The problem is real. I am a 21 year old woman and an aspiring rationalist, and my friends are mostly women and some are also aspiring rationalists. We find much of the conversation about women on this site so off-putting that I for one have never commented before. I read Eliezer's work and enjoy it very much indeed, which is why I stick around at all.

I am simply astounded at the men here confidently asserting that they aren't alienating women when they talk about "getting" "attractive women" and speak of women as symbols of male success or indeed accessories for a successful male. This reduces me and other females (including female rationalists) to the category of a fancy car or a big house, and I feel humiliated when I read it.

I am fully aware that some men think this way, and that in certain social scenes almost all the "players" in the social "game" see it this way. If getting ahead in a social game like that gives you loads of utility then thinking of women in this way might be rational. But if you would derive more utility from having long and close relationships with female rationalists, you might like to know that female rationalists will be less likely to seek out your company and attention if you persist in that attitude.

A coach who sticks with the conventional strategy is protected by a "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" attitude, whereas a coach who does something unconventional (but probabilistically correct) runs the risk of getting fired if it doesn't work out.

This reminds me of the TV series House. Dr. House, the maverick, is always coming up with courses of action that are rationally correct, and Dr. Cuddy, his boss, is always striking them down as unethical or something. I wonder how many members of the general population side with Cuddy.

Thank you for this lengthy and thoughtful reply. I, too, am encouraged to notice the points on which we agree or are not that far off.

I don't really think you are the "thought police," and I didn't mean to imply that. But I do stand by my assessment of your post as vaguely coercive. There is such a thing as coercion by public shaming. I think this is what Roko might have been getting at in his recent post. If you do not see how this is a legitimate concern, then perhaps I can pull an "Alicorn" and just insist that if you were a man, you would know what this feels like. And if you think I am being overly sensitive, well you are just swimming like a fish in a sea: a world that favors your right to say anything you damn please about any gender without automatically questioning your self-awareness, your motives, the amount of serious thought you have put into the issue, and your fish-not-knowing-water-tude.

"I'm sorry you feel creepy. It would be nice if it were possible to confront privilege without feeling creepy." Obviously I'm not saying it feels creepy to confront privilege. That seems like an almost deliberately obtuse statement on your part... though taken in context of your otherwise respectful comments, I'll assume it's meant sincerely.

What feels creepy is the notion that there is some vaguely defined "offensiveness" out there that I — as a person with great affection for and deference to my mother, my three sisters, my wonderful female friends, my respected female co-workers and my stupendous female lovers — cannot sense, and that I must take another's word for it that I am wrong and the other is right. I can perceive most sexism, but there is a special class of sexism lurking everywhere that I am blind to, even though I've thought seriously about these matters. The evidence you link to, incidentally, is rather weak — it is all internal comments, and one might just as easily point to the comments you object to as counter-evidence as each instance is by definition an example of yet another person who feels differently than you on this topic, hence raising your hackles.

Incidentally, Alicorn, for the record (and my apologies to all if this comment is out of place here... I can edit it out if need be...), I actually used to think much closer to the way you do on these topics. I am by no means "blind" to the things you point out, and in fact I used to have a highly developed radar for them. I still pick them out all the time. I just think it is a particular form of contemporary ideology that teaches many people (men and women) that these things are hurtful and must be banished from all hearts and minds, when no one perceived them that way in the past. They are supposed to be inidicative of a disdainful attitude towards women even when, as I assure you is the case with me, no such attitude exists. Or, if the complainant grants that there was no harmful intent, she can still gain traction with the argument that "Well, no, you didn't mean to insult me, but these kinds of so-called innocuous comments are the stuff with which the patriarchy keeps women down and belittles them etc and is therefore unethical. I am insulted, therefore you are the one who did the insulting." This is supposedly what makes gender non-neutral statements about women unacceptable while gender non-neutral statements about men are considered by the same people to be regrettable (or occasionally a laff-riot!), but par for the course. When men point out that people make casual blanket generalizations about men all the time and that men rarely complain and usually just chuckle along, they are told that they can't possibly understand what it feels like from the woman's point of view, and may also be accused of "calling all girls whiney," a specter you raise in your disclaimer.

