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Of Gender and Rationality
Among all self-identified "rationalist" communities that I know of, and Less Wrong in particular, there is an obvious gender imbalance—a male/female ratio tilted strongly toward males.
Yet surely epistemic and instrumental rationality have no gender signature. There is no such thing as masculine probability theory or feminine decision theory.
There could be some entirely innocuous explanation for this imbalance. Perhaps, by sheer historical contingency, aspiring rationalists are recruited primarily from the atheist/libertarian/technophile cluster, which has a gender imbalance for its own reasons—having nothing to do with rationality or rationalists; and this is the entire explanation.
Uh huh. Sure.
And then there are the less innocuous explanations—those that point an accusing finger at the rationalist community, or at womankind.
If possible, let's try not to make things worse in the course of having this discussion. Remember that to name two parts of a community is to split that community—see the Robbers Cave experiment: Two labels → two groups. Let us try not to make some of our fellow rationalists feel singled-out as objects of scrutiny, here. But in the long run especially, it is not a good thing if half the potential audience is being actively filtered out; whatever the cause, the effect is noticeable, and we can't afford to ignore the question.
These are the major possibilities that I see:
(1) While the pure math of the right Way has no gender signatures on it, we can imagine that men and women are annoyed to different degrees by different mistakes. Suppose that Less Wrong is too disagreeable—that relative to the ideal, just-right, perfectly-rational amount of disagreement, we have a little more disagreement than that. You can imagine that to the men, this seems normal, forgivable, takeable in-stride—wrong, perhaps, but not really all that annoying. And you can imagine that conversely, the female-dominated mirror-image of Less Wrong would involve too much agreement relative to the ideal—lots of comments agreeing with each other—and that while this would seem normal, forgivable, takeable-in-stride to the female majority, it would drive the men up the wall, and some of them would leave, and the rest would be gritting their teeth. (This example plays to gender stereotypes, but that's because I'm speculating blindly; my brain only knows half the story and has to guess at the other half. Less obvious hypotheses are also welcome.) In a case like this, you begin by checking with trusted female rationalists to see if they think you're doing anything characteristically male, irrational, and annoying.
(2) The above points a finger at the rationalist community, and in particular its men, as making a mistake that drives away rational women. The complementary explanation would say: "No, we have exactly the rational amount of argument as it stands, or even too little. Male newcomers are fine with this, but female newcomers feel that there's too much conflict and disagreement and they leave." The true Way has no gender signature, but you can have a mistake that is characteristic of one sex but not the other, or a mistake that has been culturally inculcated in one gender but not the other. In this case we try to survey female newcomers to see what aspects seem like turn-offs (whether normatively rational or not), and then fix it (if not normatively rational) or try to soften the impact somehow (if normatively rational). (Ultimately, though, rationality is tough for everyone—there are parts that are hard for anyone to swallow, and you just have to make it as easy as you can.)
(3) It could be some indefinable difference of style—"indefinable" meaning that we can't pin it down tightly enough to duplicate—whereby male writers tend to attract male recruits and female writers attract female recruits. On this hypothesis, male writers end up with mostly male readers for much the same reason that Japanese writers end up with mostly Japanese readers. In this case I would suggest to potential female authors that they should write more, including new introductions and similar recruiting material. We could try for a mix of authorial genders in the material first encountered on-site. (By the same logic that if we wanted more Japanese rationalists we might encourage potential writers who happened to be Japanese.)
(4) We could be looking at a direct gender difference—where I parenthetically note that (by convention in such discussions) "gender" refers to a culture's concept of what it means to be a man or woman, while "sex" refers to actual distinctions of XX versus XY chromosomes. For example, consider this inspirational poster from a 1970s childrens' book. "Boys are pilots... girls are stewardesses... boys are doctors... girls are nurses." "Modern" cultures may still have a strong dose of "boys are rational, girls are un-self-controlled creatures of pure feeling who find logic and indeed all verbal argument to be vaguely unfeminine". I suppose the main remedy would be (a) to try and correct this the same way you would correct any other sort of childhood damage to sanity and (b) present strong female rationalist role models.
(5) The complementary hypothesis is a direct sex difference—i.e., the average female human actually is less interested in and compelled by deliberative reasoning compared to the average male human. If you were motivated to correct the sex balance regardless, you would consider e.g. where to find a prefiltered audience of people compellable by deliberative reasoning, a group that already happened to have good gender balance, and go recruiting there.
(6) We could be looking an indirect gender difference. Say, boys are raised to find a concept like "tsuyoku naritai" ("I want to become stronger") appealing, while girls are told to shut up and keep their heads down. If the masculine gender concept has a stronger endorsement of aspiring to self-improvement, it will, as a side effect, make a stronger endorsement of improving one's rationality. Again, the solutions would be female authors to tailor introductions to feminine audiences, and strong female role models. (If you're a woman and you're a talented writer and speaker, consider reading up on antitheism and trying to become a Fifth Horsewoman alongside Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens...?)
(7) We could be looking at an indirect sex difference. The obvious evolutionary psychology hypothesis behind the imbalanced gender ratio in the iconoclastic community—the atheist/libertarian/technophile cluster—is the idea that males are inherently more attracted to gambles that seem high-risk and high-reward; they are more driven to try out strange ideas that come with big promises, because the genetic payoff for an unusually successful male has a much higher upper bound than the genetic payoff for an unusually successful female. It seems to me that male teenagers especially have something like a higher cognitive temperature, an ability to wander into strange places both good and bad. To some extent, this can be viewed as a problem of authorial style as well as innate dispositions—there's no law that says you have to emphasize the strangeness. You could start right out with pictures of a happy gender-balanced rationalist unchurch somewhere, and banner the page "A Return To Sanity". But a difference as basic as "more male teenagers have a high cognitive temperature" could prove very hard to address completely.
(8) Then there's the hypothesis made infamous by Larry Summers: Male variance in IQ (not the mean) is higher, so the right tail is dominated by males as you get further out. I know that just mentioning this sort of thing can cause a webpage to burst into flames, and so I would like to once again point out that individual IQ differences, whether derived from genes or eating lead-based paint as a kid, are already as awful as it gets—nothing is made any worse by talking about groups, since groups are just made out of individuals. The universe is already dreadful along this dimension, so we shouldn't care more whether groups are involved—though of course, thanks to our political instincts, we do care. The remedies in this not-actually-any-more-awful case are (a) continue the quest to systematize rationality training so that it is less exclusively the preserve of high-g individuals, and (b) recruit among prefiltered audiences that have good gender balance.
(9) Perhaps women are less underrepresented on Less Wrong than may at first appear, and men are more likely to comment for some reason. Or perhaps women are less likely to choose visibly feminine usernames. The gender ratio at physical meetups, while still unbalanced, seems noticeably better than the visible gender ratio among active commenters on the Internet. Not very plausible as a complete explanation; but we should consider hypotheses that involve unbalanced participation/visibility rather than unbalanced attraction/retention.
Part of the sequence The Craft and the Community
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Comments (342)
Gender's far from the only division here, I would say. There's also a difference in approach to rationalism, that may also have some overlap with gender differences.
I personally consider myself interested in rationalism for the practical benefits: models that are useful, for real-life definitions of useful... not useful for "Knowing The Absolute Truth And Being Right". However, this doesn't appear to be a common attitude on LW.
In the computing field, there's a stereotype that says the difference between men and women is that men care about computing for its own sake, whereas women care about doing other things with computers, how computers can be used to interact with people, and so on. In other words, that women have a more instrumental view of computers than men.
Of course, some men take this to mean that women are therefore not as skilled as men with computers, but I have not found this to be true. The women I've known in computing were happy to develop as much skill as was required by their instrumental aims -- quite often more skill than the men I knew! They just didn't make a religion out of it.
Now, in the case of rationalism, I have to say I've seen what looks like the flip side of the stereotype: namely, a bunch of guys ranting about what's true or right and correcting what they see as "mistakes" in a patronizing manner... whether their targets are male or female. (And I have to admit, I was doing some of that here myself at first... and maybe still am, relative to non-tech discussion norms.)
Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say that LW is not (IMO) an especially friendly forum for instrumental rationalists at the present time. And if the gender stereotype from computing applies, then it is therefore also not a particularly friendly forum for women who haven't already gotten thick-skinned through similar experiences in a technology field. (i.e., if we assume that women are statistically more likely to orient on practical and social applications of a field than men in that same field are.)
Strongly seconded. To sum up the most important points:
Instrumental rationality has its own skillset, related to but far from identical to the current OB/LW corpus. It's a skillset we need if we want to deal well with the practical world.
Right now, folks with skill at instrumental rationality who come upon LW are likely to leave again. We aren't set up to give them what they're looking for, or to avoid misinterpreting them, or to ask for what they can teach us.
Adding a partial focus on practical, visible applications (i.e., including instrumental rationality in LW) might well improve the gender balance.
I think it's pretty frequent on the Internet, especially among those that have been around since the early-to-mid 1990s, to assume that everybody online is male by default until proven otherwise.
