Before I get bogged down in reading all the comments, I just want to say: nursing is one of the most admirable and versatile professions in existence. There are very few people I'd rather have available in any generic critical situation than an experienced and competent nurse. Good on you.

A few thoughts:

(1) I agree with Nanani, and think it would be awful to actively try to "recruit" females, or even really do anything to entice them to come/stay. Though I appreciate the spirit of the post nonetheless because I think it's a very interesting and important issue, and I think it's okay to acknowledge it and question it. If anything, efforts to even out the male/female imbalance would have to be made on a much greater scale to start to see change.

(2) Do people really think that it's an issue of females frequenting Less Wrong and then LEAVING? I doubt it. I suspect that a much lower proportion of females even happen upon the blog in the first place. This would eliminate a number of the explanations.

(3) This is an issue that deeply intrigues me. I have some fairly simple theories. Unfortunately, I am not well-versed enough in evol. psych., gender studies, history, sociology, etc. to feel like I have enough background to really get at the heart of the matter. So most of my ideas are purely anecdotal.

I believe that females on a whole are less interested in intellectual pursuits. Particularly intellectual pursuits that are HARD and take a higher amount of mental horsepower to grasp. Period. The question is: Why?

From my own experience, I've found myself to be less INNATELY CURIOUS than many of my male counterparts. Once I get onto a topic, I can puzzle over it for hours at a high level, but if the topic is not in front of me, my brain can be content to space out and think trivial things. Once I realized this was the case, I started to actively work to be more curious and to think more. When I'm sitting around spacing out, I will actually tell myself that I should start thinking about a problem. My brain does not do this automatically.

Now, I don't know if this is purely a messed up issue that I have to deal with, or if it extends across the female gender. From observing other females, it doesn't seem unreasonable that others would face the same lack of intellectual curiosity.

My big question is where does this come from? It's either biological or social. I used to think it was biological (this helped me reconcile the fact that I had to work overtime and be more aware so that I could become more interested in things in the first place). Now I think it's entirely possible that the explanation is social and that females, through media/peer groups/etc. simply are not encouraged to be as curious about intellectual issues and by the time they are older, they've simply stopped thinking. (This is all pertaining to females as a group, not particular individuals).

(4) I don't think the atmosphere (meanness) of this site is the problem. Enough females are thick-skinned. I think it's simply the subject matter. Though I agree that it's possible that the ratio of females is slightly higher than what is apparent because of their relative silence. I personally have a much higher fear of rejection to comments, etc. This extends to in-person interactions, and upon the slightest rejection, I will quickly shut up.

Tried it. Didn't work. Welcome to the unfair universe.

Good thing you don't have that attitude about FAI.

Mind you, aerobic exercise does put me in better aerobic condition, sorta. It just doesn't have anything to do with weight loss.

Have you considered the possibility that you just did something wrong? Common knowledge says that you need to exercise for 20 minutes or more to do any fat burning, but I've read an interesting book that says aerobics don't actually improve your fitness or burn fat.

Specifically, the author claims that, yes, exercising for more than 20 minutes will cause you to burn fat because your sugar stores are exhausted. However, he says, this tells your body that it needs to keep fat around, since clearly you're doing things that need it. Thus, the long-term effect of long-duration aerobics is that you adapt to store fat more... which is why runners who stop running, quickly get fat.

What he suggests needs to happen instead is that you exercise in a way that rapidly consumes sugar, but doesn't dip into the fat stores, so that the adaptation response is to make the body lean towards storing food as sugar, and to convert stored fat to sugar.

His theory is that in the ancestral environment, we needed to do a lot of sprinting to catch things or avoid being caught, with relatively less long/slow exercise. (Also, that training for recovery after short bursts of exercises increases lung capacity and heart health more quickly.)

Anyway, I'm currently experimenting with one of his simpler "beginner" routines: 10 minutes, consisting of alternating one minute of anaerobic sprinting with one minute of slow walking recovery. I'm only in the first week, but my speed and ability to recover have increased a good bit, even though I've not done it every day this week. I'll have to see what effect it has over a longer term.

I just mention this to point out that there could easily be minor changes to exercise that could make big differences to one's results, and that "tried it, didn't work" isn't a helpful approach to investigating them. In my own case, the only part of my life that I wasn't overweight was the time where I didn't have a car, had to walk or bicycle everywhere, and had moderately long distances to go.

What I've observed since then, though, as I slowly drop the 100 pounds that I put on when I started working at home (got about 30lbs left to go), is that losing fat is a lot more about what I put into my body than what I take out.

This may or may not be true for you. What may be true, however, is that you're not considering this as a constraint-solving problem. Your ability to lose weight or put on muscle are going to be constrained by a wide variety of factors including what nutrition you're getting, how much water, how much sleep, what intensity of exercise at what heart rate... even frequency of meals. Hell, you might even be eating too little food, or the wrong food for your metabolism or pH. I've had to tweak ALL of these things in order to lose weight. How many have you tried tweaking?

There are tons of variables that could act as constraints on your ability to lose weight, and until you make sure they're all simultaneously satisfied, you're not going to get a result.

Simply labeling yourself "metabolically challenged" is not rational. How, specifically, are you challenged? What is the mechanism by which this challenge operates? Which nutritional theories and exercise theories have you tested? What variables have you measured and tracked?

Perhaps a crisis of belief would be appropriate here as well.

Post in this thread if you live in the US or Canada.

I bet neurofeedback could be used to help people distinguish between ideas originating with memory retrieval and ideas that they are constructing.

I also bet that some decline in creativity has to do with decreasing sleep with age. Older people sleep less. More productive people sleep less. More productive people are less creative.

People feel differently reading something by Paul Graham and something by blogger they've never heard about.

Which people, and how do you know? The first time I read a PG essay, I'd never heard of him. I think you're confusing the cause and effect about people following -- at least where some people are concerned. PG, RMS, and EY aren't convincing because they have followers, they have followers because they're convincing.

Now, if you're saying the status indicators are in their writing, then that's another story. It's arguably a status symbol merely to speak possibly-unpopular and/ore weird opinions in an authoritative voice without weaseling or implying that you're a persecuted minority or even so much as dignifying the possibility that people might disagree with you.

Ok, the best way for me to answer this question is to list the 10 most important scientists/academics of all time, and then look them up on wikipedia. I'll write down the list, and then comment again once I've ascertained how "generalist" they are. So, in order of importance:

1. Galileo
2. Darwin
3. Newton
4. Descartes
5. Socrates
6. Aristotle
7. Plato
8. Hume
9. Einstein
10. Francis Bacon

EDIT: I kind of picked these guys at random out of "famous important academics". Berners-Lee is on my mind as I study the semantic web. The main point of the exercise is that I wrote down the names before I went and read their wikipedia articles to see how much they're generalists. Do feel free to suggest changes to this list. Once some consensus is reached, I will post the analysis. I kicked pythagoras off in favor of Francis Bacon, since Bacon seems to be particularly relevant to this site's interests, and the article on Pythagoras disputes the worth of his science. Strictly speaking, this is a bit naughty of me, but what the hell - I'll allow this one indulgence. Note that I didn't look at Francis Bacon's article before I decided he was to go on the list; I was spurred into including him by scientism's comment below.