You come very close to this realization when you say to me "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". You see, I'm essentially saying the same thing. Yes, you are more offended than I am, and that's your problem and not mine. As you say in your rejoinder to my "coercion" comment, no one here is trying to "threaten, intimidate, trick, or otherwise exercise pressure or force on" you.

If, in the absence of threats, intimidation, tricks, pressure, or force —that is: in the absence of any actual harm done to you or anyone else— you persist in feeling offended, that is your business. As I said in my earlier comment, that is every bit your right and I would never want to mock or belittle someone for feeling set-upon as you quite apparently do. It's a very unpleasant feeling, I know, and I am in no way trying to say that you are imagining your own feelings. But I feel that it is precisely that: your business, and not that of the community.

So what that means for me is that while, naturally, you have every right to say whatever you want on this topic, I remain unconvinced. Perhaps you never intended for me specifically to change anything, as I note that I personally am not linked to in your catalog of offenders. If that's the case, then bully for both of us, as I have no plans to alter my manner of talking or writing.

Maybe (if your goal was to get them to score higher) you could have pitched it as gambling for entertainment, i.e. record which answers you guessed on, and later compare who was luckiest in getting the biggest portion of those correct.

Most apathetic students have no qualms with guessing. It sounds like these peers of yours are either extremely diligent and motivated by fear, or unwilling to lose face by admitting that you're more clever than they.

I suggest that the students aren't as irrational as they appear. After all, why would the designer of the test incorporate a "don't know" option and a penalty for wrong answers, except to discourage guessing on questions that you're clueless on? And if I were a random student (instead of someone especially interested in the mathematics of decision theory), why should I take the trouble to second guess the test designer, instead of assuming that (with high probability) he is rational and competent at his job?

ETA: Also, you're supposed to maximize expected utility, not expected number of points. Increasing the variance of your score may decrease expected utility, even if it keeps the expected score the same. (I see that John Maxwell IV has made a similar point.)

I don't think it's a straw man argument. Yes if a woman is wearing a nice dress and a pair of Crocs, that's an issue, but from what I've seen the marginal effect of shoes is pretty small from most men's perspectives. My impression, both from personal experience and from popular culture, is that women actually notice accessories and men do not. That sounds like signaling towards women; in fact, women I know who spend a lot on accessories have admitted as much to me. If someone has actually gathered hard data on this, I can't find it and would love to see it, but I'd be really surprised if women who shop for accessories seriously are doing so to attract men.

I just haven't yet heard a convincing explanation why women would benefit from signaling high status to each other.

So? The behaviour either happens or it doesn't. Your ability to explain it is totally irrelevant. Granted my evidence is undesirably anecdotal, so you may have not seen evidence that women buy accessories for other women to see. Still, the fact that you can't explain it (especially that you can't explain it with ev-psych specifically) does not preclude or remove the event from existence. I'd still believe men have nipples even if I couldn't figure out how it were evolutionarily advantageous.

But I'll try to offer an explanation (and an alternative). People seek social status. That simple. Women may also want to signal friendliness and caring (they're not opposed to status), but they benefit strongly from being high-status. Similarly, it may simply be a social thing. My parents encouraged me to dress one way and not another. Clothing is a significant indicator of social status. Thus, people come to believe a certain style is "right," and what style that is does a lot to signal what social niche they come from. This lets the whole thing operate without any consciousness of signaling.

An alternative. People value looking good for obvious reasons. The only evaluation they can make of "looking good" is by their own criteria, thus they seek primarily to look good to themselves. Thus, if some women like accessories, they will seek them out seriously, because they want to look good and they view them as vital to achieving that end, even if men don't agree.

