wedrifid comments on What is missing from rationality? - Less Wrong

19 [deleted] 27 April 2010 12:32PM

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Comment author: wedrifid 28 April 2010 07:29:31PM 5 points [-]

Observation of a few weeks of commenting would make this apparent to anyone with a modest amount of social awareness. This is not something that should be surprising. I find my own popularity skyrocket when doing, for example, yoga. Being the scarce gender gives all sorts of power! :D

Comment author: Jack 28 April 2010 08:06:01PM *  0 points [-]

I honestly don't see it and think of myself as being fairly socially aware (though I suppose I wouldn't know if I was wrong about that). What power do women here have that men don't?

Comment author: mattnewport 28 April 2010 08:39:13PM *  12 points [-]

I'm not sure that higher status (as claimed in the OP) is quite the right way to phrase it but it seems to me that women are treated differently and I am also aware that I do it myself. Some observations:

  • Society teaches us that women are fragile and that men should be careful not to hurt them. This is an observation about physical differences but it carries over to verbal interactions. I find myself being more careful with my words when I know I am communicating with a female. I get the impression that others are too.
  • Women are a minority here and we are often reminded of this and encouraged to create a welcoming environment for them. I know of no other clearly defined group we have a similar community norm for.
  • Many males here are of a personality type that means they will not have a lot of natural success with women and will be enthusiastic about the prospect of talking to women who appear to share their interests. They will not always act on this enthusiasm in an effective way. This phenomena is also common in other communities that attract similar personality types.
  • Females legitimately offer a perspective that is novel here and so their insights are inherently more valuable than those that can be offered by the many nerdy male computer programmer types who share similar perspectives with each other. They thus are more likely to post insightful comments than average in some areas.

There's probably others but I hope this gives you some things to consider.

Comment author: Jack 29 April 2010 04:37:17PM *  4 points [-]

Good points. I can see some of this. I also agree that "higher status" is not the way to describe it.

Society teaches us that women are fragile and that men should be careful not to hurt them. This is an observation about physical differences but it carries over to verbal interactions. I find myself being more careful with my words when I know I am communicating with a female. I get the impression that others are too.

My experience, here and elsewhere, is that on average women are more interested in exploring ideas and less in getting into a debate. A very high percentage of comments here basically say "Some aspect of the post above this one is wrong" so often my default reaction to a reply to one of my comments is to take the reply as a reason why I'm wrong. But I've found this default fails more often when the replier is female. Relatedly, I do find myself being less belligerent and aggressive in replies to women, but I think this is mostly me just matching their tone instead of automatically altering mine when I see they are a woman.

Another aspect of this issue, is that debating between males probably triggers egos more readily than debating between males and females, so perhaps some men here are less aggressive when arguing with females because females don't trigger programming that evolved to guide us in battles for alpha male status, tribal supremacy and mating privileges. This might be one reason more female posters would help the community, egos care not for truth.

Women are a minority here and we are often reminded of this and encouraged to create a welcoming environment for them. I know of no other clearly defined group we have a similar community norm for.

True. But this isn't really because women are special or unique among such groups, it's because we aren't even diverse enough to worry about other groups. There are at least enough women here to point out blind spots and excluding language. Not so for lots of other groups.

(I've felt like we do pretty well on neurodiversity issues, for similar reasons.)

They will not always act on this enthusiasm in an effective way.

Okay, I have seen this. Heh.

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