But it's quite common for groups to identify as "the non-clique clique", to borrow a phrase from a recent conversation:
Unfortunately, "the non-clique clique" is vulnerable to outgroup-homogeneity and related biases. It's all too easy to think that they are a clique with simplistic views, wereas we (our own tribe) are a diverse group with a variety of opinions and well-argued viewpoints. It's not clear that this adds anything in terms of basic hygiene.
... what she saw as rigorous axiomatization would be enough to prevent the pitfalls of ideology. She put a huge amount of effort into streamlining her philosophy along those lines ...
I assume that Objectivism was not in fact the first known attempt at "rigorous axiomatized" philosophy - so the outside view should've been fairly clear, even at the time. Besides, it's not clear what you (or perhaps Rand herself) mean by "ideology": informally, rigorous axiomatization seems to be a recipe for absolute-sounding, black-and-white statements. Is it really plausible that this would not be understood at the time?
"the non-clique clique" is vulnerable to outgroup-homogeneity and related biases. It's all too easy to think that they are a clique with simplistic views, wereas we (our own tribe) are a diverse group with a variety of opinions and well-argued viewpoints.
Which is exactly my point. Everyone thinks this, and most of them are wrong. What I'm hoping for is some data point that suggests, from the outside view, that our approach of focusing on the underlying heuristics and biases is more effective at preventing actual affective death spirals than ...
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)