How diverse is Less Wrong? I am under the impression that we disproportionately consist of 20-35 year old white males, more disproportionately on some axes than on others.
We obviously over-represent atheists, but there are very good reasons for that. Likewise, we are probably over-educated compared to the populations we are drawn from. I venture that we have a fairly weak age bias, and that can be accounted for by generational dispositions toward internet use.
However, if we are predominately white males, why are we? Should that concern us? There’s nothing about being white, or female, or hispanic, or deaf, or gay that prevents one from being a rationalist. I’m willing to bet that after correcting for socioeconomic correlations with ethnicity, we still don’t make par. Perhaps naïvely, I feel like we must explain ourselves if this is the case.
This sounds like the same question as why are there so few top-notch women in STEM fields, why there are so few women listed in Human Accomplishment’s indices*, why so few non-whites or non-Asians score 5 on AP Physics, why...
In other words, here be dragons.
* just Lady Murasaki, if you were curious. It would be very amusing to read a review of The Tale of Genji by Eliezer or a LWer. My own reaction by the end was horror.
That’s absolutely true. I’ve worked for two US National Labs, and both were monocultures. At my first job, the only woman in my group (20 or so) was the administrative assistant. At my second, the numbers were better, but at both, there were literally no non-whites in my immediate area. The inability to hire non-citizens contributes to the problem—I worked for Microsoft as well, and all the non-whites were foreign citizens—but it’s not as if there aren’t any women in the US!
It is a nearly intractable problem, and I think I understand it fairly well, but I would very much like to hear the opinion of LWers. My employers have always been very eager to hire women and minorities, but the numbers coming out of computer science programs are abysmal. At Less Wrong, a B.S. or M.S. in a specific field is not a barrier to entry, so our numbers should be slightly better. On the other hand, I have no idea how to go about improving them.
The Tale of Genji has gone on my list of books to read. Thanks!
At Less Wrong, a B.S. or M.S. in a specific field is not a barrier to entry, so our numbers should be slightly better.
Yes, but we are even more extreme in some respects; many CS/philosophy/neurology/etc. majors reject the Strong AI Thesis (I’ve asked), while it is practically one of our dogmas.
The Tale of Genji has gone on my list of books to read. Thanks!
I realize that I was a bit of a tease there. It’s somewhat off topic, but I’ll include (some of) the hasty comments I wrote down immediately upon finishing:
The prevalence of poems & puns is quite remarkable. It is also remarkable how tired they all feel; in Genji, poetry has lost its magic and has simply become another stereotyped form of communication, as codified as a letter to the editor or small talk. I feel fortunate that my introductions to Japanese poetry have usually been small anthologies of the greatest poets; had I first encountered court poetry through Genji, I would have been disgusted by the mawkish sentimentality & repetition.
The gender dynamics are remarkable. Toward the end, one of the two then main characters becomes frustrated and casually has sex with a serving lady; it’s mentioned that he liked sex with her better than with any of the other servants. Much earlier in Genji (it’s a good thousand pages, remember), Genji simply rapes a woman, and the central female protagonist, Murasaki, is kidnapped as a girl and he marries her while still what we would consider a child. (I forget whether Genji sexually molests her before the pro forma marriage.) This may be a matter of non-relativistic moral appraisal, but I get the impression that in matters of sexual fidelity, rape, and children, Heian-era morals were not much different from my own, which makes the general immunity all the more remarkable. (This is the ‘shining’ Genji?) The double-standards are countless.
The power dynamics are equally remarkable. Essentially every speaking character is nobility, low or high, or Buddhist clergy (and very likely nobility anyway). The characters spend next to no time on ‘work’ like running the country, despite many main characters ranking high in the hierarchy and holding ministral ranks; the Emperor in particular does nothing except party. All the households spend money like mad, and just expect their land-holdings to send in the cash. (It is a signal of their poverty that the Uji household ever even mentions how less money is coming from their lands than used to.) The Buddhist clergy are remarkably greedy & worldly; after the death of the father of the Uji household, the abbot of the monastery he favored sends the grief-stricken sisters a note—which I found remarkably crass—reminding them that he wants the customary gifts of valuable textiles.
The medicinal practices are utterly horrifying. They seem to consist, one and all, of the following algorithm: ‘while sick, pay priests to chant.’ If chanting doesn’t work, hire more priests. (One remarkable freethinker suggests that a sick woman eat more food.) Chanting is, at least, not outright harmful like bloodletting, but it’s still sickening to read through dozens of people dying amidst chanting. In comparison, the bizarre superstitions that guide many characters’ activities (trapping them in their houses on inauspicious days) are practically unobjectionable.
Thank you very much. I looked for but failed to find this when I went to write my post. I had intended to start with actual numbers, assuming that someone had previously asked the question. The rest is interesting as well.
However, if we are predominately white males, why are we?
Ignoring the obviously political issue of “concern”, it’s fun to consider this question on a purely intellectual level. If you’re a white male, why are you? Is the anthropic answer (“just because”) sufficient? At what size of group does it cease to be sufficient? I don’t know the actual answer. Some people think that asking “why am I me” is inherently meaningless, but for me personally, this doesn’t dissolve the mystery.
The flippant answer is that a group size of 1 lacks statistical significance; at some group size, that ceases to be the case.
I asked not from a political perspective. In arguments about diversity, political correctness often dominates. I am actually interested in, among other things, whether a lack of diversity is a functional impairment for a group. I feel strongly that it is, but I can’t back up that claim with evidence strong enough to match my belief. For a group such as Less Wrong, I have to ask what we miss due to a lack of diversity.
The flippant answer is that a group size of 1 lacks statistical significance; at some group size, that ceases to be the case.
The flippant answer to your answer is that you didn’t pick LW randomly out of the set of all groups. The fact that you, a white male, consistently choose to join groups composed mostly of white males—and then inquire about diversity—could have any number of anthropic explanations from your perspective :-) In the end it seems to loop back into why are you, you again.
I’ve been thinking that there are parallels between building FAI and Talmud—it’s an effort to manage an extremely dangerous, uncommunicative entity through deduction. (An FAI may be communicative to some extent. An FAI which hasn’t been built yet doesn’t communicate.)
Being an atheist doesn’t eliminate cultural influence. Survey for atheists: which God do you especially not believe in?
I was talking about FAI with Gene Treadwell, who’s black. He was quite concerned that the FAI would be sentient, but owned and controlled.
This doesn’t mean that either Eliezer or Gene are wrong (or right for that matter), but it suggests to me that culture gives defaults which might be strong attractors. [1]
He recommended recruiting Japanese members, since they’re more apt to like and trust robots.
I don’t know about explaining ourselves, but we may need more angles on the problem just to be able to do the work.
[1] See also Timothy Leary’s S.M.I.2L.E.-- Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, Life Extension. Robert Anton Wilson said that was match for Catholic hopes of going to heaven, being trajnsfigured, and living forever.
He recommended recruiting Japanese members, since they’re more apt to like and >trust robots.
He has a very good point. I was surprised more Japanese or Koreans hadn’t made their way to Lesswrong. This was my motivation for first proposing we recruit translators for Japanese and Chinese and to begin working towards a goal of making at least the sequences available in many languages.
Not being a native speaker of English proved a significant barrier for me in some respects. The first noticeable one was spelling, I however solved the problem by outsourcing this part of the system known as Konkvistador to the browser. ;) Other more insidious forms of miscommunication and cultural difficulties persist.
I’m not sure that it’s a language thing. I think many (most?) college-educated Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese can read and write in English. We also seem to have more Russian LWers than Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese combined.
According to a page gwern linked to in another branch of the thread, among those who got 5 on AP Physics C in 2008, 62.0% were White and 28.3% were Asian. But according to the LW survey, only 3.8% of respondents were Asian.
Maybe there is something about Asian cultures that makes them less overtly interested in rationality, but I don’t have any good ideas what it might be.
I’m not sure that it’s a language thing. I think many (most?) college-educated Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese can read and write in English. We also seem to have more Russian LWers than Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese combined.
All LW users display near-native control of English, which won’t be as universal, and typically requires years-long consumption of English content. English-speaking world is the default source of non-Russian content for Russians, but it might not be the case with native Asians (what’s your impression?)
My impression is that for most native Asians, the English-speaking world is also their default source of non-native-language content. I have some relatives in China, and to the extent they do consume non-Chinese content, they consume English content. None of them consume enough of it to obtain near-native control of English though.
I’m curious, what kind of English content did you consume before you came across OB/LW? How typical do you think that level of consumption is in Russia?
I generally agree with your assessment. But I think there may be more East and South Asians than you think, more 36-80s and more 15-19s too. I have no reason to think we are underrepresented in gays or in deaf people.
My general impression is that women are not made welcome here—the level of overt sexism is incredibly high for a community that tends to frown on chest-beating. But perhaps the women should speak for themselves on that subject. Or not. Discussions on this subject tend to be uncomfortable, Sometimes it seems that the only good they do is to flush some of the more egregious sexists out of the closet.
OMG! A whole top-level-posting. And not much more than a year ago. I didn’t know. Well, that shows that you guys (and gals) have said all that could possibly need to be said regarding that subject. ;)
It does have about 100 pages of comments. Consider also the “links to followup posts” in line 4 of that article. It all seemed to go on forever—but maybe that was just me.
I don’t know why you presume that because we are mostly 25-35 something White
males a reasonable proportion of us are not deaf, gay or disabled (one of the top level posts is by someone who will soon deal with being perhaps limited to communicating with the world via computer)
I smell a whiff of that weird American memplex for minority and diversity that my third world mind isn’t quite used to, but which I seem to encounter more and more often, you know the one that for example uses the word minority to describe women.
Also I decline to invitation to defend this community for lack of diversity, I don’t see it as a prior a thing in need of a large part of our attention. Rationality is universal, however not in the sense of being equally universally valued in different cultures but certainly universally effective (rationalists should win). One should certainly strive to keep a site dedicated to refining the art free of unnecessary additional barriers to other people. I think we should eventually translate many articles into Hindi, Japanese, Chinese, Arab, German, Spanish, Russian and French. However its ridiculous to imagine that our demographics will somehow come to resemble and match a socio-economic adjusted mix of unspecified ethnicities that you seem to hunt for after we eliminate all such barriers. I assure you White Westerners have their very very insane spots, we deal with them constantly, but God for starters isn’t among them, look at GSS or various sources on Wikipedia and consider how much more a thought stopper and a boo light atheism is for a large part of the world, what should the existing population of LessWrong do? Refrain from bashing theism? This might incur down votes, but Westerners did come up with the scientific method and did contribute disproportionately to the fields of statistics and mathematics, is it so unimaginable that developed world (Iceland, Italy, Switzerland, Finland, America, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan ect.) and their majority demographics still have a more overall rationality friendly climate (due to the caprice of history) than basically any part of the world? I freely admit my own native culture (though I’m probably thoroughly Westernised by now due to late childhood influences of mass media and education) is probably less rational than the Anglosaxon one. However simply going on a “crusade” to make other cultures more rational first since they are “clearly” more in need is besides sending terribly bad signals as well as the potential for self-delusion perhaps a bad idea for humanitarian reasons.
Sex ration: There are some differences in aptitude, psychology and interests that ensure that compsci and mathematics, at least at the higher levels will remain disproportionately male for the foreseeable future (until human modification takes off). This obviously affects our potential pool of recruits.
Age: People grow more conservative as they age, Lesswrong is firstly available only on a relatively a new medium, secondly has a novel approach to popularizing rationality. Also as people age the mind unfortunately do deteriorate. Very few people have a IQ high enough to master difficult fields before they are 15, and even their interests are somewhat affected by their peers.
