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GabrielDuquette comments on [Poll] Method of Recruitment - Less Wrong Discussion
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Such as?
"Woman" is preferred to "female", when used as a noun. Either is grammatically fine (though I do think it sounds more normal to use "woman"), but some women dislike being called females.
Agreed; when I hear "male" or "female", I tend to think of animal husbandry, not human participation. What's wrong with "man" and "woman" ?
I'd hesitate to use "woman" if only because a not insignificant fraction of our members are still in their teens.
I only used "female" because that's what the OP used.
I think that you've mistaken which comment of yours I'm replying to (because you don't use the word "female" anywhere upthread of me). I was giving an example of something to dislike about the sentence "Even if you are a lurker; ESPECIALLY if you are a female!" in the OP.
Sorry, yes, my mistake.
(Though I can't help but think that, if polled, non-male LWers would converge on a third, write-in option: "This poll is a waste of time.")
EDIT: I am not referring to the poll in the OP.
Rather than recite the standard arguments about affirmative action based on sex, I'll let you google them. If that's not what Konkvistador meant, then sorry.
Edit: Okay, my sarcastic tone was anti-productive. Rephrase:
I googled "affirmative action based on sex" and a few variants. None of them produced an obvious set of concerns that are relevant to the situation at hand - increasing female interest on a community blog (and more importantly, the ideas therein), which is not the same thing at all as hiring people for a limited number of paid positions.
I appreciate not wanting to rehash out arguments that HAVE been done to death on Less Wrong, but it's not clear what you think Konkvistador's concern was. And if Konkvistador himself is tired of repeating the same arguments, it'd have been better to at least link to an older post rather than a simple, vague "dislike."
I thought that Konkvistador's point was quite clear.. And I didn't want to rehash the argument about whether it is reasonable to think that zero-sum is a useful approach to thinking about selective invitation.
Kudos for noticing that tone detracted from the argument. Konkvistador can tell you about my recent experience here about how hard that is to recognize from the inside.
Daenerys' interest in encouraging the participation of females who already frequent the site (albeit anonymously) seems a bit far from affirmative action. But I'm also willing to say "oops" if necessary.
Here's what I took Konkvistador's point to be:
Don't underestimate the mental/social barrier between lurking and posting, which is approximately as strong as the mental/social barrier between posting and writing Discussion posts or Main posts.
Will a local refutation of this by daenerys relax fears?
Agreed. Thus, an extended hand is helpful.
Maybe? But she didn't.
I think that omission was justifiable. The nature of social principles of construction is that making your disagreement with them explicit is unlikely to be effective because (1) you won't always be believed, (2) you might look like you are signalling a belief rather than holding that belief, and (3) noting that a particular social convention doesn't apply in this circumstance can function to reinforce that the convention does and should apply in most circumstances.
Also, I owe you a bit of an apology. All of this was really obvious to me in reading Konkvistador's comment, and I erroneously assumed a short inferential distance. My semi-snarky reply to you assumes the short inferential distance. That is, I didn't assume your question was in good faith, and I should have. Sorry.
Thanks for the apology, but we aren't solving Friendliness here. AFAICT, daenerys just wants to reach out to lurking females. Her doing so will have a negligible non-imaginary negative impact on the community and, indeed, the world at large.
I'm not sure that all feminists would acknowledge any negative impact at all (consider Mary Daly). That's bad mental hygiene.
I guess I wrote what I did as part of my personal project to convince feminism-skeptics that not all feminism is inherently unhealthy for mental hygiene.
If her Wikipedia page is any guide, Mary Daly had exceedingly poor mental hygiene.
The path between there and here seems dauntingly circuitous.
I in no way mean to make males feel unwelcome in this survey. All voices are welcome. However, I do feel that it is worthwhile to specifically encourage females to answer. Here is my reasoning below
Say 100 people respond to the survey. At only 8% female users, we are only going to have 8 female answers. If we want to know how females came to find the site, this isn't a very good sampling size.
I understand that this may upset some readers, and am sorry for this fact. I have set up a survey above, and if either the majority of respondents OR at least 15 people are upset by this, I will take down the phrase referring to gender in the OP.
In this case at least, that's definitely not true for me, and I don't have any evidence showing that it's true for others. So, why have you concluded that it's broadly true, or worth avoiding the possibility, for others in this case?
