I have a few links that just keep giving on two prevalent and contrasting forms of discussion, often labeled as male/female styles, starting from a LW discussion that brought them up.

The comments about tone, friendliness, sharing yourself, etc., from Submitter B are what I would expect of people with the "female" mode in a forum dominated by the "male" mode.

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/fvf/link_two_modes_of_discours

http://alastairadversaria.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/of-triggering-and-the-triggered-part-4/

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/12/intellectual-discourse-taking.html

Apparently, RationalWiki scores surprisingly well on friendliness to women compared to large chunks of the skepticsphere of late. I was both surprised and pleased, and somewhat disconcerted that the bar was quite so low. Here's an excerpt from the post that says that (written by a female regular contributor, and RWF board member - two women on the board out of six):

Go to any site that hosts modern intellectual discussions, especially around the sciences, atheism, skepticism, and freethought, and one topic that will be shared across all of them is “the role of women at our site”.

...

First of all, you have to want women’s participation, and accept that it’s a good thing to have various minority voices on your site. Having decided that, you have to encourage it by having a variety of topics that might interest or appeal to women specifically, as well as the generic ones that appeal to everyone, regardless of gender. You have to walk the walk, and listen to what women are saying: What topics matter to some or most women in your field? What questions are unique to the women of/in your field? What articles have been written by women at your site, on any topic, and how can you highlight them? What off-site discussions are happening? Are women involved? Are they encouraged to talk?

And a big one — what is your actual attitude as represented in your sitespace? Is it easy to find moments where women’s opinions have been dismissed? Does the site allow anyone to say anything at any time about women? Are the conversations bully-based (that is, to the extent that it’s true that women “give up” earlier than men, do the men win when there are disagreements, just ’cause they are louder, meaner, and more stubborn)? Are lots of the participants telling those who speak abusively to back down or get out? And if fights (all too common around mansplaining-land) do break out, how does the community at large, handle them?

A lot of guys I've dated in the last year have made the same creepy mistake. I think this is likely to be relevant because they're so much like LW members (most of them are programmers, their personalities are very similar and one of them had even signed up for cryo), and because I've seen some hints of this behavior on the discussions. I don't talk enough about myself here to actually bring out this "creepy" behavior (anticipation of that behavior is inhibiting me as well as not wanting to get too personal in public) so this could give you an insight that might not be possible if I spoke strictly of my experiences on LessWrong.

The mistake goes like this: I'd say something about myself. They'd disagree with me.

For a specific example, I was asked whether I was more of a thinker or feeler and I said I was pretty balanced. He retorted that I was more of a thinker. When I persist in these situations, they actually argue with me. I am the one who has spent millions of minutes in this mind, able to directly experience what's going on inside of it. They have spent, at this point, maybe a few hundred minutes observing it from the outside, yet they act like they're experts. If they said they didn't understand, or even that they didn't believe me, that would be workable. But they try to convince me I'm wrong about myself. I find this deeply disturbing and it's completely dysfunctional. There's no way a person will ever get to know me if he won't even listen to what I say about myself. Having to argue with a person over who I am is intolerable.

This may well be me overgeneralizing from the example, but that sounds to me like they saw you as choosing the less prestigious option, and were essentially trying to compliment you (maybe sincerely, maybe out of affection or whatever.) At least, that's how I would model myself saying something like that.

I've thought about this a lot trying to figure out what they're trying to do. It's never going to be a sexy "negative hit" to argue with me about who I am. Disagreeing with me about myself can't possibly count as showing off their incredible ability to see into me because they're doing the exact opposite: being willfully ignorant. Maybe they have such a need to box me into a category that they insist on doing so immediately.

I find all these "possibilities" quite insulting and, frankly, objectifying of men in the worst sense. We're not all PUA robots.

It's good to hear these complaints. I'm not sure if they'll stop soon, though. Most of the objectionable gender-related material is collecting dust deep in the LW archives... it feels like we've gotten better since then to me, probably as a result of complaints like these, but that stuff is going to be an ongoing karma leak as people stumble across it. (Maybe link to the LW Women series at the top and make it clear that it's there for historical purposes only? Or link to the series from here or the sequences page or something? If we aren't linking to it at all, it may not be found by future readers.)

