This post (and the comments on it) made me finally to register in here, partly because I had few discussions about similar topics just a few days ago.
As knb said: “This site is hugely less sexist than society at large.” While this might be true, it only means that most people in here are “less wrong” than society at large. This does not mean that they are right. It also has the same ring to my ears as “Some of my friends are black/jewish/”.
Gender bias is rampant even in the internet where it should hold no sway (there are no visual clues, no pheromones etc.), and denying its excistence only enforces it. If you want to see it, just try using feminine nickname for few weeks.
On the topic of objectification and PUA, I have decided to read “The Book” because I know that I hold a bias against it.
Heteronormative examples actually bother me more than masculine ones, and this might be because there are no gender specific pronomins in my native language. My brain just seems to skip over the usual “he/his/him” and interpret it as a gender neutral version.
Generalizations of certain type of either sex are very annoying. By this I refer to things like “men don’t cry” and “women are such gossips”. My annoyance with things like these most likely stems form two points. First, I don’t recognize myself or anyone I know in them (I know, anecdotal evidence and all that). Second, they put up a framework according which one should behave.
As Alicorn says, costs of this type of thinking can be very high. For excample, because of “women are the weaker sex” they were effectively shut out of the intellectual community until about 100 years ago. Because of “men are not caring” they still lose custodity battles more often than not, and end up being deprived of their children.
Basically, assigning certain attributes to either sex effectively prohibits those attributes in the other sex. That is not useful or rational, that is just limiting the potential.
Basically, assigning certain attributes to either sex effectively prohibits those attributes in the other sex. That is not useful or rational, that is just limiting the potential.
Upvoted for this but… in a way this reminds me of the Tversky and Edwards experiment mentioned in the Technical Explanation where participants are shown a sequence of red and blue cards and asked to guess the next in the sequence. Since 70% of the cards are blue the best strategy is to always guess blue, but participants irrationally guess a mixture of blue and red as if they could predict the sequence.
So, if you are confident that a group exists (confident that you are ‘carving reality at its joints’), are confident that an individual is a member of that group, have good evidence that more than half of the members of the group have Trait X, and no further information about a member-of-the-group and you must make a decision based on available information with no opportunity to gather more information (or it is prohibitively expensive to gather information), you should assume that member-of-the-group has Trait X. In all other cases it is not rational to operate under the assumption that the individual has Trait X.
(Reading back through that my point seems kind of pedantic. But that’s what we do here, right? Anyway.)
Using gendered language or (much worse) thought experiments in a discussion that has nothing to do with gender adds noise and impedes understanding. This is the danger of using PUAs as examples of winners in “rationalists should win”* discussions. It brings in irrelevant assumptions and excludes women by using an example most of them can’t relate to (technical details about picking up women in bars or bookstores or the singularity summit or whatever.) So what I’m saying is discussions about sex (in both senses of the word) should be deliberately kept seperate from other discussions of rationalism, and that allowing irrelevant sex talk to bleed into our discussions distorts them and our conclusions.
You raise a good point. There are certain statistically proven differences between sexes and making generalizations based on these statistics is a good strategy for example under the conditions you specified. Differencies of this kind include things like “men on average are taller than women” and “women on average have higher percantage of body fat than men”. I don’t think anyone in here has a problem with generalizations like these.
My point was that there is a different class of generalizations which is problematic. One of the examples I used above was “men don’t cry”. This implies that if you don’t adhere to the norm described, you don’t fit in. Showing emotions is “unmanly” and and boys are actually told this when growing up (using a masculine example purely intentional). While the claim “men don’t cry” might have some statistical support, we should think about the causal relations between the claim and the reality. The fact that the claim exists and is used bringing up boys will establish a situation where it becomes a norm. Men will not cry because they are told not to, not because that is inherently built in the Y chromosome. With generalizations like this everyone in here should have a problem.
On your comment about excluding discussions about sex from other discussions about rationalism: I think this would generate a unneccessary blind spot. Rationalism should be applied whenever possible, and I find discussions about sex in no way an exception to this “rule”. The area is difficult because humans are so interested in it and it affects us in many ways, most of which are hard to see. This is why there might be a lot to gain.
This is simply a case of confusing normative statements with descriptive ones. If we raise the sanity line enough, such misconceptions should vanish spontaneously.
That’s a two-way process as well. One of the ways we can raise the sanity line is to clearly demonstrate an understanding of the difference between those statements.
