How diverse is Less Wrong? I am under the impression that we disproportionately consist of 20-35 year old white males, more disproportionately on some axes than on others.
We obviously over-represent atheists, but there are very good reasons for that. Likewise, we are probably over-educated compared to the populations we are drawn from. I venture that we have a fairly weak age bias, and that can be accounted for by generational dispositions toward internet use.
However, if we are predominately white males, why are we? Should that concern us? There's nothing about being white, or female, or hispanic, or deaf, or gay that prevents one from being a rationalist. I'm willing to bet that after correcting for socioeconomic correlations with ethnicity, we still don't make par. Perhaps naïvely, I feel like we must explain ourselves if this is the case.
I was never trying to say that there was something wrong with the way that Less Wrong is, or that we ought to do things to change our makeup. Maybe it would be good for us to, but that had nothing to do with my question. I was instead (trying to, and apparently badly) asking for people's opinions about whether or how our makeup along any partition --- the ones that I mentioned or others --- effect in us an inability to best solve the problems that we are interested in solving.
People are touchy on this. I guess its because in public discourse pointing something like this out is nearly always a call to change it.
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