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I currently do participate in politics discussions on LW and would endorse (and comply with) a return to the politics taboo.
Gender may be somewhat more difficult given that a few of the recent discussions have highlighted gender-essentialism problems in the sequences, which are unlikely to change. The connection between gender essentialism and the more pop-psych, status-quo-justifying emanations of evolutionary psychology is also hard to break. (This is an interesting current discussion of that subject.) So I don't think I can endorse tabooing gender issues, since it would taboo discussing some problems with the sequences which a lot of LWers take as background material.
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.
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.
Technically, if we had a "taboo on gender issues", then even this article would not be allowed.
Which would be a pity. I like having information I would have problems getting otherwise, even if I don't know how to act on that information. I agree with descriptions of the problems. I just disagree with typical solutions, which seem to involve one-sided taboos (e.g. linking to PUA articles or speaking about differences between men and women is taboo, because that's political, but linking to non-radical feminist articles or asserting that there are no differences is OK, because that's, uhm, a consensus of some people).
Thing is, given the gender stuff in the sequences previously mentioned, it seems to me that communications intended to say the former would be likely to come across as "let's not talk about gender politics — and therefore, Eliezer's stuff about verthandi, boreana, catgirls, and the like, and various folks' side comments on ev.psych, are all allowed to stand unquestioned."
Eh? That seems rather unrelated.
I think that gender is on topic when discussing fun theory, self-modification, and CEV, in ways that politics are on topic when discussing those things. I do agree that it might be worthwhile to try and rewrite articles that are problematic; the last I heard, the sequences were being edited to become a book, and that seems like a good time to attempt those changes.
Is good science more likely to match or smash stereotypes? If you believe that stereotypes are Bayesian evidence for the ground truth, then good science is more likely to match stereotypes, and thus, science that smashes stereotypes is less likely to be good science. Now, this is still just Bayesian evidence, and enough studies that are done well can outweigh the hastily-made impressions of the public. The neat thing about this is that we can quantify the amount that we should believe in stereotypes; the linked article suggests anti-believing in stereotypes, without explicit justification as to why.
When someone encourages science to smash stereotypes, they need to be clear what methodological principle they have in mind. Without that, it reads like a political rallying cry, supplemented with ammunition used to kill enemy soldiers, rather than a serious suggestion by an empiricist.
For example, consider this study, and its rapid promotion by feminists. It was a single study, which was sprinkled with warnings that a single study doesn't prove anything, and that this was, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the only time this result had ever been observed, despite widespread experimentation. Glancing at it briefly, I found several components of their results that looked odd, and warranted investigation.
Separating what one wants to be true and what one believes to be true is a very important rationality skill, which should be applied to gender just as much to the rest of life.
Depends on what you mean by "stereotype".
If everyone says that Welsh corgis weigh less than one ton, that is good evidence that they do weigh less than one ton.
However, if a group of loud Greens says that Blues are whiny, I am not so sure that this is good evidence that Blues are whiny. I think it is more likely to be something other than evidence — for instance, a rhetorical tactic to encourage Greens to steal Blues' stuff and discourage Blues from complaining about it.
I expect there to be plenty of low-quality motivated search. That is not surprising. I also expect that if Greens hold a stereotype about the lived experience of Blues that is contrary to Blues' reports of their own lived experience, the Greens' stereotype is screened off as evidence by the Blues' experience.
That ... really doesn't follow.
Suppose G is a binary variable of the ground truth, S is a binary variable of the stereotype, and E is a binary variable of the result of an experiment.
If stereotypes are Bayesian evidence for the ground truth, that means P(S|G)>P(S|~G) and P(~S|G)<P(~S|~G). By "good" science, I mean science that is Bayesian evidence for the ground truth, so P(E|G)>P(E|~G) and P(~E|G)<P(~E|~G). Thus, for most distributions we get P(E|S)>=P(E|~S), and P(~E|S)<=P(~E|~S). (If you don't see why this is, I recommend opening up a spreadsheet, generating some binary distributions which are good evidence, and then working out the probabilities through Bayes.)
It's not guaranteed to be the case, because stereotypes and the results of experiments are probably not independent once we condition on the ground truth. The important thing about using this as a criticism is noting that stereotypes prevalent in academia and stereotypes prevalent in the general population may be rather different. Looking at the suggested results in the linked article, you'll note it's saying "hey, you should conform to my stereotypes, even when the ground truth is probably the other way" under the guise of "smash stereotypes."
Could you maybe give some examples for those of us who haven't read it? "stereotypes are mostly accurate" could mean a lot of things, from the trivially false to the trivially true.
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?
LW with no politics talk > LW with diverse political views expressed > LW with only Moldbuggery expressed.
It's a coordination problem. I'm willing to cooperate if the other folks do.
So that you express your views so that the Moldbuggers don't have the field to themselves?
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.
For clarity, could you give some examples of this?