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NancyLebovitz comments on LW Women: LW Online - Less Wrong
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Thanks for the details.
Can you see how this sort of thing, applied through a whole educational career, would tend to discourage learning and accomplishment?
Even if it's true (at least until transhumanism really gets going) that the best mathematicians will always be men, it's not as though second rank mathematicians are useless.
Yes. In general, I recommend that people try to do the best they can with themselves, and not feel guilty about relative performance unless that guilt is motivating for them. If gatekeepers want to use this sort of effect in their reasoning, they should make it quantitative, rather than a verbal justification for a bias.
It's not clear how desirable accurate expectations of future success are. To use startups as an example, 10% of startups succeed, but founders seem to put their chance of success at over 90%, and this may be better than more realistic expectations and less startups. For clever women, though, there seems to be a significant amount of pressure to go into STEM fields followed by high rates of burnout and transfer away from STEM work. What rate of burnout would be strong evidence for overencouragement? I'm not sure.
Having to deal with biased gatekeepers isn't the same thing as feeling guilty about relative ability, even if some of the same internal strategies would help with both.
How likely is this?
Agreed; that phrase was more appropriate in an earlier draft of the comment, and became less appropriate when I deleted other parts which mused about how much people should expect themselves to regress towards the population mean. They have a lot of private information about themselves, but it's not clear to me that they have good information about the rest of the population, and so it seems easier to judge one's absolute than one's relative competence.
On topic to dealing with biased gatekeepers, it seems self-defeating to use the presence of obstacles as a discouraging rather than encouraging factor, conditioned on the opportunity being worth pursuing. Since the probability of success is an input to the calculation of whether or not an opportunity is worth pursuing, it's not clear when and how much accuracy in expectations is desirable.
I don't know enough about the population of gatekeepers to comment on the likelihood of finding it in the field, but I am confident in it as a prescription.
Burnout might be related to factors other than not being able to do the work well enough. It could be a matter of hostile work environment.
From what I've read, women are apt to do more housework and childcare than their spouses, so there might be a matter of total work hours-- or that one might be balanced out by men taking jobs with longer commutes.
I find it interesting that you site evidence that is exactly what traditionalist theories of gender would predict, and not even mention them as a possible explanation.
I took your "apt" at first to mean "more able to"!
As this sort of think becomes more common, it will be necessary to take into account the fact that others are also doing this when making these calculations.
And once transhumanism gets going it will be the case that the best mathematicians will be the people who received intelligence upgrade "Euler" as children. My point is that if you're hoping for transhumanism because it will solve problems with inequality of ability, you should be careful what you wish for.
I just threw in the bit about transhumanism for completeness.
Needing to get the implants in childhood is probably an early phase-- I'm expecting that more and better plasticity for adults will also get developed.
Well, unconstrained self-modification can have even more unpleasant results.
It seems to me that, given people are already sexist, and given that telling someone their group has a lower average directly lowers their performance, such a re-weighting should never ever be used.