From the complaints (and not just here and now) it seems obvious that there is a problem we really should solve.
This said, it seems to me that people are complaining about multiple things. I think they should be analyzed separately. Maybe not all of them are a problem, or maybe the same solution would not work for all of them. Even if they have similar patern “reading A makes person X unhappy”, it is still not the same situation. (For a trivial example, some people are unhappy when they read about atheism. While we should not offend religious people unnecessarily, there is only so far we can go, and even then some people will remain offended.) Specifically, from the article and also this linked comment, women complain when men do the following:
talk about “getting” “attractive women”;
make remarks about attractive/unattractive women;
speak of women as symbols of male success or accessories for a successful male;
talk about difficulty to deal with women;
make claims about men and women having different innate abilities, especially without saying “on average”;
uncritically downvote anything feminist sounding, and upvote armchair ev-psych;
are much more likely to point out one’s flaws than to appreciate what one said;
create an environment where warmth is scarce;
focus on negative reinforcement;
argue with one’s self-description.
I see at least three different topics here (maybe more could be found in other articles and discussions) -- speaking of women as objects; unsupported or incorrect theories about differences between men and women; unfriendly environment—and I believe each of them deserves to be discussed separately.
1) There are two important aspects of talking about “getting women”; I guess one of them is more obvious for men and one for women, so I will write both explicitly.
a) For a typical heterosexual man, “getting women” is an important part of his utility function; perhaps so important that talking about instrumental rationality without mentioning this feels dishonest. There are tons of low-hanging fruit here (the whole PUA industry is about that); ignoring this topic would be like ignoring the topic of finding a good job or developing social skills. Seen from this perspective, I would say we speak relatively little about the topic; we already have kind of a taboo, it’s just not absolute.
b) Discussing women as objects sends a strong message to women: “you do not belong here”. We speak about you, but not with you. -- Ladies can describe their feelings better, I can only recommend imagining a reversed situation; a “rationalist website” with women discussing how to get handsome millionaires (or whatever would be the nearest equivalent), creating a feeling that if you are not a millionaire, you have no worth as a human being, and even if you are a millionare, your worth is exactly the money you have, nothing more. Your personal utility function is not important; the only important thing is how much utilities the discussing women can get from you.
Is there a good solution which would not ignore either of these aspects? In my opinion, there is: having both discussions about “getting women” and “getting men” on the website. And having them only in articles on a given topic, not randomly anywhere else. But even if this would be acceptable to others (which I doubt), the problem remains how to get from here to there.
I propose an experiment on how to balance the gender imbalance here. Once in a time create a “ladies first” topic, where only women would be allowed to comment during the first two days; after this time, the discussion is open to everyone. (During the two days, the announcement would be visible in the top and bottom of the article; and then it would be removed.) It could give us an idea of how the discussion would look if we had more women here. And if a man wants to contribute, waiting two days is not so difficult. The obvious disadvantage: women members who don’t want to make their gender publicly known would have to avoid the discussion or create another account. -- The topics could be women-specific (getting the handsome millionaire), or even, for the sake of experiment, completely neutral, for example “ladies first” Open Thread (which after two days becomes a normal Open Thread, but the different initial dynamics could be interesting).
[pollid:405]
2) With regards to unsupported theories, I just want to note that even “politically correct” theories can be unsupported or incorrect. (Yes, that includes even feminist theories.) I would like having the same rule for both of them. If it is forbidden to write “men are statistically better than women in math”, it should be equally forbidden to write “men are statistically exactly the same as women in math”, if in both cases the same level of evidence is provided. Or perhaps we should have the same reaction for both of them, something like “[citation needed]” in Wikipedia.
3) I would enjoy having a more friendly discussion environment, but I don’t want to make it a duty. I mean, offenses are bad, but mere “lack of warmth” is normal, although it is nice to do better than this. Among men, this is often the normal mode of speech; among women it’s usually otherwise… I think it would be nice to let everyone speak in their preferred voice. We should encourage men to display more warmth (and it would be an interesting topic on how to do it without feeling awkward), but not criticize them for failing to reach the level convenient for women.
Maybe we could have in comments small icons indicating how we want to communicate (how we want other people to respond to us). Something like Crocker’s rules, but with three options: nice / impersonal / Crocker’s rules. (Graphically: a heart, a square, a crosshair.) A user would select an icon when making a comment, and would select the default icon in user preferences dialog. New users would automatically get the “nice” icon as a default (as a trivial incentive for more people to have this option). Of course the “nice” icon means that also the comment is nice, not only the reactions are expected to be.