One of the anonymous women complains about the behavior of men in male-dominated groups, and says that LW reminds her of those male-dominated groups. Well, I don't think I've seen much of what she's worried about in actual LW meetups--people have always struck me as fairly warm and friendly, if a bit socially awkward. It's possible that LW would get these sort of complaints even if we actually fix all the major problems with male-dominated groups, and just continued to look like a male-dominated group in other ways.

I've noticed that I sometimes complain to myself internally about "things that women do", but when I try to think of specific cases where specific women I know did the thing I'm complaining internally about, I don't really come up with anything. In the same way, some of the complaints here seem to me to be about things that happen rarely or not at all on LW. For example, off the top of my head I can't recall a reading single sneery comment about unattractive women (and I also never observed them getting ignored at meetups, FWIW, and I for one would certainly not want to see that happen). But maybe my perception is skewed--I'd appreciate being corrected if that's the case.

I'm somewhat in favor of cutting out gender discussions altogether. It's apparently pretty easy for me to accidentally offend women when I say stuff about gender, and posting on a public forum seems like an expensive way to improve my model. I'm ambivalent about posting this comment, for instance, because it seems likely that someone will find a way to be offended by it in a way that I didn't expect, and I don't particularly want to offend anyone :(

It feels like people are ten thousand times more likely to point out my flaws than to appreciate something I said. Also, there's >next to no emotional relating to one another.

I'm sorry, that sucks. I think you're right and hope this changes. I don't post very often, but when I do in the future, I'll be more aware of this.

Schelling point for metacontrarian replies of the sort I currently don't feel like making but probably need to be made despite bad signalling.

A bit of me wishes that the "no mindkiller topics" rule was enforced more strictly, and that we didn't discuss sex/gender issues ... We already rarely discuss politics, so would it be terrible to also discuss sex/gender issues as little as possible?

I agree - I think the weakening of the taboos against discussing politics and gender has been a seriously bad thing. The arguments used to establish these taboos are in retrospect unsatisfying (for example, the explicit argument used for the politics taboo did not support nearly as strong a taboo as we in practice actually had), so people can easily come up with plausible accounts of how we can avoid the ill the taboo prevented without needing the full force of the taboo. However, I think these accounts are poorly motivated; there are deeper reasons against discussing the mindkillers. Whilst a particular style of conversation might avoid the particular danger that attention was brought to, the underlying issue is still there, so other damage will be wrought instead.

I don't see much way to enforce this though, as it's a tragedy of the commons. My best guess is to persuade enough people to just reflexively downvote anything to do with object-level politics or gender (including posts masquerading as meta-level).

If I try to tell by the way people are acting, I'm half convinced that most of the people here think I'm a moron.

Perhaps comments suggest this (though I admit I generally find LW a very freindly place, so maybe we just read comments in a different mental tone of voice), but I think it's clear this is not true of karma. If your comments are being upvoted then, at least by the origional states interpretation of karma, people "want more of" your comments.

In general, in fact, most comments are upvoted; only the very worst are downvoted. Indeed, it tends to be the freindly, jokey comments, rather than serious ones, that get upvoted the most. This encourages people to post more and more, as they get the positive reinforcement, but the money-illusion (karma-illusion?) means they don't realise the currency is being debased.

Thanks for posting this! I agree with Submitter B that LW can be cold and unfriendly and that this seems to be a general failure mode of the kind of people who post on LW. I think people feel like they shouldn't post a comment unless it either contains an insight or a counterargument to someone else's argument and that to counter this we should cultivate a norm of upvoting nice comments.

Warning- Submitters were told to not hold back for politeness. You are allowed to disagree, but these are candid comments; if you consider candidness impolite, I suggest you not read this post

I find this warning ironic given the nature of the complaints that are subsequently expressed.

