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MileyCyrus comments on How can people be actually converted? - Less Wrong
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Comments (94)
(Retracted.)
Downvoted for sexism.
Taboo "sexism", please.
Retracted. I'm curious if you think my statement was inaccurate "sexism," but really I shouldn't have made the post at all due to the mind-killing-ness of the topic.
So you're going to leave the original statement up to our imaginations? Let's hope future readers aren't too imaginative :P. I'm not sure if I remember the original comment correctly, but if I do it definitely had a relatively favorable possible interpretation.
Yes, I do think there are ways to draw women to Less Wrong that would be easier than "flirt-to-convert". The 2011 survey indicates that we are already making progress in this area. We also drawing interest from anti-sexism bloggers such as Hugh Ristik, Clarisse Thorn and Ozymandias. The latter has started a LW-influenced feminist blog that avoids the mind-killing patterns of thought that have derailed mainstream feminism.
Of course, women are still underrepresented on LessWrong. I'm not sure how much of that is due to sexism within LW, sexism outside of LW, or innate differences between the female and male populations. But to hastily presume that women will never flock to LessWrong unless we "flirt-to-convert" is sexist. We don't want to turn into r/atheism.
I would have readily agreed that there were easier and more effective ways to draw more women to Less Wrong than flirt-to-convert before reading this comment. It suggests to me that the relative power of flirt-to-convert to other strategies is far greater than I would have predicted, and implementing more effective ones may be harder than I thought.
Instead of just guessing how people have come to find out about LW, I figured why don't we ASK?
I have made a poll, and posted the link on the discussion section. Please answer. Even if you are a lurker. ESPECIALLY if you are a female.
Click here to go to the post
We've had at least one thread on this before, and the question was also featured on the latest survey, although there's only a single category for people referred in person by another person.
I went ahead and played around with the survey data, and got some interesting results:
Women are more likely to have been brought into LW by either a friend or by reading HPMoR
Percentage of women referred by a friend: 18%
Percentage of men referred by a friend: 10%
Percentage of women referred by HPMoR: 33%
Percentage of men referred by HPMoR: 17%
Conversely, men were more likely to have been brought in by OB or other blogs:
Percentage of women referred by OB: 18%
Percentage of men referred by OB: 29%
Percentage of women referred by other blogs: 13%
Percentage of men referred by other blogs: 24%
Referral by search engines were about the same between the sexes, with 8% of females, and 9% of males. The rest were write-ins, most commonly of specific websites that referred them.
ETA- This is for the data for the big 2011 survey. Not for the data from the currently running survey
Also, both were about the same age, with females averaging 26, and males averaging 27.
Females however, had a higher self-reported IQ and higher average karma
Average female self-reported IQ: 145.4
Average male self-reported IQ: 139.7
Average female karma: 1,599
Average male karma: 600
Thanks for the links! But the thread doesn't clarify between genders, and also doesn't come in an easy to manipulate format (such as a spreadsheet)
The survey does much better at this, but has almost half the respondents answer that they came from OB or HPMoR, where I am specifically asking "If you came from OB or HPMoR, then how did you find THOSE sites?"
Do you think the initial sex disparity on OB/LW was mostly due to those communities being sexist from the start, or a selection effect caused by the subject matter, or something else?
The 2011 survey has us at only 8% female. That may be progress, but for me, it still isn't good enough. I am going to come right out and say that I WANT a more balanced gender representation on LW and in rationalism in general.
When it comes to recruiting there are two completely separate issues: 1) Getting People in The Door, and 2) Keeping Them.
Right now the discussion seems focused on Getting Females in The Door, so that is what I will focus on here.
How do people join this community?
MileyCyrus mentions that OB/LW draws its readers from crowds that tend to be male-dominated. I think this is true, but it is not something that we can change within a generation:
LW draws its from the computer science, transhumanist, etc, communities.
These communities are mainly male.
Therefore LW will end up mainly male.
So looking at this, if we want to have LW more gender-balanced, we either have to have more females in the computer/transhumanist/etc communities, or we have to draw from a more gender-balanced crowd. None of these seem like feasible strategies, so we have to ask:
What is another way to Get People In The Door?
