Good points! I also find it difficult to balance niceness with usefulness in textual comments.

One thing that may be on some folks' mind is that expressions of appreciation that don't also add something empirical or logical to the discussion are not likely to themselves be appreciated. If you post something I appreciate, and I comment to say merely "I'm glad you posted that!" I would expect that hardly anybody but you would be glad that I posted that.

I suppose that I could send a private message instead, but I would feel a little bit creepy sending a private message of appreciation to someone I don't know. I think I'd be more reluctant to send one to someone I thought of as a woman than someone I thought of as a man, too. (I don't endorse that behavior, but I suspect I have it.)

I wonder if the existence of voting as a way of expressing "mere" approval or disapproval disproportionately affects expressions of approval. Downvoting as an expression of mere disagreement is somewhat frowned upon; so do people upvote to agree and comment to disagree?

I worry about seeking to institute niceness as a terminal rather than instrumental value.

Rest assured we are in agreement about this. But I don't think a comment has to directly serve my terminal values to be worth upvoting.

Personally I feel quite strongly that 'niceness' is way too vague a concept to in any way promote, no matter the social context.

I'd like to talk instead about the value of comments that are specific, positive (+ hopefully warm, without gushing), and cooperative. In short, creating a norm of definite, positive, 'working together to work out what's true' attitudes. I think it is fine to make comments that only express approval, as long as it is approval of a specific behaviour / characteristics and not blanket 'good job'. These kinds of specific comments help people evaluate themselves and encourage them to continue doing what works.

LessWrong is not a debate club -- we're trying to approach the truth, not merely win the argument. That means that things which keep us working together on that are a net win, providing they do not obscure the truth.

I've posted a lot of messy examples all over this thread, but I think I've finally gathered my thinking now.

I would like to make a simple case that niceness clarifies communication. This is because not all disagreements are perfectly rational and sometimes contain defensiveness and other stuff that is difficult to filter out. Furthermore, even disagreements that are balanced and rational often fail to engage the original comment, and thus they come off as dismissive -- therefore, they unintentionally communicate "I don't respect you" or "I don't like you." Therefore, if it is difficult to predict whether your comment will unintentionally communicate "I don't like" you to the other person, then adding "but nevertheless I still like you" into what you said in some socially accepted way does increase the likelihood that what you wrote is perceived as what you meant to write.

Sometimes, this can be as small as a smiley. Or an exclamation mark. It doesn't have to be a crazy stream of niceties and smalltalk and hugs that them mundanes engage in on a daily basis in conversations of no substances because they're not cool like we are.

If one comes to LW for refined insights, they want to see insights and counterarguments, and posts and comments that are nice but not insightful are not particularly useful.

Signal to noise.

A positive affirmation has almost no generalized information content useful for the reader. For people looking to exchange useful information on the internet, it will act as noise that needs to be filtered to get to the useful stuff.

Good point!

A discussion board seems to me like a very strange place to have that kind of rigorous discussion. It seems like it belongs in a wiki (or similar) where only the talk/discussion page has historical arguments, counterarguments, and contextual comments, but the main article is just the finished argument. I find it hard to follow a discussion thread where individual portions of an argument appear in different comments (sometimes entirely different articles) with little or no context. Perhaps I am misinterpreting the degree to which you think extraneous comments should be excluded. Or perhaps there is too little re-posting of improved arguments once the discussion has finished. Or too little use of the existing wiki.

The best example I can think of is the metamath.org proof explorer. It's composed mostly of rigorous derivations of theorems that (conveniently for mathematical arguments) can be checked for correctness by a computer, but with clarifying comments where necessary and a history of abandoned theorems and definitions with explanations.

The numbers ("95%", "50%" in your example) are good to illustrate the differences. But sometimes hard to obtain.

Indeed, which is why I made them up! :P

Problem is I can't even provide a good estimate for myself.

I can think of one time when this happened to me and was annoying, about 2 months ago. Every other time that I can remember when someone has contradicted one of my self-assessments, I've responded positively, because I enjoy getting feedback about myself.

I am of two minds about a taboo on gender issues. On the one hand, it seems tiresome and ineffectual to try and fix other people's mistaken conclusions on empirical questions if they hold them for political reasons. If someone thinks that the height distributions for men and women are equal because that's what they feel is the morally correct answer, then it seems unlikely that showing them the evidence will change their mind. They could have found it themselves if they had been interested, and so discussing it on-site is likely going to be a waste of the time of everyone involved. (For example, I wrote a long takedown of the piece you mentioned, which I've deleted and relegated to a few sentences at the end of this comment.)

