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 life evidence would lead you to that conclusion. Unfortunately I have no idea how you would attempt to empirically try to figure out the validity of this claim.
Anecdata: last year I went to a hippie school where out of two hundred students or so there wasn't a single "out of the closet" Republican, so it's probably fair to say that feminism was pretty big. The girls there were all unusually very assertive/confident/leaderlike, and yet I didn't get the feeling that they were ever rude or whiny, although I'm not one hundred percent sure what behavior you're picturing. I never saw anyone yell at a man for doing anything un-feminist, if that's what you're talking about, except for maybe one or two exceptions. The girls at the normal school I went to before that were probably ruder overall - a lot of "bitchy hot girl" types.
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.
I sort of feel like when you're "living in reaction", as Tyler might say, your level of niceness almost has more to do with the defense mechanism you choose than it does what you actually think of other people. Being nice is submission, being an asshole is self-handicapping. But if you're confident enough that you can actually be free to act in the way you want, then you'll be nice if you actually value other people's happiness, and an asshole otherwise. (This is an over-simplification, obviously.)
For what it's worth, I feel like the nicest guys I've ever met have all been very cool and confident, and the biggest assholes I've met have been spread across nerds and cool guys. The biggest asshole I've ever hung out with was a very alpha dude, but a few months after I met him I heard that he tried to kill himself and was finishing high school in a rehab facility, or something like that. So there's more anecdata, I guess.
For what it's worth, I feel like the nicest guys I've ever met have all been very cool and confident, and the biggest assholes I've met have been spread across nerds and cool guys.
Note that this is what I would expect a human to perceive even if the cool, confident, tall, attractive or powerful people in question were either equally nice or slightly crueller than their lower status counterparts.
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.