I’m a 30 year old software engineer with a “traditional rationalist” science background, a lot of prior exposure to Singularitarian ideas like Kurzweil’s, with a big network of other scientist friends since I’m a Caltech alum. It would be fair to describe me as a cryocrastinator. I was already an atheist and utilitarian. I found the Sequences through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
I thought it would be polite, and perhaps helpful to Less Wrong, to explain why I, despite being pretty squarely in the target demographic, have decided to avoid joining the community and would recommend the same to any other of my friends or when I hear it discussed elsewhere on the net.
I read through the entire Sequences and was informed and entertained; I think there are definitely things I took from it that will be valuable (“taboo” this word; the concept of trying to update your probability estimates instead of waiting for absolute proof; etc.)
However, there were serious sexist attitudes that hit me like a bucket of cold water to the face—assertions that understanding anyone of the other gender is like trying to understand an alien, for example.
Coming here to Less Wrong, I posted a little bit about that, but I was immediately struck in the “sequence rerun” by people talking about what a great utopia the gender-segregated “Failed Utopia 4-2″ would be.
Looking around the site even further, I find that it is over 90% male as of the last survey, and just a lot of gender essentialist, women-are-objects-not-people-like-us crap getting plenty of upvotes.
I’m not really willing to put up with that and still less am I enthused about identifying myself as part of a community where that’s so widespread.
So, despite what I think could be a lot of interesting stuff going on, I think this will be my last comment and I would recommend against joining Less Wrong to my friends. I think it has fallen very squarely into the “nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists” cognitive failure mode.
If you’re interested in one problem that is causing at least one rationalist to bounce off your site (and, I think the odds are not unreasonable, where one person writes a long heartfelt post, there might be multiple others who just click away) here you go. If not, go ahead and downvote this into oblivion.
Perhaps I’ll see you folks in some years if this problem here gets solved, or some more years after that when we’re all unfrozen and immortal and so forth.
Thanks for writing this. It’s true that LW has a record of being bad at talking about gender issues; this is a problem that has been recognized and commented on in the past. The standard response seems to have been to avoid gender issues whenever possible, which is unfortunate but maybe better than the alternative. But I would still like to comment on some of the specific things you brought up:
assertions that understanding anyone of the other gender is like trying to understand an alien, for example.
I think I know the post you’re referring to, I didn’t read this as sexist, and I don’t think that indicates a male-techy failure mode on my part about sexism. Some men are just really, really bad at understanding women (and maybe commit the typical mind fallacy when they try to understand men, and maybe just don’t know anyone who doesn’t fall into one of those categories), and I don’t think they should be penalized for being honest about this.
gender essentialist
I haven’t seen too much of this. Edit: Found some more.
women-are-objects-not-people-like-us crap
Where? Edit: Found some of this too.
I think it has fallen very squarely into the “nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists” cognitive failure mode.
This is a somewhat dangerous weapon to wield. It is very easy to classify any attempt to counter this argument as falling into the failure mode you describe; please don’t use this as a fully general counterargument.
Try to keep in mind selection effects. The post was titled Failed Utopia—people who agreed with this may have posted less than those who disagreed.
I confess to being somewhat surprised by this reaction. Posts and comments about gender probably constitute around 0.1% of all discussion on LessWrong.
Whenever I see a high quality comment made by a deleted account (see for example this thread where the two main participants are both deleted accounts), I’d want to look over their comment history to see if I can figure out what sequence of events alienated them and drove them away from LW, but unfortunately the site doesn’t allow that. Here SamLL provided one data point, for which I think we should be thankful, but keep in mind that many more people have left and not left visible evidence of the reason.
Also, aside from the specific reasons for each person leaving, I think there is a more general problem: why do perfectly reasonable people see a need to not just leave LW, but to actively disidentify or disaffiliate with LW, either through an explicit statement (SamLL’s “still less am I enthused about identifying myself as part of a community where that’s so widespread”), or by deleting their account? Why are we causing them to think of LW in terms of identity in the first place, instead of, say, a place to learn about and discuss some interesting ideas?
Why are we causing them to think of LW in terms of identity in the first place, instead of, say, a place to learn about and discuss some interesting ideas?
