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taw comments on Of Gender and Rationality - Less Wrong
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Comments (342)
Personally I'm really annoyed by all the complaints about gender imbalance in so many smarter-than-average communities. There is high male to female ratio on almost every possible extreme of the society, both "good" extremes and "bad" extremes. This is natural. Until rationality hits the mainstream, it will stay this way. If it hits the mainstream, it will automatically balance itself. That's all.
Regardless of whether the current gender imbalance is natural, some aspects of rationalist community and of rationalist activism might work better if we could get a more even gender-balance, all else equal.
Off-thread; but I hate the phrase "all else equal" in the real world all else is never equal. I think we need to try to decide what people are trying to say with the phrase and come up with a clearer way of saying it.
"In a hypothetical situation with no confounding factors"?
Does this mean when one says 'we need more females' they mean 'we need to be more mainstream?'
My intuition says that improving the gender balance would help us become more mainstream; more diverse groups look less exclusive/threatening, so people feel more inclined to join them. Does anyone know of relevant research that would support/refute this hypothesis?
This is really intriguing. Do you think this is the case because of greater IQ variance in men or is there something else?
There is greater everything variance in men, not just IQ. To say it crudely women stayed with the tribe, played it safe, and reproduced this way - median success was close to mean; while men took part in one big tournament, where the winners had much higher reproduction rates than losers - and median success was much lower than mean, playing it safe was like half losing.
Taw - the women also got half of their genes from the men who won those games. How does this affect the way that men behave, but not women?
I am aware of research (eg the visual wall stuff) that male babies are more likely to take risks than female babies... but I'm not sure that your example gives the whole picture.
Can you expand on it a bit?
Genes can easily act differently based on gender, and do it all the time, there's nothing remotely surprisingly about it.
I, too, find myself sceptical about a lot of the claims about fundamental brain-ware-differences between men/women that are often made here.I rarely see sources & credible studies linked. May I ask for reading material?
Did a quick google for it and can't dig up anything easy to reach. I'm remembering stuff from first-year psych that was basically a decade ago now.
The only keywords I recall are that it was a "visual wall experiment" that was done with crawling infants (ie mainly pre-language). I'll describe the experiment in case anybody else recognises it and can point us at better references.
I can remember watching the video, where infants were placed on a glass tabletop - underneath which was an obvious drop off, visible through the glass. ie the infants weren't in actual danger of falling - but it looked (to them) as though they might. The drop-off went down about a metre and was painted with a grid-pattern so the infant had clear visual clues of what it was.
A reward (toy? food? can't remember) was placed at the other end of the table, and the infant could go get it by crawling across the glass, over the visual drop-off.
I do not recall how many infants were in the study - but it produced a clearly distinct average gender-difference in the likelihood of whether the infant would brave the scary-looking crawl to go get it.
The take-home conclusion was that males were more likely to risk more for the reward, whereas females were less likely to do so.
IIRC, the keyword for that experiment is "visual cliff", not "visual wall".
Aha! thank you :)
Ok, so now that we've got the correct key-phase ("visual cliff") I see that there's heaps of research using this apparatus, and most of the studies are on development of depth-perception, or infant reactions to maternal prompting etc...
Can't seem to find anything on the study that I remember. Sorry.
So down voting me for asking a question is a little weird.
Yeah, I thought the same thing.
Upvoted. I came to exactly the same conclusion. Men are extremophiles, and in (7), Eliezer explained why.
As to Anna's point below, we should ask how much good can be expected to accumulate from trying to go against nature here, versus how difficult it will be. I.e. spending effort X on attracting more women to LW must be balanced against spending that same effort on something else.