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cousin_it comments on Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians - Less Wrong
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Comments (271)
I think you're being a little unfair to brazil84's comment. Adding a woman to a men-only group affects all (edit: many, not all) men because they feel an impulse to compete for her. A gay guy won't cause this reaction.
Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Some mixed gender groups do have downsides, which may be important to some people. In my experience, being in a group with many males and few females feels slightly less comfortable than either an all-male group or an evenly mixed group.
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.
Wouldn't what you are describing be happening to some extent on this forum as well?
It certainly can happen in virtual venues, but IME the experience is nowhere near as visceral. Until you mentioned the idea, it actually hadn't occurred to me it could happen without actually seeing or hearing the people involved.
This is depressing.
Question: is this the depressing bit?
(My tentative solution: figure myself out before others do. Then I feel much better about it.)
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.
If we're not unusual, we wouldn't be in Less Wrong. We supposedly pride ourselves on being more sane than the average population, no?
"We are unusual" is not a licence to say "We have a significant chance of being unusual in this particular manner that just happens to be convenient to my argument."
What evidence were you thinking of that this rule does not apply to LessWrong readers in particular?
I wasn't primarily arguing that it does not apply, more that it might not apply.
As for reasons that it might not apply -- for starters, awareness of the issue enough to discuss it. Same way it works with awareness of all other biases.
Cutting out half the potential membership out of a rationalist group seems to me a high enough price to pay (especially given how few we are, especially given the impresison it'd give to outsiders) that we ought consider very carefully how big the downsides of gender inclusiveness really are, in the given situation. Not just say "standard ape behaviour".
That's certainly an excellent start. But awareness of and being able to cope with a bias doesn't make it go away - it takes considerable practice until you're not just compensating for it. The mind is a very thin layer on top of a chimp - the biases run deep.
Not just unusual, mistaken about a general claim. Humans (of either sex) behave differently in a mixed group. The social rules and payoffs are entirely different. Not behaving differently would be a mistake, even for those people who can emulate a different personality expression consistently in the long term with no adverse effects. If others are being more competitive you need to push back just to hold your ground.
Mind you I consider rationalist meetups a terrible place to meet women. Apart from being a hassle to deal with all the other guys (and annoying for the swarmed girls) the gender imbalance inflates social value. Basic economics ensures that for a given amount of social capital you can get a more desirable mate at other locations. There are plenty of intelligent and rational women out there that don't go to rationalist meetups and you encounter them when you are a breath of fresh air and a kindred spirit rather than one of a dozen walking stereotypes.Then there is the unfortunate tendency for people (of either gender) with inflated social value in a specific context to be kind of a pain in the ass.
Writing off that particular social domain could be considered lazy or otherwise low status but I prefer to consider it one of the MIN parts of the min max equation. While it is still necessary to behave differently in the mixed group and be somewhat more aggressive it frees up a bunch of background processing and eliminates a swath of social-political constraints. Although you still have to pay more attention to the approval of the scarce women. They have far more social power and influence than they otherwise would so can damage you by more than just their own personal disinterest. Not that social politics matters much at all for occasional meetups where there is not much of a hierarchy anyway. More of a work consideration.
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.)
Agreed. Edited the comment. Sorry.
Yes, the vast majority of debates in the space of possible policy debates should appear 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.
Well, if we're being picky: for all natural numbers n, let P(n) be the proposal "all future policy decisions should be decided by a sack containing n potatoes".
I meant that as saying all the considerations for deciding any given issue go the same way, not all issues to be decided go the same way.
Right, but there really aren't any good arguments for adopting P(n) for any n - none worth considering, at least. And that's a countably infinite number of policy debates that we don't need to have!
But that's an example of "wins by a comfortable margin", not "all the arguments go the same way". For example, P(n) is cheap to implement for low n.
No cheaper than leaving out the sack and the potatoes. Do you really think that there are any benefits of P(n) for any n that would justify having a debate over it? I think all the arguments go the same way for sufficiently small values of "all" - that is, it's "one-sided" enough that it shouldn't even be brought up.
One reason to bring up argument X against policy P when policy P is clearly better is that there might be a slight modification of P that retains the advantages of P while addressing argument X.
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.
Exactly. Another way to put it would be - policy debates should not appear one-sided, so long as you do not consider all proposals about policy to constitute policy debates.
("PDSNAOS" does not mean "people don't have bad ideas")