Honestly, that whole line of reasoning seems entirely silly given the background knowledge. I think it's widely known that women aren't represented here as much as most of us would like, and so we need to find a way to reach out to women, and so asking the existing women how they got here makes perfect sense.
Other than the relative usefulness of marginal male and female LWers, there's two other effects here that you have to weigh:
(Of course, these assumptions can't both be true, and are likely to both be substantially false.)
I don't think there's been an outreach effort for men or women, and I'm doubtful that men or women would respond significantly differently to outreach. My point is that we need to find a way to outreach to women given their small representation here, and asking the women that already comment (or lurk) on LW how they got here has potential for finding a way to outreach to women. E.g., women on LW typically come from X, then begin to focus on X.
Why does group X being under-represented somewhere automatically warrant efforts to increase their representation?
I don't think a group being underrepresented automatically warrants effort. It's trivial that there are cases where that might result in a worse outcome. However, like I implied in a previous comment in this thread, it's more to do with wanting more women in this community. Why? This community predominantly white, male, and nerd-like, and that makes it easily ignored by outsiders. I think if one of goals of LessWrong is to spread rationality, it's in its interest to diversify its culture and population.
This thread's tl;dr:
You are proposing we expend effort in order to provide gain. Have you asked yourself the following questions:
If not, is there any evidence this is a cost effective strategy for "not being ignored"?
So white nerd-like males tend to generally get ignored in Western society? I haven't seen much difference in the amount of attention female nerds tend to get (except among male nerds). Mostly female groups of nerds or subcultures don't seem to attract even male nerd attention. Groups of non-white nerds also don't seem to do better attention wise. Otakus aren't taken seriously in Japan. Weaboos even less.
Mayybe, just maybe, could it perhaps be the nerd-like thing? Might we be better off working on that?
Actually now that I think of it combating nerd-like behaviour is probably one of the easier ways to make LessWrong less white and less male (if for some reason you want to do that - since some white people are perfectly ok human beings, some of my best friends are white males). For example it can be coherently argued that in the US at least nerd culture is basically hyperwhite culture.
I'll happily answer your question if you engage in some basic reciprocity by answering my question to you.
Ah, sorry I see which post you mean. I missed that one.
I'm pretty sure they would.
I didn't take it as affirmative action as much as proper statistical sampling.
Why in the world do you expect a forum dedicated to refining the art of human rationality to conform to such sampling? Unless you haven't noticed this is a rather niche interest associated with even more neiche memes.
And may I ask what exactly are the benefits of such sampling? Has it been demonstrated, in any endeavour whatsoever, that the efforts expended on it give greater returns in terms of achieving stated goals than other options?
Sounds like a silly rationalization for a soft-headed "diversity" applause light.
Daenerys has said that the poll has so far gotten a response of 13% female, compared to 8% in the Less Wrong survey a few months ago. I also think it's unlikely that the proportion of female members has grown by more than 50% in the last four months.
You mean the poll that specifically asked female posters to participate? From a set of people that already read LessWrong.
Yes. Daenerys is trying to find out how people who're on Less Wrong came to be here, particularly female members, and since we have considerably fewer female members, it's harder to get a significant sampling. She made a particular push for female members to participate, and it seems to have worked. So what is it that you're objecting to?
Ah I see, I thought we where talking about the general desirability of making LW representative of something or other (college educated people, the global population, France, hypothetical perfect society, ect.) not this particular drive to get data from LessWrong users who are female.
Sorry for the misunderstanding!
Well, Daenerys has expressed an interest in getting more female participation in Less Wrong. Whether or not we should expect proportional representation on this site, I don't think it's particularly contentious that we could be attracting more, and I do think our demographic homogeneity is a meaningful status concern.
Every action has opportunity costs, but given that we have members who're interested in bringing in more female members, I think that by doing so they will probably be doing more for the community than they would otherwise be doing.
This is an excellent point and I have no problem at all with such added activity.
However as soon as they start changing norms or trying to convince other existing LessWrong users to change their behaviour, a cost-benefit analysis needs to be done. If they decline to provide it, or if I am unconvinced I simply will not conform to the new norms (and other users are of course free to vote on my conduct).