I am sure I am rationalizing at least a few of these points, however I need to ask you is pursuing some popular concept of diversity (why did you for example not commend LW on its inclusion of non-neurotypicals who are often excluded in some segments of society? Also why do you only bemoan the under-representation of groups everyone else does? Is this really a rational approach? Why don’t we go study where the in the memspace we might find truly valuable perspectives and focus on those? Maybe they overlap with the popular kinds, maybe they don’t, but can we really trust popular culture and especially the standard political discourse on this? ) is truly cost-effective at this point?
If you read my comment, you would have seen that I explicitly assume that we are not under-represented among deaf or gay people.
I smell a whiff of that weird American memplex [...] you know the one that for example uses the word minority to describe women.
If less than 4% of us are women, I am quite willing to call that a minority. Would you prefer me to call them an excluded group?
but God for starters isn’t among them
I specifically brought up atheists as a group that we should expect to over-represent. I’m also not hunting for equal-representation among countries, since education obviously ought to make a difference.
There are some differences in aptitude, psychology and interests that ensure that compsci and mathematics, at least at the higher levels will remain disproportionately male
That seems like it ought to get many more boos around here than mentioning the western world as the source of the scientific method. I ascribe differences in those to cultural influences; I don’t claim that aptitude isn’t a factor, but I don’t believe it has been or can easily be measured given the large cultural factors we have.
age
This also doesn’t bother me, for reasons similar to yours. As a friend of mine says, “we’ll get gay rights by outliving the homophobes”.
why do you only bemoan the under-representation of groups everyone else does?
Which groups should I pay more attention to? This is a serious question, since I haven’t thought too much about it. I neglect non-neurotypicals because they are overrepresented in my field, so I tend to expect them amongst similar groups.
I wasn’t actually intending to bemoan anything with my initial question, I was just curious. I was also shocked when I found out that this is dramatically less diverse than I thought, and less than any other large group I’ve felt a sort of membership in, but I don’t feel like it needs to be demonized for that. I certainly wasn’t trying to do that.
I ascribe differences in those to cultural influences;I don’t claim that aptitude isn’t a factor, but I don’t believe it has been or can easily be measured given the large cultural factors we have.
But if we can’t measure the cultural factors and account for them why presume a blank slate approach? Especially since there is sexual dimorphism in the very nervous and endocrine system.
I think you got stuck on the aptitude, to elaborate, I’m pretty sure considering that humans aren’t a very sexually dimorphous species (there are near relatives that are less however, example: Gibons), the mean g (if such a thing exists) of both men and women is probably about the same. There are however other aspects of succeeding at compsci or math than general intelligence.
Assuming that men and women carrying the exactly the same mems will respond on average identically to identical situations is a extraordinary claim. I’m struggling to come up with a evolutionary model that would square this with what is known (for example the greater historical reproductive success of the average woman vs. the average man that we can read from the distribution of genes). If I was presented with empirical evidence then this would be just too bad for the models, but in the absence of meaningful measurement (by your account), why not assign greater probability to the outcome proscribed by the same models that work so well when tested by other empirical claims?
I would venture to state that this case is especially strong for preferences.
And if you are trying to fine tune the situations and memes that both men and women for each gender so as to to balance this, where can one demonstrate that this isn’t a step away rather than toward improving pareto efficiency? And if its not, why proceed with it?
Also to admit a personal bias I just aesthetically prefer equal treatment whenever pragmatic concerns don’t trump it.
But if we can’t measure the cultural factors and account for them
We can’t directly measure them, but we can get an idea of how large they are and how they work.
For example, the gender difference in empathic abilities. While women will score higher on empathy on self report tests, the difference is much smaller on direct tests of ability, and often nonexistent on tests of ability where it isn’t stated to the participant that it’s empathy being tested. And then there’s the motivation of seeming empathetic. One of the best empathy tests I’ve read about is Ickes’, which worked like this: two participants meet together in the room and have a brief conversation, which is taped. Then they go into separate rooms and the tape is played back to them twice. The first time, they jot down the times at which they remember feeling various emotions. The second time, they jot down the times at which they think their partner is feeling an emotion, and what it is. Then the records are compared, and each participant receives an accuracy score. When the test is run is like this, there is no difference in ability between men and women. However, a difference emerges when another factor is added: each participant is asked to write a “confidence level” for each prediction they make. In that procedure, women score better, presumably because their desire to appear empathetic (write down higher confidence levels) causes them to put more effort into the task. But where do desires to appear a certain way come from? At least partly from cultural factors that dictate how each gender is supposed to appear. This is probably the same reason why women are overconfident in self reporting their empathic abilities relative to men.
The same applies to math. Among women and men with the same math ability as scored on tests, women will rate their own abilities much lower than the men do. Since people do what they think they’ll be good at, this will likely affect how much time these people spend on math in future, and the future abilities they acquire.
And then there’s priming. Asian American women do better on math tests when primed with their race (by filling in a “race” bubble at the top of the test) than when primed with their gender (by filling in a “sex” bubble). More subtly, priming affects people’s implicit attitudes towards gender-stereotyped domains too. People are often primed about their gender in real life, each time affecting their actions a little, which over time will add up to significant differences in the paths they choose in life in addition to that which is caused by innate gender differences. Right now we don’t have enough information to say how much is caused by each, but I don’t see why we can’t make more headway into this in the future.
But if we can’t measure the cultural factors and account for them
We can’t directly measure them, but we can get an idea of how large they are and how they work.
For example, the gender difference in empathic abilities. While women will score higher on empathy on self report tests, the difference is much smaller on direct tests of ability, and nonexistent on tests of ability where it isn’t stated to the participant that it’s empathy being tested. And then there’s the motivation of seeming empathetic. One of the http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-6811.2000.tb00006.x/abstract is Ickes’, which worked like this: two participants meet together in the room and have a brief conversation, which is taped. Then they go into separate rooms and the tape is played back to them twice. The first time, they jot down the times at which they remember feeling various emotions. The second time, they jot down the times at which they think their partner is feeling an emotion, and what it is. Then the records are compared, and each participant receives an accuracy score. When the test is run is like this, there is no difference in ability between men and women. However, a difference emerges when another factor is added: each participant is asked to write a “confidence level” for each prediction they make. In that procedure, women score better, presumably because the their desire to appear empathetic causes them to put more effort into the task. But where do desires to appear a certain way come from? At least partly from cultural factors that dictate how each gender is supposed to appear. This is probably the same reason why women are overconfident in their empathy abilities relative to men.
The same applies to math. Among women and men with the same math ability as scored on tests, women will rate their own abilities much lower than the men do. Since people do what they think they’ll be good at, this will likely affect how much time these people spend on math in future, and the future abilities they acquire.
And then there’s priming. Asian American women do better on math tests when primed with their race (by filling in a “race” bubble at the top of the test) than when primed with their gender (by filling in a “sex” bubble). More subtly, priming affects people’s implicit http://ase.tufts.edu/psychology/ambady/pubs/2006Steele.pdf towards gender-stereotyped domains too. People are often primed about their gender in real life, each time affecting their actions a little, which over time will add up in significant differences in the paths they choose in life in addition to that which is caused by innate gender differences.
I neglect non-neurotypicals because they are overrepresented in my field, so I tend to expect them amongst similar groups.
How do you know non-neurotypicals aren’t over or under represented on Lesswrong as compared to the groups that you claim are overrepresented on Lesswrong compared to your field the same way you know that the groups you bemoan are lacking are under-represented relative to your field?
Is it just because being neurotypical is harder to measure and define? I concede measuring who is a woman or a man or who is considered black and who is considered asian is for the average case easier than being neurotpyical. But when it comes to definition those concepts seem to be in the same order of magnitude of fuzzy as being neurotypical (sex is a less, race is a bit more).
Also previously you established you don’t want to compare Less wrongs diversity to the entire population of the world. I’m going to tentatively go that you also accept that academic background will affect if people can grasp or are interested in learning certain key concepts needed to participate.
My question now is, why don’t we crunch the numbers instead of people yelling “too many!”, “too few!” or “just right!”? We know from which countries and in what numbers visitors come from, we know the educational distributions in most of them. And we know how large a fraction of this group is proficient enough English to participate meaningfully on Less wrong.
This is ignoring the fact that the only data we have on sex or race is a simple self reported poll and our general impression.
But if we crunch the numbers and the probability densities end up looking pretty similar from the best data we can find, well why is the burden of proof that we are indeed wasting potential on Lesswrong and not the one proposing policy or action to improve our odds of progressing towards becoming more rational? And if we are promoting our member’s values, even when they aren’t neutral or positive towards reaching our objectives why don’t we spell them out as long as they truly are common! I’m certainly there are a few, perhaps the value of life and existence (thought these have been questioned and debated here too) or perhaps some utilitarian principles.
But how do we know any position people take would really reflect their values and wouldn’t jut be status signalling? Heck many people who profess their values include or don’t include a certain inherent “goodness” to existence probably do for signalling reasons and would quickly change their minds in a different situation!
Not even mentioning the general effect of the mindkiller.
But like I have stated before, there are certainly many spaces where we can optimize the stated goal by outreach. This is why I think this debate should continue but with a slightly different spirit. More in line with, to paraphrase you:
Which groups should we pay more attention to? This is a serious question, since we haven’t thought too much about it.
If less than 4% of us are women, I am quite willing to call that a minority. Would you >prefer me to call them an excluded group
I’m talking about the Western memplex whose members employ uses the word minority when describing women in general society. Even thought they represent a clear numerical majority.
I was suspicious that you used the word minority in that sense rather than the more clearly defined sense of being a numerical minority.
Sometimes when talking about groups we can avoid discussing which meaning of the word we are employing.
Example: Discussing the repression of the Mayan minority in Mexico.
While other times we can’t do this.
Example: Discussing the history and current relationship between the Arab upper class minority and slavery in Mauritania.
This (age) also doesn’t bother me, for reasons similar to yours.
Ah, apologies I see I carried it over from here:
How diverse is Less Wrong? I am under the impression that we disproportionately >consist of 20-35 year old white males, more disproportionately on some axes than >on others.
You explicitly state later that you are particularly interested in this axis of diversity
However, if we are predominately white males, why are we?
Perhaps this would be more manageable if looked at each of the axis of variability that you raise talk about it independently in as much as this is possible? Again, this is why I previously got me confused by speaking of “groups we usually consider adding diversity”, are there certain groups that are inherently associated with the word diversity? Are we using the word diversity to mean something like “proportionate representation of certain kinds of people in all groups” or are we using the world diversity in line with infinite diversity in Infinite combinations where if you create a mix of 1 part people A and 4 parts people B and have them coexist and cooperate with another one that is 2 part people A and 3 parts people B, where previously all groups where of the first kind, creating a kind of metadiversity (by using the word diversity in its politically charged meaning)?
I specifically brought up atheists as a group that we should expect to over-represent. I’m also not hunting for equal-representation among countries, since education obviously ought to make a difference.
Then why aren you hunting for equal representation on LW between different groups united in a space as arbitrary as one defined by borders?
mentioning the western world as the source of the scientific method.
While many important components of the modern scientific method did originate among scholars in Persian and Iraq in the medieval era, its development over the past 700 years has been disproportionately seen in Europe and later its colonies. I would argue its adoption was a part of the reason for the later (lets say last 300 years) technological superiority of the West.
Edit: I wrote up quite a long wall of text. I’m just going to split it into a few posts as to make it more readable as well as give me a better sense of what is getting up or downvoted based on its merit or lack of there of.
That seems like it ought to get many more boos around here than mentioning the western world as the source of the scientific method. I ascribe differences in those to cultural influences;
Given new evidence from the ongoing discussion I retract my earlier concession. I have the impression that the bottom line preceded the reasoning.
I expected your statement to get more boos for the same reason that you expected my premise in the other discussion to be assumed because of moral rather than evidence-based reasons. That is, I am used to other members of your species (I very much like that phrasing) to take very strong and sudden positions condemning suggestions of inherent inequality between the sexes, regardless of having a rational basis. I was not trying to boo your statement myself.
