As a rationalist who happens to be female, here is my take on this:
1) On an ideal amount of agreement vs disagreement : while it may be true that female dominated segments of the internet have much more agreement in their comments than male dominated ones, these same segments are significantly less rational, on average, and to a degree so are the topics they revolve around.
Rationalists tend not to bother with stating the obvious, and there isn’t much “nice post” type commentary around here, so even if the amount of agreeing were higher on this community, it would not be obvious. This “invisible agreement” issue has been discussed before isn’t really all that tied to gender as far as I can tell.
2) Can’t comment on this because obviously, LW and OB do not contain significant turn offs for me.
3) If a recruit is attracted because the poster shares their sex organs, they aren’t a very promising recruit.
How about an experiment where a male writer posts under a more feminine name?
As for recruiting Japanese rationalists, good luck doing that in English. Maybe some of your key posts ought to be translated instead. Hire a professional.
4) Agreed.
5) Sad, but probably correct. (Though I can only say this by observation and not by biological study.)
6) Not all that different from 4), and again all I can do is agree.
7) Your armchair evopsych again… Have you read Cochran and Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion? It might significantly improve the quality of these thoughts.
8) Like 5), sad but probably true.
9) Seems very plausible to me. Female readers have probably experienced the GIRL reaction quite often.
Conclusion : There will, in all likelyhood, always be a higher proportion of males to females in rationalist communities. However, putting more rationality into the world at large is a good in itself regardless. I would vastly prefer to see the recruitment efforts continue to deal with people as individuals. Focusing on recruiting women is not likely to work very well, and is quite likely to cause backlash, especially if done badly. The rationaly inclined women, if anything like me, will not react positively to attempts to feminize the community.
Just treat people as people.
No. Just No.
A society of rational agents ought to reach the conclusion that they should WIN, and do so by any means necessary, yes? Then why not just nuke ’em? *
*replace ‘nuke’ with whatever technology is available; if our rationalist society has nanobots, we could modify them into something less harmful than barbarians.
Offer amnesty to barbarians willing to bandon their ways; make it as possible as we can for individual barbarians to defect to our side; but above all make sure the threat is removed. That’s what constitutes winning.
Turning individual lottery-selected rationalists into “courageous soliders” is not the way to do that. That’s just another way of losing.
Furthermore, the process of selecting soldiers by lottery is a laughably bad heuristic. An army of random individuals, no matter how much courage they have, is going to be utterly slaughtered by an army whose members are young, strong, fast, healthy, and all those other attributes. If the lottery is not random but instead gives higher weight to the individuals best fit to fight, then it is not different from the draft decried above.
This is a terrible post, the first one so awful that I felt moved to step out of the lurkersphere and comment on LW.