What theory? The one Filipe just made up out of thin air, where Imaginary Douglas Reay proposed discrimination as a blank-slate explanation for "the gender ratio in High-IQ communities"? Or some actual theory that he actually claimed was likely to be true?
The theory that creepy behavior is happening at LW meetups and that it's responsible for the skewed gender ratios.
the obvious candidate explanation for Douglas_Reay's action, i.e., the one that makes his actions look bad
Either I'm seriously misunderstanding you, or you have what seems to me a seriously broken heuristic for how to generate candidate explanations for people's actions. It seems like you're saying that when you're trying to understand why someone did something, "the obvious candidate explanation" is "the one that makes his actions look bad". Why?
I could ask you the same question about the heuristic generating your explanation.
It looks to me as if you just pointed out one similarity between what I said and what Filipe said, namely that we both speculated that someone might be doing something for not-very-impressive reasons. I agree: we both did that. Aside from that, I see many differences and no other similarities. I can try to list some differences, but there are so many that I think it would be helpful if you'd first explain what inferences you want drawn from the alleged similarity.
They're similar in that they both share the property you just criticized above.
The theory that creepy behavior is happening at LW meetups and that it's responsible for the skewed gender ratios.
So, in fact, a theory composed of two parts, neither of which Douglas_Reay either stated nor implied. Why, then, call it "his theory" and object to his not having provided evidence for it?
I could ask you the same question about the heuristic generating your explanation.
I suppose you could, but since you don't know what that heuristic is I'm not sure what the point would be. (But you seem to be claiming -- I am completely unable...
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)