Another way people join communities is when they are "converted" by their friends. I am going to generalize here, and say that most male LWers tend to hang out with other males (because they tend toward the aforementioned computer/transhumanist/etc male-dominated communities). So when male LWers tell their friends about LW, they are probably telling other males.
If we want them to tell FEMALES about LW, there is a pretty high probability that the one female they spend the most time with is their SO, and so that will be the one female our generic male LWer is most likely to tell.
So....at this point in our discussion, we have discussed two ways that females will happen to discover LW. The first is if they are one of the few female computer/transhumanist/etc types, and accidentally stumble onto this site. This is unlikely to result in many females, due to the gender-imbalance of those communities we are drawing from.
The second option is if a male LWer tells his SO about it. This seems more likely to succeed. I would guess that male LWers have a tendency to date more rational-minded females in the first place (The same way that I have a tendency to date more rational-minded males).
Clearly the optimal method for this is to train as many LessWrong users in the PUA arts as possible, so that they successfully acquire as many female partners as possible in order to convert them to polyamory and rationality.
That might be optimal if the goal is "attract any and all women." However, a large amount of what PUA advice focuses on is exploiting the irrationalities of certain groups of women. The women most susceptible to PUA techniques are probably not the most likely to become rationalists.
Highly intelligent women are if anything more susceptible to verbal game (the left half of the bell curve basically goes for caveman game). Granted that dosen't filter for personality type or rationality.
In any case I have to take issue with the tone here:
Am I exploited by curvy figures and symmetric faces too?
These mostly aren't irrationalities. These are preferences. Sure you might argue, that a PUA is somehow tricking a person when he/she uses his skill to create behaviour A that is usually associated with B. Because clearly even though, people with B often get little attention in absence of A, it must be what they really want. But why are we so quick to assume this is so? Especially when it comes to sexuality. If nature found A good enough a proxy, even if B was really what gave fitness, why would it bother? If evolution did bother with that kind of optimization, contraception probably wouldn't have had the impact it has.
Naturally our society finds some such preferences objectionable or shallow. But we admit they are such in men, without any great qualms. We roll our eyes, but we don't judge (too much) or consider men bad people. Yet with women, such a proposal stirs controversy. Is this because for women personality seems to matter more in sexual attractiveness, and we perceive personality to be a morally defining characteristic? Again, why? Dark triad traits are as much a biological trait as breast size is.
BTW Why must we constantly implicitly define female preferred sexual behaviour as moral and male preferred sexual behaviour as immoral?
I don't think there is any evidence at all for this. People who are routinely bringing this throwaway line up, should either present it or shut up. The only thing remotely sensible that could go in this direction is that perhaps women on LW (high IQ correlates with androgynous traits) are more androgynous (male if you want to put it that way) personality wise. But even then we have no real data on any such traits in female LW users!
The rest of your comment seems to suggest the word you want is masculine and not androgynous perhaps? Androgynous means having both masculine and feminine characteristics.
Anyway, do you have any studies which show the correlation of high IQ with masculine (or androgynous, if you do actually mean that) traits? Cursory googling didn't turn up much, but yes, I wasn't trying too hard.
You probably could be influenced irrationally by them, yes. To further clarify, you would probably more readily accept the view of a curvy, symmetrical woman without further evidence than that of a flat, asymmetric one. If this is a primary influence, you're probably not the best target for rationality training.
It seems like we're disagreeing about something testable (specifically, whether susceptibility to PUA-style techniques correlates negatively with rationality). I am not particularly well-versed in all things PUA, but I have an inkling that some sort of rationality test could be incorporated in a routine, and we could find out that way.
Also LOL echoes of bad girls vs. good girls scrip. What's next slut shaming the girls who fall for "PUA tricks"? I don't think we ever slut shame guys who go for hot young golddigers as much as we do women who go for supposedly "bad guys". Why do we pick so much on people seeking sexual fulfilment?
For what it's worth, my girlfriend is a lurker and found out about the site from me. Ironically, I found out about HPMOR from a female (platonic) friend of mine. Granted, that female is a Reddit editor (where she found it), so it's not exactly outside our typical demographic.