That said, I feel like I have legitimate reasons to oppose suggestions that women are inherently weaker in mathematics and related fields. I mentioned one immediately below the passage you quoted. If you insist on supporting that view, I ask that you start doing so by citing evidence, and then we can begin the debate from there. At minimum, I feel like if you are claiming women to be inherently inferior, the burden of proof lies with you.
Mathematical ability is most remarked on at the far right of the bell curve. It is very possible (and there’s lots of evidence to support the argument) that women simply have lower variance in mathematical ability. The average is the same. Whether or not ‘lower variance’ implies ‘inherently weaker’ is another argument, but it’s a silly one.
I’m much too lazy to cite the data, but a quick Duck Duck Go search or maybe Google Scholar search could probably find it. An overview with good references is here.
My own anecdotal experience has been that women are rare in elite math environments, but don’t perform worse than the men. That would be consistent with a fat-tailed rather than normal distribution, and also with higher computed variance among women.
Also anecdotal, but it seems that when people come from an education system that privileges math (like Europe or Asia as opposed to the US) the proportion of women who pursue math is higher. In other words, when you can get as much social status by being a poly sci major as a math major, women tend not to do math, but when math is very clearly ranked as the “top” or “most competitive” option throughout most of your educational life, women are much more likely to pursue it.
I have no idea; sorry, saying so was bad epistemic hygiene. I thought I’d heard something like that but people often say bell curve when they mean any sort of bell-like distribution.
Also anecdotal, but it seems that when people come from an education system that privileges math (like Europe or Asia as opposed to the US) the proportion of women who pursue math is higher.
I’m left confused as to how to update on this information… I don’t know how large such an effect is, nor what the original literature on gender difference says, which means that I don’t really know what I’m talking about, and that’s not a good place to be. I’ll make sure to do more research before making such claims in the future.
I’m not claiming that there aren’t systematic differences in position or shape of the distribution of ability. What I’m claiming is that no one has sufficiently proved that these differences are inherent.
I can think of a few plausible non-genetic influences that could reduce variance, but even if none of those come into play, there must be others that are also possibilities. Do you see why I’m placing the burden of proof on you to show that differences are biologically inherent, but also why I believe that this is such a difficult task?
Do you see why I’m placing the burden of proof on you to show that differences are biologically inherent
Either because you don’t understand how bayesian evidence works or because you think the question is social political rather than epistemic.
It might have been marginally more productive to answer “No, I don’t see. Would you explain?” But, rather than attempting to other-optimize, I will simply present that request to datadataeverywhere. Why is the placement of “burden” important? With this supplementary question: Do you know of evidence strongly suggesting that different cultural norms might significantly alter the predominant position of the male sex in academic mathematics?
… but also why I believe that this is such a difficult task?
I can certainly see this as a difficult task. For example, we can imagine that fictional rational::Harry Potter and Hermione were both taught as children that it is ok to be smart, but that only Hermione was instructed not to be obnoxiously smart. This dynamic, by itself, would be enough to strongly suppress the numbers of women to rise to the highest levels in math.
But producing convincing evidence in this area is not an impossible task. For example, we can empirically assess the impact of the above mechanism by comparing the number of bright and very bright men and women who come from different cultural backgrounds.
Rather than simply demanding that your interlocutor show his evidence first, why not go ahead and show yours?
But producing convincing evidence in this area is not an impossible task. For example, we can empirically assess the impact of the above mechanism by comparing the number of bright and very bright men and women who come from different cultural backgrounds.
I agree, and this was what I meant. Distinguishing between nature and nurture, as wedrifid put it, is a difficult but not impossible task.
Why is the placement of “burden” important? With this supplementary question: Do you know of evidence strongly suggesting that different cultural norms might significantly alter the predominant position of the male sex in academic mathematics?
I hope I answered both of these in my comment to wedrifid below. Thank you for bothering to take my question at face value (as a question that requests a response), instead of deciding to answer it with a pointless insult.
It might have been marginally more productive to answer “No, I don’t see. Would you explain?”
The problem with other-optimising here is that it doesn’t account for my goals. I care far more about the nature of rational evidence than I do about the drawn out nature vs nurture debates. A direct denunciation of the epistemic rational failure mode of passing the ‘proof’ buck suits my purposes.
It might have been marginally more productive to answer “No, I don’t see. Would you explain?”
Actually, it would have been more productive, since you obviously didn’t understand what I was saying.
I am not claiming that I have evidence suggesting that culture is a stronger factor in mathematical ability than genetics. What I’m claiming is that I don’t know of any evidence to show that the two can be clearly distinguished. Ignorance is a privileged hypothesis. Unless you can show evidence of differences in mathematical ability that can be traced specifically to genetics, ignorance reigns here, and we shouldn’t assume that either culture or genetics is a stronger factor.
The burden of proof lies on you, because you are appealing to me to shift my belief toward yours. I am willing to do this, provided you provide any evidence that does so under a sane framework for reasoning. Meanwhile, the reason the burden of proof is not on me is that I am claiming ignorance, not a particular position.
A direct denunciation of the epistemic rational failure mode of passing the ‘proof’ buck suits my purposes.
You’re being incredibly critical, and have been so in other threads as well. I realize that this is your M.O., and is not solely directed at me, but I would appreciate it if you would specify exactly what I’ve said, here or in other comments, that has convinced you so thoroughly that I am unable to hold a rational discussion.
Actually, it would have been more productive, since you obviously didn’t understand what I was saying.
No, I rejected your specific argument because it was by very nature fallacious. There are other things you could have said but didn’t and those things I may not have even disagreed with.
The burden of proof lies on you, because you are appealing to me to shift my belief toward yours.
The conversation was initiated by you admonishing others. You have since then danced the dance of re-framing with some skill. I was actually only at the fringes of the conversation.
A direct denunciation of the epistemic rational failure mode of passing the ‘proof’ buck suits my purposes.
but I would appreciate it if you would specify exactly what I’ve said, here or in other comments, that has convinced you so thoroughly that I am unable to hold a rational discussion.
I haven’t said that. Specifics quotations of arguments or reasoning that I reject tend to be included in my comments. Take the above for example. Your reply does not relate rationally to the quote you were replying to. I reject the argument that you were using (which is something I do consistently—I care about bullshit probably even more than you care about supporting your culture hypothesis). Your response was to weasel your way out of your argument, twist your initial claim such that it has the intellectual high ground, label my disagreement with you a personal flaw, misrepresented my claim to be something that I have not made and then attempt to convey that I have not given any explanation for my position. That covers modules 1, 2, 3 and 4 in “Effective Argument Techniques 101”.
I don’t especially mind the slander but it is essentially futile for me to try to engage with the reasoning. I would have to play the kind of games that I come here to avoid.
Was that the Joan of Arc reference? I’ve been studying these sexual related genetic mutations and chromosomal abnormalities recently in a Biology class and her name came up. I found it fascinating and nearly left the comment there just for that. Each to their own. :)
Maybe it was the Joan comment. I can’t find it now.
That Joan comment annoyed me too, though I didn’t say anything at the time. Not your fault, but just let a woman do something remarkable, something almost miraculous, and sure enough, some man 500 years later is going to claim that she must have actually been male, genetically speaking.
I wasn’t feminist at all until I came here to LW. Honest!
That Joan comment annoyed me too, though I didn’t say anything at the time. Not your fault, but just let a woman do something remarkable, something almost miraculous, and sure enough, some man 500 years later is going to claim that she must have actually been male, genetically speaking.
She is a woman, regardless of whether she has a Y chromosome. It is SRY gene that matters genetically. So we can use that observation to free us up to call evidence evidence without committing crimes against womankind.
If I my (most decidedly female) lecturer is to be believed the speculation was based primarily on personal reports from her closest friends. It included things like menstrual patterns (and the lack thereof) and personal habits. I didn’t look into the details to see whether or not the this was an allusion to the typically far shorter vagina becoming relevant. I’m also not sure if the line of reasoning was prompted by some historian trying to work out what on earth was going on while researching her personal life or just biologists liking to feel like their knowledge is relevant to impressive people and events.
If she hadn’t done famous things then we probably wouldn’t have any records whatsoever to go on and nor would anyone care to look.
You’re starting to sound like a troll. I would feel less sure of that if you hadn’t just admitted that you don’t expect to care what you’re arguing about in another comment.
What do you want out of this discussion? Personally, I would like to be better informed about an area that smart people disagree with me on. You’re not helping me attain that goal, since you are providing me with no evidence. Meanwhile, you are continuing to hold a hostile tone and expecting me to support positions I neither hold nor claim to hold.
If you have an actual interest in either the topic of this discussion or working with me to fix whatever it is that has sent up so many red flags with you, I’d appreciate it. I don’t feel like I’m guilty of any of the things you mentioned, but if you feel adamantly that I am, I’m happy to listen to specifics so that I can evaluate and fix that behavior. If instead you feel merely like insulting me, I urge you to make better use of your time.
You’re starting to sound like a troll. I would feel less sure of that if you hadn’t just admitted that you don’t expect to care what you’re arguing about in another comment.
It is my policy to remove comments whenever social aggressors find them to be useful to take out of context and have done so with the subject of your link, assuring Resgui that it was nothing to do with him.
In that discussion Relsqui and I came to an amicable agreement to disagree. He (if he’ll pardon the assumption of gender and chastise me if I have made an incorrect inference) had already made some hints in that direction in the ancestor and acknowledging that I too didn’t think such a trivial matter of word definition was really worth arguing about is a gesture of respect. (Some people find it annoying if the other person leaves them hanging, especially if they had offered to extend the discussion mostly as a gesture of goodwill, which is what I had taken from Relsqui.)
I’ll note that whatever you may think of me personally a distinguishing feature of trolls is that they enjoy provoking an emotional response in others while on the other hand I find it unsavoury. Even though I have actively developed myself in order to have a thicker ‘emotional skin’ (see related concurrent discussion) with when it comes to frustrations this sort of conflict will always be a net psychological drain.
My goal was to support Will’s comment in the face of a reply that I would have found frustrating and was also an error in reasoning. In the future I will reply directly to Will (or whomever), expressing agreement and elaborating on the point with more details. Replying to the undesired comment gave more attention to it rather than less and obscuration would perhaps have been more useful than rebuttal.
a distinguishing feature of trolls is that they enjoy provoking an emotional response in others while on the other hand I find it unsavoury
For what it’s worth, it is very hard to distinguish between someone who is deliberately provoking a negative reaction and someone who is not very practiced at anticipating what choices of language or behavior might cause one. I, like datadataeverywhere, did get the impression that you were at least one of those things; off the top of my head, here are a few specific reasons:
Your initial comment disagreed with my terminology without actually addressing it directly, merely asserting that I was wrong without providing evidence nor argument. This struck me as aggressive and also poorly reasoned.
You persisted in the argument about definition despite, as you later said, not caring about it. I did not continue that thread out of goodwill but out of a desire to resolve the disagreement and return to the original topic—hence stopping and checking in that we were on the same page. That’s why it annoyed me when you said you didn’t care; in that case, I wish we hadn’t wasted the time on it!
Applying the label “social aggressor” in response to someone who is explicitly trying to find out what’s going on in the conversation and steer it somewhere useful. (In fairness, dde suggesting you’re a troll was not necessary either, but the situations are different in that I have not noticed you specifically trying to get the conversation on track.)
Not answering direct questions, especially when they are designed to return the conversation to a productive topic.
I hope I’m not overstepping my bounds by spelling this out; my impression of the LW community is that constructive criticism is encouraged. Therefore, I’m giving you specific suggestions to avoid making a negative impression you seem to not want to make. Conveniently, this will also resolve the ambiguity in my first (non-quoted) sentence in this comment. If you confirm that you want to avoid garnering negative reactions in conversation, it’ll be clear that you are indeed not a troll.
Absolutely not. In general people overestimate the importance of ‘intrinsic talent’ on anything. The primary heritable component of success in just about anything is motivation. Either g or height comes second depending on the field.
