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.