Being one of those, my first guess would be that the LW audience is > 90% male, but I'd love to see the results of an anonymous survey...
http://xkcd.com/322/
This touches on something that I've been thinking about, but am not sure how to put into words. My wife is the most rational woman that I know, and its one of the things that I love about her. She's been reading Overcoming Bias, but I've never been completely sure if its due to the material, or because she's a fan of Eliezer. Its probably a combination of the two. In either case, she's shown no interest in this particular group, and I'm not sure why.
I also have a friend who is the smartest person and the best thinker that I've ever met. He's a practicing rationalist but of the sort who uses it as a means to an end. In his case its the design of computer systems of all kinds. Now, I haven't even bothered to point out the Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong communities to him, as I can't imagine he'd have any interest in them, although I'm sure he'd provide useful insights if one could get him interested.
So, of the three most likely candidates to participate in this group that I know of, only one does. This may well be partly due to my own biases in which groups of people I select to tell about which blogs I read, but I think some of it has got to be due to this site being somehow appealing to a narrower segment of the population than those who it might be most valuable to.
I have no proposed solution. This is simply an observation.
Computer scientists are very highly represented here; a show of hands on IRC found more than half had some CS background. This site is particularly appealing to the CS mindset, so that's not so surprising, but it means that Less Wrong inherits the same massive gender imbalance that computer science has. Of course, this only pushes the question one step away, to the reasons why CS has a gender imbalance; but that's a question that's already been studied, with many hypotheses put forth.
As a rationalist who happens to be female, here is my take on this:
1) On an ideal amount of agreement vs disagreement : while it may be true that female dominated segments of the internet have much more agreement in their comments than male dominated ones, these same segments are significantly less rational, on average, and to a degree so are the topics they revolve around.
Rationalists tend not to bother with stating the obvious, and there isn't much "nice post" type commentary around here, so even if the amount of agreeing were higher on this community, it would not be obvious. This "invisible agreement" issue has been discussed before isn't really all that tied to gender as far as I can tell.
2) Can't comment on this because obviously, LW and OB do not contain significant turn offs for me.
3) If a recruit is attracted because the poster shares their sex organs, they aren't a very promising recruit.
How about an experiment where a male writer posts under a more feminine name?
As for recruiting Japanese rationalists, good luck doing that in English. Maybe some of your key posts ought to be translated instead. Hire a professional.
4) Agreed.
5) Sad, but probably correct. (Though I can only say this by observation and not by biological study.)
6) Not all that different from 4), and again all I can do is agree.
7) Your armchair evopsych again... Have you read Cochran and Harpending's The 10,000 Year Explosion? It might significantly improve the quality of these thoughts.
8) Like 5), sad but probably true.
9) Seems very plausible to me. Female readers have probably experienced the GIRL reaction quite often.
Conclusion : There will, in all likelyhood, always be a higher proportion of males to females in rationalist communities. However, putting more rationality into the world at large is a good in itself regardless. I would vastly prefer to see the recruitment efforts continue to deal with people as individuals. Focusing on recruiting women is not likely to work very well, and is quite likely to cause backlash, especially if done badly. The rationaly inclined women, if anything like me, will not react positively to attempts to feminize the community.
Just treat people as people.
I have my own issues with armchair evolutionary psychology, and to a much lesser degree, with Eliezer's armchair evolutionary psychology, but he said nothing very rationally questionable here IMHO, and certainly nothing that "The 10,000 Year Explosion" (well written but not very persuasive on most of the claims that I didn't already agree with and occasionally flat-out poorly reasoned) would call into question.
I was talking to my brother the other day about the blinders that come from hanging out only with math/physics/compsci nerds. And he suggested that yes, it is valuable to expose oneself to many types of people, but looking for “normal people” or “non-nerds” is the wrong way to do it; normal people are boring. The thing to do is to find people who share some other kind of passionate interest -- people’s whose enthusiasm for public speaking, or windsurfing, or whatever it is has driven the creation of their own interesting, idiosyncratic culture.
As a student, I participated in a (fairly small) number of programs for women in math. The programs were all lousy. I love it when I find other women I can really talk to -- it makes me feel more at home with myself, my gender, and my ability to learn to think. But these programs weren’t like that. These programs were blah. “Adding more women” is a boring aim, like “meeting normal people” or “meeting non-nerds”. Usually it’s achieved by taking whatever it is that might make the program distinctive (e.g., math talent, or an analytical/argumentative spirit) and watering down that distinctiveness until more women are involved.
I don’t know if there’s a viable alternative here, but it’s worth asking if we can find something distinctive and interesting that:
Pjeby, elsewhere in this thread, suggested that instrumental rationality (using rationality to achieve visible, concrete aims) might be a useful, distinctive skill-set that naturally includes more women among its passionate practitioners. Another candidate might be rationality components that emphasize inter- and intra-personal skills, such as emotional self-awareness. (I’m fairly lousy at that one myself, but understanding one’s own motives is clearly part of making good decisions in the face of human biases. And stereotypes suggest we might get better gender-balance here.) Anyone have any other suggestions?
I had similar experiences in my first year of university (though it was Women in Science instead of Math, a slightly larger population). It was boring.
Women in Rationality screams "pointless PC navel-gazing" because of association with these experiences.
I do want to emphasize - it was in a previous version of the post, in fact, but I took it out - that I am maintaining my phrasing of my goal as create rationalists not create female rationalists. But if half of the audience is being filtered for some silly avoidable reason, then I want to fix that.
There is a strong selfish incentive for single male rationalists to pursue this goal, though. I know I would love to have my next girlfriend be a rationalist (if only to avoid my most recent failure mode), and given the numbers, that's probably not something every male rationalist can hope for right now.
One point is that it's rather silly of people to filter out for silly reasons. You don't stop reading a good book because it uses a funny font. This may be made into a general warning, a failure mode to be avoided, and linked to from the introductory article. Although I understand that it's not a mode of thinking that is likely to work where the mistake surfaces.
You very well might, if you found the font so distracting that you couldn't enjoy the book. I think that you can only assert that this is a failure mode by misunderstanding who is being "silly" and who has control of avoiding the "avoidable".
I am reminded of Paul Graham's explanation for the low number of female startup partners from Ideas for Startups:
I would suspect that all the more fundamental reasons (2, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8) are factors, but that they are then magnified by 1 and 3. As far as 9 is concerned, I am female myself and have never commented on Less Wrong before, to provide a single, anecdotal data point.
Any idea why you haven't?
Not entirely sure, though I believe I did post a couple of comments to Overcoming Bias a while back. I used to comment on reddit and comment semi-regularly on Hacker News, which refutes the first explanation that I thought of, that it was a matter of my time, since clearly I do sometimes take time to comment on the internet.
The comments here are high quality, which is somewhat intimidating, and also makes things take longer, since I want to think more carefully about what I say, but that would probably apply to Hacker News as well.
A possible explanation consistent with the quotation I mentioned is that even though I read all the posts here and on Overcoming Bias, I don't think I've thought about the issues deeply enough to have much original to contribute. And that may have something to do with the fact that most of my friends aren't all that interested in the topics. I imagine if I were talking about the posts more often in real life I would feel like I had more to contribute.
I'm in a similar situation - I comment (sometimes) on reddit and HNews, and have occasionally posted a few sentences to OB, but I am much less likely to comment here. The high quality of the posts and comments leads me to agonize a bit overmuch about every part of a comment, and sometimes I will write, edit, and rewrite a comment before deciding to just not comment at all. I, too, often feel I would not be contributing anything original.
(I should also note in this comment that I am male.)
Huh, that minority-squared effect is interesting, but I'm not sure it need apply here. It'd be individuals coming here, right? It doesn't take a group to, well, come to LW.
Or am I misunderstanding your point in some way?
While it's ultimately true that individuals come to LW, not groups, I'm far more likely to follow and especially to comment on blogs that my friends also read. For me, one primary way I get really interested in subjects and motivated to understand them well is by talking about them to my friends in real life. And most of my friends are girls.
hrm... actually, I'm reminded of something. Several years back, someone designed these simulations that basically ran an algorithm like "assume people don't mind being around people that are different, so long as at least some small fraction of their nearest neighbors are also like themselves.", and basically simulated people moving around to fulfil those criteria.
The simulation would consistently produce highly segregated results. Aha! here's a site with applets that run such simulations: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~segregation/segregation-simulator.html
Just an short addendum: Thomas Schelling is the one who originally thought up this model.
I think the point is that there are multiple factors which all reduce the chances. In startup founding, you need multiple similar people; in LW browsing, you need multiple personal characteristics. Maybe 90% of women can handle the disagreeableness; maybe an independent 90% can handle the male-style-writing; maybe another 90% is unswayed by cultural gender differences; maybe another 90% are unaffected by a female genetic predisposition against reasoning (I'm just running down Eliezer's list), and so on.
A LW commentor who is female would be in the subset of women who is in all these groups. (Just with these few factors, we're down to something like only 60% of women are 'eligible' for LW membership to begin with!)
Sure, that all makes sense, but an LW commentor who is male would also have to fall into multiple subsets.
The question isn't "why are so few members of the total human population on LW?" but "what's with the different proportion of males and females?"
Eliezer,
You once responded to someone's comment by writing:
"It would seem we don't appreciate your genius. Perhaps you should complain about this some more."
I'm a professor at a women's college and when I read this comment I thought to myself that a significant percentage of women who read this would not want to participate in this site.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/7i/rationality_is_systematized_winning/4zp
Agreed. This reminds me of an anecdote a high school teacher once shared with me about when he switched from coaching the boys' track team to the girls' track team. He didn't adjust his coaching strategy at all and in short order had a fair number of crying high school girls on his hands.
I am male with Agreeableness probably at least as high as the average female, and that comment annoyed me also. I wouldn't say that such dismissive sarcasm is never deserved, but I don't see how that post came anywhere near deserving it. Eliezer seems to have a short fuse with some individuals, but without knowing the history between them or being interested in digging it up, such comments seem mean-spirited. They may also look like an evasion.
It is an answer short on patience, but it was a comment short on insight. In response to a post relayed in short as: 'The common definition of rationality is stupid. Here is a new proposal that is a basic tenet of most of my writing. (Implicitly, keep this in mind when you see me talk about rationality.)', the poster simply added 'Well, I think the original definition of rationality is right, and I've said this before.'
The inciting comment seems just like the responses (on Fark, HNews, etc.) to Pullum's article about Strunk & White- people who like what they learned flatly deny any counterargument.
(And the said comment was voted down to -4, the threshold at which comments (by default) become invisible.)
I'm bothered that this is voted up so high. Perhaps EY's words were intemperate, but this feels more like taking the opportunity to have a jab at him than sitting down to address the broader problem he raises.
The point is valid that, probably for reasons of social training, more women than men are likely to be turned away by such snide criticism.
However, it's not clear that that sort of tone is even remotely common in comments here, and in fact the negative score Eliezer's comment received is strongly indicative that the community as a whole disapproved.
I hardly think -4 (now -3, apparently) is indicative of wholesale disapproval. Of course, if most people keep the default viewing threshold and don't click through often then it' would be impossible to tell. But since this very thread has a comment at -8, and I've seen several below -10, I don't think that's the case.
I've found this comment too elliptical to be helpful. I've left to guess why "a significant percentage of women who read this would not want to participate in this site."
Here is my guess. A comment whines of unappreciated genius, the reply is a sarcastic put down. That is not just a person-male interaction. That is a male-male interaction. I expect stereotypical female readers to tune it out as boys-will-be-boys bullshit. It is noise, so it makes the signal to noise ratio worse, but it is also tuned out pretty automatically, so it is not a large enough deterioration to drive any-one away.
So my guess doesn't work. I fail. Shrug.
That comment was so far outside what I expect to see on this site in general or from Eliezer in particular that I didn't initially realize that he was being hostile. On any comment board I've seen more than a glimpse of outside OB/LW I doubt I make that mistake.
There's almost always room for improvement in this area but this is one place where I think we do an admirable job. If this were a primary cause, I would expect most forum-based sites to have the same problem, usually far worse than we do. Is there a general gender imbalance in most forums?
This of course just pushes the problem back a step, but isn't the breakdown in Myers-Briggs between Thinking and Feeling types something like 60:40 for men and 30:70 for women? Mightn't this have something to do with it?
I'm a female-type person. I can't speak to anyone else, but I did make a post a while ago, and it was met largely with indifference and I wound up taking a (small) karma hit. This did a variety of things, some useful and some not, but one thing it hasn't done is encourage me to take the time to write another top-level post.
If I'm wandering around a large in-person gathering and I drift over to an interesting conversation and say something and get shot down - even if it's because I said something stupid - I'm more likely to drift away or at least shut up rather than continue to hang out with and seek approval from Those People Who Were Mean To Me™. "Drifting away" is much easier on the Internet, and if more women are giving up after making one or two poorly-received comments, that could easily explain the gender bias.
Possible solutions if I have the right idea (no idea how palatable they are to others):
1) Be more parsimonious with downvotes and generous with upvotes in general.
2) Attempt to draw out individual women Less Wrong ers on particular topics (solicited input puts one out on less of a social limb).
3) Identify who makes each vote on a comment or post, so people can identify Those People Who Were Mean To Me™ and not have to consider the entire Less Wrong community as a whole to be united against them.
Please don't do 2 and 3.
Why in particular don't you like those ideas?
For 2) It reeks too much of the navel-gazing "women in X" boredom occuring in education that AnnaSalamon pointed out in her comment. I certainly don't want my ideas and imput valued because of my chromosomes; I want them to be valued if and when they have merit.
For 3), anyone who thinks the entire community is against them based on one negative reply has insufficiently thick skin to deal with the internet in general. The burden of effort not to think this way is on you, not on the community. If it helps, assume the mean person was just that, a Mean Person. Also, be Awesome so that anyone who is Mean to you will look stupid in comparison.
Overall, I just think that encouraging niceness is just going to be more trouble than its worth, and a turnoff to participating in the community for the already-interested nerdy set that doesn't much care for such things.
strongly agree with 2, only partly agree with 3.
There is such a thing as efficient niceness. This isn't kindergarden, and you don't get a big gold star for 'participating'. Still, it shouldn't be a crime to post a few words acknowledging a good point, encouraging someone, or wishing someone well. Even among us guys, who are conditioned to pretend we don't need them, such practices can help keep people motivated, and keep people coming back.
tl;dr: rationality/honesty should not be compromised for niceness' sake. Niceness is still possible, and indeed desirable within these constraints.
There's no reason male Less Wrong ers couldn't be drawn out individually in the same way; I only phrased it that way to keep it germane to the topic. If we had individual profiles on which we could sum up our relevant interests/activities, for instance, I could put in a little non-intrusive box "I am writing a paper on why the Reflection Principle is stupid for school" and somebody interested in the Reflection Principle could say "hey, Alicorn, do you feel like crossposting the précis of your paper here on Less Wrong? I'd like to read it." I'd be more comfortable sharing something like that at someone's request than I would just posting it on my own initiative, but there would be nothing stopping someone else of any gender from being solicited to make another post on another subject.
I overreacted a bit. Sorry.
(Edited)
I'm not sure I like your solutions but I think your sort of experience might not be atypical. My female friends and family have often reacted to criticism of their ideas with what I (a man) found to be an overly defensive posture. My reply was always to tell them not to take things so personally. My guess is that boys are tend to receive more encouragement and confidences boosting from parents and teachers and so are more confident putting their ideas out there and don't take poor reception as hard- but I don't really know.
I've definitely made comments (here and elsewhere) that were taken poorly and lead me to back off commenting for a while. I know where your coming from but I think identifying votes can easily lead retaliatory voting which is all kinds of irrational and is a disincentive for honest voting. I'd also be wary of devaluing karma by being more generous with it.
I'm curious what you have in mind for (2). I guess if topics were specifically about gender-related biases there would be room for it. I think some of few women here might be annoyed by this.
My suggestions are two fold.
It would be nice if there was some information on individual comments regarding either the poster's join date, post count, or karma. I'd prefer one of the first two to avoid people favoring comments by people with higher karma counts. I suggest this specifically so that we can easily identify newcomers and not treat them too harshly. There are pretty high barriers of entry here (the OB back catalog is almost required reading and if you're not familiar with Ev psych, cog sci or programming you're gonna get lost at times). We could be a lot more welcoming if we knew who we were welcoming.
Down votes should be followed by comments that explain them whenever possible. The whole point of rating comments and posts, in addition to sorting them, is to provide feedback. But frankly people don't get more rational just because one of their comments has a negative number attached. People need to know what the community didn't like about their comment and what facts they should consider that might lead them to change their mind. And in critical replies education should take priority over scoring rationalist points for mocking cleverness.
I think these ideas might help with the gender thing, but frankly they'd just make for a more sustainable community.
While acknowledging that we're talking about a small sample size here, this matches my experiences -- especially in the area of religion.
Agreed.
This can be time-consuming -- it's a good ideal, but we should not have a norm of down-votes requiring an explanation.
Cannot agree enough.
I wonder if you are subconsciously more aggressive in the area of religion.
Another explanation would be that religious women are inherently more defensive.
Explaining downvotes for newcomers (as shown by join date) would economize on effort where the marginal payoff is high.
I'm trying to think of a simple icon which could appear by user-name in comments to indicate either "I have been an active member for <X weeks" or "I have posted <X comments". My first thought was a cartoon of a newborn, but that seems a bit patronizing.
ETA: Ideally the icon would be the same height as the username itself, which doesn't give us many pixels to play with.
I've seen a few forums where a user's name is accompanied by a 'rank', often humorous, indicating standing in the community. I'm not sure whether this is generally based on number of posts or length of membership or some combination of the two but it might be apt here. I'm sure someone else can do a much better job of coming up with ranks than me but something along the lines of:
neophyte, aspiring rationalist, follower of the way, master rationalist, etc.
Or in keeping with the martial arts theme, a series of belt colors? I know this varies from art to art and dojo to dojo, though.
Why not use what we've already got and use their karma score? Maybe show it when you mouse over the name or something?
Maybe some average karma-per-comment/post number, rather than an absolute karma number, would skew slightly less in favor of people who have high karma scores half for sheer volume?
Well, we're trying to signal whether you should treat a particular commenter gently. If a particular commenter has posted 1000 comments, and none have been voted up, there's no need for kid gloves.
Why not just when you click Vote Down, if they're considered new, a little message appears that says "<username> is new to the site. Could you gently explain why you are disrecommending their comment to others?"
I like this
I think our tribe is small enough, and blatant mistakes made by commenters are rare enough, for senior members to be able to recognize the new members simply by memory, checking the commenting history on the user pages when in doubt.
But if the tribe expands?
Strongly seconded. This would be particularly helpful in discounting systematic downvoters.
Much more than finding out who voted what way, I'd like to see the total upvotes and downvotes on a comment. It would be very useful to know if I got 5 upvotes and 5 downvotes or if the comment just sat there getting nothing. I'd much rather know how many people found it interesting or useful than who didn't like it. The original comment also wasn't thought through - if the "community as a whole to be united against them" occurred they'd get trashed, not a few down votes.
Off-thread: I recently up voted a comment with -7 votes, because I thought it was worth reading even though probably wrong.
Oh, I'd love that too, I just want to know who the person is who logs on once or twice a week and systematically downvotes everything I posted since the last time they were on.
Something like a "5 points (10+/5-)" display, linked to a page that displayed the votes would be nice. I'd contribute it if I could afford the time to really dive into the codebase and learn how it works.
I think another advantage a +x/-y display would be that sympathy votes or outcome skewing would be harder. If I see a post that is rated -7 and disagree with its status, should I vote the comment up? What if the post was -1? Would that change my vote? I think +5/-12 is harder to sympathize with than -7.
I have a strong opinion that votes should be independent of each other.
I wonder if there is a gender difference in tone of the way people introduce themselves to a group. Per my experience, the girl way seems to be personal sharing (signal: "I'm approachable"), the guy way seems to be chiming in on topic (signal: "I'm capable"). Since your article was weighted more to personal sharing than to providing something topically useful, I think you might have gotten a confused reaction from the regulars ("how is this supposed to help me be a rationalist?").
I wonder if allowing explicitly flagged "hello / about me posts" would help? Normal contextual politeness would kick in and the response to such a post would be much less aggressive.
Regular open threads for introductory posts?
Good idea. With the threads for introductory posts linked to from the (to be built) welcome page, and with newcomers encouraged to introduce themselves and ask questions.
I just had a go at an introductory/welcome page. Any suggestions?
welcome
how's this?
I like it :). Two small suggestions:
You might consider changing the phrase "please feel free to leave a comment" -- it might be more welcoming to just ask people to "please leave a comment", giving the impression that we want to hear from them. (Though I'm not confident this would be better.)
It would be nice to invite questions, not only on LW jargon (which you do), but on the etiquette of posting and voting, why those mean people may have downvoted one of your comments (and why you shouldn't take that to mean we won't appreciate you), etc. I'm not sure how to gracefully incorporate this into your text.
Eliezer should add a link from LW's "About" page. (Except, the link should move somehow with the month's welcome thread, if we have new ones every month. What's your plan here?)
1 Done =)
Is "We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, and how you found us." too strong do you think?
2 Good idea -- let's see what I can come up with....
Yeah, I'm not sure how well this works with the one-a-month structure. Ideally I'd like this thread to be stickied to the front page, but I know that requires some admin-help.
hmm, here's a spiel on voting and karma, I'm a little worried that it sounds too forbidding -- what do you think?
My non-confident impression is that it's good. One slightly friendlier suggestion would be to replace "Don't be discouraged by this." with "Don't be discouraged by this; it happened to many of us."
Thanks for building us the welcome thread.
I like that
No problem =)
I really like the newcomer welcome page. I also really like what ciphergoth and others are doing with their self-introductions; explaining when and how they came to LW, and a little about their perspective and what their goals are in LW . While this is a big step in the right direction, I think it could go further to be a lot better.
When a newcomer comes to LW, a warm welcome consists of two parts. First, they introduce themselves to you; this is the welcome page. Second, an introduction from you should be available to them, at the click of a button. When you first arrive at LW, it feels like a huge dark opera hall of masked voices. It would be great if whenever you read an interesting comment, you can click on that person's name and read their self-introduction. The problem with the welcome page as it is currently built is that it would difficult for a newcomer to retrieve introductions over the weeks or months that they are getting to know us.
I don't know how Reddit works, but it just occurred to me that one simple solution would be to make comments written on the welcome page special so that they're always listed first in the list of comments, regardless of when it was written.
The monthly Open Thread may be repurposed to also act as a more fleshed-out introductory & welcome thread.
If you click on "Preferences" under your name in the upper-right corner, you can check the box "Make my votes public".
Thanks, I didn't realize about preferences, you solved several problems for me.
Where can we see the votes of people who have ticked this box?
After experimenting with it, I don't think you can. Looks like it's unimplemented.
Does that preference affect which posts you have up/down voted?
You're brave to even touch this topic.
I don't know if that's a factor, but it's a very good idea.
One thing puzzles me about evolutionary arguments for genders being interested in different subjects: It would be an evolutionary win to be interested in things that the other gender is interested in. Many women value a man who knows fashion; many men long for a woman who likes sports and video games. I would have expected an equilibrium with nearly-equal interest in subjects across genders.
(Yes, video games haven't been with us for an evolutionary timespan; but if there's an evo-psych explanation for men liking video games, then the things that make them like video games have been with us for an evolutionary timespan.)
You're right, this is puzzling. Has it only been true for an evolutionarily short amount of time? Is seeking members of the opposite sex who share these kinds of interests a recent cultural invention? Is the claimed preference not as strong in reality as people think?
I would say both.
For much of our evolutionary history the idea of a consumption partner rather than a production partner would have been an unaffordable luxury. Desirable properties in a mate were primarily those that would support survival and reproduction.
I think the claimed preference is also weaker in reality than people think. This is a common theme in the seduction community. What people are actually attracted to is not necessarily what they say they are looking for - sexual attraction is not based on a conscious rational weighting of positive and negative attributes.
Thank you for the link -- I'd never seen that distinction made before and I suspect now I'm going to see it everywhere.
Yeah, I think its only been a win for a short time. Maybe, for most of history hierarchy within the genders has mattered a lot more for sexual selection. And your position in the hierarchy is usually determined by your success at gender specific roles. So if you want to be the the alpha male you need to be really good at hunting and so the best hunters win. Similarly, power in the female hierarchy was dictated by things like child rearing and social knowledge. So those that focused on that won.
It seems like that would simply set up a sort of elastic restoring force opposed to whatever force is causing (for example) men to like video games, and you wind up at a sort of equilibrium. Presumably that's what we see around us.
Do women, on average, have more connected social lives than men do? It's very easy for a few people with no life to effectively dominate a community like this simply by spending more time than any "normal" person would want to. If women are more likely to have "a life" and less likely to become fixated on a specific hobby, that could explain why we see fewer women commenters. (One reason I'm here is that I have very few people in Real Life that I talk to regularly.)
A possibly relevant data point is that males are roughly four times more likely to have autism or Asperger's syndrome than females.
May or may not be connected, but I do have Asperger's.
This suggestion accounts for women being underrepresented, but not for their distinct absence (unless if several popular posters are, in fact, female).
I don't believe that any significant portion of this community has these conditions, so it's not a relevant data point.
This is, to me, a non-obvious claim. (For example...)
That depends on whether you consider autism or Asperger's to be discrete states, or to be extremes of traits which may be found to a lesser extent in individuals labeled neurotypical. If the latter, then gender distribution of autism/Asperger's could be relevant to discussion of the milder versions of those traits
I was considering the consequences to the gender ratio if it is true that LW draws from people who are nerdy and social. It seems that "nerdy" qualities tend to be associated with men (perhaps due to correlation with autism traits), and social skills tend to be associated with women. While plenty of men have great social skills, even nerdy men, what fraction of nerdy women have good social skills? From my experience, women in math and science have a good chance of not feeling socially comfortable. While men have a higher chance of autism traits, I wonder if within the sub-population of math and science, women have a higher incidence.
However you interpret my message, these factors can't significantly account for male/female participation ratio, as I'm pretty sure they don't concern at all, in any form at least 70% of the community.
I think MBlume's point was that there is a fairly mainstream theory of autism spectrum disorders (which includes Asperger's) that claims they can be explained as extreme cases of the 'male brain'. If there is a correlation between the male brain traits that in extreme form are diagnosed as autism/Asperger's and the patterns of thinking that would lead to an interest in this community and if it is true that autism/Asperger's fall on a continuum rather than being discretely identifiable conditions then the gender bias observed here could be explained by the same factors that explain the gender bias in these conditions.
The implicit hypothesis here is that the average community member on this site would score higher on tests designed to diagnose autism spectrum disorders than the general population, without necessarily scoring high enough to be diagnosed with the condition. That seems at least plausible to me.
Far from a complete explanation, but it often is hard to simultaneously view oneself as female and as intellectually able, even given evidence of intellectual ability. Role models can help, but artificially manufacturing role models (e.g., by preferentially making women’s writing visible) has its own costs. Others’ remarked surprise at how one is at once female and intellectual/rational/etc. can make this harder.
One relevant subskill here is... I don’t know how to say it. Something like “the ability to keep in mind the whole complex layout of the evidence, without letting your anticipations get overwhelmed by the nearest cliche”. So that even though gender is terribly salient (more salient than, say, GRE scores), gender doesn’t affect one’s views of one’s abilities to a greater extent than do similarly informative non-gender data points.
A second relevant subskill is the ability to put in a full effort even in the presence of threatening stereotypes and probable failure. Eliezer has written about many aspects of this one, but not the “in the presence of threatening stereotypes” part.
If anyone feels up to writing a tutorial on one of these skills, I'd like to read it. And it might be useful to both members of underrepresented groups and everyone else.
I don't really know what the reason for the gender imbalance is, though I suspect reasons 4 to 8 all play a part, but I think it's highly likely that if you could find explanations for the gender imbalance in undergraduates studying math, physics and computer science, among sci-fi fans, programmers and libertarians and within the classic works of philosophy then you'd have sufficient explanation.
The fact that this question has been debated in all those areas for many years and we don't have very good answers suggests that it is not easy to answer. I think the suggestion of a greater focus on instrumental rationality and concretely useful applications for the real world is a potentially good approach to reducing the imbalance and likely to deliver better results than a likely extended effort to find an explanation for the imbalance.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think our efforts would be better directed to attempting to address the imbalance than in trying to explain it (though obviously theories about why it exists might be useful in guiding attempts to address it).
I'll expand on the controversial stance as to why this is. It's obviously extremely complicated and I can't really do it justice in this specific comment. However I will try to give a cursory explanation. I personally tend to think that rational thinking may in part be genetically encoded in the brain and is a trait that may be somewhat distinct from aspects of general intelligence. I think its very likely that their has been differential selection pressures on male and female brain's over the course of evolution. There has been a lot of evolutionary selection pressure over the last 10,000 years in humans. You can think every time an important invention arose in a specific location of the world, then their were resulting shifts in human evolution as a result of that new technology. Genes that allowed their host vehicle to best exploit that new technologies propagated.
So in a society where the written language was more common (for instance), there was selection to build brains that could seek out and absorb more written material. People who had more analytical/rational/logical brains that could seek out the most salient written material were probably selected for. Those who spent a lot of time reading nonsense or were not good/logical readers were not as reproductively fit. They would probably have less information in painting a correct world picture and would be less likely to avoid dangers to their life. To me, it seems obvious that evolutionary selection pressures between men and women were different in this regard. This is especially true in societies where women were relegated to a much different societal roles than men. Gene expression patterns have been shown to be different in female vs. male brains, for instance.
Their is probably a huge variation of human brain abilities depending on where a person is located in the world and their unique evolutionary history on the branch of life. In places where a written language was uncommon until recently, then you might conceivably expect a different neural architecture to be in place. Evolution does not necessarily lead to improved abilities in all traits over time, though. For instance chimps have a superior numerical working memory than humans. So their is probably a wide swath of individual variation with people having specific aspects of intelligence that are quite different. I definitely believe in the construct of general intelligence, but I do think there are subsets to intelligence (working memory being one example, creativity being another that is a harder trait to define, logical/rational thinking).
Gregory Cochran has posited the unique history niche of ashkenazi jews as leading to their higher verbal IQ over non-jewish europeans. This is another instance of a historical branch on the evolutionary tree of life resulting in a shifted bell curve when comparing two population groups. I would imagine in certain historical evolutionary niches, men were probably in positions where they need to seek out and digest written material in a rational/logical way and women less likely to be in those positions.
However until you have a complete understanding of history, gene expression profile changes over the course of history, how they relate to brain/behavior changes, sex differences in phenotypical gene expressions and meme propagation, your always going to have an incomplete picture as to why any specific "macroscpic phenotypical trait" is different when comparing macroscopic "groups". All group categorizations are ultimately going to be fuzzy and phenotypical traits are as well. The evolutionary tree of life is complex and a group classification is ultimately going to have to have some arbitrary cut off. I think a lot of "macroscopic phenotypical traits" can be found on a bell curve. So the bell curve for any phenotypical trait (like a majority of Less Wrong readers being male) has a long universal evolutionary history behind it that defies easy synopsis.
There is no way. I mean no way, that there was any significant selection pressure in favor of reading more and a reading more salient works. For the vast majority of human history there were no written works to seek out. Even once writing was developed it was used almost exclusively for book keeping. Then people wrote down myths. I like the legend of Gilgamesh as much as the next guy but reading it never conferred an evolutionary advantage on anyone. Were our ancestors seeking ancient hunting manuals?
Well here's a paper about the changes in surnames in Britain between 1600 to 1851. This is recent evolutionary selection.
http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/Farewell%20to%20Alms/Clark%20-Surnames.pdf
Wealthier people quickly out bred poorer people. I think its highly probable that genes were selected for to be able to better seek out and absorb written material. Being able to learn information has a huge fitness benefit to propagating your genes. There was plenty of scientific reading material available at this time (1600-1851) that could have conferred a fitness benefit.
Any factual information you learn about the world (through reading) can improve your odds of avoiding death. Death was very common in the recent past.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2007evolutionofintelligence.pdf
Its an interesting study but I don't think it proves your point. Wealthy people out bred poor people in a span of 10 generations in England. But I have no particular reason to think that the reason the rich outlived the poor was their ability to read. Access to better food, more sanitary living, less stress all indicate higher survival rates. Its not surprising the the children of the wealthy were more likely to survive into adulthood.
Now maybe we think the rich were better readers to begin with and the gene spread that way. But we have no particular reason to believe this either- or rather we might have reason to believe the rich were better readers but we have no reason to believe this advantage was genetic.
Being able to learn and absorb written material allows a person to create more wealth. This is presumably why people go to school at all. Being able to accumulate more wealth as a result of learning allows a person to have increased reproductive fitness. So when you say "Access to better food, more sanitary living, less stress all indicate higher survival rates", these things could be the result of learning information. Like if you learned how to build something from a book that could improve your surrounding living conditions. Of course this could be highly variable depending on an individual person's evolutionary past.
Genes have been correlated with reading ability. http://www.physorg.com/news142091390.html I would imagine their could have been selection pressure on these genes in the recent past.
See here for more info. http://jmg.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/44/5/289
Well the second article claims that ev psych cannot explain reading ability and that this is-- wait for it!-- evidence of intelligent design. Pretty sure thats neither of our advocacies.
Being able to learn and absorb written material allows a person in our economy to create more wealth. Its not clear to me at all that that has always been the case- at least in degrees high enough to exert enough selection pressure over only a handful of generations to account for a reading ability gender gap. Your average man in 17th century England doesn't learn to read because his best opportunity to increase his earning is to put in an extra hour on the farm. Or apprentice as a black smith. Or become a sailor. Those with the means might go to school and become lawyers or doctors- but they were already rich. Its not like they had academic scholarship or pell grants.
Its also recalling that in this time period the literacy rate was considerably lower than it is today. And thats not because vast majorities in Europe didn't have the genes to read during the 18th-- its because they weren't taught to read. That means any selection that was happening was only happening within the small subset of the population that was given the opportunity to learn.
http://books.google.com/books?id=DyMjW21HwHwC&pg=PA89&lpg=PA89&dq=reading+literacy+england+1600&source=bl&ots=SL1ct7yRfW&sig=0Hz6txLaE3_51PwzxFQTxSdEka4&hl=en&ei=4NHmSdjPF8LgtgeVvvCVBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1 30 percent of english men could read in 1600. I would say that is a considerable amount. Only 10 percent of women could read at that time. By 1700 50% of men could read.
So I would bet that the 30 percent that could read in 1600 out bred those who couldn't. It's possible that the increase in reading literacy was partly genetic in origin.
Rational/logical/analytical abilities could help with learning.
There are obviously a lot of complex interactions at work in our evolutionary past that I think we are just begining to understand.
All those older literacy statistics, as it says in the very next sentence in your source, are based on the ability to sign one's name. Thats not exactly evidence of superior analytic reading and writing skills.
There are perfectly ordinary, non-genetic reasons for the increase in literacy. For one, doesn't it seem strange to you that literacy rates increased all across Europe at roughly the same time? Shouldn't some nations have remained illiterate until they interbred with the literate ones? Instead, literacy correlates perfectly with widespread economic and cultural changes. How exactly did people start reading in Europe at all? For a long time it was only the monks who could manage it and they weren't passing their genes on.
Also, from a quick google it looks like the dyslexia gene set, which is the one you previously identified as evidence for the genetic basis of reading, is autosomal, which means its spread should be equal among males and females.
About the literary statistics, it specifically says "These figures may be pessimistic because reading was taught before writing at school". So the figures may actually underestimate the literacy rate. I don't have the time to found other sources.
I'm not saying the increase in literacy rates was all genetic in origin. The fact that literacy increased on a societal scale probably had to do with new inventions that made it easier to publish and distribute written material (I'm not sure of the whole history to be honest so that is somewhat of a guess). However these societal changes may have also led to genetic changes as well. Read the "10,000 year explosion" for more examples of how societal changes lead to gene frequency changes that led to more societal changes. Some animals have rudimentary reading capabilities. Being able to read may just be an offshoot of some other brain process (reading facial expression for example). So evolution is often good at co-opting brain processes for alternative uses. With a wider distribution of reading material it is possible that evolution selected gene frequencies that altered reading ability (speed of reading, logical analysis, etc.)
I don't think the it matters if the dyslexia gene is the same in females versus males. The phenotypical effect of the gene on the host (male vs. female) would likely be different. The fact that men and women have different hormones could alter the expression of any single gene (for example). The phenotypical effect of any gene in an organism is going to depend on a multitude of factors (like environment, other genes).
That's all I can say for now.
There are a number of average sex differences in personality traits that would contribute to more males identifying as "rationalists" than females.
Here are the sex differences found in the Big Five personality inventory, from a cross-cultural survey by Costa et al.:
Women score higher on Agreeableness
Men score higher on the Assertiveness facet of Extraversion
Men score higher on Openness to Ideas, especially in the US. Women score higher on Openness to Feelings and Openness to Aesthetics. In the US, men also score higher on Openness to Fantasy.
Some particular items, such as identification with the word "logic," were skewed strongly towards males
An interest in rationality may depend on Openness to Ideas. Otherwise, someone just isn't going to care about the kind of things we talk about here.
Furthermore, the identification of males, but not females, with words like "logic" suggests that perhaps part of the gender gap of interest in rationality is about words like "logic," and "rationality." Women are often labeled as "irrational" or "illogical" when they are perceived as overemotional, and this labeling may put them off words like "rationality," regardless of whether they appreciate the underlying thought processes of rationality.
Another major sex difference relates to Simon-Baron Cohen's theory of autism as an example of the "extreme male brain." Baron-Cohen argues that males tend to be higher in "systemizing" traits, while women tend to be higher in "empathizing" traits:
Here is an interesting summary from Baron-Cohen:
This sounds like a rationalistic cognitive style.
If autistic-spectrum traits, or "systemizing," are related to interest in rationality, and in identifying as a rationalist, then it would be unsurprising that females are less likely to do those things.
I've lurked OB/LW for quite some time now (about a year) and haven't posted much for many of the same reasons as divia (intimidated by the quality, felt like I wasn't familiar enough, etc) and have tried to get a few people that are interested in this kind of thing to follow along with me to little success. This post made me wonder why people I was so sure would care about rationality didn't care to join the community here and further why I sit on the sidelines.
My first thoughts were that this group feels "cliquey". There are a lot of in-phrases and technical jargon floating around, which to an outsider can be very intimidating.
On top of that every incorrect comment is completely and utterly destroyed by multiple people. I know and you know we're dismantling ideas in an attempt to kick out biases and fallacies every time they appear, but to an outsider it looks/feels like an attack on all fronts. I think this stems from the separation of ideas from the self, which is really the first step on the road to rationality. Anyone who hasn't made that step feels like they are being personally attacked, and it isn't an easy step to make. Dislodging your ideas from your self-image is already required by the sciences, which may be part of the reason science-types are so well represented, but there are many fields where it isn't necessary (or even beneficial). Consider business where defending your ideas like they were your life will get you ahead most of the time.
I know of no "fix" for any of these, but perhaps a section for beginners would be beneficial. Perhaps something similar to would work. The OB backlogs are useful, but there is something to be said for being able to discuss new topics and it just isn't available for the older posts. How to implement such a thing without creating in/out groups I don't know. Maybe just flagging submissions as beginner->advanced would be helpful (along with actually posting things for beginners). In any case, some more "back to basics" posts couldn't hurt.
Even if you've made the step in general, it doesn't help when people use status-signaling language in their comments. e.g. "Have you thought of X?" is a lot better than, say, "Clearly you haven't paid any attention to X", if your goal is to actually improve discussion, rather than to get a charge from demolishing your opponent. (I suspect that the concept of a martial art of rationality doesn't help with this, from a priming perspective.)
Setting a frame of etiquette that indicates we are all here to help people become rationalists rather than to show off our own skills at rationalism might help with this.
As a student, I would love to see this.
As an argumentative SOB I need to consider this.
As an opinionated member of LW: damnit, this is front page stuff, right here! This is bang on the money, and a hell of a lot less misogynistic than my own reactions to the post!
We are engaged in a collaborative effort that produces a webpage documenting the interplay of ideas. For example
Addressing the commentor is a mistake. It invites the replier to read the commentors mind to the detriminate of responding to the actual words of the comment.
I'm sensitised to this from attempting to teach Go to beginners. It is Black's move that makes bad shape/is too close to thickness/small/slow. If I have to correct a mistake I don't say "your move was bad", I say "black's move is bad". Black and White are characters in a collaborative fiction and me and my pupil are having an Author to Author conversation about how to maintain the dramatic tension and not just have White beat up Black.
Off-topic, but: surely you want to teach your Go student to win, not to have a close game? As per Eliezer's favorite swordfighting quote?
This is a feature, not a bug. If you spend a day discussing, say, Newcomb's problem, and it doesn't change the way you think and speak about similar situations in the future -- if you don't find easier, faster ways of describing the situation, which were previously unavailable to you -- then you've probably wasted a day.
The effect this has on newcomers is a bug though. Hopefully the Wiki, once it's active and fully implemented, will help to address this.
I desperately wish that there were a way to emotionally differentiate between attacking a meme someone is carrying and attacking a person.
The wiki is entirely ready to go; all it needs is more contributions.
We have a styled and integrated wiki under development, but it's on the same platform as the current wiki - we'll pull in all content from the current wiki when we finish. Full support for ciphergoth's sentiments from the devs - go forth and enwiki the good stuff.
Will it cause you any trouble that not all users have the same username on the wiki as they do here?
We may look into it later, but we're not currently looking to merge user accounts. LW is Python, MediaWiki is PHP; the database formats are different; we don't generally love working in PHP; etc.
Both will continue to be open source projects (of course), so contributions will be welcome :).
I think MediaWiki has some provision for supporting SSO, but yeah, I don't fancy hacking on it myself and I imagine you have better things to do too!
It also needs a long-term hosting, so that you can safely link to it, and not worry that the target URL will go away or get abandoned.
Another solution would be to support wikilinking in the markup language; that way if the wiki moves the links can move with it.
This is too hard to enforce outside the wiki, where anyone can fix failures to conform.
The greater convenience of the wiki markup might be enough, though?
I don't agree with this. Maybe it is because I am new, but I spend half of my time here translating everything into a more common language. I find it easier to keep track of different arguments and reasonings once I translate it into the linguistic matrix I have been using to learn about everything else in my life.
Brand new concepts need new words and terms, but Newcomb's problem isn't one of them. The term "one-box" is jargon. "Omega" is jargon. It speeds up discussion on Less Wrong, not the real world. If I translate those terms into short sentences I can begin to have the conversation with anyone and the reusable terms will bump into topics I remember from other conversations I have had with people outside of Less Wrong and I see no harm in typing four words instead of one.
To beat this to death: If I always talk about Omega as "Omega," I think about it as Omega. If I think of Omega has someone who has a perfect guessing rate at what I am going to do, this reminds me of omniscience and that reminds me of how a lot of Christians view their God. Is there any relation between Newcomb's problem and God? Who knows, but it seems an interesting train of thought. If I end up talking to a Christian about Newcomb's problem and they state that Omega seems like God I have a better recourse already in place than simply saying, "No, Omega is Omega; not God."
That being said, I have to register the terms "Omega" and "one-box" because I am engaging in conversations here at LW. But even if I spent all day talking about Newcomb's problem using these new terms, I do not consider the point of the conversation to have the same conversation faster or easier. Neither do I consider the point to be having similar future conversations faster or easier. Faster and easier are luxuries; they are icing on the cake. I want to learn new concepts and I consider this to be very different than learning new jargon.
Backing up a little, "cliquey" holds negative connotations. In-phrases and technical jargon can be useful but I have also seen other communities latch onto their jargon and begin to skim over what would be relevant distinctions. It also forces newcomers to learn from the top down because they see a lot of words they do not understand. They register the jargon in their linguistic matrix and assign it an estimated meaning due to context. Eventually they can learn that some terms apply in certain circumstances, but they will never understand the concept until someone teaches it to them or they head off to the wiki and look it up.
This site is not newcomer friendly and that in and of itself is not a problem. Newcomers are justified in feeling intimidated because it is intimidating but there is a difference between the subject matter being intimidating and the community being intimidating. If the community is the source of a lot of intimidation because it feels cliquey, that is a bad thing. Labeling it a feature does not make it less of a bad thing.
(Side-note) I have also seen communities "name-drop" terms in attempts at status. That seems less of a concern here.
Agreed. I know that when I'm talking with philosophers I tend to use their special prepositions ("On X's view...", "Y consists in...") to sound more in-groupy and thus give extra weight to my arguments.
On OB/LW this primarily takes the form (started by Eliezer, I think) of embedding a link to a previous article in every other sentence, which certainly comes off as intimidating, at least to me.
That's interesting -- I quite enjoy that convention, and feel like it makes the site more penetrable to newcomers. To me, the purpose of the links seems to be "if this sentence seems to follow from the last, keep reading. If I seem to have made an unsupported leap, you may profit by following the link."
It's nice for reading, yes (although it does mean that reading one Eliezer post can quickly turn into eight tabs' worth of previous posts), but when it comes to writing a post (or even a comment), I feel like if I don't have a bunch of references I'm leaving myself open to accusations of "Oh, that point was addressed here, here, and here. Try doing some reading."
Which might not be a bad thing, necessarily: it's certainly not too productive to be constantly going over the same ground as MrHen says below, but it certainly does affect what I choose to write.
I spent a lot of happy afternoons this way last year (didn't get much done on my quantum problem sets though)
Ah, this I totally get. I think this might be a good function for the welcome thread -- you could just leave a comment saying "hi, I'm thinking about writing something about X -- is there anything I ought to be reading first?"
I imagine that some of this task will be handled by the wiki or the tags assigned to each post.
That being said, I have little problem with someone talking about a topic that was broached seventy times previously as long as it either adds a new perspective or is a decent summary or launching point for people not there during the past discussions.
That being said, having "little problem with" may mean I will not read it because I consider the topic saturated.
Yeah, my philosophy classes had a lot of people who would skip over discussions by using a well-known name. This is similar to what Andrew's You don't need Kant post was talking about.
That being said, the other extreme is not terribly useful, either. I have trouble remembering philosopher's names because the arguments and logic are more interesting and I never bothered associating it with the person who was speaking. As it turns out, I spend a lot of time going over ground that has already been covered because I did not learn the shortcut term.
This could be seen as a counter-point to my comment above.
When Eliezer does it, I interpret it as a desire not to repeat himself. When other people do it, sometimes my first impression is that the person is implying they are better-read and more knowledgeable, i.e., that they're trying to signal superior status by implying "I have been here longer and know more," as well as implying a stronger in-group affiliation, by the amount of work they've done to dig up appropriate scriptures and link to them.
The tone of the non-linked portion of the comment of course makes a big difference, of course. "Have you read XYZ? It seems to me like what you're saying contradicts point Q; how would you address that?" would be a lot different than some of the comments I've seen that look like trying to win an argument by the volume of their citations.
I think I see it as something between you two. I sometimes see it as "I agree with these articles so these articles agree with me." This probably qualifies as a weird form of appealing to authority.
To make it fit better with your view, "If I put my article in a list of their articles I am like them."
The charitable side of me thinks of it as tracing someone's train of thought backwards. "Oh, so that's why they were thinking about this subject."
I get link fatigue when read LW/OB. But I think it's unavoidable. It has to be done for at least two reasons:
There's a lot of conceptual "bittage". As the writer, you not only have to close the inferential gap between new concepts, but close it for every new word. That's a lot to explain (and to see, if a new reader) at once.
The medium of blogging wasn't designed to visualize information of this depth.
And that means heavy link back.
I didn't actually mean that it makes it easier to talk about Newcomb's problem, more that if, say, we're talking about the Israeli government dealing with a hostage situation, and someone says the Israelis should "one-box," they mean to communicate that "not only the effects on the current situation, but the impact their decision-making process will have on others trying to predict their actions, should be salient to their decision"
Funny, I would not have associated one-boxing to mean what you described. I assumed that it only really matters when dealing with a perfect predictor. Apparently I missed some form of "action implies predicability" side of the discussion? In any case, looks like I get to go do some research/thinking. Thanks.
Ah, okay. Thanks for the clarification. I think my points more or less stand as is but could probably have been less targeted at the Newcomb's problem example.
(Topic branch) Something I personally do dodge issues in terms is to rotate synonyms throughout a discussion to troll for bad assumptions in terms. If anyone gets a "Wait, what?" look on their face it means we may not be on the same page.
I think ameliorating that issue is one of the main reasons for the Less Wrong wiki. Is it helpful in even its current state?
We could add a "Jargon request" category, so if you want to know what a term means and Google can't tell you, create a page on the wiki and just put {{pagewanted}} in there, and then I or someone else might notice and fix it.
EDIT: I've done this.
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.
This is really intriguing. Do you think this is the case because of greater IQ variance in men or is there something else?
So down voting me for asking a question is a little weird.
Yeah, I thought the same thing.
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.
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"?
A few thoughts:
(1) I agree with Nanani, and think it would be awful to actively try to "recruit" females, or even really do anything to entice them to come/stay. Though I appreciate the spirit of the post nonetheless because I think it's a very interesting and important issue, and I think it's okay to acknowledge it and question it. If anything, efforts to even out the male/female imbalance would have to be made on a much greater scale to start to see change.
(2) Do people really think that it's an issue of females frequenting Less Wrong and then LEAVING? I doubt it. I suspect that a much lower proportion of females even happen upon the blog in the first place. This would eliminate a number of the explanations.
(3) This is an issue that deeply intrigues me. I have some fairly simple theories. Unfortunately, I am not well-versed enough in evol. psych., gender studies, history, sociology, etc. to feel like I have enough background to really get at the heart of the matter. So most of my ideas are purely anecdotal.
I believe that females on a whole are less interested in intellectual pursuits. Particularly intellectual pursuits that are HARD and take a higher amount of mental horsepower to grasp. Period. The question is: Why?
From my own experience, I've found myself to be less INNATELY CURIOUS than many of my male counterparts. Once I get onto a topic, I can puzzle over it for hours at a high level, but if the topic is not in front of me, my brain can be content to space out and think trivial things. Once I realized this was the case, I started to actively work to be more curious and to think more. When I'm sitting around spacing out, I will actually tell myself that I should start thinking about a problem. My brain does not do this automatically.
Now, I don't know if this is purely a messed up issue that I have to deal with, or if it extends across the female gender. From observing other females, it doesn't seem unreasonable that others would face the same lack of intellectual curiosity.
My big question is where does this come from? It's either biological or social. I used to think it was biological (this helped me reconcile the fact that I had to work overtime and be more aware so that I could become more interested in things in the first place). Now I think it's entirely possible that the explanation is social and that females, through media/peer groups/etc. simply are not encouraged to be as curious about intellectual issues and by the time they are older, they've simply stopped thinking. (This is all pertaining to females as a group, not particular individuals).
(4) I don't think the atmosphere (meanness) of this site is the problem. Enough females are thick-skinned. I think it's simply the subject matter. Though I agree that it's possible that the ratio of females is slightly higher than what is apparent because of their relative silence. I personally have a much higher fear of rejection to comments, etc. This extends to in-person interactions, and upon the slightest rejection, I will quickly shut up.
I distinctly remember my first meeting with one of my female friends, she was staring at a poster on the wall which explained why e^(i pi)=-1, copying down each step, and clearly trying to understand it. This was not in connection to any class, she was just interested. And I remember being immediately, strongly attracted to her simply for that reason, because of that demonstrated, genuine curiosity. Which indicates that on some level, I perceived that trait as being remarkable, though I'm not sure that that's specifically because she was a girl.
(For those looking for the end of the story, my best friend was already actively pursuing her (which is why we were being introduced), and I chose to respect the friendship.)
I'm the most intellectually curious person I know (in non-Less Wrong circles, anyway), but of course I could be an exception.
Considering that an alicorn is a unicorn's horn, I think mine is a fairly girly username. Unless there is a unicorn-loving male element I should be aware of.
Apparently sufficiently girly that I didn't even know that's what it was...
We should also look for specific, teachable “gateway” skills that might allow more women to participate in LW.
I remember reading some story about how women did persistently worse in a particular organic chemistry course than men did, until they added a training session explicitly teaching mental rotation (there’s a gender gap in visual/spatial abilities), after which point test scores equalized because mentally rotating the molecules was no longer a barrier, and other skills could come into play. I can’t find the webpage, though (though there’s a bit of corroboration here), so take the story with a grain of salt.
Given the comments elsewhere in the thread about gender differences in expected agreeableness, and about women being discouraged by downvotes, it sounds like one plausible barrier concerns how to have heart in the face of criticism. Maybe someone should write a post or two on process/growth vs. trait models of ability, and how to have the former. Or on how to keep in mind that people are responding to your words, not your inner soul, and that there’s some system of rules that determines their responses that you can learn to hack. Or something along these lines. There are skills here, and they can be broken into small, learnable chunks. And probably many LW-ers could use a boost here; I know I’d like one.
Such posts could be linked to a welcome page for newcomers, with mention that some find LW difficult at first and later like it and that these posts might help the transition period, but without mention of gender.
Brilliant posts, Anna. Would you consider doing this?
I've only just come into contact with this place, and normally I avoid commenting the day I start somewhere, but this post was compelling considering how I found LW.
A very good friend of ours sent a link to LW to my husband, but not to me. Usually he will send links to both of us he believes we'll both be interested in, and links only to me that he feels I'll be interested in but not my husband, and vice versa.
So clearly he felt I wouldn't be interested in this place, despite knowing that I am fond of rational discourse. Fortunately, my husband knew I would, and so I am here. I just found it an interesting data point in the context of this particular conversation.
Edit: Though this makes me wonder, why didn't I come across LW myself? Why didn't I bother searching for such things?
Interesting point: How does anybody find LW? Suppose you're out in cyberspace, wanting to discuss rationality. What search term could you enter to find this place? Googling "rationality" doesn't turn up LW.
Should I put a link to Less Wrong in the Wikipedia page on rationality? Is there a better keyword than 'rationality' for LW?
