Big: 2% to 20% is - what - about a 1000% increase?

Liklihood: extreme-rationality and intelligent machines are ultra-nerd material - and of course, most ultra-nerds are male.

The resolution of tension is in the following. I do empathize with complaints related to sexual harassment in the workplace, them being under pressure due to "unreasonable" norms etc.

I however absolutely detest lying or soft peddling the truth or refraining from asking hard and important questions, simply because they affect some people's political sensibilities. I have little regard for such political sensibilities that subvert the quest for the truth.

So yes, a woman who complains of sexual harassment in the workplace is not one I would characterize as whiny; a woman who claims that Larry Summers's talk was sexist is certainly one I would characterize as whiny and finding sexism where there is none.

I hope I've made my point clear.

I defy your claim about signaling because it seems wildly improbable to me. Why would women want to signal their attractiveness to other women? Give a citation or something.

Shoes and handbags are probably an adequate citation. Clothing as well, perhaps, but that's at least somewhat ambiguous. There may be a lot of men out there who pay close attention to the shoes and handbags of the women they are interested in, but I can't say I've met any of them. I'm not entirely sure what the motivation is for women who buy these things (I dated a woman with numerous $500+ purses, and she was in college), but I am pretty sure it's unrelated to attracting men, and it would make a great deal of sense if it's status signaling towards other women.

If it's so tiny, it shouldn't be such a struggle to get people to accommodate the wish. I have less trouble getting my roommate to drive me to another city an hour away and back.

You probably don't ask your roommate in such a way as to imply that it's his or her fault that you have no way to get to the city, and that their failure to comply will be considered unethical and/or harm-causing by you. Nor, I presume, have you called upon other residents of your building or block to denounce any other incidents of non-ride-offering, and professed surprise that they have not already repudiated such incidents.

Many people, including myself, do not object to what you're asking nearly so much as to the way in which you asked it. By depersonalizing the issue from being about you and your hurt feelings to some sort of ethical issue, you created a perceived requirement for people to start taking sides -- i.e., signaling their ethical position.

But if you look back to previous calls for inclusive language on LessWrong, I didn't object to them; in fact, I argued in favor of one of them. (I remember it because some of my comments in that thread brought rather large doses of karma.) I believe in being reasonably considerate to people who reasonably request it.

Thus, I find myself in the bizarre-to-me position of being grouped with "masculinists", as though I'm somehow against politeness or in favor of sexist language. This is not the case, and framing my disagreement with your flawed logic (or with your inconsistent and terminally vague definitions) as being something to do with sexism is behavior unbecoming a professed rationalist.

That having been said, I will certainly say that there are plenty of other people in these threads who've said what I was thinking, much better than I was able to say it, and have been able to bring up some of the same points I made with more tact and less directness. I hope that continues.

However, had you said to Roko, "I was put off by this statement, did you mean to imply that I'm an interchangeable commodity? No? Oh, what did you mean then? Ah, I see. Would you mind phrasing it like that in future then? Thanks."... Then I never would've opened my trap in the first place, and everybody would've been much happier. (And yes, I do see the irony in my jumping on you for you jumping on Roko. At least, I do now, and will try to follow my own advice on this point in future.)

The example of the Rubinstein bargaining model suggests that you could make players alternate offers and introduce exponential temporal discounting. An equal split isn't logically necessary in this case: a player's payoff will likely depend on their personal rate of utility discounting, also known as "impatience", and others' perceptions of it. The search keyword is "n-person bargaining"; there seems to be a lot of literature that I'm too lazy and stupid to quickly summarize.

This... absolutely sickens me. It's bad enough when I hear my family members argue morals/politics/economics that they subscribe to for proximate lifestyle purposes - but when University students pull this, and then ignore the eminent Yvain when he councils them otherwise?

My only comforts are the harsh cold truth of schadenfreude, that such beings don't deserve an extra 5%, and that at least I only wasted three years and $20 000 at post-secondary.*

*(My degree was non-technical; Humanities students who don't want a PhD should drop out in second year, spend a year reading, and then lie on their resume.)

P.S. Excellent break down of the reasoning process, Yvain. I think you hit the nail on the head.

Agreed. It is more socially acceptable for women to improve their attractiveness to the opposite sex than it is for men. Women can also get more improvement of their attractiveness through these methods. Additionally, it's considered acceptable for women to use various forms of psychological influence over men; see this NYT article I critiqued on my blog advocating training men like animals. When men do this, it's evil.