Some possibilities:
There have been deliberate efforts at community-building, as evidenced by all the meetup-threads and one whole sequence, which may suggest that one is supposed to identify with the locals. Even relatively innocuous things like introduction and census threads can contribute to this if one chooses to take a less than charitable view of them, since they focus on LW itself instead of any “interesting idea” external to LW.
Labeling and occasionally hostile rhetoric: Google gives dozens of hits for terms like “lesswrongian” and “LWian”, and there have been recurring dismissive attitudes regarding The Others and their intelligence and general ability. This includes all snide digs at “Frequentists”, casual remarks to the effect of how people who don’t follow certain precepts are “insane”, etc.
The demographic homogeneity probably doesn’t help.
I agree with these, and I wonder how we can counteract these effects. For example I’ve often used “LWer” as shorthand for “LW participant”. Would it be better to write out the latter in full? Should we more explicitly invite newcomers to think of LW in instrumental/consequentialist terms, and not in terms of identity and affiliation? For example, we could explain that “joining the LW community” ought to be interpreted as “making use of LW facilities and contributing to LW discussions and projects” rather than “adopting ‘LW member’ as part of one’s social identity and endorsing some identifying set of ideas”, and maybe link to some articles like Paul Graham’s Keep Your Identity Small.
Should we more explicitly invite newcomers to think of LW in instrumental/consequentialist terms, and not in
terms of identity and affiliation?
I think so. The other thing about “snide digs” the grandparent is talking about is they are not just bad image, they are also wrong (as in incorrect). I think the LW “hit rate” on specific enough technical matters is not all that good, to be honest.
One of the times the issue of overidentifying with LW came up here, about a year ago, I mentioned that my self-description is “LW regular [forum participant]”. It means that I post regularly, but does not mean that I derive any sense of identity from it. “LWer” certainly sounds more like “this is my community”, so I stay away from using it except toward people who explicitly self-identify as such. I also tend to discount quite a bit of what someone here posts, once I notice them using the pronoun “we” when describing the community, unless I know for sure that they are not caught up in the sense of belonging to a group of cool “rationalists”.
I think the “LWer” appellation is just plain accurate (but then I’ve used the term myself). Any blog with a regular group of posters & commenters constitutes a community, so LW is a community. Posting here regularly makes us members of this community by default, and being coy about that fact would make me feel odd, given that we’ve strewn evidence of it all over the site. But I suspect I’m coming at this issue from a bit of an odd angle.
Why are we causing them to think of LW in terms of identity in the first place, instead of, say, a place to learn about and discuss some interesting ideas?
It may be because lot of LW regulars visibly think of it in terms of identity. LW is described by most participants as a community rather than a discussion forum, and there has been a lot of explicit effort to strengthen the communitarian aspect.
why do perfectly reasonable people see a need to not just leave LW, but to actively disidentify or disaffiliate with LW
As a hypothesis, they may be ambivalent about discontinuing their hobby (“Two souls alas! are dwelling in my breast; (...)) and prefer to burn their bridges to avoid further ambivalence and decision pressures. Many prefer a course of action being locked in, as opposed to continually being tempted by the alternative.
Why are we causing them to think of LW in terms of identity in the first place, instead of, say, a place to learn about and discuss some interesting ideas?
Some people come from a background where they’re taught to think of everything in terms of identity.
Why are we causing them to think of LW in terms of identity in the first place, instead of, say, a place to learn about and discuss some interesting ideas?
LW is a hub for several abnormal ideas. An implication that you’re affiliated with LW is an implication that you take these ideas seriously, which no reasonable person would do.
Coming here to Less Wrong, I posted a little bit about that, but I was immediately struck in the “sequence rerun” by people talking about what a great utopia the gender-segregated “Failed Utopia 4-2″ would be.
Did you use a Rawlsian veil of ignorance when judging it? From a totally selfish point of view, I would very, very, very much rather be myself in this world than myself in that scenario (given that, among plenty of other things, I dislike most people of my gender), but think of, say, starving African children or people with disabilities. I don’t know much about what it feels like to be in such dire straits so I’m not confident that I’d rather be a randomly chosen person in Failed Utopia 4-2 than a randomly chosen person in the actual world, but the idea doesn’t sound obviously absurd to me.
By whom? (Of course, that’s not literally true, since the overwhelming majority of all 3.5 billion male humans alive are people I’ve never met or heard of and so I have little reason to dislike, but...)