The mistake goes like this:

I'd say something about myself.

They'd disagree with me.

I agree this can be annoying, on the other hand someone with an outside view can notice things about us that we ourselves might not. Remember, the fundamental attribution error goes both ways.

On Submitter A

You can expect that attractive people to get more attention from those attracted to them, including sexual attention, anywhere you go, including LW meetings.

I agree that sneering comments about those with low status, particularly status based on physical health and beauty, are unnecessary and harmful.

On male/female generalizations, just as a matter of language generalizations are generally taken as statistical generalizations, not as statements holding true for absolutely every member of the group.

I realize that's probably not so helpful, since there is no discernible difference between 51% and 99.999%. Wouldn't it be helpful if people tossed out a number to indicate an estimated sort rate of a generalization? Men are more X than women. Some kind of mutual relative entropy measure on their ranks? Area of the receiver operator curve? Jefrey's divergence! But I digress.

you don't convert people to rationality by talking about such emotive topics.

I don't think you hold the interest of people interested in rationality by saying "we like rationality, but we're not rational enough to discuss particular topics that happen to be ones you're likely to find important, so we taboo those topics".

I would like to second the "clamoring for demonstrating awesomeness" attitude. I've had a few

What is your subjective experience?

It is this.

Psh, that's because you are clearly rationalitying wrong. You should rationality like this.

exchanges. Sometimes the original question wasn't even about overcoming brainflaws! I would love to see people be more okay with others demonstrating flaws/vulnerability -- that's friendliness!

I think learning how to constructively criticise whilst signalling that one intends to constructively criticise a very worthy skill. If one knows how some thing critical, and perhaps other things not critical could be said more nicely, it would be to the benefit of all for one to share their knowledge or opinion of that tact.

I'm ok with the general emotional tone (lack of tone?) here. I think I read the style of discussion as "we're all here to be smart at each other, and we respect each other for being able to play".

However, the gender issues have been beyond tiresome. My default is to assume that men and women are pretty similar. LW has been the first place which has given me the impression that men and women are opposed groups. I still think they're pretty similar. The will to power is a shared trait even if it leads to conflict between opposed interests.

LW was the first place I've been where women caring about their own interests is viewed as a weird inimical trait which it's only reasonable to subvert, and I'm talking about PUA.

I wish I could find the link, but I remember telling someone he'd left women out of his utilitarian calculations. He took it well, but I wish it hadn't been my job to figure it out and find a polite way to say it.

Remember that motivational video Eliezer linked to? One of the lines toward the end was "If she puts you in the friend zone, put her in the rape zone." I can't imagine Eliezer saying that himself, and I expect he was only noticing and making use of the go for it and ignore your own pain slogans-- but I'm still shocked and angry that it's possible to not notice something like that. It's all a matter of who you identify with. Truth is truth, but I didn't want to find out that the culture had become that degraded.

And going around and around with HughRustik about PUA.... I think of him as polite and intelligent, and it took me a long time to realize that I kept saying that what I knew about PUA was what I'd read at LW, and he kept saying that it wasn't all like Roissy, who I kept saying I hadn't read. I grant that this is well within the normal range of human pigheadedness, and I'm sure I've done such myself because it can be hard to register that people hate what you love, but it was pretty grating to be on the receiving end of it.

There was that discussion of ignoring good test results from a member of a group if you already believe that they're bad at whatever was being tested. (They were referred to as blues, but it seemed to be a reference to women and math.) It was a case of only identifying with the gatekeeper. No thought about the unfairness or the possible loss of information. I think it finally occurred to someone to give a second test rather than just assuming it was a good day or good luck.

Unfortunately, I don't have an efficient way of finding these discussions I remember-- I'll grateful if anyone finds links, and then we can see how accurate my memories were.

All this being said, I think LW has also become Less Awful so far as gender issues are concerned. I'm not sure how much anyone has been convinced that women have actual points of view (partly my fault because I haven't been tracking individuals) since there are still the complaints about what one is not allowed to say.