Hair and clothes are very important for men, though, not just because of physical looks, but because of the status and sexuality that they do (or don't) convey.

I agree with most of what you say here. Probably I shouldn't have brought up divergence from verbalized rules; that's a different conversation.

That leapt out at me as well. "Outside View" has a technical meaning and this doesn't seem to be it.

Yep, economists call this barriers to entry.

I'm asking why he thinks that different gender ratio would be a big change. Are men and women so different from each other that it would be noticeable? Even if the discussions are strictly about rationalism?

I'm also asking why he thinks change like that wont happen. Are women inherently less rationalistic?

And a question for you: why it is likely that people who want to join have that skewed sex ratio?

(Disclaimer: I'm asking these questions because I'm interested in what people think, and I'm trying to keep them as "unthreatening" as possible. But as they are questions, they always seem somewhat aggressive :P)

I suspect that your friends were simply trying to rationalize their previous behavior or avoid admitting they were wrong. I'll bet more of them would have been sympathetic to your arguments if they'd been presented before they'd ever taken a test of that type. In fact, I'll bet a few of them would find your arguments so obvious as to barely be worth mentioning if presented in this context. (E. g. if you'd posed as a brainteaser to your friends: "on a test of this type, do you increase your expected score by guessing or marking don't know", I'll bet some of them would have said "Guess. That's obvious.")

According to my interpretation, the only reason your outcome was superior was because you made the discovery early on under your own steam. To measure whether you would be better at admitting you were wrong than your friends, we would have to give you a test where you actually had to admit you were wrong.

Anyway, guessing does increase the variance in your answer. So maybe a more complete argument where you asked your friends how many questions they expected to know and then gave them odds for getting each of "no pass", "pass", "honors" and "high honors" using guess and no-guess strategies would have been more effective.

My main problem with this post is that it attempts to impose social norms based on nothing more than your personal feelings, Alicorn.

If the evidence linked to in the post didn't persuade you that I'm not alone in those feelings, I'm afraid I don't have any more handy to offer, especially since as I write this comment the site is down and I can't do searches.

I found your "Disclaimer" very off-putting. Though I'm sure you will say that you were either trying to be as straight-forward as possible or that you are just being cute and charming ... I immediately read this disclaimer as saying: "Anyone who disagrees in the comments with what I have to say in this post is almost certainly going to be labelled as sexist." This casts a pallor over the entire discussion.

When I try to be cute, I usually do a better job. There exist people who assume that if there were sexism around, their keen sexism senses would have detected it; therefore, in the minds of these people, anyone who points out sexism they didn't notice is making it up. Mockery of the "whiny girls" typically follows. The existence of those people and the fact that they are idiots does not mean that I am automatically right when I say there is a problem in this community. However, anyone who, upon reading any statement of sexism that they hadn't already observed, would dismiss it without further thought, would have found the post wasted on them. As you might have suspected, I think I'm right and that people who think that the problems I point out aren't problems are mistaken. That doesn't mean I think every person who disagrees with me about this falls into the category of person targeted by my disclaimer.

Imagine if I wanted to post something controversial on AI, something that I knew from past experience with the community was going to get me a lot of challenges in the comments, and I prefaced it with "If you are a stupid person who doesn't really understand AI the way I do, and who can't really do math as well as I can, this post is unlikely to interest you." I'd be laughed off the board, and rightly so.

That would be quite unlike what my disclaimer said.

In fact, one might consider it an excellent piece of evidence of one's own yet-unseen bias if one feels the need to preface a discussion with all-purpose disagreement-deflectors of this kind!

This is an interesting claim, and I would like to hear more about why you think it seems likely.

My other objection to the way you have framed this issue is to your twin assertions that you (A) are not interested in feminist stuff per se, and (B) are not easily offended. I believe you on both counts, of course, though I have nothing to go on except your own assertion. Nevertheless, it is my observation that on the particular issues you raise in this post (and many, many times before in the comments of other posts), you are easily offended. To my mind, almost comically so.

The fact that I am more offended than you by a certain class of things - specifically, by things that have to do with a group I belong to and you do not - does not make me easily offended, any more than the fact that Superman can be quickly brought to his knees by Kryptonite while ordinary humans walk around unaffected means that Superman is easily weakened.

But, to follow your rhetorical maneuver here: You (A) aren't particularly a "feminist" and (B) aren't particularly sensitive, therefore (C) you aren't being overly-sensitive on this issue. Well, even granting (A) and (B) on very little evidence, I still reject (C).

