Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014)

Gondolinian

21 Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014)

15th Dec 2014

7 min read

21

If you've recently joined the Less Wrong community, please leave a comment here and introduce yourself. We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, what you value, how you came to identify as an aspiring rationalist or how you found us. You can skip right to that if you like; the rest of this post consists of a few things you might find helpful. More can be found at the FAQ.

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There's actually more than meets the eye here: look near the top of the page for the "WIKI", "DISCUSSION" and "SEQUENCES" links.

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SEQUENCES: A huge corpus of material mostly written by Eliezer Yudkowsky in his days of blogging at Overcoming Bias, before Less Wrong was started. Much of the discussion here will casually depend on or refer to ideas brought up in those posts, so reading them can really help with present discussions. Besides which, they're pretty engrossing in my opinion.

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A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

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More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.

Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site!

_{Once a post gets over 500 comments, the site stops showing them all by default. If this post has 500 comments and you have 20 karma, please do start the next welcome post; a new post is a good perennial way to encourage newcomers and lurkers to introduce themselves. (Step-by-step, foolproof instructions here; takes <180seconds.)}

_{If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post.}

_{Finally, a big thank you to everyone that helped write this post via its predecessors!}

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21 Welcome to Less Wrong! (7th thread, December 2014)

by Gondolinian

15th Dec 2014

7 min read

639

21

A few notes about the site mechanics

EXTRA FEATURES:

There's actually more than meets the eye here: look near the top of the page for the "WIKI", "DISCUSSION" and "SEQUENCES" links.

A few notes about the community

A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.

Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site!

_{If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post.}

_{Finally, a big thank you to everyone that helped write this post via its predecessors!}

Open Threads

Personal Blog

21

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top scoring

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 1:07 PM

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VoiceOfRa11y-50

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.

[anonymous]11y70

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 m... (read more)

4Gram_Stone11y

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?" [...] 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. [...] 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 r

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