FWIW, I am a man, but I too find the Less Wrong community to be emotionally detached and unfriendly. That's why I like it. If my beliefs are wrong, then it's critical that I discover this as soon as possible, and it's refreshing to know that at least some of the thoughts I post will be combed through by unfriendly people who are determined to tear them apart -- on an intellectual rather than emotional level.

Furthermore, if I told people, "I'm more of a thinker than a feeler" (or vice versa), and they consistently responded with, "no dude, you're definitely more of a feeler" (ditto), I'd consider this valuable information, and ask to see some evidence. I know how I personally see myself, but that's just one data point, and an unreliable one at that.

Edited to add:

I should clarify that I'm speaking purely for myself here -- and not for all men, all LWers, all male LWers, or anything of the sort.

We already rarely discuss politics, so would it be terrible to also discuss sex/gender issues as little as possible?

Discussing politics is not productive. The political opinions held by most people don't affect actual politics. Discussing politics would be a waste of time even if it wasn't mindkilling. I make a point of never reading local political news and not knowing anything about my country's politics, as a matter of epistemical hygiene.

Gender relations and understanding, on the other hand, are important in everyone's lives. I can't ignore gender like I do politics, and I wouldn't want to. On the contrary, I want to become rational and virtuous about gender.

So I very much want to have discussions about gender, unless the consensus is that our rationality is too weak and we can't discuss this subject without causing net harm (or net harm to women, etc).

From the complaints (and not just here and now) it seems obvious that there is a problem we really should solve.

This said, it seems to me that people are complaining about multiple things. I think they should be analyzed separately. Maybe not all of them are a problem, or maybe the same solution would not work for all of them. Even if they have similar patern "reading A makes person X unhappy", it is still not the same situation. (For a trivial example, some people are unhappy when they read about atheism. While we should not offend religious people unnecessarily, there is only so far we can go, and even then some people will remain offended.) Specifically, from the article and also this linked comment, women complain when men do the following:

• talk about "getting" "attractive women";
• make remarks about attractive/unattractive women;
• speak of women as symbols of male success or accessories for a successful male;
• talk about difficulty to deal with women;
• make claims about men and women having different innate abilities, especially without saying "on average";
• uncritically downvote anything feminist sounding, and upvote armchair ev-psych;
• are much more likely to point out one's flaws than to appreciate what one said;
• create an environment where warmth is scarce;
• focus on negative reinforcement;
• argue with one's self-description.

I see at least three different topics here (maybe more could be found in other articles and discussions) -- speaking of women as objects; unsupported or incorrect theories about differences between men and women; unfriendly environment -- and I believe each of them deserves to be discussed separately.

A friend of mine read this thread-- she has long experience as a Quaker, a religion where at least a lot of people do substantial work to figure out how to deal well with each other and get work done.

Unfortunately, she doesn't want to post here because she hates scoring systems. They make her feel like she's being graded. I'm seriously hoping that other rationality blogs with different structures and populations evolve.

Anyway, she made a couple of points that I haven't seen in the discussion-- the definition of niceness that she grew up with included gifts and mutual aid. She said that women talk/post differently when they're away from men-- directly and without emoticons. I haven't spent enough time in all-women groups to have an opinion about this.

There also seems to be quite a lot of knee-jerk up-voting of poorly researched armchair ev-psych.

Indeed, and I am sad to say that I have seen this even in the top-level posts and blog as well. I'm actually doing a write-up about evo-psych and why a rationalist community should maybe try to avoid it. I might post it to this forum if there's interest.

Why Our Kind can't Cooperate is relevant here. No one else has posted a link yet, so here it is. Anyone who hasn't read it should read it before getting involved in the discussion here, as it deals with what seems to be the very same issue.

So, apparently LessWrong feels unfriendly. This is something I've heard several times, so I'll accept it as correct. (I don't get that feeling myself, but I wouldn't expect to notice it anyway.) What are some Internet forums that don't feel unfriendly, and what do they do there that we don't do on LessWrong? Talk about ourselves and our lives - "small talk", in other words?