I agree. I think it is quite obvious that ability is always somewhat heritable (otherwise we could raise our pets as humans), but this effect is usually minimal enough to not be evident behind the screen of either random or environmental differences. I think this applies to motivation as well!
And that was really what my claim was; anyone who claims that women are inherently less able in mathematics has to prove that any measurable effect is distinguishable from and not caused by cultural factors that propel fewer women to have interest in mathematics.
Am I misunderstanding, or are you claiming that motivation is purely an inherited trait? I can’t possibly agree with that, and I think even simple experiments are enough to disprove that claim.
Am I misunderstanding, or are you claiming that motivation is purely an inherited trait?
Misunderstanding. Expanding the context slightly:
I agree. I think it is quite obvious that ability is always somewhat heritable (otherwise we could raise our pets as humans), but this effect is usually minimal enough to not be evident behind the screen of either random or environmental differences. I think this applies to motivation as well!
It doesn’t. (Unfortunately.)
When it comes to motivation the differences between people are not trivial. When it comes the particular instance of difference between the sexes there are powerful differences in motivating influences. Most human motives are related to sexual signalling and gaining social status. The optimal actions to achieve these goals is significantly different for males and females, which is reflected in which things are the most motivating. It most definitely should not be assumed that motivational differences are purely cultural—and it would be astonishing if they were.
The optimal actions to achieve these goals is significantly different for males and females.
Are you speaking from an evolutionary context, i.e. claiming that what we understand to be optimal is hardwired, or are you speaking to which actions are actually perceived as optimal in our world?
You make a really good point—one I hadn’t thought of but agree with—but since I don’t think that we behave strictly in a manner that our ancestors would consider optimal (after all, what are we doing at this site?), I can’t agree that sexual and social signaling’s effect on motivation can be considered a-cultural.
I may be wrong, but I don’t expect the proportion of gays in LessWrong to be very different from the proportion in the population at large.
My vague impression is that the proportion of people here with sexual orientations that are not in the majority in the population is higher than that of such people in the population.
This is probably explained completely by Lw’s tendency to attract weirdos people who are willing to question orthodoxy.
It might matter whether or not one counts closeted gays. Either way, I was just throwing another potential partition into the argument. I also doubt that we differ significantly in our proportion of deaf people, but the point is that being deaf is qualitatively different, but shouldn’t impair one’s rational capabilities. Same for being female, black, or most of the groups that we think of as adding to diversity.
I am actually interested in, among other things, whether a lack of diversity is a >functional impairment for a group. I feel strongly that it is, but I can’t back up that >claim with evidence strong enough to match my belief. For a group such as Less >Wrong, I have to ask what we miss due to a lack of diversity.
To little memetic diversity is clearly a bad thing, for the same reason too little genetic variability. However how much and what kind are optimal depends on the environment.
Also have you considered the possibility that diversity for you is not a means to an end but a value in itself? In that case unless it conflicts with more any other values you would perhaps consider more important values you don’t need any justification for it. I’m quite honest with myself that I hope that post-singularity the universe will not be paperclipped by only things I and people like me (or humans in general for that matter) value. I value a diverse universe.
Edit:
Same for being female, black, or most of the groups that we think of as adding to >diversity.
I.. uhm...see.
At first I was very confused by all the far reaching implications of this however thanks to keeping a few things in mind, I’m just going to ascribe this to you being from a different cultural background than me.
Diversity is a value for me, but I’d like to believe that is more than simply an aesthetic value. Of course, if wishes were horses we’d all be eating steak.
Memetic diversity is one of the non-aesthetic arguments I can imagine, and my question is partially related to that. Genetic diversity is superfluous past a certain point, so it seems reasonable that the same might be true of memetic diversity. Where is that point relative to where Less Wrong sits?
Um, all I was saying was that women and black people are underrepresented here, but that ought not be explained away by the subject matter of Less Wrong. What does that have to do with my cultural background or the typical mind fallacy? What part of that do you disagree with?
Um, all I was saying was that women and black people are underrepresented here, but that ought not be explained away by the subject matter of Less Wrong. What does that have to do with my cultural background or the typical mind fallacy? What part of that do you disagree with?
Well I will try to elaborate.
Same for being female, black, or most of the groups that we think of as adding to >diversity.
After I read this it struck me that you may value a much smaller space of diversity than I do. And that you probably value the very particular kinds of diversity (race, gender,some types of culture) much more or even perhaps to the exclusion of others (non-neurotypical, ideological and especially values). I’m not saying you don’t (I can’t know this) or that you should. I at first assumed you thought the way you do because you came up with a system more or less similar to my own, a incredibly unlikely event, that is why I scolded myself for employing the mind projection fallacy while providing a link pointing that this particular component is firmly integrated into the whole “stuff White people like” (for lack of a better word) culture that exists in the West so anyone I encounter online with whom I share the desire for certain spaces of diversity is on average overwhelmingly more likely to get it from that memplex.
Also while I’m certainly sympathetic about hoping one’s values are practical, but one needs to learn to live with the possibility one’s values are neutral or even impractical or perhaps conflicting with each other. I overall in principle support efforts to lower unnecessary barriers for people to join Lesswrong.But the OP doesn’t seem to make it explicit that this is about values, and you wanting other Lesswrongers to live by your values but seems to communicate that its about it being the optimal course of improving rationality.
You haven’t done this. Your argument so far has been to simply go from:
“arbitrary designated group/blacks/women are capable of rationality, but are underrepresented on Lesswrong”
to
“Lesswrong needs to divert some (as much as needed?) efforts to correct this.”
Why?
Like I said lowering unnecessary barriers (actually you at this point even have to make the case that they exist and that they aren’t simply the result of the other factors I described in the post) won’t repel the people who already find LW interesting, so it should in principle get a more effective and healthy community.
However what if this should prove to be insufficient? Divert resources to change the preferences of designated under-represented groups? Add elements to Lesswrong that aren’t strictly necessary to reach its stated objectives? Which is not to say we don’t have them now, however the ones we have now probably cater to the largest potential pool of people predisposed to find LW’s goals interesting.
After I read this it struck me that you may value a much smaller space of diversity than I do. And that you probably value the very particular kinds of diversity (race, gender,some types of culture) much more or even perhaps to the exclusion of others (non-neurotypical, ideological and especially values).
There is a fascinating question that I’ve asked many times in many different venues, and never received anything approaching a coherent answer. Namely, among all the possible criteria for categorizing people, which particular ones are supposed to have moral, political, and ideological relevance? In the Western world nowadays, there exists a near-consensus that when it comes to certain ways of categorizing humans, we should be concerned if significant inequality and lack of political and other representation is correlated with these categories, we should condemn discrimination on the basis of them, and we should value diversity as measured by them. But what exact principle determines which categories should be assigned such value, and which not?
I am sure that a complete and accurate answer to this question would open a floodgate of insight about the modern society. Yet out of all difficult questions I’ve ever discussed, this seems to be the hardest one to open a rational discussion about; the amount of sanctimoniousness and/or logical incoherence in the answers one typically gets is just staggering. One exception are several discussions I’ve read on Overcoming Bias, which at least asked the right questions, but unfortunately only scratched the surface in answering them.
I’ve spent some time thinking about this, and my conclusion is that, at least personally, what I value about diversity is the variety of worldviews that it leads to.
This does result in some rather interesting issues, though. For example, one of the major factors in the difference in worldview between dark-skinned Americans and light-skinned Americans is the existence of racism, both overt and institutional. Thus, if I consider diversity to be very valuable, it seems that I should support racism. I don’t, though—instead, I consider that the relevant preferences of dark-skinned Americans take precedence over my own preference for diversity. (Similarly, left-handed peoples’ preference for non-abusive writing education appropriately took precedence over the cultural preference for everyone to write with their right hands, and left-handedness is, to the best of my knowledge, no longer a significant source of diversity of worldview.)
That assumes coherence in the relevant group’s preference, though, which isn’t always the case. For example, among people with disabilities, there are two common views that are, given limited resources, significantly conflicting: The view that disabilities should be cured and that people with disabilities should strive to be (or appear to be) as normal as possible, and the view that disabilities should be accepted and that people with disabilities should be free to focus on personal goals rather than being expected to devote a significant amount of effort to mitigating or hiding their disabilities. In such cases, I support the preference that’s more like the latter, though I do prefer to leave the option open for people with the first preference to pursue that on a personal level (meaning I’d support the preference ‘I’d prefer to have my disability cured’, but not ‘I’d prefer for my young teen’s disability to be treated even though they object’, and I’m still thinking about the grey area in the middle where such things as ‘I’d prefer for my baby’s disability to be cured, given that it won’t be able to be cured when they’re older if it’s not cured now, and given that if it’s not cured I’m likely to be obligated to take care of them for the rest of my life’ exist).
I think that’s coherent, anyway, as far as it goes. I’m sure there are issues I haven’t addressed, though.
With your first example, I think you’re on to an important politically incorrect truth, namely that the existence of diverse worldviews requires a certain degree of separation, and “diversity” in the sense of every place and institution containing a representative mix of people can exist only if a uniform worldview is imposed on all of them.
Let me illustrate using a mundane and non-ideological example. I once read a story about a neighborhood populated mostly by blue-collar folks with a strong do-it-yourself ethos, many of whom liked to work on their cars in their driveways. At some point, however, the real estate trends led to an increasing number of white collar yuppie types moving in from a nearby fancier neighborhood, for whom this was a ghastly and disreputable sight. Eventually, they managed to pass a local ordinance banning mechanical work in front yards, to the great chagrin of the older residents.
Therefore, when these two sorts of people lived in separate places, there was on the whole a diversity of worldview with regards to this particular issue, but when they got mixed together, this led to a conflict situation that could only end up with one or another view being imposed on everyone. And since people’s worldviews manifest themselves in all kinds of ways that necessarily create conflict in case of differences, this clearly has implications that give the present notion of “diversity” at least a slight Orwellian whiff.
Yet out of all difficult questions I’ve ever discussed, this seems to be the hardest one to open a rational discussion about; the amount of sanctimoniousness and/or logical incoherence in the answers one typically gets is just staggering.
My experience is similar. Even people that are usually extremely rational go loopy.
One exception are several discussions I’ve read on Overcoming Bias, which at least asked the right questions, but unfortunately only scratched the surface in answering them.
I seem to recall one post there that specifically targeted the issue. But you did ask “what basis should” while Robin was just asserting a controversial is.
But you did ask “what basis should” while Robin was just asserting a controversial is.
I probably didn’t word my above comment very well. I am also asking only for an accurate description of the controversial “is.”
The fact is that nearly all people attach great moral importance to these issues, and what I’d like (at least for start) is for them to state the “shoulds” they believe in clearly, comprehensively, and coherently, and to explain the exact principles with which they justify these “shoulds.” My above stated questions should be understood in these terms.
If you are sufficiently curious you could make a post here. People will be somewhat motivated to tone down the hysteria given that you will have pre-emptively shunned it.
I think I’m going to stop responding to this thread, because everyone seems to be assuming I’m meaning or asking something that I’m not. I’m obviously having some problems expressing myself, and I apologize for the confusion that I caused. Let me try once more to clarify my position and intentions:
I don’t really care how diverse Less Wrong is. I was, however, curious how diverse the community is along various axes, and was interested in sparking a conversation along those lines. Vladimir’s comment is exactly the kind of questions I was trying to encourage, but instead I feel like I’ve been asked to defend criticism that I never thought I made in the first place.
I was never trying to say that there was something wrong with the way that Less Wrong is, or that we ought to do things to change our makeup. Maybe it would be good for us to, but that had nothing to do with my question. I was instead (trying to, and apparently badly) asking for people’s opinions about whether or how our makeup along any partition—the ones that I mentioned or others—effect in us an inability to best solve the problems that we are interested in solving.
