and in at least some ways feminine (something I have trouble with, despite organically wanting both), I’d love to hear it, and, if it’s good, I could imagine referring other smart women I know to LW though the post.
Anna, not sure if you meant to paste in Alicorn’s entire comment at the top of yours, but the fact there’s no quote bar made me think you might not’ve—hence this comment =)
It was indeed a mistake. Thanks. Fixed.
I did no such thing. I cited it as something that contributed to my lack of a belief on this topic. I recognize that it would not suitably motivate any belief; it’s just competing with an equally unsuitable intuition to make me have no particular interest in the answer to the question. If I had a belief on this topic, I would not cite my optimism about human nature as evidence.
Of course; I agree completely. That doesn’t mean we can’t have a narrowed, less creepy topic set; there are several subjects that don’t get much attention here that nonetheless can have truths about them, and I think seduction might do better in that category.
You read me correctly. I did mention passively absorbing information on the subject; I’m not sticking my fingers in my ears and humming show tunes when I read things about seduction.
The only characteristically feminine thing I have any special knowledge about is cooking. Would that be a suitable subject, if I can figure out how to make it on-topic? (Drawing a blank, but perhaps something would come to me in a dream.)
Cooking’s a great place to talk about where to add, where to multiply, where to pay attention to ratios, and above all where to pay attention to diminishing marginal utility of returns to X. These are core rationalist skills that haven’t been adequately discussed.
It’s also something that anyone who eats could relate to, and want to be less wrong about. http://xkcd.com/720/
Or this famous dilbert strip
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For one thing, no blog is large enough to contain the aggregate state of the evidence about anything. For another, don’t you suppose some women might know something about this topic that you and your sources have missed? It may help to meditate on “Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence”—even if some critics irrationally discount the domain knowledge of PUAs, this is no excuse for irrationally discounting the critics’ domain knowledge.
Argument screens off authority. I agree that this is a wonderful blog, but it doesn’t mean that you should expect people to just accept the majority opinion here simply on the grounds that it’s such a wonderful blog. Especially on a mind-killing topic like gender, about which I fear no one’s rationality can simply be trusted. The authority of biologists derives from massive amounts of empirical evidence and many years of intense study, and even then, I do not think you should automatically trust everything a biologist says about anything to do with biology; you may have domain knowledge of your own that bears on some particular question. A comment thread full of smart people who profess truthseeking has still less authority.
Isn’t this a fully general counterargument? It might similarly be said that you can afford to hold the opinions you do because inaccurate beliefs may cost you little in this area. And it gets us nowhere, either way.
Not nearly as much as the reply was!
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A rational/scientific approach to cooking is the inspiration behind quite a few books and websites. I don’t really like to follow recipes so I’m quite interested in explanations of cooking that let you improvise by deriving from first principles rather than blindly following a rule book.
I haven’t read that book (I independently developed my style) but I’m thinking of buying it. Still, “how to cook without a recipe” is the premise of Improvisational Soup proper; I’d need some way to connect it more tightly to Less Wrong-worthy subjects to turn it into a post here that wouldn’t just serve as an excuse to plug Improv Soup. Maybe I could relate intuitions about food to the stuff about control theory (I don’t always know what I need to do to make my food turn out how I want it, so I guess, and with experience cooking all the ingredients, it’ll often work).
You could potentially make an interesting article illustrating common biases and failures of rationality with culinary examples.
One that springs to mind is browning meat to ‘seal in the juices’ when making stews or casseroles. As I’ve heard the story, a famous cookbook from many years ago explained the importance of browning meat to producing good stews and explained it as ‘sealing in the juices’ and that was the standard explanation for many years. At some point it was realized that the actual value of browning the meat is that the caramelization of sugars in the meat improves flavour and that the original explanation was nonsense. The process is still called ‘sealing’ however and many chefs will still try to avoid leaving any part of the meat ‘unsealed’. This seems like a pretty good example of how people come to believe a spurious explanation because it produces a good outcome and are reluctant to abandon the original explanation even when a better explanation comes along.
I’m sure there must be many more examples of this kind of thing in cooking—there seems to be a lot of pseudo science and poorly understood ritual in the culinary arts.
Anecdotal, perhaps, but I always found that the complicated method of “making a roux” seems totally pointless to me.
The point is to mix in a starchy flour-like substance to a sauce, then heat it up to make the starches go glutinous… this can be done much easier by mixing the flour into a little bit of cold water—then stirring it into the sauce while the heat is on it.
All this frigging about with putting it in butter in a pan and heating it up while madly stirring it to make sure it doesn’t burn or clump and only then adding it to the sauce seems totally unnecessary complication. It’s much more difficult than just dissolving it in water and stirring.
If you prefer to thicken things this way, use cornstarch: that’s exactly how you do it. The point of roux is partly to cook the flour so it doesn’t taste so floury. (Although if you find you have to “madly stir” your butter and flour you may have the heat up too high.)
Hmm—I guess I do tend to use cornflour. However—even when I use normal flour—I’ve never had it taste that floury. Cooking it in the sauce also cooks the flour… just afterwards instead of before.
Actually, if memory serves me, the primary benefit comes from the Maillard reaction, a heat-driven process involving amino acids. Not that this changes your point, of course.
I don’t know enough about how other people cook to have a collection of myths like that on hand, although I guess I could consult my mother (a more traditional cook) and see what she has to say.
The confusion comes from ambiguity between lack of belief as disbelief, and lack of belief as not looking for evidence and thus lacking strong opinion either way.
If it’s not horribly offensive, may I ask you to actually insert the pejorative? I don’t think I’ve seen any assumed in mainstream conversation here.
I’m afraid I might come off as being deliberately obtuse, but I really am genuinely confused about...what the actual accusation is here.
No specific word belongs in the brackets. It represents a variety of things that have been said that appear to me to convey negative attitudes about women, some simply by virtue of saying anything about “women” without a qualifier like “many” or “in my experience” or “as a general tendency”.
In against disclaimers Robin argues against the idea that those qualifiers should be included
The idea is that among aspiring rationalists, it is silly to assume that “Any general claim about human behavior is an absolute law without exception unless it includes qualifiers like “tends” or “often.”″. Since there are always exceptions, you can drop the qualifier without losing any information.
I disagree with that part of that article. In spite of the fact that it may be safe to make charitable assumptions of most people on this site, the fact remains that people do make general statements about groups, including women, without deliberately intending to leave room for abundant exceptions. Also, qualifiers can convey different information about how general a tendency is being claimed. If I say “women have two X chromosomes”—am I making a definitional statement that excludes the transgendered, or am I just mentally classifying them as exceptions and hoping everyone knows what I mean? If I say “diamonds are the favorite gem of women”, am I unaware that plenty of women think moissanite is prettier or am I just saying that I think, if all women voted, diamonds would win? Qualifiers do change the information in many cases. Even when they don’t (less often, I suspect, than Robin thinks), they’re polite.
Hanson’s post certainly does come off a bit strong, and I agree that there are times to use disclaimers.
However, in this case, I assumed the disclaimer and (correct me if I’m wrong Yvain), but I think my interpretation was more accurate because of that.
I added the “among aspiring rationalists” qualifier for a reason; it makes less sense for those with no mental “sub buckets” within the “women” one.
If the disclaimer goes as far as to specify the size/location of the exception then yes, it adds more information. This may be not be useful information if the point is just that it’s a general trend. I see it like saying “The probability of a meteorite striking my house tomorrow is 0” (with the implied disclaimer “almost”)
I’m just going to link my own comment on Robin’s post. Short version: include written disclaimers if the idea you want to convey includes disclaimers.