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JoachimSchipper comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - LessWrong
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Comments (1254)
It bothers me how many of these comments pick nits ("plowing isn't especially feminine", "you can't unilaterally declare Crocker's Rules") instead of actually engaging with what has been said.
(And those are just women's issues; women are not the only group that sometimes has problems in geek culture, or specifically on Less Wrong.)
I don't know what you expect when you say "actually engaging what has been said" - the post is a collection of interesting and well-written anecdotes, but it doesn't actually have a strong central point that is asking for a reaction.
It's not saying "you should change your behavior in such-and-such a way" or "doing such-and-such a thing is wrong and we should all condemn it" or asking for help or advice or an answer or even opinions ...
It is possible for people to criticize or comment on specific (possibly minor issues) while still learning from or getting the overall set of points made by something.
Have you read the comment sections on this site before? I don't think LWers where any more nitpicky than usual.
So, I just wanna be sure I understand the substance of your reply:
JoachimSchipper is expressing frustration with nitpicking, and your (nitpicky) reply is that it's not unusually nitpicky?
Yep. And you responded by nitpicking one meta level up. I love this site.
Just one? EDIT: Okay, okay. ;p
This comment is relevant.
What would differentiate picking nits and engaging with what was said?
Like SaidAchmiz points out, there's not all that much to say when someone shares information. I'm certainly not going to share the off-site experiences of female friends that were told to me in confidence, and my experiences are not particularly relevant, and so I don't have much to add.
One of the issues that has poisoned conversations about feminism I have been in previously, and which I sincerely hope does not happen here, is that the feminists in the conversation did not have a strong ability to discern between useful and useless criticisms. I understand that many people don't listen to women, especially about their experience as women; I understand that many people dismiss good feminist arguments, or challenge them with bad arguments.
But when people do listen, and respond with good arguments- and then their good arguments are trivialized or dismissed- then we're not having a conversation, but a lecture. The people putting forth good arguments realize they're not welcome and leave, and only the trolls are left.
Especially in the context of minimizing inferential distance, it's important to have experience exchange both ways. For example, DMs shutting down a player's attempt to deviate from the script is a common enough experience that I expect more than half of D&D players can relate, and letting the person who shared the anecdote know that "yep, this is a common problem" is valuable information that can help them feel less singled out. Of course, this can be interpreted as a status-reduction move; they're trivializing the concerns and making the speaker less special! This is the uncharitable interpretation and so in general I recommend against it.
It really bothers me that you're not taking seriously either the (hopefully unintentional) misuse of Crocker's Rules or the unintentional violation of IRC norms. Those rules apply to everyone and are in place for good reason, and pointing out rule violations should not be seen as picking nits if you want those rules to stick around.
I think this is an excellent point, and in the interests both of minimizing inferential distance and perhaps making some other points relevant to smart/geeky women's issues, I offer a personal anecdote:
My early experiences as a D&D player included some memorable instances when I tried to "deviate from script", though at the time I didn't entirely understand that there was a script and that I was deviating from it; I was doing what seemed to make sense in my character's situation. My DMs would sometimes be unprepared, would respond either by explicitly stating that I had gone off script or by more subtly trying to corral me back onto the rails, and some frustration would ensue; I would be frustrated because I felt like my freedom of character action, my ability to flex my imagination, was being curtailed.
My DMs were frustrated too, though the nature of the DM's frustration was not something I understood until later, when I started to DM my own games, and learned firsthand about the way combinatorial explosion rears its head in adventure and world design, about the difficulty of anticipating the imaginations of several intelligent, creative, self-selected-for-out-of-the-box-thinking people, and many other issues. As a DM, these problems are solvable with effort and practice, and I've gotten better over the almost 10 years that I've been a DM; I try rather hard to set up my world and adventures to allow for maximum freedom of choice and action (or at least the convincing illusion of such; much DMing comes down to sleight-of-hand).
Most of my DMing experience has been for an all-male group of experienced tabletop gamers, but recently I had the opportunity to run a semi-regular game for a group that was (shock and gasp!) majority-female. About half of the players, including two of the girls*, were entirely new to D&D and tabletop roleplaying in general; this was their very first game.