“Um, all I was saying was that women and black people are underrepresented here, but that ought not be explained away by the subject matter of Less Wrong. What does that have to do with my cultural background or the typical mind fallacy? What part of that do you disagree with?”
To get back to basics for a moment: we don’t know that women and black people are underrepresented here. Usernames are anonymous. Even if we suspect they’re underrepresented, we don’t know by how much—or whether they’re underrepresented compared to the internet in general, or the geek cluster, or what.
Even assuming you want more demographic diversity on LW, it’s not at all clear that the best way to get it is by doing something differently on LW itself.
Um, all I was saying was that women and black people are underrepresented here, but that ought not be explained away by the subject matter of Less Wrong.
“Ought”? I say it ‘ought’ to be explained away be the subject matter of less wrong if and only if that is an accurate explanation. Truth isn’t normative.
Is this a language issue? Am I using “ought” incorrectly? I’m claiming that the truth of the matter is that women are capable of rationality, and have a place here, so it would be wrong (in both an absolute and a moral sense) to claim that their lack of presence is due to this being a blog about rationality.
Perhaps I should weaken my statement to say “if women are as capable as men in rationality, their underrepresentation here ought not be explained away by the subject matter”. I’m not sure whether I feel like I should or shouldn’t apologize for taking the premise of that sentence as a given, but I did, hence my statement.
Ahh, ok. That seems reasonable. I had got the impression that you had taken the premise for granted primarily because it would be objectionable if it was not true and the fact of the matter was an afterthought. Probably because that’s the kind of reasoning I usually see from other people of your species.
I’m not going to comment either way about the premise except to say that it is inclination and not capability that is relevant here.
I was never trying to say that there was something wrong with the way that Less Wrong is, or that we ought to do things to change our makeup. Maybe it would be good for us to, but that had nothing to do with my question. I was instead (trying to, and apparently badly) asking for people’s opinions about whether or how our makeup along any partition—the ones that I mentioned or others—effect in us an inability to best solve the problems that we are interested in solving.
People are touchy on this. I guess its because in public discourse pointing something like this out is nearly always a call to change it.
How diverse is Less Wrong? I am under the impression that we disproportionately consist of 20-35 year old white males, more disproportionately on some axes than on others.
We obviously over-represent atheists, but there are very good reasons for that. Likewise, we are probably over-educated compared to the populations we are drawn from. I venture that we have a fairly weak age bias, and that can be accounted for by generational dispositions toward internet use.
However, if we are predominately white males, why are we? Should that concern us? There’s nothing about being white, or female, or hispanic, or deaf, or gay that prevents one from being a rationalist. I’m willing to bet that after correcting for socioeconomic correlations with ethnicity, we still don’t make par. Perhaps naïvely, I feel like we must explain ourselves if this is the case.
This sounds like the same question as why are there so few top-notch women in STEM fields, why there are so few women listed in Human Accomplishment’s indices*, why so few non-whites or non-Asians score 5 on AP Physics, why...
In other words, here be dragons.
* just Lady Murasaki, if you were curious. It would be very amusing to read a review of The Tale of Genji by Eliezer or a LWer. My own reaction by the end was horror.
That’s absolutely true. I’ve worked for two US National Labs, and both were monocultures. At my first job, the only woman in my group (20 or so) was the administrative assistant. At my second, the numbers were better, but at both, there were literally no non-whites in my immediate area. The inability to hire non-citizens contributes to the problem—I worked for Microsoft as well, and all the non-whites were foreign citizens—but it’s not as if there aren’t any women in the US!
It is a nearly intractable problem, and I think I understand it fairly well, but I would very much like to hear the opinion of LWers. My employers have always been very eager to hire women and minorities, but the numbers coming out of computer science programs are abysmal. At Less Wrong, a B.S. or M.S. in a specific field is not a barrier to entry, so our numbers should be slightly better. On the other hand, I have no idea how to go about improving them.
The Tale of Genji has gone on my list of books to read. Thanks!
Yes, but we are even more extreme in some respects; many CS/philosophy/neurology/etc. majors reject the Strong AI Thesis (I’ve asked), while it is practically one of our dogmas.
I realize that I was a bit of a tease there. It’s somewhat off topic, but I’ll include (some of) the hasty comments I wrote down immediately upon finishing:
The prevalence of poems & puns is quite remarkable. It is also remarkable how tired they all feel; in Genji, poetry has lost its magic and has simply become another stereotyped form of communication, as codified as a letter to the editor or small talk. I feel fortunate that my introductions to Japanese poetry have usually been small anthologies of the greatest poets; had I first encountered court poetry through Genji, I would have been disgusted by the mawkish sentimentality & repetition.
The gender dynamics are remarkable. Toward the end, one of the two then main characters becomes frustrated and casually has sex with a serving lady; it’s mentioned that he liked sex with her better than with any of the other servants. Much earlier in Genji (it’s a good thousand pages, remember), Genji simply rapes a woman, and the central female protagonist, Murasaki, is kidnapped as a girl and he marries her while still what we would consider a child. (I forget whether Genji sexually molests her before the pro forma marriage.) This may be a matter of non-relativistic moral appraisal, but I get the impression that in matters of sexual fidelity, rape, and children, Heian-era morals were not much different from my own, which makes the general immunity all the more remarkable. (This is the ‘shining’ Genji?) The double-standards are countless.
The power dynamics are equally remarkable. Essentially every speaking character is nobility, low or high, or Buddhist clergy (and very likely nobility anyway). The characters spend next to no time on ‘work’ like running the country, despite many main characters ranking high in the hierarchy and holding ministral ranks; the Emperor in particular does nothing except party. All the households spend money like mad, and just expect their land-holdings to send in the cash. (It is a signal of their poverty that the Uji household ever even mentions how less money is coming from their lands than used to.) The Buddhist clergy are remarkably greedy & worldly; after the death of the father of the Uji household, the abbot of the monastery he favored sends the grief-stricken sisters a note—which I found remarkably crass—reminding them that he wants the customary gifts of valuable textiles.
The medicinal practices are utterly horrifying. They seem to consist, one and all, of the following algorithm: ‘while sick, pay priests to chant.’ If chanting doesn’t work, hire more priests. (One remarkable freethinker suggests that a sick woman eat more food.) Chanting is, at least, not outright harmful like bloodletting, but it’s still sickening to read through dozens of people dying amidst chanting. In comparison, the bizarre superstitions that guide many characters’ activities (trapping them in their houses on inauspicious days) are practically unobjectionable.
You may want to check the survey results.
Thank you; that was one of the things I’d come to this thread to ask about.
Thank you very much. I looked for but failed to find this when I went to write my post. I had intended to start with actual numbers, assuming that someone had previously asked the question. The rest is interesting as well.
Ignoring the obviously political issue of “concern”, it’s fun to consider this question on a purely intellectual level. If you’re a white male, why are you? Is the anthropic answer (“just because”) sufficient? At what size of group does it cease to be sufficient? I don’t know the actual answer. Some people think that asking “why am I me” is inherently meaningless, but for me personally, this doesn’t dissolve the mystery.
The flippant answer is that a group size of 1 lacks statistical significance; at some group size, that ceases to be the case.
I asked not from a political perspective. In arguments about diversity, political correctness often dominates. I am actually interested in, among other things, whether a lack of diversity is a functional impairment for a group. I feel strongly that it is, but I can’t back up that claim with evidence strong enough to match my belief. For a group such as Less Wrong, I have to ask what we miss due to a lack of diversity.
The flippant answer to your answer is that you didn’t pick LW randomly out of the set of all groups. The fact that you, a white male, consistently choose to join groups composed mostly of white males—and then inquire about diversity—could have any number of anthropic explanations from your perspective :-) In the end it seems to loop back into why are you, you again.
ETA: apparenty datadataeverywhere is female.
No, I think that’s a much less flippant answer :-)
It’s come to my attention that you’re female. Apologies for assuming otherwise, and shame on you for not correcting me.
I’ve been thinking that there are parallels between building FAI and Talmud—it’s an effort to manage an extremely dangerous, uncommunicative entity through deduction. (An FAI may be communicative to some extent. An FAI which hasn’t been built yet doesn’t communicate.)
Being an atheist doesn’t eliminate cultural influence. Survey for atheists: which God do you especially not believe in?
I was talking about FAI with Gene Treadwell, who’s black. He was quite concerned that the FAI would be sentient, but owned and controlled.
This doesn’t mean that either Eliezer or Gene are wrong (or right for that matter), but it suggests to me that culture gives defaults which might be strong attractors. [1]
He recommended recruiting Japanese members, since they’re more apt to like and trust robots.
I don’t know about explaining ourselves, but we may need more angles on the problem just to be able to do the work.
[1] See also Timothy Leary’s S.M.I.2L.E.-- Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, Life Extension. Robert Anton Wilson said that was match for Catholic hopes of going to heaven, being trajnsfigured, and living forever.
He has a very good point. I was surprised more Japanese or Koreans hadn’t made their way to Lesswrong. This was my motivation for first proposing we recruit translators for Japanese and Chinese and to begin working towards a goal of making at least the sequences available in many languages.
Not being a native speaker of English proved a significant barrier for me in some respects. The first noticeable one was spelling, I however solved the problem by outsourcing this part of the system known as Konkvistador to the browser. ;) Other more insidious forms of miscommunication and cultural difficulties persist.
I’m not sure that it’s a language thing. I think many (most?) college-educated Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese can read and write in English. We also seem to have more Russian LWers than Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese combined.
According to a page gwern linked to in another branch of the thread, among those who got 5 on AP Physics C in 2008, 62.0% were White and 28.3% were Asian. But according to the LW survey, only 3.8% of respondents were Asian.
Maybe there is something about Asian cultures that makes them less overtly interested in rationality, but I don’t have any good ideas what it might be.
All LW users display near-native control of English, which won’t be as universal, and typically requires years-long consumption of English content. English-speaking world is the default source of non-Russian content for Russians, but it might not be the case with native Asians (what’s your impression?)
My impression is that for most native Asians, the English-speaking world is also their default source of non-native-language content. I have some relatives in China, and to the extent they do consume non-Chinese content, they consume English content. None of them consume enough of it to obtain near-native control of English though.
I’m curious, what kind of English content did you consume before you came across OB/LW? How typical do you think that level of consumption is in Russia?
Unfortunately, browser spell checkers usually can’t help you to spell your own name correctly. ;) That is one advantage to my choice of nym.
Right click, add to dictionary. If that doesn’t work then get a better browser.
Ehm, you do realize he was making a humorous remark about “Konkvistador” being my user name right?
Edit:
Well its all clearly Alicorn’s fault. ;)
Actually it was more about Konkivstador not being your name.
I do now. Sorry about that.
I generally agree with your assessment. But I think there may be more East and South Asians than you think, more 36-80s and more 15-19s too. I have no reason to think we are underrepresented in gays or in deaf people.
My general impression is that women are not made welcome here—the level of overt sexism is incredibly high for a community that tends to frown on chest-beating. But perhaps the women should speak for themselves on that subject. Or not. Discussions on this subject tend to be uncomfortable, Sometimes it seems that the only good they do is to flush some of the more egregious sexists out of the closet.
We have already had quite a lot of that.
OMG! A whole top-level-posting. And not much more than a year ago. I didn’t know. Well, that shows that you guys (and gals) have said all that could possibly need to be said regarding that subject. ;)
But thx for the link.
It does have about 100 pages of comments. Consider also the “links to followup posts” in line 4 of that article. It all seemed to go on forever—but maybe that was just me.
Ok. Well, it is on my reading list now. Again, thx.
I don’t know why you presume that because we are mostly 25-35 something White males a reasonable proportion of us are not deaf, gay or disabled (one of the top level posts is by someone who will soon deal with being perhaps limited to communicating with the world via computer)
I smell a whiff of that weird American memplex for minority and diversity that my third world mind isn’t quite used to, but which I seem to encounter more and more often, you know the one that for example uses the word minority to describe women.