I would enjoy having a more friendly discussion environment, but I don’t want to make it a duty. I mean, offenses are bad, but mere “lack of warmth” is normal, although it is nice to do better than this. Among men, this is often the normal mode of speech; among women it’s usually otherwise… I think it would be nice to let everyone speak in their preferred voice. We should encourage men to display more warmth (and it would be an interesting topic on how to do it without feeling awkward), but not criticize them for failing to reach the level convenient for women.
I think it would be useful for someone who finds niceness natural to do a post how the average LW can build affordance for being nice, preferably in a way that doesn’t add to much noise. I also think it would be good if people were motivated to use some of these affordances due to genuine niceness/to help build the community.
On the other hand I strongly agree that having a “nice” voice should not be even quasi-required. Fake/forced niceness often feels phony in an unpleasant way, furthermore forcing people to change their conversational voice seems like making them jump though hoops. Also, I suspect that people who have a naturally nice voice underestimate how hard it is for people who don’t have a naturally nice voice to talk nicely, even when they want to (this is based on super-high priors for this general form of fail happening any time the opportunity presents it self).
On the other hand I strongly agree that having a “nice” voice should not be even quasi-required. Fake/forced niceness often feels phony in an unpleasant way, furthermore forcing people to change their conversational voice seems like making them jump though hoops. Also, I suspect that people who have a naturally nice voice underestimate how hard it is for people who don’t have a naturally nice voice to talk nicely, even when they want to (this is based on super-high priors for this general form of fail happening any time the opportunity presents it self).
I agree with this so strongly that a mere upvote isn’t enough.
After two days, a discussion will die down to the point where it barely gets any responses. If you’re going to make it ladies only, make it ladies only permanently. Make an identical male only counterpart. That would solve the problem “Where will the men post?” and give you a nice undiluted control for your observations about the women. It will also help keep things organized (Otherwise can you imagine the overhead in going through the thread trying to figure out who was male and who was female, and reading each time stamp to determine who was who? It’s much much easier to make two threads.) If women know that men will reply to their comments later, this may inhibit them from saying certain things the same way that it will inhibit them if men are there right away. If they know the men are never supposed to reply to that comment, that would help maximize the women’s comfort.
Counterpoint: I don’t think gender segregation of posts will break down any communication barriers; if anything it will cause divisiveness as in an ‘us-versus-them’ mentality.
If two days is too long (and it probably is), then let’s make it one day, or 12 hours, or 6 hours, or whatever value will work best. I didn’t want to make “separate but equal” thread, but to use the time bonus for ladies as a way to approximate how LW would look like if we had more balanced gender ratio. (An artificial tool to amplify the “women’s voice”.) So the best value would be the one which on average results in equal number of comments by men and women when the discussion is over.
And I am not interested which specific comments are written by whom. (So I would ignore the timestamps while reading. Also, women are allowed to write later, too.) I just want to know how the whole discussion would feel like if it was gender-balanced.
If women know that men will reply to their comments later, this may inhibit them from saying certain things the same way that it will inhibit them if men are there right away.
Then those women would probably be also inhibited from saying those things in a gender-balanced environment.
If they know the men are never supposed to reply to that comment, that would help maximize the women’s comfort.
I would prefer an environment where everyone is as comfortable as possible, not an environment optimized for one gender’s comfort only. (More technically, a cooperate/cooperate solution, not male-cooperate/female-defect solution.)
Reducing the amount of time the women have to comment may mean that no women comment at all. Considering that only a little over a third of the posts on page two of discussions have enough comments to (statistically speaking) contain at least one comment from two different women (the post would need to have 20 comments, as LW is about 10% female), if you don’t absolutely maximize the number of comments from women in your experiment post, you’re likely to see no discussions between females. It would probably have the best chance of working if you asked the women to agree to comment on the thread before hand. If you ask, also, for male volunteers, you’ll then be able to control the male to female ratio by asking non-volunteers not to respond at all because it is an experimental thread.
Also, what conversational differences will you look for and how will you know that you found them?
Reducing the amount of time the women have to comment may mean that no women comment at all.
I emphasised a word in my original proposal, just to avoid a possible misunderstanding. Women would have all the time to comment. Only the first day or two it would be exclusive time, and later the discussion would be open to everyone.
I agree that if we already don’t have enough women here, they may be unable to make a longer-than-epsilon discussion. But I feel bad about asking someone specifically to comment on a post. I know I probably wouldn’t like to be asked to comment on a topic which may not interest me naturally, just because I happen to have some trait.
what conversational differences will you look for and how will you know that you found them?
A lack (or just less) of whatever women complain about in articles like this. Whether the complaints are about form or content. During the protected time period those things should not happen at all. (Unless some complaining women are wrong about the cause of their complaint. We could possibly find out that e.g. rationalist women do also naturally produce “less warm” discussions than is usual for women discussing outside LW.) And later, the discussion should already be primed. (I know it does not stop anyone from introducing e.g. the topic of PUA. But even if that happens, the discussion will already have a lot of threads without this topic, so this topic is unlikely to become dominant in the discussion.)