Since I cannot imagine anything but a few cherry picked examples that could have led to your impression, let me use some of my own (the number of cases is low):
The extremely positive reception of Alicorns “Living Luminously” sequence (karma +50 for the main post alone, Anja’s great and technical posts (karmas +13, +34, +29) all indicate that good content is not filtered along gender lines, which it should be if there were some pervasive bias.
Even asserting that understanding anyone of the other gender is “like trying to understand an alien” does not imply any sort of male superiority complex. If you object to sexism as just pointing out that there are differences both based on culture and genetics, well you got me there. Quite obviously there are, I assume you don’t live in a hermaphrodite community. Why is it bad when/if that comes up? Forbidden knowledge?
If you’re interested in one problem that is causing at least one rationalist to bounce off your site (...)
Are you sure that’s the rationalist thing to do? Gender imbalance and a few misplaced or easily misinterpreted remarks need not be representative of a community, just as a predominantly male CS program at Caltech and frat jokes need not be representative of College culture.
Gender imbalances and the occasional frat jokes didn’t cause you to leave Caltech.
It’s possible that user is sensitive to gender issues precisely because it’s comparatively difficult and not entirely rationalist to leave a community like Caltech.
It’s generally the stance of gender-sensitive humans that no one should have to listen to the occasional frat joke if they don’t want to. I agree with everything else in your post; that final “can’t you take a frat joke?” strikes me as defensive and unnecessary.
You’re right, strictly speaking, the protocol would be TCPIP. :)
(There is no mandatory or even authoritative social protocol for this situation. The typical behavior is editing and then putting an EDIT: brief explanation of edit, but just editing with no explanation is also fine, particularly if nobody’s replied yet, or the edit is explained in child comments).
just editing with no explanation is also fine, particularly if nobody’s replied yet
Well earlier today I clarified (euphemism for edited) a comment shortly after it was made, then found a reply that cited the old, unclarified version. You know what that looks like, once the tribe finds out? OhgodImdone.
In a hushed voice I just found out that EY can edit his comments without an asterisk appearing.
Ordinarily I’d leave this for SamLL to respond to, but I’d say the chances of getting a response in this context are fairly low, so hopefully it won’t be too presumptuous for me to speculate.
First of all, we as a community suck at handling gender issues without bias. The reasons for this could span several top-level posts and in any case I’m not sure of all the details; but I think a big one is the unusually blurry lines between research and activism in that field and consequent lack of a good outside view to fall back on. I don’t think we’re methodologically incapable of overcoming that, but I do think that any serious attempt at doing so would essentially convert this site into a gender blog.
To make matters worse, for one inclined to view issues through the lens of gender politics, Failed Utopia 4-2 is close to the worst starting point this site has to offer. Never mind the explicitly negative framing, or its place within the fun theory sequence: we have here a story that literally places men on Mars on gender-essentialist grounds, and doesn’t even mention nonstandard genders or sexual preferences. No, that’s not meant to be taken all that seriously or to inform people’s real behavior. Doesn’t matter. We’re talking enormously poor associations here.
From there, the damage has basically been done. If you take that as a starting point and look around the site with gender in mind—perhaps not even consciously trying to vet things in those terms, but having framed things in that way—you aren’t going to go anywhere good with it. Facts like the predominately male gender mix (which I’d be inclined to explain in terms of background demographics; computer science is the dominant intellectual framework here and that field’s even more gender-skewed) or the evopsych reasoning we use occasionally start to look increasingly sinister, and every related data point’s going to build on an already dismal impression. These data points are in fact pretty sparse—we don’t talk much about gender here, for what I see as good reasons—but they’re fairly salient if you’re looking for them. And there aren’t many pointing in the other direction.
I don’t agree with the conclusion. But I can see where it’s coming from, and once it’s been accepted sticking around to fight a presumptively hopeless battle wouldn’t be a very smart move. Now, can we prevent impressions like this from being formed without losing sight of our primary goals or engaging in types of moderation that aren’t going to happen with our current leadership and culture? That I’m not sure of.
we as a community suck at handling gender issues without bias.
As far as I can tell, we as a species suck at handling gender issues without bias, the closest thing to an exception to that I recall seeing being some (not all) articles (but usually not the comments) on the Good Men Project and the discussions on Yvain’s “The $Nth Meditation on $Thing” blog post series.
