You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

CharlieSheen comments on LW Women: LW Online - Less Wrong Discussion

29 [deleted] 15 February 2013 01:43AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (590)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 15 February 2013 02:34:54PM *  23 points [-]

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.

Comment author: CharlieSheen 17 February 2013 03:18:39PM *  3 points [-]

From the complaints (and not just here and now) it seems obvious that there is a problem we really should solve.

There being a problem people complain about and it actually being worth solving are remarkably uncorrelated. Here is an argument I made on the matter in the past.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 17 February 2013 07:55:25PM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: MugaSofer 19 February 2013 01:14:44PM -2 points [-]

the complaining seems coherent, is persistent, and there are no women saying: "actually, I think it is completely the other way."

Source?