The games and my DMing met with satisfaction; all involved, as far as I can tell, enjoyed themselves, to the extent that after the game ended and we had to go our separate ways (the setting for this was a summer-long internship), a couple of the first-timers immediately went on to seek out regular D&D groups, which means that the D&D game I ran was what got them into this particular part of geekdom (that is, tabletop roleplaying gaming). All the players who expressed their satisfaction — including, notably, the first-timers — said that prominent among the things that contributed to their enjoyment of the game was the feeling of freedom, of options; the sense that their imagination and creativity in deciding what their characters could do, was not artificially constrained.
I took pride in this, because I've worked hard to develop the DMing skills that allow for such flexibility; my own early experiences are what prompted me to keep firmly in mind this particular failure mode of DMing (the inflexible script). I took pride also in being the vehicle through which intelligent women are introduced to geekdom (or, for those who were already geeks but in different ways, have their horizons expanded).
Of course, a certain awareness of women's experiences, such as those mentioned in this post, and of certain of the sorts of gender-related failures that plague geekdom, did also (I hope!) help in creating the sort of atmosphere in which female geeks/gamers could feel comfortable.
* "girls": college-age women, several years younger than me. No belittlement intended.
Maybe we need a "minimize inferential distance to DMs" thread?
See "Better Disagreement". Nitpicking occupies level DH3-4: mere contradiction and responding to minor points, but not addressing the central point of the post.
(If you disagree with the rubric presented in "Better Disagreement", respond there.)
I think Better Disagreement uses a confrontational lens that isn't particularly suited to these situations. If the central point of the post is "these are real female experiences that you should be aware of," DH7 seems like a cruel joke at best: "This is what a real real female would experience, and even then we shouldn't be aware of it!"
It seems to me that helpful complaint comments will often come in two forms: error correction and alternative perspectives. If, say, an anecdote about EY in one of these posts spelled his name "Elezer," pointing out that they missed an "i" could be labeled as nit picking, but it doesn't seem like a helpful label: fix it, say thanks, and be happy that the post is better! If most of the comments are minor corrections, but the post is highly upvoted, remember that each of those upvotes is a short comment saying "I want to see more posts like this post." (If most of the comments are corrections and the post has low karma, the post has deeper problems that should get fixed.)
Alternative perspectives are trickier territory. Suppose that Anonymous Alice writes a story about how she was hurt that she said "good morning" to Name-changed Norman and Norman didn't respond; it made her feel unimportant and unappreciated. Bob comments that, if he were Norman and he didn't respond, it would have been because he was totally focused on what he was doing and didn't notice the greeting, not because it was a deliberate snub.
Both people like Bob and people like Alice have information they can acquire from this exchange- Bobs can learn that greetings are more important than they originally thought they were, and Alices can learn that greetings are less important than they originally thought they were. The next time someone doesn't greet Alice, she can tell herself "they look busy" instead of "I'm not important enough to warrant a greeting;" the next time Bob sees someone that he doesn't remember greeting that morning, he can greet them to make sure they don't feel unappreciated.
But the way that Alice and Bob write their comments, and read the other's comment, will have a big impact on how productive their perspective exchange is. It helps to acknowledge the other person's perspective, and cast yours as adding to theirs rather than contradicting theirs as much as possible. This is particularly tough when it comes to interpretations- if Alice says Norman was rude and Bob doesn't think that's the case, they can get bogged down by confusing the word "rude" for an empirical fact about reality that they can go out there and measure. Standard advice is to word things in terms of feelings: instead of "Norman snubbed me" which asserts intention, something like "I feel less important when Norman doesn't greet me" is much less contentious, and a discussion about how much Alice's importance is related to Norman's greetings is likely to be more productive by virtue of being more precise.
I'm pretty sure there is an awesome steel man some of the epic level contrarian rationalists here could make for this. I would totally pay money to read it for the entertainment value.
Too bad it would cause epic drama too.
Of course it's always possible to argue both sides of debate. So let's try it for the sake of the argument:
Every human is unique. Effective social interactions means that you listen to the other person. It's about being in the moment and perceiving the other person without preconceived notions. Being empathic is not about having an intellectual concept of what the other person is going through. It's about actually feeling the emotion that the other person is feeling with them.
