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lucidian comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong
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There's high-status creeping too (like someone putting an arm round someone who doesn't want him to). This can be very bad for the creepee - the high status means that complaints to the group are likely to be dismissed as oversensitivity or whining.
It's a natural human tendency to let high-status people get away with things, but I don't think it's so immutable that a group can't develop a culture that reduces the damage.
And if you are the creep, there's at least a chance that you didn't mean to be and that you're willing to modify your behaviour in ways that have large advantages for the creepee and only small disadvantages for you.
If male creepiness is contributing to the gender imbalance on LessWrong, I would expect high-status creepiness to be far more problematic than low-status creepiness. In a social setting, it's a lot easier to call a low-status member out for being creepy. If a high-status member is being creepy, a newcomer might prefer to leave than to confront him/her or complain about his/her behavior to the rest of the group. Alternatively, if the newcomer does complain about the high-status member, he/she might be scoffed at by the rest of the group, who likes that individual.
Status gets wonky here, though, and online in general. One's status doesn't readily translate from one's RL social network to the internet (celebrities are an obvious exception here), and the cultural makeup of the group's members, in addition to the social norms they propagate within the group itself, will go a long way toward determining relative status.
It's one thing if you're talking Eliezer or Alicorn, but the run-of-the-mill LW member probably fits into this situation. Hence, we don't need to necessarily see creepy behavior among the highest-status folks here, for it to nevertheless be a widespread norm that affects gender ratios on the site. (Frankly, all sorts of communities, online and off, encounter this in some form).