Yeah, I was fairly impressed with Yvain’s posts on the subject; if we did want to devote some serious effort to tackling this issue, I can think of far worse starting points.
Hello and goodbye.
I’m a 30 year old software engineer with a “traditional rationalist” science background, a lot of prior exposure to Singularitarian ideas like Kurzweil’s, with a big network of other scientist friends since I’m a Caltech alum. It would be fair to describe me as a cryocrastinator. I was already an atheist and utilitarian. I found the Sequences through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
I thought it would be polite, and perhaps helpful to Less Wrong, to explain why I, despite being pretty squarely in the target demographic, have decided to avoid joining the community and would recommend the same to any other of my friends or when I hear it discussed elsewhere on the net.
I read through the entire Sequences and was informed and entertained; I think there are definitely things I took from it that will be valuable (“taboo” this word; the concept of trying to update your probability estimates instead of waiting for absolute proof; etc.)
However, there were serious sexist attitudes that hit me like a bucket of cold water to the face—assertions that understanding anyone of the other gender is like trying to understand an alien, for example.
Coming here to Less Wrong, I posted a little bit about that, but I was immediately struck in the “sequence rerun” by people talking about what a great utopia the gender-segregated “Failed Utopia 4-2″ would be.
Looking around the site even further, I find that it is over 90% male as of the last survey, and just a lot of gender essentialist, women-are-objects-not-people-like-us crap getting plenty of upvotes.
I’m not really willing to put up with that and still less am I enthused about identifying myself as part of a community where that’s so widespread.
So, despite what I think could be a lot of interesting stuff going on, I think this will be my last comment and I would recommend against joining Less Wrong to my friends. I think it has fallen very squarely into the “nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists” cognitive failure mode.
If you’re interested in one problem that is causing at least one rationalist to bounce off your site (and, I think the odds are not unreasonable, where one person writes a long heartfelt post, there might be multiple others who just click away) here you go. If not, go ahead and downvote this into oblivion.
Perhaps I’ll see you folks in some years if this problem here gets solved, or some more years after that when we’re all unfrozen and immortal and so forth.
Sincerely,
Sam
Thanks for writing this. It’s true that LW has a record of being bad at talking about gender issues; this is a problem that has been recognized and commented on in the past. The standard response seems to have been to avoid gender issues whenever possible, which is unfortunate but maybe better than the alternative. But I would still like to comment on some of the specific things you brought up:
I think I know the post you’re referring to, I didn’t read this as sexist, and I don’t think that indicates a male-techy failure mode on my part about sexism. Some men are just really, really bad at understanding women (and maybe commit the typical mind fallacy when they try to understand men, and maybe just don’t know anyone who doesn’t fall into one of those categories), and I don’t think they should be penalized for being honest about this.
I haven’t seen too much of this. Edit: Found some more.
Where? Edit: Found some of this too.
This is a somewhat dangerous weapon to wield. It is very easy to classify any attempt to counter this argument as falling into the failure mode you describe; please don’t use this as a fully general counterargument.
Try to keep in mind selection effects. The post was titled Failed Utopia—people who agreed with this may have posted less than those who disagreed.
I confess to being somewhat surprised by this reaction. Posts and comments about gender probably constitute around 0.1% of all discussion on LessWrong.
Whenever I see a high quality comment made by a deleted account (see for example this thread where the two main participants are both deleted accounts), I’d want to look over their comment history to see if I can figure out what sequence of events alienated them and drove them away from LW, but unfortunately the site doesn’t allow that. Here SamLL provided one data point, for which I think we should be thankful, but keep in mind that many more people have left and not left visible evidence of the reason.
Also, aside from the specific reasons for each person leaving, I think there is a more general problem: why do perfectly reasonable people see a need to not just leave LW, but to actively disidentify or disaffiliate with LW, either through an explicit statement (SamLL’s “still less am I enthused about identifying myself as part of a community where that’s so widespread”), or by deleting their account? Why are we causing them to think of LW in terms of identity in the first place, instead of, say, a place to learn about and discuss some interesting ideas?
