timtyler comments on Being saner about gender and rationality - Less Wrong

14 [deleted] 20 July 2009 07:17AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (84)
Tags: politics gender mind_killer

Comments (84)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: timtyler 20 July 2009 08:19:15AM 2 points [-]

20% women would be a big change. But this is an ultra-nerd topic - so I don't see it happening.

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 21 July 2009 06:16:30AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: timtyler 21 July 2009 05:35:14PM -1 points [-]

Here's the members of the LW facebook group - so you can see for yourself:

http://www.facebook.com/s.php?k=100000004&id=144017955332&gr=2&a=7

Comment author: Rakel 20 July 2009 09:12:34AM 0 points [-]

Why?

Comment author: SoullessAutomaton 20 July 2009 10:48:11AM 7 points [-]

In short, the type of backgrounds that most people on LW have, and other communities they are in, tend to be as gender-skewed as LW, if not sometimes moreso. Go look at the Computer Science department at your nearest university, for instance.

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 21 July 2009 06:11:30AM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Rakel 20 July 2009 11:03:29AM 0 points [-]

I'm well aware that communities like this tend to be extremely gender-skewed. Perhaps I should have elaborated on my question(s):

Why 20% women would be a big change? Why timtyler doesn't see it happening?

Comment author: SoullessAutomaton 20 July 2009 10:37:01PM 3 points [-]

Well, I can't really speak for him, but I assume he's just saying that the current ratio is far from 20% and that he sees no reason to expect it to change, possibly because the kind of people who would be likely to join will have a similarly skewed ratio.

I'm not really sure what you're asking.

Comment author: Rakel 21 July 2009 05:12:37AM 1 point [-]

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)

Comment author: SoullessAutomaton 21 July 2009 10:44:26AM *  1 point [-]

I think you're reading too much into it--it would be a big change in the gender ratio, not necessarily anything else. Personally, I don't think it'd matter all that much otherwise, as far as the discourse here is concerned.

why it is likely that people who want to join have that skewed sex ratio?

People don't find sites like LW out of the blue; they need to find links from some other site, have some reason for doing a web search that leads to this site, or have it mentioned by a friend.

  • If memory serves me, statistically, most friendships are same-sex, so that vector will have a similar sex ratio.
  • LW is a small site on esoteric topics, therefore the chance of finding it from a random Google search are small, so that vector is likely to have little impact.
  • Most of the other sites that would currently be inclined to link to LW are topically related to computer science, philosophy, economics, science, athiesm, technology, science fiction, &c.--most of which are interests that also have skewed gender ratios to some degree, some more or less so than LW[1].

That is also my answer to "why I don't expect it to change", at least not without deliberate outreach of some sort to compatible communities with less gender skew.

Short version: It's a self-perpetuating situation for various reasons.

[1]: I've been in at least one technology-oriented community where male-to-female transsexuals outnumbered biological females among active participants. I don't think I need to point out how statistically unlikely that is.

Comment author: wnoise 05 August 2009 10:31:16PM 1 point [-]

If memory serves me, statistically, most friendships are same-sex, so that vector will have a similar sex ratio.

Sure. But consider the stochastic matrix [1-p, p; p; 1-p]. It has eigenvalues of 1, an even split, and (1-2p), corresponding to the difference between male and female. This part shrinks at each step outward in friendship. It certainly has some influnce into site membership, but it does end up shrinking rather rapidly (exponentially!). Even a p of 0.1 (1/10 friends is opposite sex), would give a ratio of 55:45 after 10 rounds.

If we have a very biased join rate, this can reinforce that, but by itself it should be ignored.

Comment author: timtyler 21 July 2009 05:43:35AM 0 points [-]

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.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit