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earthwormchuck163 comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012) - Less Wrong
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Hello and goodbye.
I'm a 30 year old software engineer with a "traditional rationalist" science background, a lot of prior exposure to Singularitarian ideas like Kurzweil's, with a big network of other scientist friends since I'm a Caltech alum. It would be fair to describe me as a cryocrastinator. I was already an atheist and utilitarian. I found the Sequences through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
I thought it would be polite, and perhaps helpful to Less Wrong, to explain why I, despite being pretty squarely in the target demographic, have decided to avoid joining the community and would recommend the same to any other of my friends or when I hear it discussed elsewhere on the net.
I read through the entire Sequences and was informed and entertained; I think there are definitely things I took from it that will be valuable ("taboo" this word; the concept of trying to update your probability estimates instead of waiting for absolute proof; etc.)
However, there were serious sexist attitudes that hit me like a bucket of cold water to the face - assertions that understanding anyone of the other gender is like trying to understand an alien, for example.
Coming here to Less Wrong, I posted a little bit about that, but I was immediately struck in the "sequence rerun" by people talking about what a great utopia the gender-segregated "Failed Utopia 4-2" would be.
Looking around the site even further, I find that it is over 90% male as of the last survey, and just a lot of gender essentialist, women-are-objects-not-people-like-us crap getting plenty of upvotes.
I'm not really willing to put up with that and still less am I enthused about identifying myself as part of a community where that's so widespread.
So, despite what I think could be a lot of interesting stuff going on, I think this will be my last comment and I would recommend against joining Less Wrong to my friends. I think it has fallen very squarely into the "nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists" cognitive failure mode.
If you're interested in one problem that is causing at least one rationalist to bounce off your site (and, I think the odds are not unreasonable, where one person writes a long heartfelt post, there might be multiple others who just click away) here you go. If not, go ahead and downvote this into oblivion.
Perhaps I'll see you folks in some years if this problem here gets solved, or some more years after that when we're all unfrozen and immortal and so forth.
Sincerely,
Sam
Why not stay around and try to help fix the problem?
Ordinarily I'd leave this for SamLL to respond to, but I'd say the chances of getting a response in this context are fairly low, so hopefully it won't be too presumptuous for me to speculate.
First of all, we as a community suck at handling gender issues without bias. The reasons for this could span several top-level posts and in any case I'm not sure of all the details; but I think a big one is the unusually blurry lines between research and activism in that field and consequent lack of a good outside view to fall back on. I don't think we're methodologically incapable of overcoming that, but I do think that any serious attempt at doing so would essentially convert this site into a gender blog.
To make matters worse, for one inclined to view issues through the lens of gender politics, Failed Utopia 4-2 is close to the worst starting point this site has to offer. Never mind the explicitly negative framing, or its place within the fun theory sequence: we have here a story that literally places men on Mars on gender-essentialist grounds, and doesn't even mention nonstandard genders or sexual preferences. No, that's not meant to be taken all that seriously or to inform people's real behavior. Doesn't matter. We're talking enormously poor associations here.
From there, the damage has basically been done. If you take that as a starting point and look around the site with gender in mind -- perhaps not even consciously trying to vet things in those terms, but having framed things in that way -- you aren't going to go anywhere good with it. Facts like the predominately male gender mix (which I'd be inclined to explain in terms of background demographics; computer science is the dominant intellectual framework here and that field's even more gender-skewed) or the evopsych reasoning we use occasionally start to look increasingly sinister, and every related data point's going to build on an already dismal impression. These data points are in fact pretty sparse -- we don't talk much about gender here, for what I see as good reasons -- but they're fairly salient if you're looking for them. And there aren't many pointing in the other direction.
I don't agree with the conclusion. But I can see where it's coming from, and once it's been accepted sticking around to fight a presumptively hopeless battle wouldn't be a very smart move. Now, can we prevent impressions like this from being formed without losing sight of our primary goals or engaging in types of moderation that aren't going to happen with our current leadership and culture? That I'm not sure of.
As far as I can tell, we as a species suck at handling gender issues without bias, the closest thing to an exception to that I recall seeing being some (not all) articles (but usually not the comments) on the Good Men Project and the discussions on Yvain's “The $Nth Meditation on $Thing” blog post series.
s/gender//
Though I think that this particular forum sucks less at handling at least some issues.
Yeah, I was fairly impressed with Yvain's posts on the subject; if we did want to devote some serious effort to tackling this issue, I can think of far worse starting points.
Fixing the problem needs less people with a highly polarizing agenda, not more.