Is there a good solution which would not ignore either of these aspects? In my opinion, there is: having both discussions about “getting women” and “getting men” on the website. And having them only in articles on a given topic, not randomly anywhere else. But even if this would be acceptable to others (which I doubt), the problem remains how to get from here to there.
This does not strike me as a good solution; assuming each type of discussion is valuable to members of the gender engaged in it, but offensive to members of the gender under discussion, then this provides men and women both with a topic of discussion, but also a source of offense.
I think those assumptions are more favorable to the proposition than the reality is though. Women on Less Wrong could have been writing articles on “getting men” all along, but haven’t, and I don’t think that they’re likely to start because of an official policy statement that “this is allowed.” It always has been. This is a behavior that some women engage in, but I doubt it’s a significant enticement to the women who’re actually members here, or would want to be. So if that’s the case then the assumption that both men and women are getting something valuable in exchange for the source of offense wouldn’t hold. We already know that the level of offense many prospective female members are facing is considerable; if we as a community are going to keep that source of offense, and offer them something in exchange, it would have to be something they really want.
I think it’s also worth noting that we don’t have many typical heterosexual men here; the member base of Less Wrong is overwhelmingly atypical. I don’t know how many are atypical in this particular respect, but I can attest that I personally don’t talk about “getting women,” not because I’m observing a taboo, but because it makes me uncomfortable. I’d like a satisfying relationship, but treating finding a partner like an acquisition of goods feels distasteful.
Is the tendency of the sort of men who treat “getting women” as an inalienable part of their utility function something innate and unalterable? I don’t know, it feels implausible to me given how hard it is for me to personally relate to it. But given that this is a community specifically focused on adjusting our own cognitive biases, it seems to me that we should give serious consideration to the perspective of treating it as an outlook in need of adjustment.
I originally voted in favor because it sounded like an interesting experiment, but there’s a difficulty, not just with people who don’t think of themselves as male or female, but with people who don’t want to reveal their gender.
If someone does not want to reveal their gender, or does not think of themselves as female, the solution is easy: discuss only after the time limit, when the discussion is open for everyone.
I would vote for “Interesting idea”, if it was an option (i.e., ‘let’s try this for a while and see how it goes, and switch back if it doesn’t go well’).
Going to comment on each of the topics separately, as William_Bur has done:
1) I pretty much agree with the point that objectifying is fine if we objectified everyone equally—if androsexual commenters talked about unattractive men the same way gynosexual commenters talked about unattractive women, say. However statistically speaking that’s not going to happen, just because there’s a much higher proportion of gynosexuals on this site than androsexuals. As the current gender proportions stand, it’s going to look like men are the in-group and women are the out-group, even if people objectified the objects of their desires to the same extent.
As such, I think if we fixed the other two problems and actually attracted more women to this site (more gay and bisexual male conversations about getting guys might also work, though I’m not really aware of much of a LGBT presence on LW), this one is going to fix itself. (Assuming we have sensible community norms like “mentally flip the genders in your post before you post to check this is normal objectifying rather than super-offensive objectifying”, which I think we can do.)
2) I don’t have much to say about this one. For me the most likely hypothesis is that people are bad at hearing evidence that don’t agree with their current prejudices and vice versa, so if we already have a community that agrees with unsupported theories about evopsych (for whatever reason) then it’s going to post more studies about it and agree with them.
I feel similarly when people talk about paleo diets, actually. I personally prefer to just not publicly discuss topics where I feel the evidence is insufficient.
3) Anecdotal evidence suggests to me that female geeks tend to notice/focus on niceness and social codes more than male geeks, though both in turn focus on it less than non-geeks (though in non-geeks men and women often have different social codes). There are many hypotheses as to why this could be if this were true, but I don’t know well enough to speculate. There are also a lot more male geeks than female geeks. If this observation is true across the population then a website ostensibly aimed at geeks will end up with a lower level of niceness than the female geeks would like.
I’m going to be objectifying here and suggest that not being nice enough is a typical trait of low-status geeky males who’ve not learned the value of social codes, and that the only reason this is a problem is because we don’t have enough high-status men to enforce sensible standards on it (I would normally put a ”;)” as the punctuation of this sentence, but since elsewhere someone mentioned emoticons being objected to I’ll verbally disclaim that the previous sentence is intended with a light-hearted tone). Politeness and compliments are not a waste of time in the same way that dressing nicely is not a waste of time—if people like you more, they’re more likely to take what you say seriously. Similarly, understanding how the tone of your voice (or typed comment) comes across is an important life skill that people should put effort into learning if they don’t know how to do it.
