A long blog post explains why the author, a feminist, is not comfortable with the rationalist community despite thinking it is "super cool and interesting". It's directed specifically at Yvain, but it's probably general enough to be of some interest here.
http://apophemi.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/why-im-not-on-the-rationalist-masterlist/
I'm not sure if I can summarize this fairly but the main thrust seems to be that we are overly willing to entertain offensive/taboo/hurtful ideas and this drives off many types of people. Here's a quote:
In other words, prizing discourse without limitations (I tried to find a convenient analogy for said limitations and failed. Fenders? Safety belts?) will result in an environment in which people are more comfortable speaking the more social privilege they hold.
The author perceives a link between LW type open discourse and danger to minority groups. I'm not sure whether that's true or not. Take race. Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?
An overly rosy view, perhaps, and I don't want to deny the reality of the blogger's experience. Clearly, the person is intelligent and attracted to some aspects of LW discourse while turned off by other aspects.
Or the average Less Wronger knows that supporting feminism is the correct response to such a question and answers accordingly.
Saying you agree with feminism is easy. Being a feminist is incredibly hard. If a man at a LW meetup said something objectifying, misogynist, or racist, would another male LWer call them out for it? Such behavior is absolutely essential to create a space that women feel permitted to inhabit (consistent objectification is one of the main reasons programming as an industry remains a boy's club and a great deal of feminist agitation has been leveled against this), but as we all know dissenting is hard, and while I'm sure every self-identified feminist man would feel uncomfortable in such a situation, I doubt most of them would speak up.
Even without explicit deception or implicit social desirability bias, it's entirely possible to think oneself a feminist and still do and say things that would be entirely off-putting to the author of this piece. It's possible to identify as a feminist but refuse to acknowledge a variety of oppressions. It's possible to identify as a feminist but appoint yourself gatekeeper of acceptable feminist politic -- imagine the irony of a "feminist" man telling a woman what feminism is! Yudkowsky himself is in this category, since he thinks himself skilled enough in feminism to entirely dismiss sex-radical feminism, lesbian separatist feminism, and virtually all radical strains of feminism (as per http://hpmor.com/a-rant-thereof/, spoilers HPMOR ch. 93). I wouldn't attempt to discuss probability theory with any MIRI researcher without having a strong grasp over at least the key texts I can discern the relevance of, but I'm willing to predict with 95% confidence that Yudkowsky has never read a Dworkin book. (http://predictionbook.com/predictions/22850)
Feminism, feminist theory, critical race theory, and social justice in general are not something humans automatically get correct. They cannot be intuitied. They come from a space of questioning deeply held beliefs and holding those beliefs up to the highest possible ethical considerations. It is absolutely foolish to believe that it is possible to intuit these concepts, but arguments about feminism or anti-racism on Less Wrong commonly come to a feminist stating some widely-accepted notion from feminist theory or feminist psychology, and a LWer stating that the notion must be false because of some intuition.
This sort of dismissal and appeal to intuition comes from male or white privilege. It is male privilege that convinces men that the things they think are correct by default, especially the things they think about matters pertaining to gender. This is a dangerous and insidious bias that persists deep into the feminist education of men; most men who think themselves feminists have not trained themselves to realize this bias and still engage in easily identified behavior ("mainsplaining") caused by it.
Really, this is what the author of the linked article is commenting on: the reality of the LW environment being simply uncomfortable for women to inhabit. I've tried to introduce LW to several of my friends, partners, and comrades, as I believe its lessons to be useful, but nearly all of the people without male privilege have been turned away by it.
For LW to be actually feminist (instead of merely claiming to support feminism), it must be an unsafe space for discussions that probabilistically trigger response modes corresponding to male privilege or the oppression of women. It must be unsafe to say objectifying or misogynist things. It must be unsafe to discuss the oppression of social groups as an abstract intellectual concept rather than as a lived reality by the majority of humans. Attempting to discuss such issues dispassionately is a sign of privilege, and insisting that they be discussed dispassionately is an act of oppression. It's impossible to be dispassionate about a boot on your own face. It's irrational to attempt to be calm when the hot iron approaches your face. We're rationalists, not straw vulcans.
In the same way being a rationalist is hard (i.e., it's cognitively difficult.)
My mental model says yes, and I have actually seen it happen twice.
I think this is strictly correct, but I predict better outcomes in the case where one person says to the offender "Hey, that's out of line" than when everyone in the room castigates the offender i... (read more)