If anyone has a less depressing explanation of what's going on here, then I would be very glad to hear it.

I do! Filipe wrote:

Is there an actual history of people complaining about 'creepy behavior' in LW meetups?

I would genuinely like to know the answer to that question, so I upvoted it.

I think a few mutually-reinforcing things are going on, and the narcissistic pattern you describe is a big one. Another is feeling socially unsafe, in a way that's hard for me to summarize, but easier to describe some features of:

• Talk of how women are underrepresented at LW meetups (or whatever) pattern-matches to a moral demand that there be more women at LW meetups, otherwise LWers are bad sexist people. As is often the case with perceived moral demands, this feels threatening and defending oneself by attacking premises and identifying the demander as the Enemy is a really tempting response.
  • The perceived moral demand is seen as vague, which makes it feel more threatening — it feels like one can never know whether or not they're subject to criticism.
    • The OP's first link, for instance, says "no one’s required to inform you that you’re creeping" and "Not a complete instruction set on how not to be a creeper." Even if these are true, saying them in that piece's aggressive tone without indicating that doing something simple gets you a lot of the way ('you don't get cookies for being a decent person') causes me, at least, to feel gut-level fear of doing Something Wrong without knowing it and being blamed. (This fear is easy for me now to ignore, not as easy for everyone.)
• I think people often feel like "sexist" is only ever a term of extreme opprobrium, don't distinguish/feel that other people distinguish between "behaving in a sexist way" and "being sexist", and don't feel like it's possible/other people see it as possible for behaving in a sexist way to be slightly and forgivably bad, so they must defend themselves from arguments that might imply that they're sexist. (This seems easier to illustrate for "racist"; the prototype racist in most(?) people's minds is a Nazi or something equally awful, which makes the claim that it's "racist" to, e.g., be more afraid of a black person on the street at night less thinkable.)
• It is not obviously false that there are biological reasons that women would be less likely to be interested in LW absent any discrimination.
  • This possibility is a good way to claim that one isn't or might not be subject to perceived moral demands, which makes endorsing it more attractive.
  • If this is true and the people making the perceived moral demand wouldn't believe it if it were true (which it's perceived that they certainly wouldn't), then the demand will continue to be there forever even if all actual discrimination is addressed. This feels more threatening.
  • A common response (it feels to me like the most common by far on the Internet as a whole; this isn't necessarily true but the feeling is a relevant data point) to this idea, by the people perceived as making the moral demand, is that it is obviously false and considering the hypothesis makes you a bad sexist person. Independent of anything else, for X to say this about a hypothesis Y thinks might be true is likely to make Y feel threatened and (if Y identifies as a truth-seeker) offended. This leads to polarization and increases Y's identification with the hypothesis.
• This point about 'privilege' language.
• Even if none of this sort of crap is present in a particular discussion, if someone has seen it before, they're likely to pattern-match to it and become more defensive.

All of this is true or not independently of how justified the feeling of unsafety is. Any actual risk is almost always small and the mature thing to do is to feel its smallness, but rolling a saving throw for Not Trying to Please Everyone Unless They're Tagged as an Enemy — at least, that's what not being triggered by this feels like to me — is really hard for some people.

It is absolutely beyond my understanding why Filipe's comment has been voted up to +13 since what Douglas wrote was not an "attempt to explain" anything and he didn't assert that anyone was discriminating against anyone. Filipe's comment is based on two gross misrepresentations of what Douglas wrote, and on the basis of those gross misrepresentations he's made an entirely unreasonable accusation, and apparently the consensus of the Less Wrong community is that this deserves to be at +13.

In what possible world is Filipe's grotesque misrepresentation reasonable (and indeed worthy of all those upvotes) and gently pointing out its errors unreasonable (and deserving of drive-by downvotes)?

Personally, I upvoted Filipe's comment for the reason Emile gave here, I agree with Manfred's comment here, and while the second part of Filipe's comment could be taken as overly politicizing, I feel that your comments have acted to degenerate the situation further. For reasons Nick Tarleton has outlined in this comment, "blank-statey attempts to explain the gender ratio in High-IQ communities due to some form of discrimination, without any evidence" are something that some people in this community have become rather sensitive to.

If you had responded by saying, for example, "I don't think that this article is arguing that the gender disparity in this community rests primarily on behavioral issues of the members, but considering the self-confessed social fluency issues many of our members have, I think it's likely there are people here who would benefit from it," I think you could have de-escalated hostility in the discussion. The reply you gave to Manfred, though, appears far more hostile to me than Filipe's original comment, and it looks to me like you're doing more to blow out of proportion a possible cause for offense.

I upvoted Filipe's comment because it asked a question the answer to which I was also interested in, and I have downvoted a number of yours because I feel that you have done an inappropriately poor job assuming good faith.

Well, honestly. Douglas_Reay posts something saying "if people attending LW meetings are creepy then that might be bad for the community's gender balance", and Filipe responds by suggesting that it's "just one of those blank-slatey attempts to explain the gender ratio in High-IQ communities due to some sort of discrimination, without any evidence".

Douglas_Reay didn't provide any evidence for his theory. Not even what one would expect to be the minimal standard, i.e., an assertion that creepy behaviors do in fact take place at LW meetups.

Filipe was pointing this out and presented the obvious candidate explanation for Douglas_Reay's action, i.e., the one that makes his actions look bad. How is this any different from what you just did in your comment?

If anyone has a less depressing explanation of what's going on here, then I would be very glad to hear it.

No, I think you pretty much nailed it. It's been going on from Day 1, it was endemic in LWs founder population, it's very common within the cultural core demographics that LW attracts, and even folks here who are aware of it and find it a little unseemly often underestimate the extent and significance of the issue.

... well, that bit is a p.r.r.f.i. only in the same way as things like "Are you really as stupid as you sound?" are. I repeat: Douglas_Reay's post contains no blank-slatey attempts to explain anything and makes no claims that anyone's discriminating against anyone else. It just doesn't.

Well, if you bring up a a bunch of links about learning how not to come off as creepy, and pose it as a salient topic of discussion to the community, you're tacitly implying that people coming off as creepy is a problem of particular relevance to the community.

The connotations are such that, rather than having to make explicit that there have been cases where people at Less Wrong meetups have been offended by behavior they've found creepy, it could reasonably be taken as implied, unless explicitly disavowed.

If there is evidence of such a pattern, then it is certainly worth knowing about. But posing it as an explanation, or even a contributing factor, in the gender imbalance of the community, is something that could reasonably be taken as insulting.

Suppose you have an online acquaintance who's rather unpopular. Your only information on why they might be unpopular comes from your online interactions with them and what they tell you themself, and you're unsure why they have so little social success based on that information. So, you suggest "Maybe you should try showering more often."

Now, if the person does in fact have poor personal hygiene, this could be the exact behavior modification they need to achieve better social success. But this is not gently suggesting that one possible contributing factor to their lack of social success is poor personal hygiene. In terms of ordinary human communication, it amounts to a tacit accusation that they're a smelly person.

I parse Filipe's comment as being something along the lines of "Do we have evidence that this is a pervasive pattern in this community? If so, I acknowledge this as as being a potentially valuable contribution. If not, I find the tacit assumption that it is somewhat offensive." If no such assumption is intended, then the post would do well to disclaim it.