Alternative hypothesis if people believe that they do know how to be nice, they just don’t do it on LW: do you act differently with all-male groups compared to mixed groups in real life? If you do, you should post as if you are in the latter if you wish LW to become the latter.
ETA: Data-gathering to calibrate the accuracy of my own hypotheses below.
Questions for men:
Are you more or less friendly on LW than you are in real life? [pollid:407]
Do you behave differently in mixed groups compared to male only groups? [pollid:408]
Questions for women:
Is the tone on LW more or less friendly than in male-dominated groups you are part of in real life? [pollid:409]
In some male-dominated spaces, there’s a weird chivalry dynamic where I get attention for being a reasonably attractive woman but not a lot of cred for ideas, etc. I appreciate that at Less Wrong meetups, I feel my ideas are judged as ideas and not as “girl ideas which men must be polite about.”
I’m nonbinary (that is, I do not identify with either gender), and I feel that my social experience is somewhat in-between that of most men and that of most women. Would it be acceptable for me to vote on these questions, or would that distort the data?
My first reaction was to write my half of results here… but we don’t want to prime others, do we? So I guess let’s wait a week or two, and then publish the results.
(And next time, let’s remember to add the option “I did not vote” to each poll. Or is there any other way to see poll results without voting? If there is, please write it here.)
we don’t have enough high-status men to enforce sensible standards on it
I dunno if “enforcement” is the most compassionate approach. Personally, the most effective way I’ve found to counter negative attitudes towards women is to have positive social and romantic interactions with them… applying self-control can prevent me from expressing my resentment, but it doesn’t seem to fix the resentment itself. Maybe we could have compassion for sexually inexperienced guys (being a male virgin can really suck, although I suspect men contribute to this fact more than women do) and try to help them overcome their problem (e.g. this has been really useful for me).
From a cursory glance, that appears to be about overcoming porn addiction, which is not exactly the same issue (for example, I very seldom watch porn but I’m still involuntarily celibate, and I bet there are plenty of people who watch lots of it while in relationships); am i missing something, and if so can you link to somewhere more specific that the front page of the site?
Do you behave differently in mixed groups compared to male only groups?
I voted “no”, but “ADBOC”/“it depends” would be more accurate. The male-only groups I’m likely to be found in are usually unusual in ways other than the absence of women, and for any two groups A and B such that A is a subset of B, A doesn’t contain women, and I’m non-negligibly likely to be in either of them, there’s no substantial difference between the way I behave in A and the way I behave in B.
(Assuming we have sensible community norms like “mentally flip the genders in your post before you post to check this is normal objectifying rather than super-offensive objectifying”, which I think we can do.)
Most feminists believe that the objectification of women is harmful not merely because it is objectification per se, but because is embedded in/contributes to a culture in which objectification is heavily asymmetric between genders, both in its frequency and in its impact. If this is right, then mentally flipping genders in a post isn’t a reliable guide to whether the objectification in that post is a problem.
From the complaints (and not just here and now) it seems obvious that there is a problem we really should solve.
There being a problem people complain about and it actually being worth solving are remarkably uncorrelated. Here is an argument I made on the matter in the past.
The fact that some women complain, is not a big evidence per se. Some men complain, too. The evidence is that the complaining seems coherent, is persistent, and there are no women saying: “actually, I think it is completely the other way.”
Also, I would agree that it is important to maximize the number of rationalists, regardless of their demographics. But I would not be surprised if a small change of rules could make this site more attractive for many women, and still attractive enough for 95% of the men which are currently here. On the other hand I also would not be surprised if we will never have enough rational women here (or anywhere else), regardless of what we will do. Sorry, my model simply does not contain the information about what kind of a website can be best for rational women (with emphasis on both of these words). To be fair, before LW I also did not know what kind of a website would be best for rational men; I could not imagine rationality surviving in a group of more than five people. More data need to be gathered by an experiment.
Thanks for the analysis. I’m not convinced that the topics can be kept completely separate since unfriendly environment amplifies the effects of the other two, but it’s worth a try.
I see at least three different topics here (maybe more could be found in other articles and discussions) -- speaking of women as objects; unsupported or incorrect theories about differences between men and women; unfriendly environment—and I believe each of them deserves to be discussed separately.
I think the assumption here is that LW is some sort of a sealed environment, living in a vacuum only of its own generated ideas. Needless to say, it’s not like that: everybody will continue to bring here, rationality or not, basic imprinting from life AFK. This includes other-sex objectification (let’s not illude ourselves with thinking that one side is less wrong than the other), incorrect thinking, etc.
I agree though that if we are not able to win on gender issues, we are doomed.
