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maia comments on Crossing the experiments: a baby - Less Wrong
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I teach at a women's college and whenever I mention my young son most of my students smile. The semester he was born I put a picture of him on the last page of my final exam and many students positively mentioned the picture in the following semesters. A way to increase the number of women who read LW would be to have more posts like this.
The post is currently at -5. I bet if he had basically the same content but it was about some robot he just created the post would have a positive rank.
I find this vaguely unsettling, because it seems to imply (though I doubt you intended this) that women have to be attracted via discussion of babies and other stereotypically "feminine" things. I'd rather see a change where more women realize that they can be interested in things other than babies, than a change where LW condescends to women by posting about babies.
As nerd-boys have been noticing for at least decades, women don't have to be attracted at all! But jumping up in to rationality land, there are plenty of reasons to want them to be attracted, not the least of them being that providing useful information on how to improve reasoning is valuable approximately proportional to the number of people who receive it, and there are nearly as many women as men out there in the potential audience.
I certainly wasn't saying that LW shouldn't make an effort to attract women. I'm female myself, and I'd be happy to have more people who look like me around, and I agree with you about the reasons why as well.
The key part of my sentence there is "via discussion of babies," because as a female, I wouldn't like that particular method of attracting women at all. I think there might be other ways that would be more effective and that also wouldn't dilute the substance of the common interests that bring us here.