I'm a young female and like some other women in the comments, I'd like to say that I in general approve of high barriers to entry for a community like Less Wrong. Well, that might be too much of a simplification - I prefer optimal barriers of entry, and in the case of LW, I think it should be pretty high, and if that can be achieved purely psychologically, then that's great. But I think warmth/fun/kindness (which we're seeing a lot more of recently and which Eliezer always had to begin with IMO) isn't going to bring down that barrier enough to justify being cold just to keep up high standards. In short, I don't think there's a need to fear that we're becoming too nice, even though we are becoming way nicer and posts like LW_Women encourage us to be even more nice.

It is a good idea to have a screening process so that only people who would enjoy and contribute to the community eventually join it, and if it's self-selecting rather than explicit, all the better. And as sad as it might be, it is likely that the set of people who could genuinely help Less Wrong achieve its goals and become more effective is skewed male, and it's likely that the reasons for this can't be solved through social campaigns. Probably biology's a bitch as usual and higher male variance in IQ means that smart people are disproportionately male (it's a horrible tragedy that mentally impaired people are also disproportionately male).

That doesn't mean that the set of potential LWers has the same degree of gender skew as the set of actual LWers though - at a guess I'd say the percentage of women in physics, math, and CS, while low, is higher than the percentage of women here at LW. So we could and probably should be doing more not to put off the kind of women who could contribute meaningfully. But the way LW goes about attracting women shouldn't involve strict taboos on controversial topics or greater inclusiveness in general - it should be more targeted than that. After all, not-quite-as-insane-as-everywhere-else discussions about controversial topics are a big part of why we keep coming back here!

I know that when I first came to LW, I was considered "amusing", "immature", and "charming," which I probably was, since I was 15 at the time. I didn't comment for years afterward, and rarely comment now, since I rarely have much to contribute. But what put me off of LW for a while was not nastiness - I actually see very little of that, and very often see overt racism and sexism downvoted to oblivion. What put me off was massive walls of text. People digging through academic literature to prove a minor side point in a tangential discussion that spawned from an unrelated topic. People writing comments with corrections longer than the posts themselves. Throwaway jokes that required advanced mathematics to understand (at levels that women are less likely to reach, too). That's what put me off of LW, and that is probably what puts off most people who think to join, men or women. And I don't believe that's a bad thing. People are less likely to litter in a beautiful and pristine neighborhood.

That being said, even though diluting the group too much and reaching out too far is a bad idea, based on what I've read from the Overcoming Bias days, this community has improved a whole lot at being less nasty and shutting up about how to manipulate people into sex, and hasn't suffered nearly as much in terms of how thoughtful and intelligent the regular posters are. I'd buy that the average IQ has dropped since then, probably since the average age has also dropped - but even though we don't want a community with the same demographics as the general population, ten geniuses is also not much of a community. And if the community does start off being run by geniuses, the high standard of discourse combined with some judicious moderation should be enough to attract and retain only those who can meet that high standard. Being nasty to people on top of that is too much of an impediment and may keep the community too small, too insular, too stagnant.

While I would encourage civility at every turn, I don't think any amount of friendliness will ever completely remove the negative emotional jolt when pointed out you're wrong. Positive punishment* is important, and I'd rather preventively experience it in a safe place such as this (or in a relationship, for that matter), than in the real world.

I don't know of a more civil discussion forum than lesswrong, so from my perspective some people are setting the bar unrealistically high.

For some people the positive punishment seems to be associated with commenting in general instead of just being wrong. I wonder if anything can be done about that...

*I really wish the connotation was something else...

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.

I'd rather encourage everyone to do a better job interpreting "you're wrong for these reasons" as well-intentioned, potentially correct input, than encourage everyone to beat around the bush.

Seeing examples of deeply nested obviously emotional defensiveness (especially devolving into tit-for-tat time-wasting posturing) surely makes me feel "I'd like to avoid that!" (by not participating in general).

This can be avoided not only with less aggressive "you're wrong!" deliveries, but also with more receptive/honest/vulnerable listening to how you're maybe being wrong. High-status models of the latter are rare (for obvious reasons), and I'd like to see more. The former is fine too, as long as it doesn't cost all the readers more than it saves the one person being (maybe) corrected.

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.

Brief data point: I am female and I don't have a problem with the tone as such. I don't post much because I am put off by the high standards of thinking and argumentation required, but in general I approve of those standards being there and would hate to read the warm-fuzzy version of LW where bad/boring threads proliferate because people are worried about coming across as cold.

A semi-related point is that I like the general air of emotional detachment around here because in in the real world I often see expression of negative emotional reactions used as a relatively cheap form of manipulation, and I worry that encouraging open expression of emotions here (which is definitely a component of 'warmness' as I understand it) would cause a slippery slope effect where that kind of manipulation would become much more common.

Can we discuss how LW's lack-of-niceness relates to the topic of men-and-women? I feel a little confused, and this insanely long comment is my attempt to ferret out that confusion.