If you want that men and woman interact better with each other you should encourage them to treat each individual uniquely. If a man learns an intellectual concept according to which he should do X whenever a woman does Y, the man isn't authentically interacting with the woman. If the man uses an intellectual rule for the interaction he will pay less attention to his own emotions.
How does a man get better at being in the moment? How does he get more in touch with his own emotions, to get a better feeling for the interaction?
Meditation is a way where we have good research that shows that mediation improves the ability of people to be in the moment by dealing more effectively with their emotions. In Zen Buddhism there the concept of the "beginners mind". The practioner tries to let go of any preconceived notions to be more in touch with the moment. He doesn't add additional mental rules.
In my own experience my interactions with women are much better for both parties when I'm in the moment and in touch with my emotions than when I'm in my head and think "I don't want to do anything to upset the woman I'm interacting with". How do I know that the interaction is better for the woman and not only myself? When I'm dancing the woman likes to dance closer when I'm in touch with myself instead of being in my head. She also smiles more.
There are a lot of Asbergers people who know a lot about what a "real female would experience" on a intellectual level. When it comes to real interaction they are however all the time in their head. They are not in touch with their emotions and therefore they mess up the social interaction.
If you now start and give a guy all sort of additional intellectual concepts of how to treat woman, you risk that the guy spends more time in his own head. He will be less in touch with his own emotions. Less emotional intelligence means that the social interaction is less pleasent for all participants who are involved.
While I see the theoretic argument that more knowledge should help. I don't know of any empiric evidence that it does. I don't think that men primarily treat woman poorly because they have the wrong intellectual concepts. The prime reason is rather low emotional intellience.
Meditating and letting go of all preconveived notions of what it's like to be the other person allows us to treat the person with more empathy. Giving someone more stuff to think about while being in an interaction would be the opposite of meditation.
If a post has 39 "short comments saying "I want to see more posts like this post."" and 153 nitpicks, that says something about the community reaction. This is especially relevant since "but this detail is wrong" seems to be a common reaction to these kinds of issues on geek fora.
(Yes, not nearly all posts are nitpicks, and my meta-complaining doesn't contribute all that much signal either.)
See "Support That Sounds Like Dissent".
It feels to me like we both have an empirical disagreement about whether or not this behavior is amplified when discussing "these kind of issues" and a normative disagreement about whether this behavior is constructive or destructive.
For any post, one should expect the number of corrections to be related to the number of things that need to be corrected, modulated by how interesting the post is. A post which three people read is likely to not get any corrections; a post which hundreds of people read is likely to get almost all of its errors noticed and flagged. Discussions about privilege tend to have wide interest, but as a category I haven't noticed them being significantly better than other posts, and so I would expect them to receive more corrections than posts of similar quality, because they're wider interest. It could be the case that the posts make people more defensive and thus more critical, but it's not clear to me that hypothesis is necessary.
In general, corrections seem constructive to me; it both improves the quality of the post and helps bring the author and audience closer together. It can come across as hostile, and it's often worth putting extra effort into critical comments to make them friendlier and more precise, but I'm curious to hear if you feel differently and if so, why you have that impression.
All of what you say is true; it is also true that I'm somewhat thin-skinned on this point due to negative experiences on non-LW fora; but I also think that there is a real effect. It is true that the comments on this post are not significantly more critical/nitpicky than the comments on How minimal is our intelligence. However, the comments here do seem to pick far more nits than, say, the comments on How to have things correctly.
The first post is heavily fact-based and defends a thesis based on - of necessity - incomplete data and back-projection of mechanisms that are not fully understood. I don't mean to say that it is a bad post; but there are certainly plenty of legitimate alternative viewpoints and footnotes that could be added, and it is no surprise that there are a lot of both in the comments section.
The second post is an idiosyncratic, personal narrative; it is intended to speak a wider truth, but it's clearly one person's very personal view. It, too, is not a bad post; but it's not a terribly fact-based one, and the comments find fewer nits to pick.
This post seems closer to the second post - personal narratives - but the comment section more closely resembles that of the first post.