Also I decline to invitation to defend this community for lack of diversity, I don’t see it as a prior a thing in need of a large part of our attention. Rationality is universal, however not in the sense of being equally universally valued in different cultures but certainly universally effective (rationalists should win). One should certainly strive to keep a site dedicated to refining the art free of unnecessary additional barriers to other people. I think we should eventually translate many articles into Hindi, Japanese, Chinese, Arab, German, Spanish, Russian and French. However its ridiculous to imagine that our demographics will somehow come to resemble and match a socio-economic adjusted mix of unspecified ethnicities that you seem to hunt for after we eliminate all such barriers. I assure you White Westerners have their very very insane spots, we deal with them constantly, but God for starters isn’t among them, look at GSS or various sources on Wikipedia and consider how much more a thought stopper and a boo light atheism is for a large part of the world, what should the existing population of LessWrong do? Refrain from bashing theism? This might incur down votes, but Westerners did come up with the scientific method and did contribute disproportionately to the fields of statistics and mathematics, is it so unimaginable that developed world (Iceland, Italy, Switzerland, Finland, America, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan ect.) and their majority demographics still have a more overall rationality friendly climate (due to the caprice of history) than basically any part of the world? I freely admit my own native culture (though I’m probably thoroughly Westernised by now due to late childhood influences of mass media and education) is probably less rational than the Anglosaxon one. However simply going on a “crusade” to make other cultures more rational first since they are “clearly” more in need is besides sending terribly bad signals as well as the potential for self-delusion perhaps a bad idea for humanitarian reasons.
Sex ration: There are some differences in aptitude, psychology and interests that ensure that compsci and mathematics, at least at the higher levels will remain disproportionately male for the foreseeable future (until human modification takes off). This obviously affects our potential pool of recruits.
Age: People grow more conservative as they age, Lesswrong is firstly available only on a relatively a new medium, secondly has a novel approach to popularizing rationality. Also as people age the mind unfortunately do deteriorate. Very few people have a IQ high enough to master difficult fields before they are 15, and even their interests are somewhat affected by their peers.
I am sure I am rationalizing at least a few of these points, however I need to ask you is pursuing some popular concept of diversity (why did you for example not commend LW on its inclusion of non-neurotypicals who are often excluded in some segments of society? Also why do you only bemoan the under-representation of groups everyone else does? Is this really a rational approach? Why don’t we go study where the in the memspace we might find truly valuable perspectives and focus on those? Maybe they overlap with the popular kinds, maybe they don’t, but can we really trust popular culture and especially the standard political discourse on this? ) is truly cost-effective at this point?
If you read my comment, you would have seen that I explicitly assume that we are not under-represented among deaf or gay people.
If less than 4% of us are women, I am quite willing to call that a minority. Would you prefer me to call them an excluded group?
I specifically brought up atheists as a group that we should expect to over-represent. I’m also not hunting for equal-representation among countries, since education obviously ought to make a difference.
That seems like it ought to get many more boos around here than mentioning the western world as the source of the scientific method. I ascribe differences in those to cultural influences; I don’t claim that aptitude isn’t a factor, but I don’t believe it has been or can easily be measured given the large cultural factors we have.
This also doesn’t bother me, for reasons similar to yours. As a friend of mine says, “we’ll get gay rights by outliving the homophobes”.
Which groups should I pay more attention to? This is a serious question, since I haven’t thought too much about it. I neglect non-neurotypicals because they are overrepresented in my field, so I tend to expect them amongst similar groups.
I wasn’t actually intending to bemoan anything with my initial question, I was just curious. I was also shocked when I found out that this is dramatically less diverse than I thought, and less than any other large group I’ve felt a sort of membership in, but I don’t feel like it needs to be demonized for that. I certainly wasn’t trying to do that.
But if we can’t measure the cultural factors and account for them why presume a blank slate approach? Especially since there is sexual dimorphism in the very nervous and endocrine system.
I think you got stuck on the aptitude, to elaborate, I’m pretty sure considering that humans aren’t a very sexually dimorphous species (there are near relatives that are less however, example: Gibons), the mean g (if such a thing exists) of both men and women is probably about the same. There are however other aspects of succeeding at compsci or math than general intelligence.
Assuming that men and women carrying the exactly the same mems will respond on average identically to identical situations is a extraordinary claim. I’m struggling to come up with a evolutionary model that would square this with what is known (for example the greater historical reproductive success of the average woman vs. the average man that we can read from the distribution of genes). If I was presented with empirical evidence then this would be just too bad for the models, but in the absence of meaningful measurement (by your account), why not assign greater probability to the outcome proscribed by the same models that work so well when tested by other empirical claims?
I would venture to state that this case is especially strong for preferences.
And if you are trying to fine tune the situations and memes that both men and women for each gender so as to to balance this, where can one demonstrate that this isn’t a step away rather than toward improving pareto efficiency? And if its not, why proceed with it?
Also to admit a personal bias I just aesthetically prefer equal treatment whenever pragmatic concerns don’t trump it.
We can’t directly measure them, but we can get an idea of how large they are and how they work.
For example, the gender difference in empathic abilities. While women will score higher on empathy on self report tests, the difference is much smaller on direct tests of ability, and often nonexistent on tests of ability where it isn’t stated to the participant that it’s empathy being tested. And then there’s the motivation of seeming empathetic. One of the best empathy tests I’ve read about is Ickes’, which worked like this: two participants meet together in the room and have a brief conversation, which is taped. Then they go into separate rooms and the tape is played back to them twice. The first time, they jot down the times at which they remember feeling various emotions. The second time, they jot down the times at which they think their partner is feeling an emotion, and what it is. Then the records are compared, and each participant receives an accuracy score. When the test is run is like this, there is no difference in ability between men and women. However, a difference emerges when another factor is added: each participant is asked to write a “confidence level” for each prediction they make. In that procedure, women score better, presumably because their desire to appear empathetic (write down higher confidence levels) causes them to put more effort into the task. But where do desires to appear a certain way come from? At least partly from cultural factors that dictate how each gender is supposed to appear. This is probably the same reason why women are overconfident in self reporting their empathic abilities relative to men.
The same applies to math. Among women and men with the same math ability as scored on tests, women will rate their own abilities much lower than the men do. Since people do what they think they’ll be good at, this will likely affect how much time these people spend on math in future, and the future abilities they acquire.
And then there’s priming. Asian American women do better on math tests when primed with their race (by filling in a “race” bubble at the top of the test) than when primed with their gender (by filling in a “sex” bubble). More subtly, priming affects people’s implicit attitudes towards gender-stereotyped domains too. People are often primed about their gender in real life, each time affecting their actions a little, which over time will add up to significant differences in the paths they choose in life in addition to that which is caused by innate gender differences. Right now we don’t have enough information to say how much is caused by each, but I don’t see why we can’t make more headway into this in the future.
We can’t directly measure them, but we can get an idea of how large they are and how they work.
For example, the gender difference in empathic abilities. While women will score higher on empathy on self report tests, the difference is much smaller on direct tests of ability, and nonexistent on tests of ability where it isn’t stated to the participant that it’s empathy being tested. And then there’s the motivation of seeming empathetic. One of the http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-6811.2000.tb00006.x/abstract is Ickes’, which worked like this: two participants meet together in the room and have a brief conversation, which is taped. Then they go into separate rooms and the tape is played back to them twice. The first time, they jot down the times at which they remember feeling various emotions. The second time, they jot down the times at which they think their partner is feeling an emotion, and what it is. Then the records are compared, and each participant receives an accuracy score. When the test is run is like this, there is no difference in ability between men and women. However, a difference emerges when another factor is added: each participant is asked to write a “confidence level” for each prediction they make. In that procedure, women score better, presumably because the their desire to appear empathetic causes them to put more effort into the task. But where do desires to appear a certain way come from? At least partly from cultural factors that dictate how each gender is supposed to appear. This is probably the same reason why women are overconfident in their empathy abilities relative to men.
The same applies to math. Among women and men with the same math ability as scored on tests, women will rate their own abilities much lower than the men do. Since people do what they think they’ll be good at, this will likely affect how much time these people spend on math in future, and the future abilities they acquire.
And then there’s priming. Asian American women do better on math tests when primed with their race (by filling in a “race” bubble at the top of the test) than when primed with their gender (by filling in a “sex” bubble). More subtly, priming affects people’s implicit http://ase.tufts.edu/psychology/ambady/pubs/2006Steele.pdf towards gender-stereotyped domains too. People are often primed about their gender in real life, each time affecting their actions a little, which over time will add up in significant differences in the paths they choose in life in addition to that which is caused by innate gender differences.
How do you know non-neurotypicals aren’t over or under represented on Lesswrong as compared to the groups that you claim are overrepresented on Lesswrong compared to your field the same way you know that the groups you bemoan are lacking are under-represented relative to your field?
Is it just because being neurotypical is harder to measure and define? I concede measuring who is a woman or a man or who is considered black and who is considered asian is for the average case easier than being neurotpyical. But when it comes to definition those concepts seem to be in the same order of magnitude of fuzzy as being neurotypical (sex is a less, race is a bit more).
Also previously you established you don’t want to compare Less wrongs diversity to the entire population of the world. I’m going to tentatively go that you also accept that academic background will affect if people can grasp or are interested in learning certain key concepts needed to participate.
My question now is, why don’t we crunch the numbers instead of people yelling “too many!”, “too few!” or “just right!”? We know from which countries and in what numbers visitors come from, we know the educational distributions in most of them. And we know how large a fraction of this group is proficient enough English to participate meaningfully on Less wrong.
This is ignoring the fact that the only data we have on sex or race is a simple self reported poll and our general impression.
But if we crunch the numbers and the probability densities end up looking pretty similar from the best data we can find, well why is the burden of proof that we are indeed wasting potential on Lesswrong and not the one proposing policy or action to improve our odds of progressing towards becoming more rational? And if we are promoting our member’s values, even when they aren’t neutral or positive towards reaching our objectives why don’t we spell them out as long as they truly are common! I’m certainly there are a few, perhaps the value of life and existence (thought these have been questioned and debated here too) or perhaps some utilitarian principles.
But how do we know any position people take would really reflect their values and wouldn’t jut be status signalling? Heck many people who profess their values include or don’t include a certain inherent “goodness” to existence probably do for signalling reasons and would quickly change their minds in a different situation!
Not even mentioning the general effect of the mindkiller.
But like I have stated before, there are certainly many spaces where we can optimize the stated goal by outreach. This is why I think this debate should continue but with a slightly different spirit. More in line with, to paraphrase you:
Typo in a link?
I changed the first draft midway when I was still attempting to abbreviate it. I’ve edited and reformulated the sentence, it should make sense now.
I’m talking about the Western memplex whose members employ uses the word minority when describing women in general society. Even thought they represent a clear numerical majority.
I was suspicious that you used the word minority in that sense rather than the more clearly defined sense of being a numerical minority.
Sometimes when talking about groups we can avoid discussing which meaning of the word we are employing.
Example: Discussing the repression of the Mayan minority in Mexico.
While other times we can’t do this.
Example: Discussing the history and current relationship between the Arab upper class minority and slavery in Mauritania.
Ah, apologies I see I carried it over from here:
You explicitly state later that you are particularly interested in this axis of diversity
Perhaps this would be more manageable if looked at each of the axis of variability that you raise talk about it independently in as much as this is possible? Again, this is why I previously got me confused by speaking of “groups we usually consider adding diversity”, are there certain groups that are inherently associated with the word diversity? Are we using the word diversity to mean something like “proportionate representation of certain kinds of people in all groups” or are we using the world diversity in line with infinite diversity in Infinite combinations where if you create a mix of 1 part people A and 4 parts people B and have them coexist and cooperate with another one that is 2 part people A and 3 parts people B, where previously all groups where of the first kind, creating a kind of metadiversity (by using the word diversity in its politically charged meaning)?