But on the other hand, part of the reason why the politics taboo is helpful is because it extends into other parts of life. If you're an Apolitical Alan, you can be happier and focus your attention on more important things. One of the things that excited me when I first came to LW was that here was a bunch of fun things to think and talk about with a bunch of clever people, and those things were more exciting and useful than politics. If the politics taboo is just a "let's not talk about this at the dinner table, because it will interfere with our digestion," that's very different from a "politics is a suboptimal subject to spend your time and energy on. Here are some things you might prefer, and if you insist on continuing to talk about politics, do it elsewhere."

And so if we have a gender taboo, I would much rather it be a "your opinion on gender politics really doesn't matter, and to the extent you have one, you should be curious rather than idealistic" than a "let's not talk about gender politics because it might upset X." The first is dissolving politics; the second is surrendering to X.

This is an interesting current discussion of that subject.

Her claim that the biggest problem with evo psych is that it matches stereotypes doesn't seem very empirical. Notice that none of the examples that she gives in the meat of her article directly tie into her primary point that smashing stereotypes is desirable for science. Yes, lots of science is bad, psychology is worse than average, and evolutionary psychology is probably worse than psychology's average. But the primary substance of her claim should have been about the epistemic role that stereotypes should play as evidence. If some thing is true on average (say, men being taller), we should assign higher probability to the popular stereotype being that men are taller than to the popular stereotype being that men are shorter. Indeed, we find that stereotypes are mostly accurate, as outlined in this book.

it would taboo discussing some problems with the sequences which a lot of LWers take as background material.

Do you mean the failed utopia? Otherwise, I've read all the Sequences, and off hand I can't think of any other cases where they go much into gender. It's my recollection that you could get at least as much out of the sequences while ignoring evo psyc as you could if you ignore quantum, which a great many people do.

I currently do participate in politics discussions on LW and would endorse (and comply with) a return to the politics taboo.

If you don't want politics on LW, why do you discuss in on LW? And why isn't it sufficient for you, to just stop reading the politics thread?

I was once told that someone would upvote me iff I got rid of the smiley in my comment. (or perhaps it was an "lol")

Oddly, I've been trying to break exactly that habit in real life -- too many people seize on it as surrendering all points under discussion, and then respond to further argument like you're shooting from a white flag. The reaction is something along the lines of: "What the hell is your problem? You just said I was right!"

LW seems too sane for that, thankfully.

Thank you for speaking up.

Yes, I have been lurking for a similar amount of time, but I still am very reluctant to make comments or posts. I think the reason for me is that I am unsure of my rationality skills, and don't like feeling the status lowering that would come from potential comments criticizing or correct me.

Yes, this is a problem with myself, but yes, more friendliness would make it easier for me to comment.

It is- I've been on here for ~2 years (lurking, then signed up) and often refrain from commenting,

I believe that's more-or-less the desired behavior for newbies.

He probably did find it annoying, though I can't imagine that comment working the way you intended. His main justification for "biting the bullet" is going to be that biases could hinder a useful analysis. In this case, useful analysis is the thing that lets a person pause and think "this person isn't just against me., he's trying to tell me something". Since you didn't provide a useful analysis of why he didn't actually believe that, you managed to annoy him without actually demonstrating that annoyance is a valid response.

The disregard of annoyance as a valid response can be attributed to people at LW being encouraged to ignore their own emotions in situations like above, based on the idea that most misunderstandings are based on emotional biases that cloud proper thinking.

Actually, it was helpful. Rereading my comment I noticed it sounds like I'm trying to say that on the whole the boyfriends' behavior is positive; whereas, I meant to imply that it's mostly negative, but occasionally has redeeming features.

I annoy my partner with this sort of thing regularly. Perhaps I should stop. On the other hand, there have been several times in my life when other people (therapists, relatives, friends) more accurately assessed my behavior than I did at the time. Just because this behavior is annoying doesn't mean that the person doing it is incorrect. I don't buy the "How could you possibly know me better than I know myself" argument.

I don't think I'd be close to how successful I am with Alicorn-style luminosity without that sort of outside input

This nicely dovetails with Alicorn's luminosity origin story: people in her life refused to believe claims about her own mental states, and this experience was so intolerable that she resolved to become an obvious expert on mental states. Now the circle is... complete?