I’m having trouble understanding the first part of your comment. It sounds like you’re saying that the quoted portion of Viliam_Bur’s comment assumes LW is a sealed environment, but I’m not seeing where that assumption comes in. It reads to me like just a straightforward summary of and response to what was in the original post.
Are you saying that his suggestion that we can solve these issues by discussing them is overly optimistic?
Are you saying that his suggestion that we can solve these issues by discussing them is overly optimistic?
Yes, that’s basically it. If we think we can solve this LW’s issue by simply discussing within LW boundaries, I believe then that we are assuming a sealed environment. Which is not, and which will lead any of such discussions to a jumbled failure (insofar and in the future).
From the complaints (and not just here and now) it seems obvious that there is a problem we really should solve.
This said, it seems to me that people are complaining about multiple things. I think they should be analyzed separately. Maybe not all of them are a problem, or maybe the same solution would not work for all of them. Even if they have similar patern “reading A makes person X unhappy”, it is still not the same situation. (For a trivial example, some people are unhappy when they read about atheism. While we should not offend religious people unnecessarily, there is only so far we can go, and even then some people will remain offended.) Specifically, from the article and also this linked comment, women complain when men do the following:
talk about “getting” “attractive women”;
make remarks about attractive/unattractive women;
speak of women as symbols of male success or accessories for a successful male;
talk about difficulty to deal with women;
make claims about men and women having different innate abilities, especially without saying “on average”;
uncritically downvote anything feminist sounding, and upvote armchair ev-psych;
are much more likely to point out one’s flaws than to appreciate what one said;
create an environment where warmth is scarce;
focus on negative reinforcement;
argue with one’s self-description.
I see at least three different topics here (maybe more could be found in other articles and discussions) -- speaking of women as objects; unsupported or incorrect theories about differences between men and women; unfriendly environment—and I believe each of them deserves to be discussed separately.
My opinions on these three topics:
1) There are two important aspects of talking about “getting women”; I guess one of them is more obvious for men and one for women, so I will write both explicitly.
a) For a typical heterosexual man, “getting women” is an important part of his utility function; perhaps so important that talking about instrumental rationality without mentioning this feels dishonest. There are tons of low-hanging fruit here (the whole PUA industry is about that); ignoring this topic would be like ignoring the topic of finding a good job or developing social skills. Seen from this perspective, I would say we speak relatively little about the topic; we already have kind of a taboo, it’s just not absolute.
b) Discussing women as objects sends a strong message to women: “you do not belong here”. We speak about you, but not with you. -- Ladies can describe their feelings better, I can only recommend imagining a reversed situation; a “rationalist website” with women discussing how to get handsome millionaires (or whatever would be the nearest equivalent), creating a feeling that if you are not a millionaire, you have no worth as a human being, and even if you are a millionare, your worth is exactly the money you have, nothing more. Your personal utility function is not important; the only important thing is how much utilities the discussing women can get from you.
Is there a good solution which would not ignore either of these aspects? In my opinion, there is: having both discussions about “getting women” and “getting men” on the website. And having them only in articles on a given topic, not randomly anywhere else. But even if this would be acceptable to others (which I doubt), the problem remains how to get from here to there.
I propose an experiment on how to balance the gender imbalance here. Once in a time create a “ladies first” topic, where only women would be allowed to comment during the first two days; after this time, the discussion is open to everyone. (During the two days, the announcement would be visible in the top and bottom of the article; and then it would be removed.) It could give us an idea of how the discussion would look if we had more women here. And if a man wants to contribute, waiting two days is not so difficult. The obvious disadvantage: women members who don’t want to make their gender publicly known would have to avoid the discussion or create another account. -- The topics could be women-specific (getting the handsome millionaire), or even, for the sake of experiment, completely neutral, for example “ladies first” Open Thread (which after two days becomes a normal Open Thread, but the different initial dynamics could be interesting).
[pollid:405]
2) With regards to unsupported theories, I just want to note that even “politically correct” theories can be unsupported or incorrect. (Yes, that includes even feminist theories.) I would like having the same rule for both of them. If it is forbidden to write “men are statistically better than women in math”, it should be equally forbidden to write “men are statistically exactly the same as women in math”, if in both cases the same level of evidence is provided. Or perhaps we should have the same reaction for both of them, something like “[citation needed]” in Wikipedia.
3) I would enjoy having a more friendly discussion environment, but I don’t want to make it a duty. I mean, offenses are bad, but mere “lack of warmth” is normal, although it is nice to do better than this. Among men, this is often the normal mode of speech; among women it’s usually otherwise… I think it would be nice to let everyone speak in their preferred voice. We should encourage men to display more warmth (and it would be an interesting topic on how to do it without feeling awkward), but not criticize them for failing to reach the level convenient for women.
