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GabrielDuquette comments on [Poll] Method of Recruitment - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (93)
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"?
Yes, for example, if we find that many female LW converts come from a My Little Pony forum, then I wouldn't mind some spending time talking about rationality and how perhaps the characters in the show relate to it (that's what I've heard anyway). I might spend time doing that, instead of reading articles from google reader.
Or, if we find that many of the converts come from HPMoR, I might try recommending it to fans of Harry Potter that I know. And so on.
The costs seem trivial.
We are typing words on the internet. All costs are trivial. Except the most important one, how smart people spend their time matters a lot.
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?
I see your point now, and I think might agree. Although, there are different more widely accepted versions of nerd culture (I think someone like Jonah Lehrer exemplifies that more acceptable culture), while the other versions are seen as populated by hopeless losers (e.g., the typical trekkie that's laughed at in sitcoms). So, if you were to fight against LW nerd culture, I think you could keep a lot of it out in the open. You'd have to treat your love of Star Trek, for example, as sort of a guilty pleasure and laugh it off. And you could never mention that you like anime unless it's by Miyazaki. But you could profess your love of books, science, and philosophy while gaining status for doing so.
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 don't have anything against nerd culture or white males; I'm all of the above. I'm also not arguing that we should dissuade or combat whiteness, maleness, or nerdliness.
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.