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chaosmage comments on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2013 Edition - Less Wrong
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Comments (44)
I do not recognize any names of women in this.
Could you please spell out your implication? There are a number of ways to interpret your statement.
From this list of authors by number of quotes, I can't distinguish this collection from a collection that is exclusive to quotes from men (and unnamed sources).
I ask to be shown a distinction, i.e. a female who was quoted seven times or more.
Or just once, really. I haven't seen even a single quote from a female when skimming the main list.
So, I think my favorite female public rationalist is Byron Katie, who has a number of great rationality quotes, most of which boil down to this one (which is I think her only quote in the LW RQs):
Close to it is one by Karen Pryor:
Above that is Megan McArdle, and the highest quote I saw that was probably by a woman was this one (I didn't look in to whether or not that Ashley is female), and this is the highest one I saw I'm pretty confident was by a woman. (A number of them were attributed to internet callsigns, which are difficult to reliably map to sex.)
If you think that more female authors on the list would be an improvement, then find female rationalists who say things worth quoting, and then quote them.
That's not your implication.
Clearly, you said that to make a point. You're not making a random observation; it's not the equivalent of "I only found five people in the list whose names are greater than 14 letters long". So what's your point?
I honestly didn't have one. I was just noticing my confusion.
Now that you ask, I've come up with the hypothesis that (verbatim) quotation as a form of communication is very male: men quote men far more than women quote women. I do not have a hypothesis on whether women quote men more than men quote women, or vice versa.
Given that historically, men have simply written more than women and more often acquired positions that made you famous enough to be quoted, I would expect that men just get quoted more often in general. The question whether men also actively quote more than women is another one.
Of course the observation isn't random. Gender imbalance is obviously more interesting than name length and the difference in curiosity needs no justification.
Let's help chaosmage express himself a bit: "I do not recognize any names of women in this. I wonder why that is."
Discuss.
Which interest is not obvious. Here's a handful of possible points which could be made by that observation:
Someone trying to make the first point, and someone trying to make the third point, have radically different interpretations of the observed data, and the resulting conversation will be very different depending on which point you think they're trying to make.
I'm not trying to be political here, and I don't think this is about LW or rationality, at all. If that observation is to have a point, I'd suggest an entirely different one:
It isn't just that scripture, constitutions and classics of literature were mostly written by men. Or that men just write more, in science, in journalism, in genre fiction etc. and almost all quotes are from written, rather than spoken expression... That's all just the "being quoted" side of it. But the quoter participates, and I think quoters are usually male too. Even The Simpsons get quoted mostly by guys rather than than girls, at least around me...
It's clear to me how quotation as a male form of communication would mean that women quote less, which you could check by comparing the usernames of quoters to the post-weighted sex distriubtion on LW. It's not as clear to me how it would mean women get quoted less- that would have to be either because of my first or second explanations. (I'm counting "men quote men more frequently than they quote women, and men dominate LW" as part of my second point.)
What's the reason we have to browbeat him to constrain the discussion to some specific point? To me it's obvious several points could be made and the observation could be a sufficient discussion starter.
Particularly on political issues, a "I observed X. Discuss." has the potential to be a trap. Each of the points I made in the grandparent post can be construed as a political attack- the first on women, the second two on the LW community- and simultaneously attacking everyone because of a lack of clarity is, generally speaking, a conversational and political mistake. It's not obvious which issue to engage with, and engaging with the incorrect issue is dangerous.
What kind of danger are we talking about?
Psychic and social- it'd be difficult for it to be physical! Implying someone is a cryptosexist when they are a feminist, or implying that they are a feminist when they are a cryptosexist, is likely to be a good way to offend them (or make them think poorly of you), and then there are coalition politics to consider.
It's not difficult to deduce what kind of a response to the implication question is a socially acceptable one. I might also have no implication. Even if my implication was benign I wouldn't give you the answer. I don't want to reward coercion or biasing a conversation before it's even started. I don't know why people pretend to expect honest answers to such questioning.
If you expect everyone to be totally biased in the conversation then instead of picking the right soldiers for the battle I would suggest concluding that the topic is simply too political to discuss in a rational manner.
If you browbeat people for making observations on issues that might need fixing you're limiting your options for doing any fixing.
If you are saying that he can figure out whether lying or telling the truth about his implication is socially acceptable, sure.
The real problem is that he already had an implication, but he's using the fact that it's an implication to maintain plausible deniability by not coming out and saying it. Saying it may be socially unacceptable, but that's because making the implication is also socially unacceptable.
What are they?