the obvious difference between the rationalist and SJ cmmunities is that the rationalist community is equipped with the proper cognitive tools and social norms for dealing with phyg-like tendencies, whereas social justice groups - broadly understood - are not.
To me this reads more as rationalist cheering than as a good argument in favor of LW social norms. Yes, we've generally got a good opinion of LW culture around here -- that's why we're posting here rather than on, say, Tiger Beatdown. But that's hardly surprising.
What are the specific norms and cognitive tools that make the LW community so well equipped, and where's the evidence that we're actually implementing them successfully? If we don't have a good answer to that, we shouldn't be making the claim.
To me this reads more as rationalist cheering than as a good argument in favor of rationalist social norms.
You may want to refer to EY's article about Guardians of Ayn Rand. Objectivists may have been "rationalists" in some sense, but did they ever claim to have good cognitive and social tools against phyg-ishness? Of course they didn't, because they expended no effort on developing such tools, and coming up with tools or successfully applying them conferred no status benefits within their social group. Do you spot the difference now? Good...
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)