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rabidchicken comments on Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter - Less Wrong
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Are rationalists more likely than average men to treat women like silly, fickle, manipulative gold diggers? As far as I can tell, trying to be rational has only given me more reasons to treat women and humans in general better.
Tangentially, I try to avoid treating women differently since the cultural assumptions about how each gender thinks are rarely accurate, and appreciate it when women do the same thing.
LW is waaaaaay on the right of the bell curve when it comes to groups treating people like they are silly.
You know, I'm honestly not entirely sure whether "waaaaaay on the right of the bell curve" means that "LW does much more than average group of treating people like they are silly", or that "LW is much better than the average group at not treating people like they are silly".
Ha! I see I assumed too much and miscommunicated by under-communicating...again.
I meant LW treats people like they are silly, none of their core values are beyond question, their imagined reasons are confabulations, and their real reasons reek of bias, irrationality, and anti-epistemology.
It doesn't seem at all correct to say "average men treat women like they're silly, but rationalists don't do that!"
Sure, rationalists treat men as silly too, which might be what is meant, but I think that part of the statement is literally false.
So we have a statement of the general form "X does Y, but we don't." This is the sort of statement that people are liable to say even when it's false, so we should heavily discount the weight that we would give to their personal opinion (because it might be biased.) Instead, we should hug the query -- gather more evidence (as unfiltered as we can -- statistics may be more unbiased than pure anecdote) or display that which has been gathered, instead of ignoring the possibility that the claim is factually true. If the claim is false, the evidence should tell us that as well.
Of course, it depends more on the individuals involved than anything else, but I would say that a non-negligible percentage of rationalists are unwilling to question gender biases (and in fact, many get defensive because they prefer to consider themselves rational and non-sexist, and then in their defensiveness, fail to examine their biases). This is common enough that the geek feminist blog Restructure has a whole post called The Myth Of White Male Geek Rationality: http://restructure.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/myth-of-white-male-geek-rationality/