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

14 [deleted] 20 July 2009 07:17AM

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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.

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