Okay. It's not like I've got an airtight, formally valid proof backing me up there, so you can certainly do that.

However, from where I sit, you have raised some legitimate concerns, and for that reason I upvoted this post. But I want to register that I strongly disapprove of the borderline-coercive way in which you do it in this post and have done it in the past in the comments. This post feels creepily thought-police-y to me, which I am sure is not your intent.

Thank you for the vote. I'm not sure what you mean by coercion. I don't really have the power to (going by Wikipedia) threaten, intimidate, trick, or otherwise exercise pressure or force on anyone here - I mean, I have the power to downvote, and the power to type sternly. But I had that before, and I've made my wishes about gendered language known before. I also would make a terrible officer of the thought police: I can't read minds, can't enforce my rules about the contents of minds, and don't know anybody who can do either of those things and is disposed to do so according to my wishes. My only powers are to read what people type, and vote, and type sternly.

I agree with #1 in principle but it's clear to me that I have a very different definition of what constitutes an unethical level of "objectification" and therefore this one may calculate out to disagreement on my part.

Okay. People are certain to draw the line in different places with objectification, just as we already do with things like lying and violence and other wrong things. My job is mostly done if you think objectification exists and that this isn't cause for confetti.

I agree with #2, though it seems like a rather tiny issue. I know, I know... Male advantage #46, right? Nevertheless, having duly considered my Male Advantages, I still think this is a negligible issue, one that you have every right to try and change if you please, but which I emphatically reject as a norm to be placed on others in this community.

If it's so tiny, it shouldn't be such a struggle to get people to accommodate the wish. I have less trouble getting my roommate to drive me to another city an hour away and back.

[various statements of agreement]

Great :)

Number 2: is a useless catch-all that, again, makes me feel creepy. What do you mean "attention"? Should we all post one comment a week that deplores male privilege? I know you are not advocating anything mandatory, and my question is tongue-in-cheek. But do you see how this kind of talk (along with your first disclaimer) casts a gauzy shroud of "guilty of sexism until proven innocent" over the place?

I'm sorry you feel creepy. It would be nice if it were possible to confront privilege without feeling creepy. I think it's worth it anyway. By "attention", I mean thought, care, consideration - not necessarily copious chat. As for "guilty of sexism until proven innocent", I don't see it. I'm not descending on a fledgling community in which no one has ever used the words "women" or "female" or even so much as a gendered pronoun and screaming, "You're all male chauvinist pigs and you must obey my law!" I'm pointing out a problem that a handful of posters have perpetuated. I have been and remain surprised by, not resigned to or broodingly resentful of, the fact that these few posters have not been as widely repudiated for these actions as I would have thought.

You said of course they consider all women to be unique

No, I said that the behavior you described is consistent with considering all women to be unique. And it is. It just also happens to be consistent with the behavior of a jerk.

How is that changing topic?

Oh my dear lord Cthulhu. Can I ask what level of class this was? If you say it was a postgraduate course at MIT, I may gather the last sane members of the human race and move to Pluto.

You're completely changing the topic.

I said that womanizers I have known consider women interchangeable, because in their plot to sleep with as many women as possible, they ever so easily substitute one for another when their moves fail on the current target. I said that is not the behavior of someone who thinks every woman is unique.

You said of course they consider all women to be unique, because "If every one is unique, then surely you'd want to meet them all. "

I pointed out that you're equivocating on unique, and now you're changing the topic again.

No offence, but I'm getting worried about how you and a few other people keep trying to force ingroup/outgroup concerns on the rest of us. It's unnecessary and it sows dissension; you really ought not to be doing this.

If you meant it ironically, I completely missed that, and I've seen enough other references to 'war' and the like here today to think that many people here take such metaphors seriously, too seriously.

Well, the book I read also emphasized that even if you had no clue, you still couldn't lose anything by guessing; on average it would just come out the same as if you left it blank, so you might as well give it a try.

But I can certainly understand why this is easier to get in the context of a 4- or 5-answer question than 2. To understand the true/false case, you need to understand at least a little about calibrated probabilities.

I also remember reading and using this information when taking the SAT, so it surprises me that Yvain's classmates wouldn't take the free points. My best guess, unfounded except for intuition, is that the something-for-nothing aspect triggered a "this can't be!" feeling. Or something. Yeah I dunno, as far as I remember everyone I talked to about this in high school was fine with guessing after eliminating a choice.