My default is to assume that men and women are pretty similar.

How do you reconcile this view with the way questions of tone have become entangled with gender issues in this very thread?

There was that discussion of ignoring good test results from a member of a group if you already believe that they're bad at whatever was being tested. (They were referred to as blues, but it seemed to be a reference to women and math.) It was a case of only identifying with the gatekeeper.

It was also an extremely straightforward application of Bayes's theorem.

No thought about the unfairness

The problem is that the concept of "fairness" you are using there is incompatible with VNM-utilitarianism. (If somebody disagrees with this, please describe what the term in one's utility function corresponding to fairness would look like.)

I'm not sure how much anyone has been convinced that women have actual points of view

Where has anyone claimed they don't? At least beyond the general rejection of qualia?

Hmm, I definitely see where you're coming from, and I don't (usually) want my comments to hurt anyone. If my comments were consistently upsetting people when I was just trying to have a normal conversation, then I would want to know about this and fix it - both because I actually do care about people's feelings, and because I don't want to prevent every single interesting person from conversing with me. It would take a lot of work, and it would go against my default conversational style, but it would be worth it in the long run.

However, it sounds more like there's a cultural/gender difference on LW. That is, different people prefer different paddings of niceness. Currently, the community has a low-niceness-padding standard, which is great for people who prefer that style of interaction, but which sucks for people who would prefer more niceness-padding, and those people are either driven away from the community or spend much of their time here feeling alienated and upset.

So the question here is, should we change LW culture? I personally would prefer we didn't, because I like the culture we have now. I don't support rationalist evangelism, and I'm not bothered by the gender imbalance, so I don't feel a need to lure more women onto LW by changing the culture. Is this unfair to rationalist women who would like to participate in LW discussions, but are put off by the lack of friendliness? Yes, it is. But similarly, if we encouraged more niceness padding, this would be unfair to the people who prefer a more bare-bones style of interaction.

(It could be that it's easier to adjust in one direction - maybe it's easier to grow accustomed to niceness padding than to the lack thereof. In that case, it might be worth the overhead.)

Regarding your example...

I feel like it doesn't take away from the discussion to say "Oh sorry! I really meant [this]" instead of "I said [this] not [that]," which sounds pretty unfriendly on the internet.

See, I would have classified this as "disrespect" rather than "unfriendliness". In the first version, the person is admitting that he/she was unclear, and is trying to correct it - a staple of intellectual discussion, which often serves to elucidate things through careful analysis. In the second version, the person is saying "I'm right and you're wrong", which means that the discussion has devolved into an argument, instead of two people working together towards greater understanding.

What about these examples?

"Oh sorry! I really meant [this]" (your example)

"Good point; let me clarify. [Clarification.]"

"Oops, let me clarify. [Clarification.]"

"Clarification: [clarification]"

I would tend towards the second or third, personally. The first has "sorry" in it, which seems unnecessarily apologetic to me. People frequently state things unclearly and then have to elucidate them; it's part of the normal discussion process, and not something to be sorry for. The fourth sounds unnecessarily abrupt to me (though I imagine it'd depend on the context). I'm curious what other people think w.r.t. these examples.

I feel like part of this is not acknowledging that quite a few people will experience non-fuzzy or anti-fuzzy feelings if they are disagreed with in a dismissive way. Or maybe when they feel like they are disagreed with in a dismissive way. And this may happen while the disagree-er is completely oblivious to this perception, and I think it is a little bit on the disagree-er to add some padding of niceness?

Like you're not going to be a bit careful if you're in danger of accidentally stepping on people's feet in real life, right? That has pretty little to do with respect and more to do with compassion. It's a mutual understanding that human feet are squishy and hurt to be stepped on. Or you'd add niceness if you accidentally offend someone in a meatspace discussion? So why not here? I feel like it doesn't take away from the discussion to say "Oh sorry! I really meant [this]" instead of "I said [this] not [that]," which sounds pretty unfriendly on the internet.

(Also, I feel like I'm the only person here that regularly uses exclamation marks. )

I feel like I've come across a lot of discussions where it's pretty obvious that the parties involved are frustrated, but they don't acknowledge it because there's a little bit of that Spocklike rationalists-don't-get-frustrated attitude still lingering around.

If I score 70% in an exam, am I "tending to ace the exam"?

You're looking at the wrong problem and numbers.

If you score 70% in an exam, you are not very accurate.

If that was the only exam on which you scored 70%, and in all your other exams (of which there were more than ten) you had scores better than 95%, then you tend to be highly accurate, even though on that exam you were not accurate.

In other words, the claim by kaetl is that on average, some particular belief about group difference will probably be very accurate, because most of them are, but there are some that are not accurate at all. Which is why they tend to be highly accurate, but they're not always highly accurate (or even accurate at all).

I'm not making that error because my conclusion is not "b cannot be responsible for c".

My point is that if she was to identify the external situation as the (main, etc.,) cause of her nervousness, her stated reason should refer to the elevator situation. But her reason actually refers to a totally different situation!

If in general it's impossible to decompose the cause of something into external or internal, then the Fundamental Attributation Fallacy is not a fallacy. I don't wish to make so controversial an argument here, so I merely pointed out that if it is possible to decompose in such a way, then her argument is inconsistant with the view on the decomposition she is supposed to have in this instance.

If I asked you to solve "2+2=x" for x and you answered "4", that would be Bayesian evidence that you know how to do simple arithmetic.

It is also Bayesian evidence that you answer "4" whenever asked for number. It is even Bayesian evidence that you only ever say the word "four", period.

See how these are not all equal? When an observation you make is correct, that very much lowers the additional probability that you are a misogynist, compared to if your observation had been incorrect.

You could say "well, why make the observation?" to which I'd reply "Because you're an attentive chap, and you're in a car and observing regularities in your environment. Other people are interesting, and their gender cannot not be seen when looking into other cars."

you also don't have to loudly describe parts of your map to everyone else in the car

If I ferried the kind of passengers who would appreciate pointing out a certain interesting geometric pattern of trees by the wayside, I wouldn't want to treat observations about the identity of other drivers and how that predicts their behavior any differently.

edit: Can't we just call the territory/reality misogynist in such cases, and when called out correctly say "I'm sorry reality offends you, ma'am." :-)

So to maximise karma I should just post links to every piece of media ever produced? People should be disincentivised from posting stuff that will harm the signal-noise ratio, here as in other threads.

I just returned from the CFAR workshop! Would people be interested in a top-level Discussion post about this?

A small correction: The Society for Venturism has been around for quite a while, although I have a vague impression they've been more active in the last year than in the past. I had a look at their site to see when they were founded (1986), and noticed they're currently raising funds for someone else, Aaron Winborn.