I expect that most people who come to LW for the first time probably find the community somewhat threatening. The karma system does make you feel like you're being judged, everyone seems extremely smart and meticulous about being right, and there's a whole lot of background knowledge to absorb before you even feel qualified to open your mouth. This is exactly what I experienced when I first came here, so I agree with the OP entirely. But I'm a male, and nothing about this seems to have anything to do with sex or gender. My response to this feeling was to read the sequences, read comments, and become knowledgeable enough (about both rationality and community norms) to participate. The OP doesn't seem to complain that the community is only cold towards women, so if there's a difference here it would seem to be at the level of how this coldness is perceived or reacted to (no, I'm not about to conclude that women are at fault for being overly sensitive).

The sort of obvious, stereotype-driven interpretation here is that women are more emotional than men, or more emotionally sensitive, and will be therefore find LW's coldness to be more off-putting than men will. I dunno if we're doing women a service or disservice by accepting this viewpoint... is it an interpretation that many feminists would approve? It seems to paint a relatively "frail and helpless, need to be protected" picture of women, which makes me think we can do better.

If we try to get more specific than just saying "emotional", Submitter B seems to be implying that women will in general need more positive feedback and "warmth" in order to feel welcome or encouraged when posting online. Or that women tend to be calibrated differently in determining what level of warmth/coldness should be interpreted as hostility. For instance, a comment that the average man would interpret as neutral, the average woman would interpret as slightly aggressive or unwelcoming. This seems at least like a less condescending interpretation than the previous one.

And shouldn't we expect self-selection effects to largely eclipse gender differences here? Reddit seems to be a predominantly male community (probably less so as time goes on and the site grows, but typical-male-bullshit still gets catapulted to the front page of the popular subs constantly). But Reddit doesn't strike me as cold at all. There's a strong sense of community identity, the comment threads are mostly just riffing off of the jokes of other commenters, and lots of warm-fuzzy "thanks for posting this!" and "you sir are a gentleman!" gets posted and upvoted all over. That last example is obviously ironic in this context, but at the same time it does demonstrate that coldness doesn't seem to be much related to maleness, which is the point I'm making

So I'm inclined to attribute LW's coldness not to it's embarrassingly male dominated demographic, but instead to some kind of apparent correlation with interest in x-rationality. To sketch another stereotype, analytical/smart/nerdy people will tend to be more cold and robotic, treating more as machines than as people, and having poor empathic skills.

It doesn't seem like a stretch to say that it will be predominantly "analytical" people who will find LW's subject matter and style of investigation interesting. So the question is how much truth there is to the stereotype that lack-of-warmth will tend to be part of the package.

I'm not sure how much to trust this stereotype. At best it's true as a rule-of-thumb with plenty of exceptions (people with great analytical minds and seemingly natural "people skills" certainly do exist). But if we run with it for a moment, doesn't it seem to screen off gender differences? That is, even if women do tend to lie further towards the "emotional" end of the emotional-analytic spectrum (again, I'm not arguing that this is even a real spectrum, just trying to hash out my confusion), this doesn't matter much because it's only the more analytical women who will give a damn about LW to begin with. The majority of men wouldn't find LW interesting for the same reason (if you think they would, I suspect you've spent too much time in this tiny corner of interest-space).

So one might naively expect that even women are more emotional than men, this difference will mostly have vanished when we shift to the groups "Men Who Like LW Stuff" and "Women Who Like LW Stuff". But apparently this isn't the case, since OP finds (and some commenters agree) that women who are on LW still tend to be more put off by the hostility. So I suppose we should conclude that the correlation between analytical-ness and empathic-shortcoming is bunk. Or possibly that the correlation between "finding LW interesting" and analytical-ness is bunk. But the Reddit example seems to show that the correlation between male-dominated-population and empathic-shortcoming is also bunk. So here I am confused how all this relates.

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

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 :(

I have suddenly acquired some sympathy for the 'keep it simple and blunt' contingent.

The transcript is incomplete, but has a fair amount about cordiality escalation and trying to decipher the possible meaning of the absence of a usual cordial signal. The audio includes a woman saying that she's apt to use an ellipsis rather than a period because she's concerned that a period is too blunt.

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.

Question: What is it exactly that is meant by "warmth" or "coldness?" I've heard those terms used to describe myself, I've heard them used to describe other people, but when my brain tries searching for an example, it comes up blank. Generally, I try to be specific. (<- Yes, that was a joke.)

I'm going to pre-emptively tap out from all discussions about gender of LW for a while (as I mostly used to do until a while ago) because I feel that, for a series of reasons, I'm unusually out of my depth when I participate in them.

(I'm so freakin' gender-blind that when last night I was in a flash mob against violence on women and I was the only male who actually danced and people pointed that out to me, I was like “Er... Was I? [looks around] Huh. I hoped there would be at least a couple more” and no I'm not making this up.)

After reading this post, I wondered if there was anything I could do to improve the local marketplace-of-ideas, such as trying to encourage more members by being more respectful of comments. Then I recalled that one of my standard rules-of-thumb is 'stay classy', which covers trying to use an appropriate amount of respect; so I then wondered if adding even further politeness would actually reduce the signal-to-noise ratio.

At present, I'm wondering if it's at all possible to figure out, to even a single deciban of evidence, how I should update, based on what's been posted... and trying to look at myself on a meta level, all that seems to have resulted is a mild strengthening of my commitment to the 'stay classy' benchmark.

Anyone care to tell me if I'm doing this wrong, and if so, how?

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.

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".

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).

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

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.