Then why aren you hunting for equal representation on LW between different groups united in a space as arbitrary as one defined by borders?
While many important components of the modern scientific method did originate among scholars in Persian and Iraq in the medieval era, its development over the past 700 years has been disproportionately seen in Europe and later its colonies. I would argue its adoption was a part of the reason for the later (lets say last 300 years) technological superiority of the West.
Edit: I wrote up quite a long wall of text. I’m just going to split it into a few posts as to make it more readable as well as give me a better sense of what is getting up or downvoted based on its merit or lack of there of.
Given new evidence from the ongoing discussion I retract my earlier concession. I have the impression that the bottom line preceded the reasoning.
I expected your statement to get more boos for the same reason that you expected my premise in the other discussion to be assumed because of moral rather than evidence-based reasons. That is, I am used to other members of your species (I very much like that phrasing) to take very strong and sudden positions condemning suggestions of inherent inequality between the sexes, regardless of having a rational basis. I was not trying to boo your statement myself.
That said, I feel like I have legitimate reasons to oppose suggestions that women are inherently weaker in mathematics and related fields. I mentioned one immediately below the passage you quoted. If you insist on supporting that view, I ask that you start doing so by citing evidence, and then we can begin the debate from there. At minimum, I feel like if you are claiming women to be inherently inferior, the burden of proof lies with you.
Edit: fixed typo
Mathematical ability is most remarked on at the far right of the bell curve. It is very possible (and there’s lots of evidence to support the argument) that women simply have lower variance in mathematical ability. The average is the same. Whether or not ‘lower variance’ implies ‘inherently weaker’ is another argument, but it’s a silly one.
I’m much too lazy to cite the data, but a quick Duck Duck Go search or maybe Google Scholar search could probably find it. An overview with good references is here.
Is mathematical ability a bell curve?
My own anecdotal experience has been that women are rare in elite math environments, but don’t perform worse than the men. That would be consistent with a fat-tailed rather than normal distribution, and also with higher computed variance among women.
Also anecdotal, but it seems that when people come from an education system that privileges math (like Europe or Asia as opposed to the US) the proportion of women who pursue math is higher. In other words, when you can get as much social status by being a poly sci major as a math major, women tend not to do math, but when math is very clearly ranked as the “top” or “most competitive” option throughout most of your educational life, women are much more likely to pursue it.
I have no idea; sorry, saying so was bad epistemic hygiene. I thought I’d heard something like that but people often say bell curve when they mean any sort of bell-like distribution.
I’m left confused as to how to update on this information… I don’t know how large such an effect is, nor what the original literature on gender difference says, which means that I don’t really know what I’m talking about, and that’s not a good place to be. I’ll make sure to do more research before making such claims in the future.
I’m not claiming that there aren’t systematic differences in position or shape of the distribution of ability. What I’m claiming is that no one has sufficiently proved that these differences are inherent.
I can think of a few plausible non-genetic influences that could reduce variance, but even if none of those come into play, there must be others that are also possibilities. Do you see why I’m placing the burden of proof on you to show that differences are biologically inherent, but also why I believe that this is such a difficult task?
Either because you don’t understand how bayesian evidence works or because you think the question is social political rather than epistemic.
That was the point of making the demand.
You cannot change reality by declaring that other people have ‘burdens of proof’. “Everything is cultural” is not a privileged hypothesis.
It might have been marginally more productive to answer “No, I don’t see. Would you explain?” But, rather than attempting to other-optimize, I will simply present that request to datadataeverywhere. Why is the placement of “burden” important? With this supplementary question: Do you know of evidence strongly suggesting that different cultural norms might significantly alter the predominant position of the male sex in academic mathematics?
I can certainly see this as a difficult task. For example, we can imagine that fictional rational::Harry Potter and Hermione were both taught as children that it is ok to be smart, but that only Hermione was instructed not to be obnoxiously smart. This dynamic, by itself, would be enough to strongly suppress the numbers of women to rise to the highest levels in math.
But producing convincing evidence in this area is not an impossible task. For example, we can empirically assess the impact of the above mechanism by comparing the number of bright and very bright men and women who come from different cultural backgrounds.
Rather than simply demanding that your interlocutor show his evidence first, why not go ahead and show yours?
I agree, and this was what I meant. Distinguishing between nature and nurture, as wedrifid put it, is a difficult but not impossible task.
I hope I answered both of these in my comment to wedrifid below. Thank you for bothering to take my question at face value (as a question that requests a response), instead of deciding to answer it with a pointless insult.
The problem with other-optimising here is that it doesn’t account for my goals. I care far more about the nature of rational evidence than I do about the drawn out nature vs nurture debates. A direct denunciation of the epistemic rational failure mode of passing the ‘proof’ buck suits my purposes.
Actually, it would have been more productive, since you obviously didn’t understand what I was saying.
I am not claiming that I have evidence suggesting that culture is a stronger factor in mathematical ability than genetics. What I’m claiming is that I don’t know of any evidence to show that the two can be clearly distinguished. Ignorance is a privileged hypothesis. Unless you can show evidence of differences in mathematical ability that can be traced specifically to genetics, ignorance reigns here, and we shouldn’t assume that either culture or genetics is a stronger factor.
The burden of proof lies on you, because you are appealing to me to shift my belief toward yours. I am willing to do this, provided you provide any evidence that does so under a sane framework for reasoning. Meanwhile, the reason the burden of proof is not on me is that I am claiming ignorance, not a particular position.
You’re being incredibly critical, and have been so in other threads as well. I realize that this is your M.O., and is not solely directed at me, but I would appreciate it if you would specify exactly what I’ve said, here or in other comments, that has convinced you so thoroughly that I am unable to hold a rational discussion.
No, I rejected your specific argument because it was by very nature fallacious. There are other things you could have said but didn’t and those things I may not have even disagreed with.
The conversation was initiated by you admonishing others. You have since then danced the dance of re-framing with some skill. I was actually only at the fringes of the conversation.
I haven’t said that. Specifics quotations of arguments or reasoning that I reject tend to be included in my comments. Take the above for example. Your reply does not relate rationally to the quote you were replying to. I reject the argument that you were using (which is something I do consistently—I care about bullshit probably even more than you care about supporting your culture hypothesis). Your response was to weasel your way out of your argument, twist your initial claim such that it has the intellectual high ground, label my disagreement with you a personal flaw, misrepresented my claim to be something that I have not made and then attempt to convey that I have not given any explanation for my position. That covers modules 1, 2, 3 and 4 in “Effective Argument Techniques 101”.
I don’t especially mind the slander but it is essentially futile for me to try to engage with the reasoning. I would have to play the kind of games that I come here to avoid.
Well, I had promised you a compliment when you deleted a post.
So, well done! I’m glad you got rid of that turkey (the great-grandparent).
Was that the Joan of Arc reference? I’ve been studying these sexual related genetic mutations and chromosomal abnormalities recently in a Biology class and her name came up. I found it fascinating and nearly left the comment there just for that. Each to their own. :)
Maybe it was the Joan comment. I can’t find it now.
That Joan comment annoyed me too, though I didn’t say anything at the time. Not your fault, but just let a woman do something remarkable, something almost miraculous, and sure enough, some man 500 years later is going to claim that she must have actually been male, genetically speaking.
I wasn’t feminist at all until I came here to LW. Honest!
She is a woman, regardless of whether she has a Y chromosome. It is SRY gene that matters genetically. So we can use that observation to free us up to call evidence evidence without committing crimes against womankind.
If I my (most decidedly female) lecturer is to be believed the speculation was based primarily on personal reports from her closest friends. It included things like menstrual patterns (and the lack thereof) and personal habits. I didn’t look into the details to see whether or not the this was an allusion to the typically far shorter vagina becoming relevant. I’m also not sure if the line of reasoning was prompted by some historian trying to work out what on earth was going on while researching her personal life or just biologists liking to feel like their knowledge is relevant to impressive people and events.
If she hadn’t done famous things then we probably wouldn’t have any records whatsoever to go on and nor would anyone care to look.
You’re starting to sound like a troll. I would feel less sure of that if you hadn’t just admitted that you don’t expect to care what you’re arguing about in another comment.
What do you want out of this discussion? Personally, I would like to be better informed about an area that smart people disagree with me on. You’re not helping me attain that goal, since you are providing me with no evidence. Meanwhile, you are continuing to hold a hostile tone and expecting me to support positions I neither hold nor claim to hold.
If you have an actual interest in either the topic of this discussion or working with me to fix whatever it is that has sent up so many red flags with you, I’d appreciate it. I don’t feel like I’m guilty of any of the things you mentioned, but if you feel adamantly that I am, I’m happy to listen to specifics so that I can evaluate and fix that behavior. If instead you feel merely like insulting me, I urge you to make better use of your time.
It is my policy to remove comments whenever social aggressors find them to be useful to take out of context and have done so with the subject of your link, assuring Resgui that it was nothing to do with him.
In that discussion Relsqui and I came to an amicable agreement to disagree. He (if he’ll pardon the assumption of gender and chastise me if I have made an incorrect inference) had already made some hints in that direction in the ancestor and acknowledging that I too didn’t think such a trivial matter of word definition was really worth arguing about is a gesture of respect. (Some people find it annoying if the other person leaves them hanging, especially if they had offered to extend the discussion mostly as a gesture of goodwill, which is what I had taken from Relsqui.)
I’ll note that whatever you may think of me personally a distinguishing feature of trolls is that they enjoy provoking an emotional response in others while on the other hand I find it unsavoury. Even though I have actively developed myself in order to have a thicker ‘emotional skin’ (see related concurrent discussion) with when it comes to frustrations this sort of conflict will always be a net psychological drain.
My goal was to support Will’s comment in the face of a reply that I would have found frustrating and was also an error in reasoning. In the future I will reply directly to Will (or whomever), expressing agreement and elaborating on the point with more details. Replying to the undesired comment gave more attention to it rather than less and obscuration would perhaps have been more useful than rebuttal.
For what it’s worth, it is very hard to distinguish between someone who is deliberately provoking a negative reaction and someone who is not very practiced at anticipating what choices of language or behavior might cause one. I, like datadataeverywhere, did get the impression that you were at least one of those things; off the top of my head, here are a few specific reasons:
Your initial comment disagreed with my terminology without actually addressing it directly, merely asserting that I was wrong without providing evidence nor argument. This struck me as aggressive and also poorly reasoned.
You persisted in the argument about definition despite, as you later said, not caring about it. I did not continue that thread out of goodwill but out of a desire to resolve the disagreement and return to the original topic—hence stopping and checking in that we were on the same page. That’s why it annoyed me when you said you didn’t care; in that case, I wish we hadn’t wasted the time on it!
Applying the label “social aggressor” in response to someone who is explicitly trying to find out what’s going on in the conversation and steer it somewhere useful. (In fairness, dde suggesting you’re a troll was not necessary either, but the situations are different in that I have not noticed you specifically trying to get the conversation on track.)
Not answering direct questions, especially when they are designed to return the conversation to a productive topic.
I hope I’m not overstepping my bounds by spelling this out; my impression of the LW community is that constructive criticism is encouraged. Therefore, I’m giving you specific suggestions to avoid making a negative impression you seem to not want to make. Conveniently, this will also resolve the ambiguity in my first (non-quoted) sentence in this comment. If you confirm that you want to avoid garnering negative reactions in conversation, it’ll be clear that you are indeed not a troll.
Absolutely not. In general people overestimate the importance of ‘intrinsic talent’ on anything. The primary heritable component of success in just about anything is motivation. Either g or height comes second depending on the field.
I agree. I think it is quite obvious that ability is always somewhat heritable (otherwise we could raise our pets as humans), but this effect is usually minimal enough to not be evident behind the screen of either random or environmental differences. I think this applies to motivation as well!
