Gram_Stone comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014) - LessWrong

16 Post author: Gondolinian 15 December 2014 02:57AM

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

Article Navigation

Comments (635)

Comments (635)

Sort By: Best

Show:

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

Comment author: Gram_Stone 22 June 2015 01:38:09AM 4 points [-]

One explicit argument in favor of excluding women from the workplace is thus: "There is currently a preponderance of men in the workplace. If there are men and women in the workplace, then there will be romance. If there is romance, then there will be reduced productivity. If there are more women in the workplace, then there will be less productivity. Therefore, there should not be more women in the workplace."

The obvious counterpoint is that this argument implicitly describes a world in which all women that would be excluded from the workplace could be replaced by men. In the case of global research effort, as opposed to particular research projects, it is highly doubtful that the possible marginal decrease in productivity of one additional pair of coworking lovers is of greater magnitude than the marginal increase in productivity of one additional researcher, regardless of their gender. That is, the purported benefit of preventing a bit of romance is not worth the cost of excluding half of the global intellectual elite from the research community.

More to the point are the connotations that are smuggled in when the explicit argument is not rehearsed as I have rehearsed it above, and more vague things are said like "You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry." Here we go beyond the pragmatic consideration of productivity; we imply that workplace romance is not a thing that occurs in the presence of men and women, but that women are the sole causal origin of workplace romance. We imply that women are seductive people, by their very nature distracting; that women are people that are incapable of accepting criticism, a necessary skill in the task of research; that women have a Seductive, Whiny Essence that is antithetical to research. By this model, we might expect that a research institution composed entirely of women would be extensionally equivalent to a lesbian orgy-fight.

I would be royally pissed if someone attributed to me a Seductive, Whiny Essence; that would be a patently inaccurate statement to no virtuous end, and more, it would do my world harm. For me, it is natural to infer that people who are not seeking truth and who are acting against my interests are threats, and it is rational to experience powerful emotions when one perceives legitimate threats.

The pedestrian response to a claim like, "Women can't take criticism," would be to emphatically reply, "Women can take criticism!" I make this distinction particularly because I have seen women acknowledge that they have had problems adjusting to the climate of professions predominantly occupied by men. Perhaps the issue is more complex than the presence or absence of such a hypothetical Criticism-Taking Ability. More interestingly, we could ask questions like, "Can we make generalizations about how particular populations of people give and take criticism, and if so, how can we, and how do they?" It is a misstep to acknowledge individual and average differences and jump to barring women wholesale from research. Optimizing communication between male and female researchers is a better solution than excluding half of the intellectual elite.

Comment author: VoiceOfRa comment score below threshold [+] (18 children)

Comment author: Gram_Stone 22 June 2015 03:14:42AM * 1 point [-]

And you seem to be conflating two separate issues, romantic attraction, and ability to handle criticism.

Such is the apparent resolution of Tom Hunt's map of the territory.

The rational response would be to look into the matter to see which is in fact the case.

As I have already said, it is not a question of which is the case any more than the case of the unobserved falling tree is a question of sound or non-sound.

Well, you're link is more like, a woman after a lot of effort improves her criticism taking ability. And even then she would rather the culture change so that she doesn't have to exercise it. The question of whether criticism is necessary for the institution achieve whatever it's actual goals are is not addressed.

To represent my position or that comment's position as a claim that criticism is unnecessary in research or business is a straw man. You are not entertaining the possibility that women in general may adapt to the particular quality of criticism in predominantly male professions as that woman did, nor that a cultural change is possible, or furthermore, optimal.

Yes, if only there were a mathematical theory of how to update on that kind of evidence.

I use the word 'how' qualitatively, not quantitatively. I don't mean, "How well do women take criticism on a scale of positiveness?," I mean, "By what internal mechanisms and social norms do women tend to interpret and exchange criticism, and how is it different from the way men do?"

How about not going out of our way to actively promote more women in research, e.g., with all the "women in science" programs.

