clarissethorn comments on Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter - Less Wrong

137 Post author: Cosmos 17 March 2011 08:12PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (166)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: rabidchicken 18 March 2011 02:55:29AM 7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: clarissethorn 20 March 2011 09:16:32PM 1 point [-]

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/