As I have already said, it [whether women can take criticism] is not a question of which any more than the case of the unobserved falling tree is a question of sound or non-sound.
What do you mean by this? Certainly it may be necessary to make the question more precise, but the question certainly talks about things that correspond to reality.
To represent my position or that comment’s position as a claim that criticism is unnecessary in research or business is a straw man. You are not entertaining the possibility that women in general may adapt to the particular quality of criticism in predominantly male professions as that woman did, nor that a cultural change is possible, or furthermore, optimal.
Once my context was realigned… well, I can’t say it was easy [emphasis mine], but at least I realised that it was “me, not you”.
So what’s her conclusion about the possibility of women in general adapting to “masculine culture”, i.e., a culture of criticism?
LW has the near-unique trait of being a bunch of people who are actively trying to change… therefore it’s entirely possible that we can avoid the at-first-blush-alienating-to-the-majority-of-women approach that is common in other masculine-only cultures.
There’s nothing wrong with the masculine culture. But it isn’t the only way we could be.
There should be room for all of us. :)
In other words, she’s arguing that most women won’t be able to adept and that to be truly inclusive of women the culture would have to change.
It would be suboptimal for an NBA talent scout to exclude a seven-foot-tall white basketball player from consideration because he had precommitted to excluding white basketball players because being of African descent correlates more strongly with height than does being of European descent.
It would also be suboptimal for said scout to spend too much time in white neighborhoods looking for seven-foot-tall white basketball players, and a precommitment to doing so would also be a lost purpose.
An important point: I have personally observed particular members of the old male guard in cell biology reliably applying much harsher standards to their female colleagues and students than to their male colleagues unreasonably and repetitively. (EDIT: it sure isn’t everyone or even a plurality but it sure is a visible pattern)
This leads to women (being over half my field at the PhD level) leaving their associations with these men and staying the heck away, as anyone would when being criticized and judged unfairly.
Thankfully I can say this is becoming much less common as the field turns over, and there are more options and sane colleagues available now such that female scientists need to put up with unreasonable behavior or leave all together much less frequently these days.
What do you mean by this? Certainly it may be necessary to make the question more precise, but the question certainly talks about things that correspond to reality.
Let us taboo ‘criticism’. Here’s one definition: “the expression of disapproval of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes.” Surely the members of predominantly or entirely female social groups have some way of expressing disapproval and updating on it, as in all social groups; the problem is that it’s different from the way that men do, and that when women find themselves in predominantly male professions, they’re unfamiliar with the culture and misinterpret social signals that express disapproval by interpreting them in terms of the cultures to which they are accustomed. To speak of an innate Criticism-Taking Ability as the sole causal factor is a lossy compression that prevents you from imagining ways that you might improve the outcomes of situations in which criticism is exchanged. The question is then “How can we improve the outcomes of situations in which criticism is exchanged?”
In other words, she’s arguing that most women won’t be able to adept and that to be truly inclusive of women the culture would have to change.
She’s arguing that the LW culture would probably be more amenable to altering itself for the sake of including women than most other cultures, not that women in the LW culture would be more amenable to altering themselves. It’s true that women in the LW culture would probably be more amenable to altering themselves, but she wasn’t arguing, and we can’t say, that her example is strong evidence of how well an arbitrary woman will adapt to an arbitrary culture, or how well an arbitrary culture with a paucity of women will adapt to more women. At any rate, I only brought this comment up in my first comment in order to provide an example of the dissonance between male and female social norms for exchanging criticism, so this isn’t really important.
It would also be suboptimal for said scout to spend too much time in white neighborhoods looking for seven-foot-tall white basketball players, and a precommitment to doing so would also be a lost purpose.
You’re breaking the analogy. Random neighborhoods of people have not already been selected for height. (This is why talent scouts don’t actually scout door-to-door. Beware when you find yourself arguing that a policy has some benefit compared to the null action, rather than the best benefit of any action.) If researchers are coming to you with résumés containing data relevant to their research ability, or if you’re searching graduate programs for potential researchers, then IQ and research ability have already been selected for. You’re using race and gender as proxies for height and IQ; you throw away proxies when you have the real deal. This is about excluding women a priori. It’s simple: if you have a perfectly good female researcher in front of you, and you don’t hire her because you have a sign that says “No girls allowed,” then your sign is stupid.
Even assuming that IQ is completely correlated with ability to do the job, your pool of applicants that is “already selected for IQ” is not selected with 100% accuracy. In other words, being in the pool is a proxy for IQ. You’re better off using two proxies than one (unless the effect of one proxy is nil when conditioned on the other proxy)--if you want to maximize the applicant quality, you should pick people from the pool, but prefer men when comparing two applicants who both are in the pool.
The basketball example here is bad because you actually can measure someone’s height. If you can measure it you don’t need proxies for it. You’re not going to measure “ability to do the job” without using proxies and even if IQ is completely correlated with it, you’re not going to measure IQ without using proxies either.
Height is a proxy for basketball ability and the résumé is a proxy for research ability. It is possible that the latter is a worse proxy than the former, but it seems unlikely that it is much worse.
(ETA: Especially given that the latter enables you to go to arXiv and look at the applicant’s actual research output so far, whereas knowing how tall someone is doesn’t enable you to watch all the basketball matches they have played in.)
I didn’t downvote, but your second paragraph has a problem in that in the basketball example height is only a proxy for the ability to play basketball.
The first paragraph is a bit iffy, too, because proxies have different effectiveness or usefulness. By the time you’re estimating someone’s ability to do the job on the basis of a resume, the male/female proxy becomes basically insignificant.