Maybe we could have in comments small icons indicating how we want to communicate (how we want other people to respond to us). Something like Crocker’s rules, but with three options: nice / impersonal / Crocker’s rules. (Graphically: a heart, a square, a crosshair.) A user would select an icon when making a comment, and would select the default icon in user preferences dialog. New users would automatically get the “nice” icon as a default (as a trivial incentive for more people to have this option). Of course the “nice” icon means that also the comment is nice, not only the reactions are expected to be.
[pollid:406]
I think it would be useful for someone who finds niceness natural to do a post how the average LW can build affordance for being nice, preferably in a way that doesn’t add to much noise. I also think it would be good if people were motivated to use some of these affordances due to genuine niceness/to help build the community.
On the other hand I strongly agree that having a “nice” voice should not be even quasi-required. Fake/forced niceness often feels phony in an unpleasant way, furthermore forcing people to change their conversational voice seems like making them jump though hoops. Also, I suspect that people who have a naturally nice voice underestimate how hard it is for people who don’t have a naturally nice voice to talk nicely, even when they want to (this is based on super-high priors for this general form of fail happening any time the opportunity presents it self).
I agree with this so strongly that a mere upvote isn’t enough.
After two days, a discussion will die down to the point where it barely gets any responses. If you’re going to make it ladies only, make it ladies only permanently. Make an identical male only counterpart. That would solve the problem “Where will the men post?” and give you a nice undiluted control for your observations about the women. It will also help keep things organized (Otherwise can you imagine the overhead in going through the thread trying to figure out who was male and who was female, and reading each time stamp to determine who was who? It’s much much easier to make two threads.) If women know that men will reply to their comments later, this may inhibit them from saying certain things the same way that it will inhibit them if men are there right away. If they know the men are never supposed to reply to that comment, that would help maximize the women’s comfort.
Counterpoint: I don’t think gender segregation of posts will break down any communication barriers; if anything it will cause divisiveness as in an ‘us-versus-them’ mentality.
That would be a hypothesis for which we’d have to complete an experiment.
If two days is too long (and it probably is), then let’s make it one day, or 12 hours, or 6 hours, or whatever value will work best. I didn’t want to make “separate but equal” thread, but to use the time bonus for ladies as a way to approximate how LW would look like if we had more balanced gender ratio. (An artificial tool to amplify the “women’s voice”.) So the best value would be the one which on average results in equal number of comments by men and women when the discussion is over.
And I am not interested which specific comments are written by whom. (So I would ignore the timestamps while reading. Also, women are allowed to write later, too.) I just want to know how the whole discussion would feel like if it was gender-balanced.
Then those women would probably be also inhibited from saying those things in a gender-balanced environment.
I would prefer an environment where everyone is as comfortable as possible, not an environment optimized for one gender’s comfort only. (More technically, a cooperate/cooperate solution, not male-cooperate/female-defect solution.)
Reducing the amount of time the women have to comment may mean that no women comment at all. Considering that only a little over a third of the posts on page two of discussions have enough comments to (statistically speaking) contain at least one comment from two different women (the post would need to have 20 comments, as LW is about 10% female), if you don’t absolutely maximize the number of comments from women in your experiment post, you’re likely to see no discussions between females. It would probably have the best chance of working if you asked the women to agree to comment on the thread before hand. If you ask, also, for male volunteers, you’ll then be able to control the male to female ratio by asking non-volunteers not to respond at all because it is an experimental thread.
Also, what conversational differences will you look for and how will you know that you found them?
I emphasised a word in my original proposal, just to avoid a possible misunderstanding. Women would have all the time to comment. Only the first day or two it would be exclusive time, and later the discussion would be open to everyone.
I agree that if we already don’t have enough women here, they may be unable to make a longer-than-epsilon discussion. But I feel bad about asking someone specifically to comment on a post. I know I probably wouldn’t like to be asked to comment on a topic which may not interest me naturally, just because I happen to have some trait.
A lack (or just less) of whatever women complain about in articles like this. Whether the complaints are about form or content. During the protected time period those things should not happen at all. (Unless some complaining women are wrong about the cause of their complaint. We could possibly find out that e.g. rationalist women do also naturally produce “less warm” discussions than is usual for women discussing outside LW.) And later, the discussion should already be primed. (I know it does not stop anyone from introducing e.g. the topic of PUA. But even if that happens, the discussion will already have a lot of threads without this topic, so this topic is unlikely to become dominant in the discussion.)
This does not strike me as a good solution; assuming each type of discussion is valuable to members of the gender engaged in it, but offensive to members of the gender under discussion, then this provides men and women both with a topic of discussion, but also a source of offense.
