I would enjoy having a more friendly discussion environment, but I don't want to make it a duty. I mean, offenses are bad, but mere "lack of warmth" is normal, although it is nice to do better than this. Among men, this is often the normal mode of speech; among women it's usually otherwise... I think it would be nice to let everyone speak in their preferred voice. We should encourage men to display more warmth (and it would be an interesting topic on how to do it without feeling awkward), but not criticize them for failing to reach the level convenient for women.

I think it would be useful for someone who finds niceness natural to do a post how the average LW can build affordance for being nice, preferably in a way that doesn't add to much noise. I also think it would be good if people were motivated to use some of these affordances due to genuine niceness/to help build the community.

On the other hand I strongly agree that having a "nice" voice should not be even quasi-required. Fake/forced niceness often feels phony in an unpleasant way, furthermore forcing people to change their conversational voice seems like making them jump though hoops. Also, I suspect that people who have a naturally nice voice underestimate how hard it is for people who don't have a naturally nice voice to talk nicely, even when they want to (this is based on super-high priors for this general form of fail happening any time the opportunity presents it self).

I originally voted in favor because it sounded like an interesting experiment, but there's a difficulty, not just with people who don't think of themselves as male or female, but with people who don't want to reveal their gender.

I would vote for “Interesting idea”, if it was an option (i.e., ‘let's try this for a while and see how it goes, and switch back if it doesn't go well’).

Is there a good solution which would not ignore either of these aspects? In my opinion, there is: having both discussions about "getting women" and "getting men" on the website. And having them only in articles on a given topic, not randomly anywhere else. But even if this would be acceptable to others (which I doubt), the problem remains how to get from here to there.

This does not strike me as a good solution; assuming each type of discussion is valuable to members of the gender engaged in it, but offensive to members of the gender under discussion, then this provides men and women both with a topic of discussion, but also a source of offense.

I think those assumptions are more favorable to the proposition than the reality is though. Women on Less Wrong could have been writing articles on "getting men" all along, but haven't, and I don't think that they're likely to start because of an official policy statement that "this is allowed." It always has been. This is a behavior that some women engage in, but I doubt it's a significant enticement to the women who're actually members here, or would want to be. So if that's the case then the assumption that both men and women are getting something valuable in exchange for the source of offense wouldn't hold. We already know that the level of offense many prospective female members are facing is considerable; if we as a community are going to keep that source of offense, and offer them something in exchange, it would have to be something they really want.

I think it's also worth noting that we don't have many typical heterosexual men here; the member base of Less Wrong is overwhelmingly atypical. I don't know how many are atypical in this particular respect, but I can attest that I personally don't talk about "getting women," not because I'm observing a taboo, but because it makes me uncomfortable. I'd like a satisfying relationship, but treating finding a partner like an acquisition of goods feels distasteful.

Is the tendency of the sort of men who treat "getting women" as an inalienable part of their utility function something innate and unalterable? I don't know, it feels implausible to me given how hard it is for me to personally relate to it. But given that this is a community specifically focused on adjusting our own cognitive biases, it seems to me that we should give serious consideration to the perspective of treating it as an outlook in need of adjustment.

After two days, a discussion will die down to the point where it barely gets any responses. If you're going to make it ladies only, make it ladies only permanently. Make an identical male only counterpart. That would solve the problem "Where will the men post?" and give you a nice undiluted control for your observations about the women. It will also help keep things organized (Otherwise can you imagine the overhead in going through the thread trying to figure out who was male and who was female, and reading each time stamp to determine who was who? It's much much easier to make two threads.) If women know that men will reply to their comments later, this may inhibit them from saying certain things the same way that it will inhibit them if men are there right away. If they know the men are never supposed to reply to that comment, that would help maximize the women's comfort.

In some male-dominated spaces, there's a weird chivalry dynamic where I get attention for being a reasonably attractive woman but not a lot of cred for ideas, etc. I appreciate that at Less Wrong meetups, I feel my ideas are judged as ideas and not as "girl ideas which men must be polite about."

Note: Women can only see how other women voted, and men can only see how other men voted.

we don't have enough high-status men to enforce sensible standards on it

I dunno if "enforcement" is the most compassionate approach. Personally, the most effective way I've found to counter negative attitudes towards women is to have positive social and romantic interactions with them... applying self-control can prevent me from expressing my resentment, but it doesn't seem to fix the resentment itself. Maybe we could have compassion for sexually inexperienced guys (being a male virgin can really suck, although I suspect men contribute to this fact more than women do) and try to help them overcome their problem (e.g. this has been really useful for me).

I'm nonbinary (that is, I do not identify with either gender), and I feel that my social experience is somewhat in-between that of most men and that of most women. Would it be acceptable for me to vote on these questions, or would that distort the data?

Do you behave differently in mixed groups compared to male only groups?

I voted “no”, but “ADBOC”/“it depends” would be more accurate. The male-only groups I'm likely to be found in are usually unusual in ways other than the absence of women, and for any two groups A and B such that A is a subset of B, A doesn't contain women, and I'm non-negligibly likely to be in either of them, there's no substantial difference between the way I behave in A and the way I behave in B.

(Assuming we have sensible community norms like "mentally flip the genders in your post before you post to check this is normal objectifying rather than super-offensive objectifying", which I think we can do.)

Most feminists believe that the objectification of women is harmful not merely because it is objectification per se, but because is embedded in/contributes to a culture in which objectification is heavily asymmetric between genders, both in its frequency and in its impact. If this is right, then mentally flipping genders in a post isn't a reliable guide to whether the objectification in that post is a problem.

The fact that some women complain, is not a big evidence per se. Some men complain, too. The evidence is that the complaining seems coherent, is persistent, and there are no women saying: "actually, I think it is completely the other way."

Also, I would agree that it is important to maximize the number of rationalists, regardless of their demographics. But I would not be surprised if a small change of rules could make this site more attractive for many women, and still attractive enough for 95% of the men which are currently here. On the other hand I also would not be surprised if we will never have enough rational women here (or anywhere else), regardless of what we will do. Sorry, my model simply does not contain the information about what kind of a website can be best for rational women (with emphasis on both of these words). To be fair, before LW I also did not know what kind of a website would be best for rational men; I could not imagine rationality surviving in a group of more than five people. More data need to be gathered by an experiment.

I'm having trouble understanding the first part of your comment. It sounds like you're saying that the quoted portion of Viliam_Bur's comment assumes LW is a sealed environment, but I'm not seeing where that assumption comes in. It reads to me like just a straightforward summary of and response to what was in the original post.

Are you saying that his suggestion that we can solve these issues by discussing them is overly optimistic?