As to the desirability of this effect: it's good to be a bit more careful around whatever minorities you have on the site, and this goes double for when the minority is trying to express a personal narrative. I do believe there are some nits that could be picked in this post, but I'm less convinced that the cumulative improvement to the post is worth the cumulative... well, not quite invalidation, but the comments section does bother me, at least.
Those are things that actually are said. If a point is blatantly wrong or the entire usage of "Crocker's Rules" is, in fact, inappropriate then those things are wrong and inappropriate and can be declared as such. If it happened that nobody engaged with the intended point of the article that would perhaps just indicate that people weren't interested (or weren't interested in discussing it here). That is... not the case.
Perhaps an instance of Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate; people who agree, do not respond... as for me, I find myself with two kinds of responses to these anecdotes. For some, I think "Wow, what an unfortunate example of systemic sexism etc.; how informative, and how useful that this is here." Other people have already commented to that effect. I'm not sure what I might say in terms of engaging with such content, but perhaps something will come to me, in which case I'll say something.
For others... well, here's an example:
My response is a mental shrug. I am male. I can relate to this anecdote completely. I, too, have never much understood the desire to be "normal", and I find that as I've gotten older, I disdain it more and more.
But what has this to do with minimizing the inferential distance between men and women...?
Here's another:
The gist of this anecdote seems to be "girls like Star Wars too". Duly noted. As an anecdote in isolation I can't say it surprises me. (At least two of my female friends are huge Dr. Who geeks. In general I would be surprised if anyone here found "geek girls exist" to be a novel and unexpected claim.) It's not necessarily clear what more general conclusion I ought to draw from this, or what conclusion (if any) is implied by the OP, and so the extent of my potential engagement is limited.
I think the point of the Star Wars anecdote is: Woman do engage in roleplaying but when they do they don't focus on papers-and-dice fighting and instead have a discussion about moral issues.
The woman who wrote the example with the evil elves probably wanted to show that she didn't cared primarily about battling the evil elves but that she rather wanted to help the farmers directly.
Well... if that's the intended point, then I just don't think it's well-supported by the anecdote.
I tell the story here of a D&D gaming group I ran which was over half female. I play D&D with several more women on a semi-regular basis. There are some differences in play style between some of the guys I play with and some of the girls I play with, but there's no monolithic bloc such that I can even begin to generalize, even ignoring the small sample size and selection effects.
To put it another way, the anecdote in question justifies an existentially quantified claim, but in no way does it justify a universally quantified claim. And anything in-between requires that stuff that you famously don't get by pluralizing "anecdote".
Is that actually true, though ? This seems to fit the pattern of "men are combative, women are nurturing", which is often denounced as a stereotype; at the very least, there is a lot of debate on whether or not this principle is generally applicable.
I'm not saying that the statement is wrong, necessarily; only that I require more evidence to be convinced.
I would read it more as "men like to model situations, women like to model people." This may be a stereotype, but I've noticed it to be anecdotally true. Men, when spending time together socially, tend to talk more about sports and politics than women do; women spend more time talking about other people (i.e. gossip) and analyzing their motivations. Fighting elves is a situation; you don't have to try to understand the elves' motivations and 'drama' in order to fight them.
"This may be a stereotype, but I've noticed it to be anecdotally true." "but" What do you think sterotypes are? Generally they tend to be statements that are true 30-90% of the time, which should provide plenty of room for confirming annecdotes.
It sounds like you are complaining that people are treating arguments as logical constructions that stand or fall based on their own merit, rather than as soldiers for a grand and noble cause which we must endorse lest we betray our own side.
If that's not what you mean, can you clarify your point better?
Why are you defending scoundrels again? :P
That it would be more epistemically and instrumentally productive not to throw up a cloud of nitpicking which closely resembles quite common attempts to avoid getting the point that there is actually a problem here.
The counterpoint to that is "If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents' arguments. But if you're interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents' arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you [also] must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse." http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=155
Mostly, what David_Gerard says, better than I managed to express it; in part, "be nice to whatever minorities you have"; and finally, yes, "this is a good cause; we should champion it". "Arguments as soldiers" is partly a valid criticism, but note that we're looking at a bunch of narratives, not a logical argument; and note that very little "improvement of the other's arguments" seem to be going on.