The problem with affirmative action is not encouraging minorities to participate in activities in which they have not historically participated; the problem with affirmative action is using a minority's membership test as the selection criterion as opposed to using the selection criteria that would maximize the intended effect of said activity. We can broadly encourage minorities to attempt to become researchers without letting people who are bad at research be researchers. Where affirmative action is suboptimal, 'negative action' is not the solution. It would be suboptimal for an NBA talent scout to exclude a seven-foot-tall white basketball player from consideration because he had precommitted to excluding white basketball players because being of African descent positively correlates more strongly with height than does being of European descent. It would be suboptimal for a senior researcher to exclude a woman with an IQ in the top 2% from consideration because he had precommitted to excluding women because having an IQ in the top 2% correlates more strongly with being male than with being female. Respecting the precommitment in those scenarios while keeping the ultimate size of your selected populations constant would not maximize the average height or IQ of your selected population, and the original purpose of the precommitments was to maximize the average height or IQ of your selected population; the precommitment in each case is a lost purpose. If you use race or gender to inductively infer someone's basketball-playing or research ability without using height or IQ when those data are available, then you are failing to update.

Except women appear to make up less than half of the intellectual elite, largely because they're IQ's have a smaller standard deviation.

Deary et al. (2006) estimate that ~1/3 of the top 2% of the population in IQ is female. 46.2 million people is non-negligible, to say the least.

Comment author: ChristianKl 22 June 2015 12:14:00PM 4 points [-]

Such is the apparent resolution of Tom Hunt's map of the territory.

Just because I can quote a 37 word paragraph of someone's speech doesn't mean that I accurately model the resolution of the map of the territory of that person.

Assuming that you can infer the full position of a person from a short exerpt is wrong. Twitter culture where people think that everything boils down to short exerpts is deeply troubling.

Comment author: Gram_Stone 22 June 2015 08:57:46PM -1 points [-]

Just because I can quote a 37 word paragraph of someone's speech doesn't mean that I accurately model the resolution of the map of the territory of that person.

Assuming that you can infer the full position of a person from a short exerpt is wrong. Twitter culture where people think that everything boils down to short exerpts is deeply troubling.

I agree. It was really just a pithy way of saying that he has a naive conception of this particular issue.

Comment author: Vaniver 22 June 2015 09:49:12PM 2 points [-]

naive conception

Note that ChristianKl's objection is that a short comment is at best a crude snapshot of someone's mind; it seems rash to make conclusions about Hunt's conceptions from just that comment.

Comment author: Gram_Stone 22 June 2015 09:59:30PM 0 points [-]

I agree that that's true in general, but on the other hand, when someone gives a weak argument for theism, I don't regard it as rash to disregard their opinion on the matter. I can have little or no knowledge of the internal process while only observing the outcome and, because I have confidence about what sort of outcomes good processes produce, infer that whatever process he is using, it is probably not one that draws an accurate map in this particular region.

Comment author: ChristianKl 22 June 2015 10:30:35PM 2 points [-]

I can have little or no knowledge of the internal process while only observing the outcome

To assess the outcome you would need to know the context in which the paragraph stands. You would need to listen to the speech. Having a high confidence that a 37 words excerpt is enough to judge the quality of someone's thinking is a reasoning error.

I agree that that's true in general, but on the other hand, when someone gives a weak argument for theism

If I read through the writings and speeches of Richard Dawkins I am highly confident that I can find a short paragraph were Dawkins makes a weak argument against theism. That's no proof that Dawkins has a naive conception of the debate about theism.

The words that follow "they cry" in the speech are "now seriously". He verbally tagged it as a joke. Making a bad joke isn't proof of a naive conception of an issue.

Comment author: Gram_Stone 22 June 2015 11:10:05PM 0 points [-]

Okay, I agree.

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 22 June 2015 05:51:18AM -2 points [-]

As I have already said, it [whether women can take criticism] is not a question of which any more than the case of the unobserved falling tree is a question of sound or non-sound.

What do you mean by this? Certainly it may be necessary to make the question more precise, but the question certainly talks about things that correspond to reality.

To represent my position or that comment's position as a claim that criticism is unnecessary in research or business is a straw man. You are not entertaining the possibility that women in general may adapt to the particular quality of criticism in predominantly male professions as that woman did, nor that a cultural change is possible, or furthermore, optimal.

You may want to reread the comment:

Once my context was realigned... well, I can't say it was easy [emphasis mine], but at least I realised that it was "me, not you".

So what's her conclusion about the possibility of women in general adapting to "masculine culture", i.e., a culture of criticism?