I think those assumptions are more favorable to the proposition than the reality is though. Women on Less Wrong could have been writing articles on “getting men” all along, but haven’t, and I don’t think that they’re likely to start because of an official policy statement that “this is allowed.” It always has been. This is a behavior that some women engage in, but I doubt it’s a significant enticement to the women who’re actually members here, or would want to be. So if that’s the case then the assumption that both men and women are getting something valuable in exchange for the source of offense wouldn’t hold. We already know that the level of offense many prospective female members are facing is considerable; if we as a community are going to keep that source of offense, and offer them something in exchange, it would have to be something they really want.
I think it’s also worth noting that we don’t have many typical heterosexual men here; the member base of Less Wrong is overwhelmingly atypical. I don’t know how many are atypical in this particular respect, but I can attest that I personally don’t talk about “getting women,” not because I’m observing a taboo, but because it makes me uncomfortable. I’d like a satisfying relationship, but treating finding a partner like an acquisition of goods feels distasteful.
Is the tendency of the sort of men who treat “getting women” as an inalienable part of their utility function something innate and unalterable? I don’t know, it feels implausible to me given how hard it is for me to personally relate to it. But given that this is a community specifically focused on adjusting our own cognitive biases, it seems to me that we should give serious consideration to the perspective of treating it as an outlook in need of adjustment.
I originally voted in favor because it sounded like an interesting experiment, but there’s a difficulty, not just with people who don’t think of themselves as male or female, but with people who don’t want to reveal their gender.
If someone does not want to reveal their gender, or does not think of themselves as female, the solution is easy: discuss only after the time limit, when the discussion is open for everyone.
I would vote for “Interesting idea”, if it was an option (i.e., ‘let’s try this for a while and see how it goes, and switch back if it doesn’t go well’).
Going to comment on each of the topics separately, as William_Bur has done:
1) I pretty much agree with the point that objectifying is fine if we objectified everyone equally—if androsexual commenters talked about unattractive men the same way gynosexual commenters talked about unattractive women, say. However statistically speaking that’s not going to happen, just because there’s a much higher proportion of gynosexuals on this site than androsexuals. As the current gender proportions stand, it’s going to look like men are the in-group and women are the out-group, even if people objectified the objects of their desires to the same extent.
As such, I think if we fixed the other two problems and actually attracted more women to this site (more gay and bisexual male conversations about getting guys might also work, though I’m not really aware of much of a LGBT presence on LW), this one is going to fix itself. (Assuming we have sensible community norms like “mentally flip the genders in your post before you post to check this is normal objectifying rather than super-offensive objectifying”, which I think we can do.)
2) I don’t have much to say about this one. For me the most likely hypothesis is that people are bad at hearing evidence that don’t agree with their current prejudices and vice versa, so if we already have a community that agrees with unsupported theories about evopsych (for whatever reason) then it’s going to post more studies about it and agree with them.
I feel similarly when people talk about paleo diets, actually. I personally prefer to just not publicly discuss topics where I feel the evidence is insufficient.
3) Anecdotal evidence suggests to me that female geeks tend to notice/focus on niceness and social codes more than male geeks, though both in turn focus on it less than non-geeks (though in non-geeks men and women often have different social codes). There are many hypotheses as to why this could be if this were true, but I don’t know well enough to speculate. There are also a lot more male geeks than female geeks. If this observation is true across the population then a website ostensibly aimed at geeks will end up with a lower level of niceness than the female geeks would like.
I’m going to be objectifying here and suggest that not being nice enough is a typical trait of low-status geeky males who’ve not learned the value of social codes, and that the only reason this is a problem is because we don’t have enough high-status men to enforce sensible standards on it (I would normally put a ”;)” as the punctuation of this sentence, but since elsewhere someone mentioned emoticons being objected to I’ll verbally disclaim that the previous sentence is intended with a light-hearted tone). Politeness and compliments are not a waste of time in the same way that dressing nicely is not a waste of time—if people like you more, they’re more likely to take what you say seriously. Similarly, understanding how the tone of your voice (or typed comment) comes across is an important life skill that people should put effort into learning if they don’t know how to do it.
Alternative hypothesis if people believe that they do know how to be nice, they just don’t do it on LW: do you act differently with all-male groups compared to mixed groups in real life? If you do, you should post as if you are in the latter if you wish LW to become the latter.
ETA: Data-gathering to calibrate the accuracy of my own hypotheses below.
Questions for men:
Are you more or less friendly on LW than you are in real life? [pollid:407] Do you behave differently in mixed groups compared to male only groups? [pollid:408]
Questions for women:
Is the tone on LW more or less friendly than in male-dominated groups you are part of in real life? [pollid:409]
In some male-dominated spaces, there’s a weird chivalry dynamic where I get attention for being a reasonably attractive woman but not a lot of cred for ideas, etc. I appreciate that at Less Wrong meetups, I feel my ideas are judged as ideas and not as “girl ideas which men must be polite about.”