Please don't. As a long-time Wikipedian, I can tell you any sane editor will nuke that addition on sight becuase it looks like (and IMO, is) self-promotion.
More logical places to add it, where it might make sense, would be the pages on Eliezer Yudkowsky and SIAI.
(I'd add Robin Hanson, but I get the impression he's chosen to remain only associated with OB. What's up with that anyway? Sometimes it feels like LW/OB is a schism - the EY-ites have migrated to LW, and the Hansonites squat on the remnants of OB.)
I've migrated to LW because threaded discussions are SO VERY MUCH BETTER! Locating old posts is easier; commenting is quicker; karma is fun (and a rationality test - not the getting it, but the not caring too much about it).
EDIT: The ability to edit my comments is also a huge win. I always write something wrong the first time, even when taking this rule into account.
Also, if I catch up on my reading and make 3 comments, on OB I have to wait an hour before I can make a 4th comment.
The latter is of debatable relevance; and it's already linked from the former (and has been for weeks, it seems).
Well, as an additional data point on how folks find less wrong, I found it through Overcoming Bias. I found that site via a link from some extropian or transhumanist blog, although I'm not sure which.
And I found the current set of my extropian and/or transhumanist blogs by actively looking for articles on cutting-edge science, which turn out to often be referenced by transhumanist blogs.
I, too, found Less Wrong from Overcoming Bias; I'm pretty sure I found Overcoming Bias from some comment on author David Brin's blog, but I don't remember when.
How about linking to it on TV Tropes? Clearly many participants of LW are Tropers already. Tropers are young, nerdy, and numerous, after all. Also less likely to be put off by dense linkage throughout articles.
Such as This one for some Weird But True topics, or This One for the Weirdest topic of all.
After all There Is No Such Thing As Notability
I've noticed strong female representation (where I least expected to find it) in The Skeptic Zone,an Australian skeptics group. The feeling I get of that community (even just as a podcast lurker) is that it's much more lighthearted than LW/OB. Whether that makes any difference to sex ratios, I don't know.
For most of the time I've listened to the podcast, there's been regular strong contributions from females. My gut feel would have been that having good female role models would encourage more female participation, however I just did a quick eyeballing of the Skeptic Zone's FaceBook fans and it looks typically about 5:1 biased to males.
nice
Skepchick is also notable, I think.
I have some conjectures.
1) People tend to hold beliefs for social reasons. For example, belief in theism allows membership of the theist community, the actual existence of a deity is largely irrelevant.
2) For most people, in order to maintain close social relationships it is necessary to maintain harmonious beliefs with nearby members of your social network. Changing your beliefs may harm your social ties.
3) The larger your social network, the more you have to lose by changing your beliefs.
4) Less Wrong encourages questioning and changing of beliefs.
5) On average, women have larger social networks than men.
6) Less Wrong encourages the adoption of strange and boring beliefs, largely based in maths and science.
7) Advocating strange and boring beliefs does not signal high status, rather it signals a misunderstanding of widely accepted social norms, and therefore poor social skills.
8) Much of a woman's percieved value as a human being is tied to her ability to navigate the social world, men may be forgiven for making the occasional faux pas, women are not. Women are therefore strongly averse to signalling poor social skills.
Some predictions:
1) Willingness to join Less Wrong is inversely proportional to the size of your social network.
2) The exceptions to this rule (Less Wrong members who have large social networks) will be members of fringe groups, where challenges to group beliefs are normal and do not lead to reductions in social status.
3) Less Wrong will never be popular among people with large, mainstream social networks, as long as it advocates self-examination and questioning of recieved beliefs, and promotes discussion of strange and boring beliefs. It will never be popular among women, and the women who do post here are unusual in some way.
ETA: for the sake of complete accuracy, let "fringe belief" be defined as one that is held by <0.1% of the population of the host nation.
Rationalists should win, and human beings need social networks for emotional well-being. Is it possible to
In my experience, my atheism, for example, has not been a huge handicap (with one glaring exception), but it's certainly hurt me from time to time. People feel that if nothing else, their beliefs deserve "respect," and I have learned no graceful way of indicating that I have given long consideration to the matter, and give their beliefs no greater probability than I do Santa Claus or the Harry Potter novels, without giving insult.
This would, I think, be an art worth learning.
(The closest, I think, I've ever come, was by saying that "where I come from," the way you give respect to a belief is by actively working to see if it's true or not -- which often simply means attacking it; that "in my culture," an attack on a belief is a sign of deep respect.)
I find myself prefacing a lot of statements with "Where I come from" or "On this side of the water" when I'm talking to a religious person whose friendship I desire to keep e.g. my parents. This lets you provide exactly the same argument, which probably ends up being processed in exactly the same way, while letting the other person know that you don't expect them to assent immediately.
I think the answer to your question may be no. I've thought on my original post some more and realised that I made a mistake in number (8), one cannot signal poor social skills since signalling is a social skill (it serves no other purpose), a person who cannot signal optimally is a person with poor social skills.
So if a tendency towards telling the truth disrupts a person's ability to signal optimally, then rationality and popularity must forever remain opposed, since in order to be rational you must give up your ability to signal popular, false beliefs. Even if we say that "rationalism" is only believing the truth - you can lie if you want to - your ability to signal is still disrupted, since the most effective way to signal is to sincerely believe what you're saying
I suggested something similar above; participating in an online discussion forum, such as this one, is a time sink that competes with maintaining an offline social network.
If
is true, then there will be more male commenters, because women have better things to do than waste time commenting here.
Exposing yourself to karma judgements is similar to asking someone out on a date, or otherwise risking rejection. Men have to do this all the time; I think a typical man has to approach or flirt with over 100 women just to get 1 date. Women don't have to do it, and so don't get used to doing it.
Karma-based explanations don't explain why we saw the same gender imbalance on OB.
Exposing yourself to any judgments, period, is risky. The OB crowd is perhaps the best-commenting community I've come across: they read previous comments and engage the arguments made there. How many other bloggers are like Robin Hanson and consistently read and reply to comments? Anyway, as a result, any comment is bound to be read and often responded to by others. There may not have been a point value attached, but judgments were made.
That part is perfectly predictable. Men are less deterred than women by lack of face-to-face contact in relationships. Film at eleven.
There were, I think, 7 OB men and no OB women at my OB meetup. (There were several women, but they had nothing to do with OB.)
it looks like an easy way to get some karma would be to create a female username and post in this thread. If we say that women's comments in a thread about how to attract more women are more valuable we're making some unstated assumptions.
Can you name an example of a wrong assumption that we might be making if we're saying this?
The profusion of upvotes did make me feel a bit odd, as though I'd wandered into a discussion with a tone of politics and random applause instead of collaborative thinking as I'm used to.
But discussion here has nevertheless been a lot better than discussion on such mind-killing topics usually is (a testament both to LW and to EY's careful post). And I agree with mattnewport's point about erring on the side of being welcoming, especially for those who said they are nervous and new.
You may have a valid point but since a common theme seems to be that newer posters do not feel welcomed or that their input is appreciated I believe people are making an effort to be more generous with up-votes in this thread. I've generally been quite parsimonious with up-votes and comments here and in the welcome thread have made me feel that I should bias myself more in favour of up-votes over down-votes.
Since this is a thread about how and why females are underrepresented on LW their input is particularly relevant and so higher karma scores do not necessarily imply any further bias. In conjunction with a hypothesized general realization that more up-voting, particularly of new commenters, would be of benefit to the community I think it's possible to explain the high comment karma without postulating further bias.
I'd be interested to know what you think the unstated assumptions are though.
What makes you say that? At the present moment, only one female comment in this thread is rated higher (20) than my highest-rated comment in this thread (17). My second-highest rated comment (11) is higher than most other female comments in the thread. There are plenty of other male comments with comparably high scores, in the 9-12 range.
It appears that people are simply voting up more in this thread in general, not merely to persons with female handles. My personal guess would be that this is because the air is getting cleared on some topics of general interest that nobody has felt comfortable expressing prior to this point, and the refreshment of hearing those things (and a few good proposed solutions) is encouraging upvotes.
(Of course, there could also be a priming effect of focusing on stereotypes around social support and being a welcoming community in general, which would also skew things more towards upvotes and away from downvotes...)
1). There is a lot of, for want of a better term, "mental masturbation" around here: arguing for the sake of arguing, debating insignificant points, flashy but ultimately useless displays of intellect etc. Men tend to enjoy this sort of thing much more than women. Perhaps the female equivalent would be "social masturbation" -- endless gossiping about other people's trivia.
2). There's a major bias toward discussing math and science topics on here, and objective rather than subjective experience. Rationality, as a meta-construct, arguably isn't necessarily limited to these domains. I don't see why it can't be applied to equally good effect to literature and the humanities, art, interpersonal relationships, etc. Broaden your conversations to include some more of these topics (but, of course, with the same characteristic rational approach) and you may win over more female participants.
Unrelated to gender, but related to inclusion: should we make LW, or some portion of LW, more accessible to teenagers somehow? It's been argued that we'll the best rationalists will be people who learn it young; but to judge by introductions in the new welcome thread, and by responses to the current survey, we seem to have few to no teenagers.
If this can be done without significant compromise, it definitely should be.