LW has the near-unique trait of being a bunch of people who are actively trying to change... therefore it's entirely possible that we can avoid the at-first-blush-alienating-to-the-majority-of-women approach that is common in other masculine-only cultures.

There's nothing wrong with the masculine culture. But it isn't the only way we could be.

There should be room for all of us. :)

In other words, she's arguing that most women won't be able to adept and that to be truly inclusive of women the culture would have to change.

It would be suboptimal for an NBA talent scout to exclude a seven-foot-tall white basketball player from consideration because he had precommitted to excluding white basketball players because being of African descent correlates more strongly with height than does being of European descent.

It would also be suboptimal for said scout to spend too much time in white neighborhoods looking for seven-foot-tall white basketball players, and a precommitment to doing so would also be a lost purpose.

Comment author: CellBioGuy 23 June 2015 04:33:20PM * 3 points [-]

An important point: I have personally observed particular members of the old male guard in cell biology reliably applying much harsher standards to their female colleagues and students than to their male colleagues unreasonably and repetitively. (EDIT: it sure isn't everyone or even a plurality but it sure is a visible pattern)

This leads to women (being over half my field at the PhD level) leaving their associations with these men and staying the heck away, as anyone would when being criticized and judged unfairly.

Thankfully I can say this is becoming much less common as the field turns over, and there are more options and sane colleagues available now such that female scientists need to put up with unreasonable behavior or leave all together much less frequently these days.

Comment author: Gram_Stone 22 June 2015 06:43:44AM * 2 points [-]

What do you mean by this? Certainly it may be necessary to make the question more precise, but the question certainly talks about things that correspond to reality.

Let us taboo 'criticism'. Here's one definition: "the expression of disapproval of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes." Surely the members of predominantly or entirely female social groups have some way of expressing disapproval and updating on it, as in all social groups; the problem is that it's different from the way that men do, and that when women find themselves in predominantly male professions, they're unfamiliar with the culture and misinterpret social signals that express disapproval by interpreting them in terms of the cultures to which they are accustomed. To speak of an innate Criticism-Taking Ability as the sole causal factor is a lossy compression that prevents you from imagining ways that you might improve the outcomes of situations in which criticism is exchanged. The question is then "How can we improve the outcomes of situations in which criticism is exchanged?"

In other words, she's arguing that most women won't be able to adept and that to be truly inclusive of women the culture would have to change.

She's arguing that the LW culture would probably be more amenable to altering itself for the sake of including women than most other cultures, not that women in the LW culture would be more amenable to altering themselves. It's true that women in the LW culture would probably be more amenable to altering themselves, but she wasn't arguing, and we can't say, that her example is strong evidence of how well an arbitrary woman will adapt to an arbitrary culture, or how well an arbitrary culture with a paucity of women will adapt to more women. At any rate, I only brought this comment up in my first comment in order to provide an example of the dissonance between male and female social norms for exchanging criticism, so this isn't really important.

It would also be suboptimal for said scout to spend too much time in white neighborhoods looking for seven-foot-tall white basketball players, and a precommitment to doing so would also be a lost purpose.

You're breaking the analogy. Random neighborhoods of people have not already been selected for height. (This is why talent scouts don't actually scout door-to-door. Beware when you find yourself arguing that a policy has some benefit compared to the null action, rather than the best benefit of any action.) If researchers are coming to you with résumés containing data relevant to their research ability, or if you're searching graduate programs for potential researchers, then IQ and research ability have already been selected for. You're using race and gender as proxies for height and IQ; you throw away proxies when you have the real deal. This is about excluding women a priori. It's simple: if you have a perfectly good female researcher in front of you, and you don't hire her because you have a sign that says "No girls allowed," then your sign is stupid.

Comment author: Jiro 22 June 2015 03:11:32PM * 1 point [-]

Even assuming that IQ is completely correlated with ability to do the job, your pool of applicants that is "already selected for IQ" is not selected with 100% accuracy. In other words, being in the pool is a proxy for IQ. You're better off using two proxies than one (unless the effect of one proxy is nil when conditioned on the other proxy)--if you want to maximize the applicant quality, you should pick people from the pool, but prefer men when comparing two applicants who both are in the pool.

The basketball example here is bad because you actually can measure someone's height. If you can measure it you don't need proxies for it. You're not going to measure "ability to do the job" without using proxies and even if IQ is completely correlated with it, you're not going to measure IQ without using proxies either.

