army1987 comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong

52 Post author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 01:53AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 03:14:13PM *  -1 points [-]

Have you considered that your writing style might be unusual for a woman? Even based on a small sample of writing that has no obvious clues, it's usually possible to guess the author's sex much better than chance. You write in a very technical matter-of-fact style, with long, complex, and yet very precisely constructed sentences, and take unusual care to avoid ambiguities and unstated implications. (You'd probably be a great textbook writer.) Whatever the reason for this state of affairs might be, people who write like that are overwhelmingly men.

That just says ‘well educated and highly intelligent’ to me. Now, such people tend to be more commonly male than female, but given that someone posts on Less Wrong I don't think that writing style is further evidence for them being male.

Comment author: DaFranker 23 October 2012 04:14:20PM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure which shadows which here. It doesn't seem like writing in this style will cause someone to post on LessWrong, while conversely it seems much more likely that someone who has been posting on LessWrong for a while will adopt this writing style. Thus, ISTM that the writing style overshadows posting-on-LessWrong more than the other way around.

Given that I have the text itself, learning that it was posted on LessWrong I wouldn't infer much from it, since regardless of gender they aren't obviously more likely to write this way on LessWrong if they're a regular user, whilst if I only know that someone is posting on LessWrong then learning that they write in this manner also gives me all the other non-LessWrong writer data.

Not sure if I'm really being clear. Basically, in my model the causal chain goes the other way around.

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