That's dismissive of their complaints without actually addressing anything. Do you think the complaints are wrong?

The statements posted above were solicited by a third party, somebody who asked for candid responses,

Yes, but it was understood that the responses candor was not directed at the solicitor.

I understand that you're probably just making a light-hearted throwaway comment.

Actually I had a serious point, that the statement constituted a tacit admission of the importance of candor to a rational discussion. If the above sentence was your attempt at a disclaimer, it back-fired horribly.

Upvoted for agreement despite the last sentence.

How do you reconcile this view with the way questions of tone have become entangled with gender issues in the very thread?

When the difference IS the topic, that tends to amplify the relevance of the differences.

My default is to assume that men and women are pretty similar.

How do you reconcile this view with the way questions of tone have become entangled with gender issues in the very thread?

I was surprised at how strongly some people (probably mostly women) are uncomfortable with the tone here, so I have a lot to update.

I don't like emoticons much-- I don't hate people who use them, but I use emoticons very rarely, and I'm not comfortable with them. I still find it hard to believe that if people do something a lot, there's a reasonable chance (if they aren't being paid) that they like it a lot, even though I can't imagine liking whatever it is.

I don't know what proportion of people are apt to interpret lack of overt friendliness as dislike, nor what the gender split is.

In the spirit of exploration, I took a look at Ravelry, a major knitting and crocheting blog. I haven't found major discussions there yet. I'm interested in examples of blogs with different emotional tones/courtesy rules/gender balances.

Now that I think about it, blogs that are mostly women may be more likely to have overt statements of strong friendship and support. I believe that sort of effusiveness is partly cultural-- wasn't more common for both men and women at least from the colonial era (US) to the Victorian era?

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.

It was also an extremely straightforward application of Bayes's theorem.

That depends on how much you demand of your priors, and low quality priors is something that makes me nervous about Bayes.

For this particular case, there's no examination of how much variance on the high side people get on tests. In particular, it seems very unlikely that people will get scores much above their baseline on tests about any sophisticated subject, though various factors (illness and other distractions) could drive their scores below their baseline.

What's VHF Utilitarianism? Is there any utilitarian cost to some capable people giving up because they believe rightly that their accomplishments will be discounted?

I'm not sure how much anyone has been convinced that women have actual points of view

Where has anyone claimed they don't? At least beyond the general rejection of qualia?

My language may have been hyperbolic and/or vague. I was thinking of "creepiness = low status" which sounds to me like "it's so unfair that women don't want to spend time with men they're uncomfortable around". In this case, I was thinking "lack of point of view", but "preferences are irrelevant" might be more accurate.

The problem is that the concept of "fairness" you are using there is incompatible with VHM-utilitarianism. (If somebody disagrees with this, please describe what the term in one's utility function corresponding to fairness would look like.)

People care about fairness, and get negative utility from feeling like they are being treated unfairly.

Sorry, but no. I was hoping that someone with a better memory and/or better search skills would be able to find the links.

I don't think I've seen that on LW, but I also haven't looked for it.

The version of the argument I'm familiar with boils down to 'regression to the mean.' Because tests provide imperfect estimates of the true ability, our final posterior is a combination of the prior (i.e. population ability distribution) and the new evidence.

Suppose someone scores 600 on a test whose mean is 500, and the test scores and underlying ability are normally distributed. Our prior belief that someone's true ability is 590 is higher than our prior belief that their true ability is 600, which is higher than our prior belief that their true ability is 610, because the normal distribution is decreasing as you move away from the mean. If the test was off by 10, then it's more likely to overestimate than underestimate. That is, our posterior is that it's more likely that their real ability is 590 than 610. (Assuming it's as easy to be positively lucky as negatively lucky, which is questionable.)

The same happens in the reverse direction: abnormally low scores are more likely to underestimate than overestimate the true ability (again, assuming it's equally easy for luck to push up and down). Depending on the precision of the test, the end effect is probably small, but the size of the effect increases the more extreme the results are.

On math scores in particular, both the male mean and the male standard deviation are higher than the female mean and female standard deviation. The difference in standard deviations is discussed much less than the difference in means, but it turns out to be very important when calculating this effect. Thus, the chance that a female got an 800 on the Math SAT due to luck is higher than the chance that a male got an 800 on the Math SAT due to luck. Of course, the true ability necessary to get an 800 by luck is rather high, but could still be below some meaningful cutoff, and like Nancy points out, getting more evidence should make the posterior better reflect the true ability.