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 23 June 2015 08:02:31AM * 1 point [-]

Height is a proxy for basketball ability and the résumé is a proxy for research ability. It is possible that the latter is a worse proxy than the former, but it seems unlikely that it is much worse.

(ETA: Especially given that the latter enables you to go to arXiv and look at the applicant's actual research output so far, whereas knowing how tall someone is doesn't enable you to watch all the basketball matches they have played in.)

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 01 July 2015 02:11:01AM 0 points [-]

The problem is that height is a number, whereas it's hard to translate résumé into a number without resorting to various gameable metrics.

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 03 July 2015 01:10:02PM 0 points [-]

So what?

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 03 July 2015 06:33:53PM 1 point [-]

It's a lot easier to measure height then evaluate a résumé.

Comment author: Jiro 22 June 2015 07:06:25PM 1 point [-]

Is there some reason why this was modded down aside from political incorrectness?

Comment author: Lumifer 22 June 2015 07:33:03PM 1 point [-]

I didn't downvote, but your second paragraph has a problem in that in the basketball example height is only a proxy for the ability to play basketball.

The first paragraph is a bit iffy, too, because proxies have different effectiveness or usefulness. By the time you're estimating someone's ability to do the job on the basis of a resume, the male/female proxy becomes basically insignificant.

In any case, I think that the better language here is that of priors. It's perfectly fine to have different priors for male job applicants than for female job applicants, but once evidence starts coming in, the priors become less and less important.

Comment author: Jiro 22 June 2015 07:56:29PM * 1 point [-]

in the basketball example height is only a proxy for the ability to play basketball.

IQ is a proxy for the ability to do well in a job, too. I was ignoring that, so in the analogy I would have to ignore that for height and ability to play basketball.

proxies have different effectiveness or usefulness

Arguing "the other proxy is so much better that we don't need the original one" is not the same as "the other proxy is better, and that's all we need to know", and is even farther from "we can measure it so we don't need a proxy at all".

Comment author: Jiro 22 June 2015 03:20:03PM * 0 points [-]

The obvious counterpoint is that this argument implicitly describes a world in which all women that would be excluded from the workplace could be replaced by men.

That isn't necessarily true, though. Imagine that an average woman has a net negative effect and an exceptional woman has a net positive effect. Then you should hold women to higher standards without excluding them completely.

I would be royally pissed if someone attributed to me a Seductive, Whiny Essence; that would be a patently inaccurate statement to no virtuous end, and more, it would do my world harm.

They're not attributing it to you specifically; they're attributing it as a statistical property to a class that includes you.

Comment author: Vaniver 22 June 2015 04:41:09PM * 3 points [-]

Then you should hold women to higher standards without excluding them completely.

So, historically this is somewhat similar to what happened--if a woman managed to get some sort of advocate / ally, she had limited access to the scientific / mathematical world as a scientist or mathematician. (Getting access to that world by hosting a salon was the typical path women would take, but that would put them much more in a support role.) But it had clear inefficiencies--Emmy Noether was unable to get a professorship in Germany, for example, and then even in America taught at a women's college, despite being a clearly first-rate mathematician.

One partial solution is to have some procedure by which Noether is declared an honorary man, and then gets full access. It is interesting to try to figure out how much of the distance this would cross between how things actually were and the ideal case, for varying strength of filtering. One can also imagine this smoothly progressing from a minor, reversible change to the ideal case, but because of that one can also see the slippery slope arguments that would have defeated it (since probably someone thought of this at the time).

(Whenever this subject comes up and we talk about people who managed to get around restrictions, it's probably also important to talk about people who couldn't get around those restrictions, not because of their ability but because of the economics or power dynamics involved. Noether had trouble getting paid for doing math, but it's cheap to do math; Jennie Cobb could find jobs flying planes but it's not cheap to go to space.)

Gram_Stone comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014) - LessWrong

Article Navigation

Comments (635)

Nearest Meetups

Virtual Study Room

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Recent Rationality Quotes

Recent Wiki Edits

Top Contributors, 30 Days

Recent Karma Awards

Comments (635)

Top Contributors, 30 Days

You'll need to login or register to do that

(Don't worry, it only takes a few seconds)

Create

Login