What was so bad about it, anyway? My most salient participation in those threads has been a disappointed comment on how easily baited into controversy LWers are, contrary to my expectations at the time. A comment count in the triple or quadruple digits, on a website that purportedly taught its users how to overcome bias, stank to me of loads and loads of pent-up “strong opinions” just waiting to be shared.
But that’s a comment about the users, not about the topic, or the intent behind it. It didn’t read as a feminist crusade, except to the extent that you can call inviting women to speak about gender issues, under the protection of anonymity, a feminist crusade. (Some women’s strategy on male-dominated, questionably female-friendly websites is to declare themselves male and to shut up about feminism, to remove their gender as an avenue for further attack. This preserves their personal peace of mind, the collective peace of the community, and it preserves the social norms that made them feel uncomfortable in the first place. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ’em. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was going on on LW, but then again it might not, and the only way to know is to ask.)
I went to check those threads, by the way. Yes, users were drawn like flies and the discussions were heated and low-quality (although I’ve learned in the meantime not to expect much), but on the plus side (though the author might disagree about that) they weren’t echo-chambers. There was some positive feedback and some negative feedback about the initiative. Insofar as it endeavoured to make LW more feminist, it made both feminist and anti-feminist narratives more prominent. And if I remember correctly… daenerys was one of the users who complained about mass downvotes from Eugine_Nier, and that’s why she left and deleted her account. So basically, The LessWrong Culture Wars: An Eternal Golden Braid...
Well, the primary issue was that the entire exercise began by a process which, by its nature, over-represented crusaders who had an axe to grind. The voice of dissent (In the Female privilege post) was accused of being a fake, even as other women chimed in in the thread to say that it was the first “LW Women” post they identified with at all.
It wasn’t about women. If it was about women, they wouldn’t have felt so omitted and under or un-represented. It was about feminism.
What was so bad about it, anyway? My most salient participation in those threads has been a disappointed comment on how easily baited into controversy LWers are, contrary to my expectations at the time. A comment count in the triple or quadruple digits, on a website that purportedly taught its users how to overcome bias, stank to me of loads and loads of pent-up “strong opinions” just waiting to be shared.
But that’s a comment about the users, not about the topic, or the intent behind it. It didn’t read as a feminist crusade, except to the extent that you can call inviting women to speak about gender issues, under the protection of anonymity, a feminist crusade. (Some women’s strategy on male-dominated, questionably female-friendly websites is to declare themselves male and to shut up about feminism, to remove their gender as an avenue for further attack. This preserves their personal peace of mind, the collective peace of the community, and it preserves the social norms that made them feel uncomfortable in the first place. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ’em. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was going on on LW, but then again it might not, and the only way to know is to ask.)
I went to check those threads, by the way. Yes, users were drawn like flies and the discussions were heated and low-quality (although I’ve learned in the meantime not to expect much), but on the plus side (though the author might disagree about that) they weren’t echo-chambers. There was some positive feedback and some negative feedback about the initiative. Insofar as it endeavoured to make LW more feminist, it made both feminist and anti-feminist narratives more prominent. And if I remember correctly… daenerys was one of the users who complained about mass downvotes from Eugine_Nier, and that’s why she left and deleted her account. So basically, The LessWrong Culture Wars: An Eternal Golden Braid...
Well, the primary issue was that the entire exercise began by a process which, by its nature, over-represented crusaders who had an axe to grind. The voice of dissent (In the Female privilege post) was accused of being a fake, even as other women chimed in in the thread to say that it was the first “LW Women” post they identified with at all.
It wasn’t about women. If it was about women, they wouldn’t have felt so omitted and under or un-represented. It was about feminism.