Suppose that some women had been told repeatedly when they were girls that they were bad at math, and saw boys doing better and getting more attention in math class-- they might do better in an all-women math class.

Similarly, if some men had been told as boys that they were less good at relationships than women, they might want to start out therapy in all-male therapy groups, or groups which aren't exactly therapy-- note that PUA is used for dealing with women, but the support structure seems to be typically all male.

In both cases, they would presumably want to build confidence and knowledge and then take both into being comfortable with the other sex.

Nah. Even if you disagree with the LessWrong memes on just about everything, you can easily get to 20 karma with a few moderately interesting Rationality Quotes or some such.

I've seen plenty of forums / newsgroups / collective blogs / real-life social circles that developed a powerful groupthink despite the lack of any karma-like mechanic and despite a very hands-off or nonexisting moderation.

There's far more buggy code in our brains than in our servers.

I don't think so - comments seem much more likely to end up with positive karma than with negative karma, except on some hot-button topics (politics, gender relations and seduction ...). So getting enough karma shouldn't be a problem unless you're systematically talking about "unwanted" topics, or write particularly bad comments ... in which case, them not being able to post top-level posts is a feature, not a bug.

I agree it's annoying and probably a problem, but I think there's still less groupthink than on most forums I've seen. I do agree that it can definitely be frustrating; I have a post I want to write up on the value of starting things sooner rather than later, and I was all set to start typing it up back when I had 19 karma (you need 20 to make a full post), but then I started posting in this thread, and my karma score drifted back down to a single digit. It's doubly frustrating because I can't tell if people legitimately think my posts there are without merit or if they're just using it as an agree/disagree button. If they do think my posts are terrible no one has said as such.

I had to impose myself the exact same warning. I was trying to use karma point to signal "rationalist status" instead of simply trying my best to comment intelligent things. There apparently is a little segment of my neurology that is constantly scanning what the median groupthink is and prompting me in that direction...

I pretty much agree with Adelene Dawner's sibling comment here. I will go further and say that I find brazil84's comment to be exclusionary speech because of its connotations. Now, some commenters here are taking the denotation of brazil84's comment seriously and disagreeing with it; and I might be among them, if the comment had been phrased like so:

I would prefer to join a sex-segregated rationality club.

I also downvoted for that reason. I want to see less of people posting without thinking about the results of their comments (e.g. the apparent surprise that Alicorn was offended - that should have been really obvious as a likely outcome). I want to see less of people trying to maximize their own comfort at the expense of others, the group as a whole, or specific subgroups of the group as a whole (I strongly suspect that having two rationality groups, divided on gender lines, will be non-optimal in several ways, and that that non-optimality will probably disproportionately affect the womens' group, since there tend to be fewer of us here). I want to see less rudeness. I want to see less non-meta focus on gender in the first place, though this particular desire is minor and would not have been sufficient to warrant a downvote on its own.

I agree that Cousin It's statement is literally false due to his use of the word all, but given that not all men are perfectly mature in your sense, I expect the essential concern to remain valid: adding a woman to a male-only group will tend to change the social dynamics, in part due to the impulse that Cousin It mentions.

(I mention this for the sake of completeness; speaking only for myself, I think that explicitly single-sex groups are a terrible idea and would not participate in one.)

Speaking as a heterosexual male, no it doesn't. People, even young human males, can be mature enough not to have an impulse to "compete" for every female they encounter.

Then you are unusual. This is a really standard ape behaviour effect.

It still triggers my "wtf" detector, but the single-sex rationalist group experiment may be worth running.

Speaking as a heterosexual male, no it doesn't. People, even young human males, can be mature enough not to have an impulse to "compete" for every female they encounter.

Describing it as an "impulse to compete" is inaccurate. It's more like an increased desire to be seen/noticed, that results in increased competition, aggression, and risk-taking behaviors as a side-effect, with the strongest effects occurring when there's only one or two females, and several males present. (Perhaps a lekking instinct is being triggered.)

Anyway, it's certainly possible to suppress the behaviors the impulse is suggesting, but merely being aware that one is being biased in this direction is not the same thing as stopping the bias.

In fact, it's likely to motivate one to try to show off just how not competing you are... i.e., to stand out by making a show of not standing out, by being... "mature" as you put it.

So, if you've been priding yourself on being more mature in such situations, it's probably because your brain selected a display of "maturity" as your strategy for competing. ;-)

IOW, it is a "live fire exercise" in debiasing behavior.

Except the policy debates that actually come up in real life are not drawn uniformly from the space of all policy debates. The one-sided issues are typically not worth mentioning, simply because they are one-sided.

"One-sided", as I understand it, doesn't mean that, on net, one side wins by a comfortable margin; it means all the arguments go the same way.

Or, put more simply, brazil84's model appears to be flawed.

(This doesn't necessarily imply that the effect he's claiming to have observed doesn't exist, though.)

I was mostly mocking you, rather than making an argument

And why exactly were you mocking me if you (mostly) weren't making an argument? I really would like to know.

My guess is that my post pushed some emotional button with you.

Most people demonstrate heterosexual behavior in modern heteronormative society. There is a huge difference between this and the generalization "most people are heterosexual".

If "is heterosexual" is determined by "sexually attracted to given gender" and sexual attraction to genders is mostly controlled by the sexual normativity of a society (is this the case? I believe so but I notice I have no evidence) then there is less of a difference between the two than you'd think.

I approve of the ideological stand you are taking. Unfortunately evolution isn't nearly as open minded. Of all the prevalent trends in human behavior to say "but it could just be cultural" sexual attraction is the most absurd. Evolution cares about babies, not political convenience.

Most people demonstrate heterosexual behavior in modern heteronormative society. There is a huge difference between this and the generalization "most people are heterosexual".

Well my comment was kinda focused on modern society. I'm not sure how things were in Ancient Greece. Would Socrates or Plato have been particularly distracted if a Greek girl in a short toga had wandered into one of their Socratic sessions?