I’m nonbinary (that is, I do not identify with either gender), and I feel that my social experience is somewhat in-between that of most men and that of most women. Would it be acceptable for me to vote on these questions, or would that distort the data?
I’m happy for you to vote on one, both or neither depending on whether you think your experiences are relevant to the question.
Thank you! I voted on both.
Note: Women can only see how other women voted, and men can only see how other men voted.
My first reaction was to write my half of results here… but we don’t want to prime others, do we? So I guess let’s wait a week or two, and then publish the results.
(And next time, let’s remember to add the option “I did not vote” to each poll. Or is there any other way to see poll results without voting? If there is, please write it here.)
Oops. Polls are non-editable too… Will do better next time.
Edit—I will probably get my OH to vote on the male half so that I can at least get the desired calibration effects myself.
Huh. I had never noticed one could vote for certain questions but not others in the same poll.
I dunno if “enforcement” is the most compassionate approach. Personally, the most effective way I’ve found to counter negative attitudes towards women is to have positive social and romantic interactions with them… applying self-control can prevent me from expressing my resentment, but it doesn’t seem to fix the resentment itself. Maybe we could have compassion for sexually inexperienced guys (being a male virgin can really suck, although I suspect men contribute to this fact more than women do) and try to help them overcome their problem (e.g. this has been really useful for me).
From a cursory glance, that appears to be about overcoming porn addiction, which is not exactly the same issue (for example, I very seldom watch porn but I’m still involuntarily celibate, and I bet there are plenty of people who watch lots of it while in relationships); am i missing something, and if so can you link to somewhere more specific that the front page of the site?
Sure, sorry. This may prove useful: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cupids-poisoned-arrow/201001/was-the-cowardly-lion-just-masturbating-too-much
http://www.reddit.com/r/nofap has lots of reports of men quitting porn + masturbation and experiencing increased confidence.
Okay, thanks.
I voted “no”, but “ADBOC”/“it depends” would be more accurate. The male-only groups I’m likely to be found in are usually unusual in ways other than the absence of women, and for any two groups A and B such that A is a subset of B, A doesn’t contain women, and I’m non-negligibly likely to be in either of them, there’s no substantial difference between the way I behave in A and the way I behave in B.
Most feminists believe that the objectification of women is harmful not merely because it is objectification per se, but because is embedded in/contributes to a culture in which objectification is heavily asymmetric between genders, both in its frequency and in its impact. If this is right, then mentally flipping genders in a post isn’t a reliable guide to whether the objectification in that post is a problem.
This is frustrating to read since complaints of other groups that amount to the same thing are ignored, but then again this is to be expected.
There being a problem people complain about and it actually being worth solving are remarkably uncorrelated. Here is an argument I made on the matter in the past.
The fact that some women complain, is not a big evidence per se. Some men complain, too. The evidence is that the complaining seems coherent, is persistent, and there are no women saying: “actually, I think it is completely the other way.”
Also, I would agree that it is important to maximize the number of rationalists, regardless of their demographics. But I would not be surprised if a small change of rules could make this site more attractive for many women, and still attractive enough for 95% of the men which are currently here. On the other hand I also would not be surprised if we will never have enough rational women here (or anywhere else), regardless of what we will do. Sorry, my model simply does not contain the information about what kind of a website can be best for rational women (with emphasis on both of these words). To be fair, before LW I also did not know what kind of a website would be best for rational men; I could not imagine rationality surviving in a group of more than five people. More data need to be gathered by an experiment.
Source?
Thanks for the analysis. I’m not convinced that the topics can be kept completely separate since unfriendly environment amplifies the effects of the other two, but it’s worth a try.
I think the assumption here is that LW is some sort of a sealed environment, living in a vacuum only of its own generated ideas. Needless to say, it’s not like that: everybody will continue to bring here, rationality or not, basic imprinting from life AFK. This includes other-sex objectification (let’s not illude ourselves with thinking that one side is less wrong than the other), incorrect thinking, etc.
I agree though that if we are not able to win on gender issues, we are doomed.
I’m having trouble understanding the first part of your comment. It sounds like you’re saying that the quoted portion of Viliam_Bur’s comment assumes LW is a sealed environment, but I’m not seeing where that assumption comes in. It reads to me like just a straightforward summary of and response to what was in the original post.
Are you saying that his suggestion that we can solve these issues by discussing them is overly optimistic?
Yes, that’s basically it. If we think we can solve this LW’s issue by simply discussing within LW boundaries, I believe then that we are assuming a sealed environment. Which is not, and which will lead any of such discussions to a jumbled failure (insofar and in the future).
Ah, thanks for the clarification.