This post (and the comments on it) made me finally to register in here, partly because I had few discussions about similar topics just a few days ago.
As knb said: “This site is hugely less sexist than society at large.” While this might be true, it only means that most people in here are “less wrong” than society at large. This does not mean that they are right. It also has the same ring to my ears as “Some of my friends are black/jewish/”.
Gender bias is rampant even in the internet where it should hold no sway (there are no visual clues, no pheromones etc.), and denying its excistence only enforces it. If you want to see it, just try using feminine nickname for few weeks.
On the topic of objectification and PUA, I have decided to read “The Book” because I know that I hold a bias against it.
Heteronormative examples actually bother me more than masculine ones, and this might be because there are no gender specific pronomins in my native language. My brain just seems to skip over the usual “he/his/him” and interpret it as a gender neutral version.
Generalizations of certain type of either sex are very annoying. By this I refer to things like “men don’t cry” and “women are such gossips”. My annoyance with things like these most likely stems form two points. First, I don’t recognize myself or anyone I know in them (I know, anecdotal evidence and all that). Second, they put up a framework according which one should behave.
As Alicorn says, costs of this type of thinking can be very high. For excample, because of “women are the weaker sex” they were effectively shut out of the intellectual community until about 100 years ago. Because of “men are not caring” they still lose custodity battles more often than not, and end up being deprived of their children.
Basically, assigning certain attributes to either sex effectively prohibits those attributes in the other sex. That is not useful or rational, that is just limiting the potential.
Upvoted for this but… in a way this reminds me of the Tversky and Edwards experiment mentioned in the Technical Explanation where participants are shown a sequence of red and blue cards and asked to guess the next in the sequence. Since 70% of the cards are blue the best strategy is to always guess blue, but participants irrationally guess a mixture of blue and red as if they could predict the sequence.
So, if you are confident that a group exists (confident that you are ‘carving reality at its joints’), are confident that an individual is a member of that group, have good evidence that more than half of the members of the group have Trait X, and no further information about a member-of-the-group and you must make a decision based on available information with no opportunity to gather more information (or it is prohibitively expensive to gather information), you should assume that member-of-the-group has Trait X. In all other cases it is not rational to operate under the assumption that the individual has Trait X.
(Reading back through that my point seems kind of pedantic. But that’s what we do here, right? Anyway.)
Using gendered language or (much worse) thought experiments in a discussion that has nothing to do with gender adds noise and impedes understanding. This is the danger of using PUAs as examples of winners in “rationalists should win”* discussions. It brings in irrelevant assumptions and excludes women by using an example most of them can’t relate to (technical details about picking up women in bars or bookstores or the singularity summit or whatever.) So what I’m saying is discussions about sex (in both senses of the word) should be deliberately kept seperate from other discussions of rationalism, and that allowing irrelevant sex talk to bleed into our discussions distorts them and our conclusions.
*This phrase bugs me so much!
You raise a good point. There are certain statistically proven differences between sexes and making generalizations based on these statistics is a good strategy for example under the conditions you specified. Differencies of this kind include things like “men on average are taller than women” and “women on average have higher percantage of body fat than men”. I don’t think anyone in here has a problem with generalizations like these.
My point was that there is a different class of generalizations which is problematic. One of the examples I used above was “men don’t cry”. This implies that if you don’t adhere to the norm described, you don’t fit in. Showing emotions is “unmanly” and and boys are actually told this when growing up (using a masculine example purely intentional). While the claim “men don’t cry” might have some statistical support, we should think about the causal relations between the claim and the reality. The fact that the claim exists and is used bringing up boys will establish a situation where it becomes a norm. Men will not cry because they are told not to, not because that is inherently built in the Y chromosome. With generalizations like this everyone in here should have a problem.
On your comment about excluding discussions about sex from other discussions about rationalism: I think this would generate a unneccessary blind spot. Rationalism should be applied whenever possible, and I find discussions about sex in no way an exception to this “rule”. The area is difficult because humans are so interested in it and it affects us in many ways, most of which are hard to see. This is why there might be a lot to gain.
This is simply a case of confusing normative statements with descriptive ones. If we raise the sanity line enough, such misconceptions should vanish spontaneously.
That’s a two-way process as well. One of the ways we can raise the sanity line is to clearly demonstrate an understanding of the difference between those statements.