It's very suspect on the surface that you say people "don't want to do anything except stop the bad feeling" followed by (paraphrasing) "except when it's the exact opposite."

While it seems that people in persistent bad situations often get nothing out of their stress and suffering but additional health problems, I think we'd have even worse failure modes if we really only reacted emotionally to changes in circumstance, and were unable to sustain persistent (dis)satisfaction with our present state. I mean this as a statement about our possible evolutionary "design", not about what's theoretically possible.

Given that people can be genetically predisposed to such emergent things as hating homosexuality (how would you make a neural net do that?), it doesn't seem far-fetched that this sort of thing is inheritable. Of course, I don't think homosexuality-hating evolved over mere centuries, nor do I know of statistically significant evidence that LW-style rationality has been inherited.

That seems like an overreaction, and sets a messy precedent as well. I agree with your analysis, except I don't think the situation is as frightening as you do.

Both her post and your reaction to it, while of reasonable quality, are exactly the type of useless meta-discussion that I'd encourage everyone to vote down at least to the extent necessary to keep it off the front page.

What's your 80% confidence interval for the current prevalence of females? (seperately per page view, per comment, or per active account, if you wish)

Don't read further if you want to avoid anchoring, but mine is 7%-30% for readers and 5%-20% per post. In other words, I really don't know. There are plenty of ambi-sexed names.

To my surprise, supposedly in the early 1990s females were 1/3 of undergraduates in computer science - http://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/Gender_issues/women_in_ai.article

I've worked with roughly 20% female AI graduate and phd, which was higher than I'd expected after my undergraduate class, which was at least 90% male.

This reminds me of an infamous chemistry exam that no longer existed at my college by the time I got there but had passed into the student lore. For each question, you would first mark your answer (multiple choice, 4 or 5 choices), and then mark a confidence option. These were "high confidence" (5 points if right, -3 if wrong), "low confidence" (3 points if right, 0 if wrong), and "I don't know, give me a point" (1 point regardless of what answer is marked).

This exam was not popular with the students.

A third data point in agreement: in my HS it was repeatedly drilled into us (by the official prep materials, by teachers, by everyone) that you should always guess.

None taken, and the ingoup thing was mostly a joke. I'm just genuinely puzzled as to why people write things like "The rest of this article is for Newcomb one-boxers only" when something like "The rest of this article concerns the subtleties of one-boxing, so if you don't care about that feel free to move on" would seem to be more accurate (and incidentally less inflammatory).

Heh. When I read: "Anyone with basic math skills should be able to calculate that out, right?" I thought: "yes!" - and waited for the inevitable complication - but it never came.

There might be genes for intelligence, but I'm extremely skeptical that there are genes for LW-style rationality. Teaching each other, on the other hand, might work.

I'm curious: if instead of moving to Pluto, these people simply bred with each other, what would result?

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.

That's a strawman argument. Of course men don't pay close attention to the individual aspects, only the general impression matters. The point is to make the guy want you, not make him want your handbag. I don't mentally note the price of girls' shoes and purses, but I certainly note when they fit in with and "enhance" the rest of their attire; knowing some girls with an extraordinary sense of color and style taught me to perceive this stuff consciously some years ago, but it's always had an unconscious influence as far as I feel.

On the other hand, I can't dismiss the idea of signaling as completely as before. I just haven't yet heard a convincing explanation why women would benefit from signaling high status to each other, as opposed to (say) signaling friendliness and caring.

When I took my high school's AP Calculus classes these last two years, the teacher pointed out that since, on average, guessing would give the same result as leaving questions blank, you might as well guess. As far as I know, nobody disagreed with him.

(Actually, he said it's better to guess, because leaving a question blank means running the risk of accidentally putting the next question's answer in the wrong place--which, in one case, led to a student answering practically every question in one section wrongly. But that's relatively impertinent.)

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.