In any case, I think that the better language here is that of priors. It’s perfectly fine to have different priors for male job applicants than for female job applicants, but once evidence starts coming in, the priors become less and less important.
in the basketball example height is only a proxy for the ability to play basketball.
IQ is a proxy for the ability to do well in a job, too. I was ignoring that, so in the analogy I would have to ignore that for height and ability to play basketball.
proxies have different effectiveness or usefulness
Arguing “the other proxy is so much better that we don’t need the original one” is not the same as “the other proxy is better, and that’s all we need to know”, and is even farther from “we can measure it so we don’t need a proxy at all”.
What do you mean by this? Certainly it may be necessary to make the question more precise, but the question certainly talks about things that correspond to reality.
You may want to reread the comment:
So what’s her conclusion about the possibility of women in general adapting to “masculine culture”, i.e., a culture of criticism?
In other words, she’s arguing that most women won’t be able to adept and that to be truly inclusive of women the culture would have to change.
It would also be suboptimal for said scout to spend too much time in white neighborhoods looking for seven-foot-tall white basketball players, and a precommitment to doing so would also be a lost purpose.
An important point: I have personally observed particular members of the old male guard in cell biology reliably applying much harsher standards to their female colleagues and students than to their male colleagues unreasonably and repetitively. (EDIT: it sure isn’t everyone or even a plurality but it sure is a visible pattern)
This leads to women (being over half my field at the PhD level) leaving their associations with these men and staying the heck away, as anyone would when being criticized and judged unfairly.
Thankfully I can say this is becoming much less common as the field turns over, and there are more options and sane colleagues available now such that female scientists need to put up with unreasonable behavior or leave all together much less frequently these days.
Let us taboo ‘criticism’. Here’s one definition: “the expression of disapproval of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes.” Surely the members of predominantly or entirely female social groups have some way of expressing disapproval and updating on it, as in all social groups; the problem is that it’s different from the way that men do, and that when women find themselves in predominantly male professions, they’re unfamiliar with the culture and misinterpret social signals that express disapproval by interpreting them in terms of the cultures to which they are accustomed. To speak of an innate Criticism-Taking Ability as the sole causal factor is a lossy compression that prevents you from imagining ways that you might improve the outcomes of situations in which criticism is exchanged. The question is then “How can we improve the outcomes of situations in which criticism is exchanged?”
She’s arguing that the LW culture would probably be more amenable to altering itself for the sake of including women than most other cultures, not that women in the LW culture would be more amenable to altering themselves. It’s true that women in the LW culture would probably be more amenable to altering themselves, but she wasn’t arguing, and we can’t say, that her example is strong evidence of how well an arbitrary woman will adapt to an arbitrary culture, or how well an arbitrary culture with a paucity of women will adapt to more women. At any rate, I only brought this comment up in my first comment in order to provide an example of the dissonance between male and female social norms for exchanging criticism, so this isn’t really important.
You’re breaking the analogy. Random neighborhoods of people have not already been selected for height. (This is why talent scouts don’t actually scout door-to-door. Beware when you find yourself arguing that a policy has some benefit compared to the null action, rather than the best benefit of any action.) If researchers are coming to you with résumés containing data relevant to their research ability, or if you’re searching graduate programs for potential researchers, then IQ and research ability have already been selected for. You’re using race and gender as proxies for height and IQ; you throw away proxies when you have the real deal. This is about excluding women a priori. It’s simple: if you have a perfectly good female researcher in front of you, and you don’t hire her because you have a sign that says “No girls allowed,” then your sign is stupid.
Even assuming that IQ is completely correlated with ability to do the job, your pool of applicants that is “already selected for IQ” is not selected with 100% accuracy. In other words, being in the pool is a proxy for IQ. You’re better off using two proxies than one (unless the effect of one proxy is nil when conditioned on the other proxy)--if you want to maximize the applicant quality, you should pick people from the pool, but prefer men when comparing two applicants who both are in the pool.
The basketball example here is bad because you actually can measure someone’s height. If you can measure it you don’t need proxies for it. You’re not going to measure “ability to do the job” without using proxies and even if IQ is completely correlated with it, you’re not going to measure IQ without using proxies either.
Height is a proxy for basketball ability and the résumé is a proxy for research ability. It is possible that the latter is a worse proxy than the former, but it seems unlikely that it is much worse.
(ETA: Especially given that the latter enables you to go to arXiv and look at the applicant’s actual research output so far, whereas knowing how tall someone is doesn’t enable you to watch all the basketball matches they have played in.)
The problem is that height is a number, whereas it’s hard to translate résumé into a number without resorting to various gameable metrics.
So what?
It’s a lot easier to measure height then evaluate a résumé.
Is there some reason why this was modded down aside from political incorrectness?
I didn’t downvote, but your second paragraph has a problem in that in the basketball example height is only a proxy for the ability to play basketball.
The first paragraph is a bit iffy, too, because proxies have different effectiveness or usefulness. By the time you’re estimating someone’s ability to do the job on the basis of a resume, the male/female proxy becomes basically insignificant.
In any case, I think that the better language here is that of priors. It’s perfectly fine to have different priors for male job applicants than for female job applicants, but once evidence starts coming in, the priors become less and less important.
IQ is a proxy for the ability to do well in a job, too. I was ignoring that, so in the analogy I would have to ignore that for height and ability to play basketball.
Arguing “the other proxy is so much better that we don’t need the original one” is not the same as “the other proxy is better, and that’s all we need to know”, and is even farther from “we can measure it so we don’t need a proxy at all”.