Some possibilities:
There have been deliberate efforts at community-building, as evidenced by all the meetup-threads and one whole sequence, which may suggest that one is supposed to identify with the locals. Even relatively innocuous things like introduction and census threads can contribute to this if one chooses to take a less than charitable view of them, since they focus on LW itself instead of any “interesting idea” external to LW.
Labeling and occasionally hostile rhetoric: Google gives dozens of hits for terms like “lesswrongian” and “LWian”, and there have been recurring dismissive attitudes regarding The Others and their intelligence and general ability. This includes all snide digs at “Frequentists”, casual remarks to the effect of how people who don’t follow certain precepts are “insane”, etc.
The demographic homogeneity probably doesn’t help.
I agree with these, and I wonder how we can counteract these effects. For example I’ve often used “LWer” as shorthand for “LW participant”. Would it be better to write out the latter in full? Should we more explicitly invite newcomers to think of LW in instrumental/consequentialist terms, and not in terms of identity and affiliation? For example, we could explain that “joining the LW community” ought to be interpreted as “making use of LW facilities and contributing to LW discussions and projects” rather than “adopting ‘LW member’ as part of one’s social identity and endorsing some identifying set of ideas”, and maybe link to some articles like Paul Graham’s Keep Your Identity Small.
“Here at LW, we like to keep our identity small.”
Nice one.
I think so. The other thing about “snide digs” the grandparent is talking about is they are not just bad image, they are also wrong (as in incorrect). I think the LW “hit rate” on specific enough technical matters is not all that good, to be honest.
One of the times the issue of overidentifying with LW came up here, about a year ago, I mentioned that my self-description is “LW regular [forum participant]”. It means that I post regularly, but does not mean that I derive any sense of identity from it. “LWer” certainly sounds more like “this is my community”, so I stay away from using it except toward people who explicitly self-identify as such. I also tend to discount quite a bit of what someone here posts, once I notice them using the pronoun “we” when describing the community, unless I know for sure that they are not caught up in the sense of belonging to a group of cool “rationalists”.
I think the “LWer” appellation is just plain accurate (but then I’ve used the term myself). Any blog with a regular group of posters & commenters constitutes a community, so LW is a community. Posting here regularly makes us members of this community by default, and being coy about that fact would make me feel odd, given that we’ve strewn evidence of it all over the site. But I suspect I’m coming at this issue from a bit of an odd angle.
It may be because lot of LW regulars visibly think of it in terms of identity. LW is described by most participants as a community rather than a discussion forum, and there has been a lot of explicit effort to strengthen the communitarian aspect.
As a hypothesis, they may be ambivalent about discontinuing their hobby (“Two souls alas! are dwelling in my breast; (...)) and prefer to burn their bridges to avoid further ambivalence and decision pressures. Many prefer a course of action being locked in, as opposed to continually being tempted by the alternative.
Some people come from a background where they’re taught to think of everything in terms of identity.
LW is a hub for several abnormal ideas. An implication that you’re affiliated with LW is an implication that you take these ideas seriously, which no reasonable person would do.
Your comment’s first sentence answers your second paragraph.
I guess you get considered fully unclean even if you’re only observed breaking a taboo a few times.
Did you use a Rawlsian veil of ignorance when judging it? From a totally selfish point of view, I would very, very, very much rather be myself in this world than myself in that scenario (given that, among plenty of other things, I dislike most people of my gender), but think of, say, starving African children or people with disabilities. I don’t know much about what it feels like to be in such dire straits so I’m not confident that I’d rather be a randomly chosen person in Failed Utopia 4-2 than a randomly chosen person in the actual world, but the idea doesn’t sound obviously absurd to me.
Is that … like … allowed?
edit: I agree with you and object to all the conditioning against contradicting “sacred” values (sexism = ugh, bad).
By whom? (Of course, that’s not literally true, since the overwhelming majority of all 3.5 billion male humans alive are people I’ve never met or heard of and so I have little reason to dislike, but...)
Since I cannot imagine anything but a few cherry picked examples that could have led to your impression, let me use some of my own (the number of cases is low):
The extremely positive reception of Alicorns “Living Luminously” sequence (karma +50 for the main post alone, Anja’s great and technical posts (karmas +13, +34, +29) all indicate that good content is not filtered along gender lines, which it should be if there were some pervasive bias.
