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TheOtherDave comments on How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy - Less Wrong
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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 .8 confident it won't turn up anything surprising enough to make it worth your effort, but if you're motivated to expend the effort anyway, I'd certainly read the results. I'm cis-male, so pretty much irrelevant to the effort other than as a reader.
I actually am very curious to the responses, but whether the results are surprising or not, I think another value it would have is as a place to point people to. For example, Norm New-Guy or Felicity the Feminist says "I think X is a problem," you can point them to the narratives, and say "8/10 women disagree." (or vice versa)
Also, even if there are no "surprises" per se, it could still be enough to redefine your hypothesis space. For example, maybe before the results, I would guess that any one of six issues might be occurring to effect the gender ratio. After reading the samples, I notice that most the results focus on only 3 of my original issues, and maybe there is a new one women were discussing, that although it wasn't in my original hypothesis space, wasn't necessarily "surprising" (depending on your definition- perhaps you hadn't thought of it yourself, but when someone said it, it made sense. I can see how you'd consider this a "surprise" though.)
In general, when making an example that could equally be made in either direction, I think it's best to go the direction against what you think - or what others think you think.
So in the same way I think Yvain's post would have been improved if his examples had been against positions he held, so too you might in future want your examples to be phrased more like
Obveously this is a purely about reducing system 1 negative reactions to posts and demonstrating an ability to visualise the other side's hypothesis, and not a content issue at all. It's much like the motivation behind Politics is the Mind Killer.
Thanks! I like this idea a lot, and have changed the relevant example accordingly.
I wonder if there's a general rule about how confident you should be there.
Dunno. What confidence level would you consider appropriate?
I could have said "I'm pretty confident..." or "I don't expect it to turn up anything..." or something along those lines, but I figure I have more of a chance of calibrating my confidence levels if I state them more precisely in the first place.
I don't know. I'm mostly musing about whether "it won't turn up anything surprising" is already contained in the concept of a confidence level, or else whether there is a particular confidence level at which you expect to not be surprised.
Put another way, when do you expect to be surprised?
Well, for example, if more than a third of the women responding reported never experiencing any unpleasant experiences of the sort described, that would surprise me.