First: I'm actually in the process of figuring out my own take on this, so my opinion may be subject to change over the course of this thread (and a few other threads elsewhere in the internet that happened to come up at the same time).
There's two sets of rules getting talked about here - one is the rules for the group, the other is the rules for an individual.
Because of things like bystander effect, status-quo bias, etc, it's important for groups to have some clear cut lines which, if crossed, result in expulsion (or at least a solid warning with a clear threat of expulsion).
I think AndrewHickey was not referring to codified group rules at the time, but to your own personal rules you should be following, regardless. The group shouldn't automatically expel every member who's doing something that one person finds arbitrarily creepy. But if you find that someone is creeped out by a behavior of yours, you should still take it upon yourself to alter that behavior, at least around that person, for no reason other than that it bothers them. You should also use common sense in the corner case that some person is arbitrarily deciding "I find X creepy" in a deliberate effort to screw with you.
It's also your responsibility to treat that question seriously and not look for reasons like "this person is arbitrarily declaring me creepy" as an excuse to not have to change your behavior.
Exactly. I was talking about the 'rule' "If a significant fraction of a group find your behaviour creepy, the responsibility to change the behaviour is yours."
That's a rule for an individual's behaviour. And as written it's a stupid rule that invites abuse -- the stereotypical 'nice guy' can just say "well, no-one else complained" and still carry on behaving that way and thinking of himself as behaving properly.
One of the lessons highlighted in the thread "Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter" is Gender ratio matters.
There have recently been a number of articles addressing one social skills issue that might be affecting this, from the perspective of a geeky/sciencefiction community with similar attributes to LessWrong, and I want to link to these, not just so the people potentially causing problems get to read them, but also so everyone else knows the resource is there and has a name for the problem, which may facilitate wider discussion and make it easier for others to know when to point towards the resources those who would benefit by them.
However before I do, in the light of RedRobot's comment in the "Of Gender and Rationality" thread, I'd like to echo a sentiment from one of the articles, that people exhibiting this behaviour may be of any gender and may victimise upon any gender. And so, while it may be correlated with a particular gender, it is the behaviour that should be focused upon, and turning this thread into bashing of one gender (or defensiveness against perceived bashing) would be unhelpful.
Ok, disclaimers out of the way, here are the links:
Some of those raise deeper issues about rape culture and audience as enabler, but the TLDR summary is:
EDITED TO ADD:
Despite the way some of the links are framed as being addressed to creepers, this post is aimed at least as much at the community as a whole, intended to trigger a discussion on how the community should best go about handling such a problem once identified, with the TLDR being "set of restraints to place on someone who is burning the commons", rather that a complete description that guarantees that anyone who doesn't meet it isn't creepy. (Thank you to jsteinhardt for clearly verbalising the misinterpretation - for discussion see his reply to this post)