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Jandila comments on New Post version 1 (please read this ONLY if your last name beings with a–k) - Less Wrong
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Comments (86)
Assuming for the moment no issue with the sources you cite (I could pull a couple books off my shelf as well and bombard you with quotes and citations I hadn't vetted or summarized for you just as well, but it would be awfully obnoxious of me and more than a bit dishonest), I find myself asking: do women pay more attention to status and resource acquisition because that's fundamental to how women view the world? Like, the way things work in our intensive-industrial, urbanized, capitalist highly-atomized society just happen to fundamentally express human nature?
(And is that parsimonious, when studies of the <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achievement_gap_in_the_United_States#Gender_gap">gender gap</a> strongly suggest that the different cross-sectional representation of men and women in society is unlikely to be solely or even primarily attributable to fundamental cognitive differences between sexes, and early, gender-differentiated social conditioning paired with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat"> stereotype threat</a> can strongly account for the real-world life situations that ultimately influence those differences in outcomes?)
You, and many many other LWers, have bought into a rather Flintstonized view of human nature as regards sex and gender differences. Anecdotally it fails to accord with my experiences, but more importantly it feels like you're massively overstating the confidence of your interpretation of these more-ambiguous studies, for which many studies with contrary conclusions can be found. Basically, this feels like [Motivated Stopping[(http://lesswrong.com/lw/km/motivated_stopping_and_motivated_continuation/)
Hang on a second! If it seems unfair to you that Luke makes generalizations about woman and draws conclusions from too little evidence, you should try to make sure you aren't doing the same thing. LessWrong is not one homogenous community, and I don't think there's sufficient evidence to conclude that a majority, or even a substantial minority, buys into a Flintstonized version of human nature. On this thread alone, some of the most highly upvoted comments have been those criticizing Luke's post for seeming to implicitly endorse a simplified view of romance and women.
By the way, Welcome to LessWrong!. Feel free to introduce yourself.
Link formatting here isn't html; the Help link on the right below comments explains the system.
My ISP has eaten this response twice now (apparently if you try to comment while offline / having connection issues, it locks the post from copying/editing, and there's no way to try to repost it, argh), so I will just say: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ap/of_gender_and_rationality/32l5 this is not an isolated incident, but I really have no clue how prevalent it is.
Yeah, I've read through most of LessWrong's "gender wars" last year, and I'll stand by the statement that most LW contributors don't hold the attitude Jandila critiques.
Specifically, the impression I get from Luke's post is that his study of rationality over the last couple years coincided with his study of his own attitudes/feelings/decisions in the realm of romance, and that he was eager to make the connections between the rationality skills and the specific example of his dating life. Unfortunately, he stepped on the anthill of LessWrong gender resentment (which goes both ways: those annoyed by the stereotyping and those annoyed by the other ones for getting annoyed so easily). Reading him charitably, he made observations about his own life without intending anyone to generalize. Reading slightly less charitably, he's internalized a couple of stereotypes to the extent he didn't even realize that they were stereotypes and that he would invoke them.
Either way, I think sexism is very rare on LW, and stereotyping that can lead to inadvertent sexism isn't uncommon, but also isn't typical.
This is why I use the Lazarus plugin for chrome or Firefox. It remembers everything you type into a form.
It's obnoxious and "more than a bit dishonest" for me to cite scientific studies without taking precious time out of my day to also summarize them and explain all their complexities and their interactions with other research? That isn't what you mean, right?