= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Alicorn comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (769)
POST IDEA- Feedback Wanted
When these gender discussions come up, I am often tempted to write in with my own experiences and desires. But I generally don't because I don't want to generalize from one example, or claim to be the Voice of Women, etc. However, according to the last survey, I actually AM over 1% of the females on here, and so is every other woman. (i.e. there are less than 100 of us).
My idea is to put out a call for women on LessWrong to write openly about their experiences and desires in this community, and send them to me. I will anonymize them all, and put them all up under one post.
This would have a couple of benefits, including:
Anonymity allows for open expression- When you are in the vast minority, speaking out can feel like "swimming upstream," and so may not happen very much.
Putting all the women's responses in one posts helps figure out what is/is not a problem- Because of the gender ratio, most discussions on the topic are Men Talking About what Women Want, it can be hard to figure out what women are saying on the issues, versus what men are saying women say.
The plural of anecdote is data- If one woman says X, it is an anecdote, and very weak evidence. If 10% of women say X, it is much stronger evidence.
Note that with a lot of the above issues, one of the biggest problems in figuring out what is going on isn't purposeful misogyny or anything. Just the fact that the gender ratio is so skewed can make it difficult to hear women (think picking out one voice amongst ten). The idea I'm proposing is an attempt to work around this, not an attempt to marginalize men, who may also have important things to say, but would not be the focus of this investigation.
Even with a sample size of 10 responses (approximately the amount I would say is needed for this to be useful), according to the last survey, that is 10% of the women on this site. A sizable proportion, indeed.
Please give feedback, if you think this is a good or bad idea, and if you are a woman (or transgendered person, or female-identifying, or...etc), if you would participate. I will only run this experiment if a) people want it, and b) women will respond.
I'm unclear on what exactly I would tell you, but assuming there exists a useful answer to that question other than "y'know, stuff", I'm game. Also, given that there are so few, anonymity may not be anonymity (my writing style's probably recognizable to some; any individual incident I've probably already told all my friends about so it'll be recognized at least by those; etc.); how would you work around that?
This comment actually gave me An Idea, so thank you!
Idea- In the Call for Responses post, there could be a Ask the Women thread, where people can submit questions. If you want a question answered, upvote it.
When the women write their responses, they can use the questions as prompts. A question that gets many upvotes will probably be written on by more women, thus getting more data. But if you want to respond to a more lower voted question, you can (or just say whatever you want to say)
I would say that the submitted questions will be assumed to be answered using Crocker's Rules, no exceptions. What we want is a more stream-of-consciousness, gut-level reaction . Not self-censored, want-to-be-polite-and-concise, filtered answers.
Some topics for the call for responses I would propose:
Occasions when a man was creepy towards you at a social event.
Occasions when a woman was creepy towards you at a social event.
Occasions you met a new male friend at a social event, and how it wasn't creepy, and what was fun/interesting/good about it.
Occasions you met a new female friend at a social event, and how it wasn't creepy, and what was fun/interesting/good about it.
(I mean new friend in the sense that you didn't know them, not that they were already a new friend before the event)
"This has never happened to me" would also be a useful response.
All of the above questions could be answered for either lesswrong-related events, or social events in general.
Occasions (or general patterns) when someone tried too hard to not be creepy toward you and displeased you as a result.
(Some of the policies that get tossed around are pretty extreme, so I'd be interested in measuring the overcompensation risk.)
I'm expecting few enough responses that I'm willing to work with people on a case-by-case basis. For example, for you I could edit your writing towards my own style, or even (so long as it's not pages) read it, wait an hour, and re-write it in my own voice, if needed (going back to make sure all relevant details are added in)
Discussing individual incidents is a bit trickier. In general, I would like to keep the narratives individual-specific. (i.e. "Lady Q writes: <insert her text >" , rather than "Thoughts on Question X: <insert all the paragraphs from different people on Question X >") . Otherwise, the concern would be unable to differentiate between 10 women writing 1 good thing and 2 bad things each, OR 9/10 women wrote 1 good thing, and 1 woman writes 20 bad things.
That said, I do see the use of an "Anonymous Incidents" section, where people can put identifying incidents they would like to discuss, without associating it with the rest of their narrative. Do you think that would solve this issue?
I don't have a clear picture of what this would look like.
I think I can illustrate with an example. Let me know if this helps!
Jane submits her narrative to the post. One paragraph in her narrative describes an incident that many people would recognize as her. Jane wants to mention this incident, but does not want to associate it with the rest of her narrative, because then people who could recognize that single incident, will know that the rest of the narrative is also hers. She pulls out the identifiable incident to be placed in a "Anonymous Comments" section that is not linked to the rest of her narrative. It is still somewhat anonymous, in that her name isn't on it, and only the people who already know the story realize it is hers. But they can not trace knowledge of that particular story back to the rest of her narrative.
The post layout would be something like:
Okay. But what is the content of "whee, I'm a narrative"?
By "narrative", I am referring to the bulk of whatever Jane wrote. Probably items such as answering the questions upvoted in the forum. It would be everything Jane submitted to me, modulo the paragraph or two that she wanted placed in the "Comments" section instead, because they are incidents known to be hers.
Perhaps I shouldn't have used the phrase "Anonymous Comments". The narratives are also anonymous. The Comments section is what allows them to be so, by having somewhere else to place Obviously-Jane material. In fact, the Comments section is probably even LESS anonymous than the narratives, because they are composed of identifiable material that you don't want associated with your super-anonymous narrative....
Um.....feel free to suggest better words than "Narrative" or "Comments section"... I don't think I'm explaining well. :P
All of the other stuff you have to say that wouldn't be easily identified as something said by you.