Arguably, Overcoming Bias is (or was) an "economics blog" and men think more like economists.
From the Journal of Law and Economics:
I won't claim this explains the entire disparity, but starting out on Robin Hanson's blog has to have had a pretty strong effect, given the nature of RH's frequent writings on gender politics. Every LW veteran from OB is someone who was able to agree with, tolerate or ignore those posts; and that's going to be a very slanted demographic.
(I won't go into this issue any further to avoid massive mindkilling, except to note that I think RH applies the wrong kind of cynicism to human beings in general, and that I fall into the "ignore" category when it comes to those posts.)
My best guess is that, although OB/LW do a decent job of respecting women, they draw most of their readers from crowds that keep women out. There is definitely sexism within the libertarian-atheist-hacker segment of the Internet. Women are also less likely to major in economics and computer science, and gender roles probably play some role in that.
I suspect most LWers come from compsci, economics, math, hacker, atheist, or libertarian circles. Where do we find more females who would be interested in technical rationality if exposed to it, if not in those circles? Any suggestions?
From my anecdotal experience, there are a lot of women in biology (or at least an equal ratio). Neuroscientists may be especially interested in LW.
I don't know if it was intentional, but Eliezer's decision to write a rationality fanfic as a brilliant gambit. Fanfic.net's readers are overwhelming smart, young and female.
LW and OB have a lot to say about psychology and sociology, two fields where women are more interested then men. Perhaps we could reach out to those segments?
The meetups could also recruit women directly. Men don't have to bring their girlfriends, a platonic female friend works too. Or you can hold the meetups in places where women are more likely to be present (think bookshops, not bars).
If you want more women at the Singularity Summit, we could make a survey for people did not attend. Ask why they didn't come, and see if there's a difference between men and women.
But the most important thing is to make sure the rationalist/trans-humanist community is a safe place for women. Keep an eye out for what Alicorn wants to reduce. Address concerns of sexism sensitively, instead of pulling a Dawkins. In general, LW's treatment of women is better than other communities that pride themselves on being rational (e.g., atheist and Objectivist). Let's keep it that way.
The way I read your last paragraph is: "we should make lesswrong less rational, at least about gender issues, in order to better attract women".
Skepchick and Rebecca Watson; they seem to have been effective in growing the female skeptic community. And the skeptic community has the same problem LW has only they're much more resistant. LW is the more welcoming community. If it was my decision, I'd probably hire someone like Rebecca Watson for growing the female LW community, or at least try to pair up with skepchick and Watson in some way.
I believe Watson recruits by giving talks at universities, art communities, and events like Dragon*Con. She also comments on controversial women's issues which then frenzies the blogosphere and sends a lot of traffic her way.
Would you please refrain from throwing around those kinds of accusations without evidence.
I have noticed that reddit's r/atheism is rather fond of basic sexist jokes such as:
http://todayilearned.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/how-men-and-women-take-photos.jpg
What sort of evidence would you like?
I think that reddit as a whole (ignoring some pockets) is fond of sexist jokes.
That is almost certainly the case.
If your working definition of "sexism" is implying that women may in at least some ways be different from men in ways that reasonably imply inferiority, I disagree with your definition.
The antecedent of your conditional is not the case. I do not have a definition of 'sexism' and am fairly confident that such a thing does not exist. That is, I am skeptical that there is a list of necessary or sufficient conditions that will match the folk-term 'sexism.'
However, the particular joke I linked to is the sort of joke that is often labeled 'sexist' by the sorts of people who care about such matters. That is good enough for me. More importantly, the joke is based off of (what seem to me to be) unjustified premises.
One potential explanation I can think of: rationality is more likely to be interesting to men because it is largely perceived as a tool for winning arguments, and in the evolutionary environment, status was more useful to men than it was to women.
Edit: I am interested in other people's opinions on this claim, as it seems to me like it may be a just so story. But I still think I believe it.
I think it was an accurate claim, but perhaps made in too flippant of a manner for the sensitivity of the subject. It is pretty much the same thing I said (currently standing at +7 karma), but needed more finesse.
It didn't bother me, but I can see how it could bother others.
Were you actually referencing some specific sex difference?