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Luke_A_Somers comments on LW Women: LW Online - Less Wrong
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I'm ok with the general emotional tone (lack of tone?) here. I think I read the style of discussion as "we're all here to be smart at each other, and we respect each other for being able to play".
However, the gender issues have been beyond tiresome. My default is to assume that men and women are pretty similar. LW has been the first place which has given me the impression that men and women are opposed groups. I still think they're pretty similar. The will to power is a shared trait even if it leads to conflict between opposed interests.
LW was the first place I've been where women caring about their own interests is viewed as a weird inimical trait which it's only reasonable to subvert, and I'm talking about PUA.
I wish I could find the link, but I remember telling someone he'd left women out of his utilitarian calculations. He took it well, but I wish it hadn't been my job to figure it out and find a polite way to say it.
Remember that motivational video Eliezer linked to? One of the lines toward the end was "If she puts you in the friend zone, put her in the rape zone." I can't imagine Eliezer saying that himself, and I expect he was only noticing and making use of the go for it and ignore your own pain slogans-- but I'm still shocked and angry that it's possible to not notice something like that. It's all a matter of who you identify with. Truth is truth, but I didn't want to find out that the culture had become that degraded.
And going around and around with HughRustik about PUA.... I think of him as polite and intelligent, and it took me a long time to realize that I kept saying that what I knew about PUA was what I'd read at LW, and he kept saying that it wasn't all like Roissy, who I kept saying I hadn't read. I grant that this is well within the normal range of human pigheadedness, and I'm sure I've done such myself because it can be hard to register that people hate what you love, but it was pretty grating to be on the receiving end of it.
There was that discussion of ignoring good test results from a member of a group if you already believe that they're bad at whatever was being tested. (They were referred to as blues, but it seemed to be a reference to women and math.) It was a case of only identifying with the gatekeeper. No thought about the unfairness or the possible loss of information. I think it finally occurred to someone to give a second test rather than just assuming it was a good day or good luck.
Unfortunately, I don't have an efficient way of finding these discussions I remember-- I'll grateful if anyone finds links, and then we can see how accurate my memories were.
All this being said, I think LW has also become Less Awful so far as gender issues are concerned. I'm not sure how much anyone has been convinced that women have actual points of view (partly my fault because I haven't been tracking individuals) since there are still the complaints about what one is not allowed to say.
How do you reconcile this view with the way questions of tone have become entangled with gender issues in this very thread?
It was also an extremely straightforward application of Bayes's theorem.
The problem is that the concept of "fairness" you are using there is incompatible with VNM-utilitarianism. (If somebody disagrees with this, please describe what the term in one's utility function corresponding to fairness would look like.)
Where has anyone claimed they don't? At least beyond the general rejection of qualia?
When the difference IS the topic, that tends to amplify the relevance of the differences.
Then why is it that this difference, out of the many dimensions of differences that form up humankind, and the multitude of interest-group formation patterns that could have been generated, is the one that gets so much attention? It would be bizarre if an unbiased deliberation process systematically decides that one unremarkable axis (gender) is the one difference that should be discussed at great length and with very vigorous champions, while ignoring all of the other axes of diversity of human minds.
Now it is possible for one unremarkable axis to become overwhelmingly dominant in coalition formation, but that would involve some fairly unpleasant implications about the truth-seekiness and utilitarian consequences of this sort of thinking.
I dunno about this. It seems that the difference between those concerned with an intelligence explosion and those concerned with other scenarios has gotten way more attention here than gender.
I wasn't surprised on the occasions when questions of differences in tone between the two camps flared up when discussing that topic. I would have been shocked almost beyond belief if, when discussing that topic, questions of tone differences between men and women had arisen.
The idea is, almost every topic, men and women are very similar, because the differences aren't relevant. When you begin looking at the differences, then you get amplifying effects. In particular, each participant being what they are and completely unable to change that means:
that the topic isn't going to be to convert people from one camp to the other or otherwise influence their choice as in the example above, but it's going to have to be about something about that. This added layer of meta makes things much less stable. Imagine having a discussion about how we ought to talk about the differences between intelligence explosion and other scenarios, while universally acknowledged that no one was going to change their position on the actual subject. It'd be all over the place.
that empathy is harder to achieve. And in particular looking at the difference from one end gives exactly opposite perspectives on the issue. When you 'normalize' the differences, it's maximally different.
This.
By definition, those on either side have different experiences with regard to the difference, and thus are vastly more likely to hold different opinions.