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All of Rakel's Comments + Replies

Sayeth the Girl
Rakel80

You raise a good point. There are certain statistically proven differences between sexes and making generalizations based on these statistics is a good strategy for example under the conditions you specified. Differencies of this kind include things like "men on average are taller than women" and "women on average have higher percantage of body fat than men". I don't think anyone in here has a problem with generalizations like these.

My point was that there is a different class of generalizations which is problematic. One of the examples... (read more)

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3Raw_Power
This is simply a case of confusing normative statements with descriptive ones. If we raise the sanity line enough, such misconceptions should vanish spontaneously.
Being saner about gender and rationality
Rakel10

I'm asking why he thinks that different gender ratio would be a big change. Are men and women so different from each other that it would be noticeable? Even if the discussions are strictly about rationalism?

I'm also asking why he thinks change like that wont happen. Are women inherently less rationalistic?

And a question for you: why it is likely that people who want to join have that skewed sex ratio?

(Disclaimer: I'm asking these questions because I'm interested in what people think, and I'm trying to keep them as "unthreatening" as possible. But as they are questions, they always seem somewhat aggressive :P)

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1SoullessAutomaton
I think you're reading too much into it--it would be a big change in the gender ratio, not necessarily anything else. Personally, I don't think it'd matter all that much otherwise, as far as the discourse here is concerned. People don't find sites like LW out of the blue; they need to find links from some other site, have some reason for doing a web search that leads to this site, or have it mentioned by a friend. * If memory serves me, statistically, most friendships are same-sex, so that vector will have a similar sex ratio. * LW is a small site on esoteric topics, therefore the chance of finding it from a random Google search are small, so that vector is likely to have little impact. * Most of the other sites that would currently be inclined to link to LW are topically related to computer science, philosophy, economics, science, athiesm, technology, science fiction, &c.--most of which are interests that also have skewed gender ratios to some degree, some more or less so than LW[1]. That is also my answer to "why I don't expect it to change", at least not without deliberate outreach of some sort to compatible communities with less gender skew. Short version: It's a self-perpetuating situation for various reasons. [1]: I've been in at least one technology-oriented community where male-to-female transsexuals outnumbered biological females among active participants. I don't think I need to point out how statistically unlikely that is.
0timtyler
Big: 2% to 20% is - what - about a 1000% increase? Liklihood: extreme-rationality and intelligent machines are ultra-nerd material - and of course, most ultra-nerds are male.
Being saner about gender and rationality
Rakel00

I'm well aware that communities like this tend to be extremely gender-skewed. Perhaps I should have elaborated on my question(s):

Why 20% women would be a big change? Why timtyler doesn't see it happening?

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3SoullessAutomaton
Well, I can't really speak for him, but I assume he's just saying that the current ratio is far from 20% and that he sees no reason to expect it to change, possibly because the kind of people who would be likely to join will have a similarly skewed ratio. I'm not really sure what you're asking.
Being saner about gender and rationality
Rakel60

I didn't see what Alicorn said in her post as a start or continuation of politicization in here. I saw it as an observation of possible biases.

I agree with you on the issue that those camps are unneccessary and harmful, but I think that excluding this topic from rationalistic discussion would do more harm than good. As you say, modelling general human female as a mechanical system is standard in both thinking and in language. Why is it so? Must it be so? Is the same true with generic human male? Is there any value in making such generalizations of either s... (read more)

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1SoullessAutomaton
I think his point is that attempting to change the demographics for the sake of changing them would result in a loss of rationality. I don't think I necessarily agree, but that's not the same as assuming the current gender ratio is ideal for some reason.
9SoullessAutomaton
In short, the type of backgrounds that most people on LW have, and other communities they are in, tend to be as gender-skewed as LW, if not sometimes moreso. Go look at the Computer Science department at your nearest university, for instance.
Sayeth the Girl
Rakel230

This post (and the comments on it) made me finally to register in here, partly because I had few discussions about similar topics just a few days ago.

As knb said: "This site is hugely less sexist than society at large." While this might be true, it only means that most people in here are "less wrong" than society at large. This does not mean that they are right. It also has the same ring to my ears as "Some of my friends are black/jewish/".

Gender bias is rampant even in the internet where it should hold no sway (there are no v... (read more)

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Tom_Talbot110

Basically, assigning certain attributes to either sex effectively prohibits those attributes in the other sex. That is not useful or rational, that is just limiting the potential.

Upvoted for this but... in a way this reminds me of the Tversky and Edwards experiment mentioned in the Technical Explanation where participants are shown a sequence of red and blue cards and asked to guess the next in the sequence. Since 70% of the cards are blue the best strategy is to always guess blue, but participants irrationally guess a mixture of blue and red as if they... (read more)

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