Even asserting that understanding anyone of the other gender is “like trying to understand an alien” does not imply any sort of male superiority complex. If you object to sexism as just pointing out that there are differences both based on culture and genetics, well you got me there. Quite obviously there are, I assume you don’t live in a hermaphrodite community. Why is it bad when/if that comes up? Forbidden knowledge?
Are you sure that’s the rationalist thing to do? Gender imbalance and a few misplaced or easily misinterpreted remarks need not be representative of a community, just as a predominantly male CS program at Caltech and frat jokes need not be representative of College culture.
It’s possible that user is sensitive to gender issues precisely because it’s comparatively difficult and not entirely rationalist to leave a community like Caltech.
It’s generally the stance of gender-sensitive humans that no one should have to listen to the occasional frat joke if they don’t want to. I agree with everything else in your post; that final “can’t you take a frat joke?” strikes me as defensive and unnecessary.
You’re right, it was too carelessly formulated.
Will you fix it? =) Is there an established protocol for fixing these sorts of things?
The edit button? :P
Is that a protocol, strictly speaking? “Pressing the edit button” would be a protocol with only one action (not sufficient).
Maybe there will be a policy post on this soon.
You’re right, strictly speaking, the protocol would be TCPIP. :)
(There is no mandatory or even authoritative social protocol for this situation. The typical behavior is editing and then putting an EDIT: brief explanation of edit, but just editing with no explanation is also fine, particularly if nobody’s replied yet, or the edit is explained in child comments).
Well earlier today I clarified (euphemism for edited) a comment shortly after it was made, then found a reply that cited the old, unclarified version. You know what that looks like, once the tribe finds out? OhgodImdone.
In a hushed voice I just found out that EY can edit his comments without an asterisk appearing.
Why not stay around and try to help fix the problem?
Ordinarily I’d leave this for SamLL to respond to, but I’d say the chances of getting a response in this context are fairly low, so hopefully it won’t be too presumptuous for me to speculate.
First of all, we as a community suck at handling gender issues without bias. The reasons for this could span several top-level posts and in any case I’m not sure of all the details; but I think a big one is the unusually blurry lines between research and activism in that field and consequent lack of a good outside view to fall back on. I don’t think we’re methodologically incapable of overcoming that, but I do think that any serious attempt at doing so would essentially convert this site into a gender blog.
To make matters worse, for one inclined to view issues through the lens of gender politics, Failed Utopia 4-2 is close to the worst starting point this site has to offer. Never mind the explicitly negative framing, or its place within the fun theory sequence: we have here a story that literally places men on Mars on gender-essentialist grounds, and doesn’t even mention nonstandard genders or sexual preferences. No, that’s not meant to be taken all that seriously or to inform people’s real behavior. Doesn’t matter. We’re talking enormously poor associations here.
From there, the damage has basically been done. If you take that as a starting point and look around the site with gender in mind—perhaps not even consciously trying to vet things in those terms, but having framed things in that way—you aren’t going to go anywhere good with it. Facts like the predominately male gender mix (which I’d be inclined to explain in terms of background demographics; computer science is the dominant intellectual framework here and that field’s even more gender-skewed) or the evopsych reasoning we use occasionally start to look increasingly sinister, and every related data point’s going to build on an already dismal impression. These data points are in fact pretty sparse—we don’t talk much about gender here, for what I see as good reasons—but they’re fairly salient if you’re looking for them. And there aren’t many pointing in the other direction.
I don’t agree with the conclusion. But I can see where it’s coming from, and once it’s been accepted sticking around to fight a presumptively hopeless battle wouldn’t be a very smart move. Now, can we prevent impressions like this from being formed without losing sight of our primary goals or engaging in types of moderation that aren’t going to happen with our current leadership and culture? That I’m not sure of.
As far as I can tell, we as a species suck at handling gender issues without bias, the closest thing to an exception to that I recall seeing being some (not all) articles (but usually not the comments) on the Good Men Project and the discussions on Yvain’s “The $Nth Meditation on $Thing” blog post series.
Yeah, I was fairly impressed with Yvain’s posts on the subject; if we did want to devote some serious effort to tackling this issue, I can think of far worse starting points.
s/gender//
Though I think that this particular forum sucks less at handling at least some issues.
Fixing the problem needs less people with a highly polarizing agenda, not more.