I... really don't see why this would be true.
Well, admittedly, I was going by reasonably widespread anecdotal evidence. You're right that this is something that could be used to make feminism look bad, but - speaking personally here - it struck me as the sort of thing that's quite likely to happen as a purely unintended consequence, with no bearing on the broader issue of feminism as a social or political movement.
Unfortunately, it can be hard to find more nuanced or evidence-based treatments of such issues, because things like feminism tend to have strong halo effects or ugh fields attached to them; most folks will think of them of "good things" or "bad things" altogether, but not many will "pull the ropes sideways" in order to improve overall outcomes in win-win ways.
In a way, being an asshole often comes from insecurity, and so can be a sign of lacking confidence/etc..
The thing is, many insecure folks find that being more of an asshole is an eminently viable way of making up for their insecurity, since it gives them some situational confidence, or something which can substitute for it - hence they never bother to fix the more basic issue. I agree that some especially cool and confident guys are quite nice; they can afford to be, after all. But my worry is that this might be a rare occurrence.
Well, admittedly, I was going by reasonably widespread anecdotal evidence. You're right that this is something that could be used to make feminism look bad, but - speaking personally here - it struck me as the sort of thing that's quite likely to happen as a purely unintended consequence, with no bearing on the broader issue of feminism as a social or political movement.
It seems hard to imagine that feminism wouldn't make women more assertive and confident at all, only rude and whiny. I don't see how that would work in theory, and I don't see what real ...
I took part in a recent discussion in the current Open Thread about how instrumental rationality is under-emphasized on this website. I've heard other people say similar things, and I am inclined to agree. Someone suggested that there should be a "Instrumental Rationality Books" thread, similar to the "best textbooks on every subject" thread. I thought this sounded like a good idea.
The title is "resources" because in addition to books, you can post self-help websites, online videos, whatever.
The decorum for this thread will be as follows:
I think depending on how this thread goes, in a few days I might make a meta post on this subject in an attempt to inspire discussion on how the LessWrong community can work together to attempt to reach some sort of a consensus on what the best instrumental rationality methods and resources might be. lukeprog has already done great work in his The Science of Winning at Life sequence, but his reviews are uber-conservative and only mention resources with lots of scientific and academic backing. I think this leaves out a lot of really good stuff, and I think that we should be able to draw distinctions between stuff that isn't necessarily drawing on science but is reasonable, rational, and helps a lot of people, and The Secret.
But I thought we should get the ball rolling a little before we have that conversation. In the meantime, if you have a meta comment, you can just go ahead and post it as a reply to the top-level post.