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aausch comments on Of Gender and Rationality - Less Wrong
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Could some of this be resolved through technology?
Imagine a voting system which takes into account the gender of the person voting, as well as the gender of the person viewing the page. A woman reader's view might place higher value on women's votes, relative to men's, such that maybe a single downvote from another woman will count much farther towards making a comment invisible than several upvotes from a men.
(with maybe a twiddle somewhere that says something like "show me the men's view" "show me the women's view" "show me both views, highlighting differences" "show me both views, ignoring differences")
I'm a bit confused by the downvotes. Did I miss something? I figured that my suggestion, or some approximation in the same solution space, would both provide useful information about the cause of the gender imbalance, and tools to try and address it.
Collecting information on the voting patterns of different categories of people might be useful. Having different things shown to different people based on what category they're in, though? Ew, no.
Are you opposed to it because it's divided along gender lines? Would you be more receptive to it if it was divided along, say, age lines, or proficiency in rationality lines?
If proficiency at rationality could be shown to be a single skill or a set of skills that are consistently improved on in an even way (so that there aren't people who are very good at one kind of rationality and very bad at another), and if we had a reliable way of measuring that trait, that might be usefully used to weight votes, though it wouldn't make sense for low-rationality people to see scores based on the votes of other low-rationality people rather than scores based on the votes of high-rationality people. I'm not confident of either of the premises, though.
In the other cases, no, it's still a bad idea.
I'm trying to understand where the bad is in this idea.
Are you maybe opposed to details of the implementation? Would you think the idea is bad if the option to filter out results is opt-in and explicitly stated? For example, offer users a "only use votes from teenagers when displaying data on the site" option, which they can enable or disable at will.
If it's opt-in, explicitly stated, and not limited to groups that the user has declared themselves to be a member of, there's probably no harm in it - it'd just be another kind of information.
Your original suggestion was missing some of those features, most notably the opt-in option.
I upvoted for practical thinking. Some of the complaints made about this kind of topic would, in fact, be resolved by the solution you propose. That said the overall effect of implementing the change would be detrimental.
Although I would be in favor of increased statistics on comments / votes in order to allow the community as a whole to analyze what writing styles, etc. favor different subgroups, I think having a voting system that prioritizes different voters simply due to characteristics they display isn't a healthy way to handle this issue, as IMHO it would lead to more "us vs. them" dichotomous thinking instead of viewing us as a group of individuals focused on understanding and developing rationality in our lives and others.
After all, the question is not, at least in my mind, how can we get more people onto LessWrong and not offend them when they get here, but rather to culture a intellectual pocket that fosters open discussion and self-improvement. If some people are offended when their ideas are not accepted (as long as it isn't rudely accomplished) I don't think that's something that we should address through the voting system, as rationality is at least partially dependent on not getting besotted with a single idea or concept, regardless of its value and accuracy.