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orthonormal comments on Narrow your answer space - Less Wrong
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Please explain what you mean. How would you measure how balanced a particular value was in how it affects men and women? Would you weigh it by the number of men and women present on LessWrong?
A key problem is that there are two different, conflicting definitions of "discrimination", and we're asked to satisfy both. One says that "discrimination" means "following a policy that favors the natural inclinations of men more than the natural inclinations of women". The other says "discrimination" means "supposing that men and women have different natural inclinations".
If I can manipulate a value to be more balanced in how it affects men and women, that presumes that men and women do in fact have different natural inclinations. That would mean that instead of choosing a "balanced" value, with which to treat everyone, I could optimize better by treating women one way, and men a different way.
I don't want to model why the reactions are this way, but I feel capable of saying this much:
On average, a dismissive/confrontational/snarky tone will be less palatable to potential female readers than potential male readers (even within our usual demographics).
And on average, a policy of explicitly adopting a different tone with replies to females than replies to males will offend many people of both genders.
So unless there is a big gain to being dimissive/confrontational/snarky, the optimally social thing to do in the current situation is to drop that tone as far as possible (without sacrificing clarity of communication). Not that I do this well or always, but I'm aware of the problem.
Is there, in your opinion, a big gain to be had from (say) the original version of your critique over the amended version? Or is it an onerous requirement to come up with the amended version in the first place?
Confrontational yes, dismissive - quite possibly, snarky probably not. Whatever difference there is in communication preferences across the sexes is stylistic more than a fundamental difference in 'niceness'.
Oh, I agree. I'm talking about the particular style of "heh, what an idiot" comments. Is there a more accurate adjective than 'snarky' for that style?
I know what you mean. That is another more stereotypically male kind of nasty. But a word doesn't spring to mind. Ok, I lie. But I'm far too polite to use any of the obvious candidates! ;)
No, the amended version is better. But now I've moved on to a more general issue; and being able to solve the particular instance that began this, does not solve the more general problem.
Well, what I'm saying is that implementing the algorithm that produced that emendation would help more generally.