And that was really what my claim was; anyone who claims that women are inherently less able in mathematics has to prove that any measurable effect is distinguishable from and not caused by cultural factors that propel fewer women to have interest in mathematics.
It doesn’t. (Unfortunately.)
Am I misunderstanding, or are you claiming that motivation is purely an inherited trait? I can’t possibly agree with that, and I think even simple experiments are enough to disprove that claim.
Misunderstanding. Expanding the context slightly:
It doesn’t. (Unfortunately.)
When it comes to motivation the differences between people are not trivial. When it comes the particular instance of difference between the sexes there are powerful differences in motivating influences. Most human motives are related to sexual signalling and gaining social status. The optimal actions to achieve these goals is significantly different for males and females, which is reflected in which things are the most motivating. It most definitely should not be assumed that motivational differences are purely cultural—and it would be astonishing if they were.
Are you speaking from an evolutionary context, i.e. claiming that what we understand to be optimal is hardwired, or are you speaking to which actions are actually perceived as optimal in our world?
You make a really good point—one I hadn’t thought of but agree with—but since I don’t think that we behave strictly in a manner that our ancestors would consider optimal (after all, what are we doing at this site?), I can’t agree that sexual and social signaling’s effect on motivation can be considered a-cultural.
I may be wrong, but I don’t expect the proportion of gays in LessWrong to be very different from the proportion in the population at large.
My vague impression is that the proportion of people here with sexual orientations that are not in the majority in the population is higher than that of such people in the population.
This is probably explained completely by Lw’s tendency to attract
weirdospeople who are willing to question orthodoxy.For starters we have a quite a few people who practice polyamory.
It might matter whether or not one counts closeted gays. Either way, I was just throwing another potential partition into the argument. I also doubt that we differ significantly in our proportion of deaf people, but the point is that being deaf is qualitatively different, but shouldn’t impair one’s rational capabilities. Same for being female, black, or most of the groups that we think of as adding to diversity.
To little memetic diversity is clearly a bad thing, for the same reason too little genetic variability. However how much and what kind are optimal depends on the environment.
Also have you considered the possibility that diversity for you is not a means to an end but a value in itself? In that case unless it conflicts with more any other values you would perhaps consider more important values you don’t need any justification for it. I’m quite honest with myself that I hope that post-singularity the universe will not be paperclipped by only things I and people like me (or humans in general for that matter) value. I value a diverse universe.
Edit:
I.. uhm...see. At first I was very confused by all the far reaching implications of this however thanks to keeping a few things in mind, I’m just going to ascribe this to you being from a different cultural background than me.
Diversity is a value for me, but I’d like to believe that is more than simply an aesthetic value. Of course, if wishes were horses we’d all be eating steak.
Memetic diversity is one of the non-aesthetic arguments I can imagine, and my question is partially related to that. Genetic diversity is superfluous past a certain point, so it seems reasonable that the same might be true of memetic diversity. Where is that point relative to where Less Wrong sits?
Um, all I was saying was that women and black people are underrepresented here, but that ought not be explained away by the subject matter of Less Wrong. What does that have to do with my cultural background or the typical mind fallacy? What part of that do you disagree with?
Well I will try to elaborate.
After I read this it struck me that you may value a much smaller space of diversity than I do. And that you probably value the very particular kinds of diversity (race, gender,some types of culture) much more or even perhaps to the exclusion of others (non-neurotypical, ideological and especially values). I’m not saying you don’t (I can’t know this) or that you should. I at first assumed you thought the way you do because you came up with a system more or less similar to my own, a incredibly unlikely event, that is why I scolded myself for employing the mind projection fallacy while providing a link pointing that this particular component is firmly integrated into the whole “stuff White people like” (for lack of a better word) culture that exists in the West so anyone I encounter online with whom I share the desire for certain spaces of diversity is on average overwhelmingly more likely to get it from that memplex.
Also while I’m certainly sympathetic about hoping one’s values are practical, but one needs to learn to live with the possibility one’s values are neutral or even impractical or perhaps conflicting with each other. I overall in principle support efforts to lower unnecessary barriers for people to join Lesswrong.But the OP doesn’t seem to make it explicit that this is about values, and you wanting other Lesswrongers to live by your values but seems to communicate that its about it being the optimal course of improving rationality.
You haven’t done this. Your argument so far has been to simply go from:
“arbitrary designated group/blacks/women are capable of rationality, but are underrepresented on Lesswrong”
to
“Lesswrong needs to divert some (as much as needed?) efforts to correct this.”
Why?
Like I said lowering unnecessary barriers (actually you at this point even have to make the case that they exist and that they aren’t simply the result of the other factors I described in the post) won’t repel the people who already find LW interesting, so it should in principle get a more effective and healthy community.
However what if this should prove to be insufficient? Divert resources to change the preferences of designated under-represented groups? Add elements to Lesswrong that aren’t strictly necessary to reach its stated objectives? Which is not to say we don’t have them now, however the ones we have now probably cater to the largest potential pool of people predisposed to find LW’s goals interesting.
Konkvistador:
There is a fascinating question that I’ve asked many times in many different venues, and never received anything approaching a coherent answer. Namely, among all the possible criteria for categorizing people, which particular ones are supposed to have moral, political, and ideological relevance? In the Western world nowadays, there exists a near-consensus that when it comes to certain ways of categorizing humans, we should be concerned if significant inequality and lack of political and other representation is correlated with these categories, we should condemn discrimination on the basis of them, and we should value diversity as measured by them. But what exact principle determines which categories should be assigned such value, and which not?
I am sure that a complete and accurate answer to this question would open a floodgate of insight about the modern society. Yet out of all difficult questions I’ve ever discussed, this seems to be the hardest one to open a rational discussion about; the amount of sanctimoniousness and/or logical incoherence in the answers one typically gets is just staggering. One exception are several discussions I’ve read on Overcoming Bias, which at least asked the right questions, but unfortunately only scratched the surface in answering them.
That’s intriguing. Would you care to mention some of the sorts of diversity which usually aren’t on the radar?
I’ve spent some time thinking about this, and my conclusion is that, at least personally, what I value about diversity is the variety of worldviews that it leads to.
This does result in some rather interesting issues, though. For example, one of the major factors in the difference in worldview between dark-skinned Americans and light-skinned Americans is the existence of racism, both overt and institutional. Thus, if I consider diversity to be very valuable, it seems that I should support racism. I don’t, though—instead, I consider that the relevant preferences of dark-skinned Americans take precedence over my own preference for diversity. (Similarly, left-handed peoples’ preference for non-abusive writing education appropriately took precedence over the cultural preference for everyone to write with their right hands, and left-handedness is, to the best of my knowledge, no longer a significant source of diversity of worldview.)
That assumes coherence in the relevant group’s preference, though, which isn’t always the case. For example, among people with disabilities, there are two common views that are, given limited resources, significantly conflicting: The view that disabilities should be cured and that people with disabilities should strive to be (or appear to be) as normal as possible, and the view that disabilities should be accepted and that people with disabilities should be free to focus on personal goals rather than being expected to devote a significant amount of effort to mitigating or hiding their disabilities. In such cases, I support the preference that’s more like the latter, though I do prefer to leave the option open for people with the first preference to pursue that on a personal level (meaning I’d support the preference ‘I’d prefer to have my disability cured’, but not ‘I’d prefer for my young teen’s disability to be treated even though they object’, and I’m still thinking about the grey area in the middle where such things as ‘I’d prefer for my baby’s disability to be cured, given that it won’t be able to be cured when they’re older if it’s not cured now, and given that if it’s not cured I’m likely to be obligated to take care of them for the rest of my life’ exist).
I think that’s coherent, anyway, as far as it goes. I’m sure there are issues I haven’t addressed, though.
With your first example, I think you’re on to an important politically incorrect truth, namely that the existence of diverse worldviews requires a certain degree of separation, and “diversity” in the sense of every place and institution containing a representative mix of people can exist only if a uniform worldview is imposed on all of them.
Let me illustrate using a mundane and non-ideological example. I once read a story about a neighborhood populated mostly by blue-collar folks with a strong do-it-yourself ethos, many of whom liked to work on their cars in their driveways. At some point, however, the real estate trends led to an increasing number of white collar yuppie types moving in from a nearby fancier neighborhood, for whom this was a ghastly and disreputable sight. Eventually, they managed to pass a local ordinance banning mechanical work in front yards, to the great chagrin of the older residents.
Therefore, when these two sorts of people lived in separate places, there was on the whole a diversity of worldview with regards to this particular issue, but when they got mixed together, this led to a conflict situation that could only end up with one or another view being imposed on everyone. And since people’s worldviews manifest themselves in all kinds of ways that necessarily create conflict in case of differences, this clearly has implications that give the present notion of “diversity” at least a slight Orwellian whiff.
My experience is similar. Even people that are usually extremely rational go loopy.
I seem to recall one post there that specifically targeted the issue. But you did ask “what basis should” while Robin was just asserting a controversial is.
wedrifid:
I probably didn’t word my above comment very well. I am also asking only for an accurate description of the controversial “is.”
The fact is that nearly all people attach great moral importance to these issues, and what I’d like (at least for start) is for them to state the “shoulds” they believe in clearly, comprehensively, and coherently, and to explain the exact principles with which they justify these “shoulds.” My above stated questions should be understood in these terms.
If you are sufficiently curious you could make a post here. People will be somewhat motivated to tone down the hysteria given that you will have pre-emptively shunned it.
I think I’m going to stop responding to this thread, because everyone seems to be assuming I’m meaning or asking something that I’m not. I’m obviously having some problems expressing myself, and I apologize for the confusion that I caused. Let me try once more to clarify my position and intentions:
I don’t really care how diverse Less Wrong is. I was, however, curious how diverse the community is along various axes, and was interested in sparking a conversation along those lines. Vladimir’s comment is exactly the kind of questions I was trying to encourage, but instead I feel like I’ve been asked to defend criticism that I never thought I made in the first place.
I was never trying to say that there was something wrong with the way that Less Wrong is, or that we ought to do things to change our makeup. Maybe it would be good for us to, but that had nothing to do with my question. I was instead (trying to, and apparently badly) asking for people’s opinions about whether or how our makeup along any partition—the ones that I mentioned or others—effect in us an inability to best solve the problems that we are interested in solving.
“Um, all I was saying was that women and black people are underrepresented here, but that ought not be explained away by the subject matter of Less Wrong. What does that have to do with my cultural background or the typical mind fallacy? What part of that do you disagree with?”
To get back to basics for a moment: we don’t know that women and black people are underrepresented here. Usernames are anonymous. Even if we suspect they’re underrepresented, we don’t know by how much—or whether they’re underrepresented compared to the internet in general, or the geek cluster, or what.
Even assuming you want more demographic diversity on LW, it’s not at all clear that the best way to get it is by doing something differently on LW itself.
You highlighted this point much better than I did.
“Ought”? I say it ‘ought’ to be explained away be the subject matter of less wrong if and only if that is an accurate explanation. Truth isn’t normative.
Is this a language issue? Am I using “ought” incorrectly? I’m claiming that the truth of the matter is that women are capable of rationality, and have a place here, so it would be wrong (in both an absolute and a moral sense) to claim that their lack of presence is due to this being a blog about rationality.
Perhaps I should weaken my statement to say “if women are as capable as men in rationality, their underrepresentation here ought not be explained away by the subject matter”. I’m not sure whether I feel like I should or shouldn’t apologize for taking the premise of that sentence as a given, but I did, hence my statement.
Ahh, ok. That seems reasonable. I had got the impression that you had taken the premise for granted primarily because it would be objectionable if it was not true and the fact of the matter was an afterthought. Probably because that’s the kind of reasoning I usually see from other people of your species.
I’m not going to comment either way about the premise except to say that it is inclination and not capability that is relevant here.
People are touchy on this. I guess its because in public discourse pointing something like this out is nearly always a call to change it.