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SforSingularity comments on 'oy, girls on lw, want to get together some time?' - Less Wrong
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I assign a 99.9% probability to there being more male readers than female readers of LW, The most recent LW meetup that I attended had a gender ratio of roughly 20:1 male:female.
Males who feel that they are competing for a small pool of females will attempt to gain status over each other, diminishing the amount of honest, rational dialogue, and replacing it with oneupmanship.
Hence the idea of mixing LW - in its current state - with dating may not be good.
However, there is the possibility of re-framing LW it so that it appeals more to women. Perhaps we need to re-frame saving the world as a charitable sacrifice?
I would love to know what the gender ratio looks like within the atheist movement; I think we should regard that as a bound on what is achievable.
"I assign a 99.9% probability to there being more male readers than male readers of LW"
I expect that you have a VERY GOOD reason. As it is, I cannot help but disagree.
I assign a 99.999999% probability to the same thing, i.e. that there are more male readers in the world, than there are male readers of LW in the world.
typo. thanks for pointing out.
Is there a way to re-frame LW as being about "charitable sacrifice" without significantly straying the general goal of "refining the art of human rationality" (which may or may not be charitable/sacrificial)?
What do you see as the essence of its current framing, and what is the evidence that women would respond better to the charitable-sacrifice frame?
(Normally I'd respond to the quoted comment with "That's sexist nonsense" and leave it at that, but I am trying to be socratic about it.)
(Also, if anybody knows or can estimate, are the gender ratios similar in the relevant areas of academia?)
All male biased as far as I know. (Math, philosophy, AI/CS)
Aren't biology and psychology solidly balanced/ skewed female?
psychology, yes, definitely. Bio, I do not know, but I would like to see what it looks like for evo psych.
If you haven't read Of Gender and Rationality and the accompanying comments lately it is worth a reread. There are so many hypotheses listed that we'd need another go-around with the specific goal of assigning probabilities to the most likely ones. It also looks like there were a number of popular proposals that were never acted upon. One or more of us needs to go through that thread and write a summary.
not good =/
Not good from the point of view of men looking for atheist partners, but good from the point of view of these rare females.
Except the lesbians, who may have some trouble.
Why would lesbians have trouble? Their pool of partners is small, but so is their pool of competitors. It's nothing like the situation that men face in a mostly male community.
With gay people, all possible partners are also possible competitors. Therefore, a larger pool can only be better because there is a higher chance of someone being appealing at all. By your logic having exactly two lesbians would be ideal, because no one could compete with them; but without the dumbest of dumb luck, they'd be poorly suited to each other.
The variance grows more slowly than the number, so the largeness of the pool probably doesn't make much of a difference above a lower bound. 10,000 lesbians are probably in less dating trouble than 1,000,000 men competing for 900,000 women. I could be wrong.
In many animal populations, unbalanced gender ratios leads to higher incidence of homosexuality. I wouldn't be surprised if that happens to humans in similar circumstances.
It is, anyway, a plausible explanation for the "lesbian until graduation" phenomenon, which occurs on (typically female-dominated) college campuses.
I'm not sure where you disagree with me. N possible partners = N possible competitors sounds just like the typical situation of heterosexuals, no special trouble in sight. Are you maybe too accustomed to being a female in a mostly-male community? From that vantage point it does seem that lesbians are in trouble.
Nice save ;)
touché. And the gay men, who have yet another situation.