If I were going to join a rationalist club, I would prefer it to be men only. Sexual impulses tend to be counter-productive to the exercise of sound judgment. If we can agree that politics is the mind-killer, the same holds true for sex.
There probably is something to that. Apparently single-sex education is one of the ways that actually work for getting more women into math and engineering, due to less self-consciousness about gender roles when studying as a teenager.
I don’t think it’d be worth the effort for adults though. Socializing people to behave in mixed-gender environments is pretty important in Western culture. Adults are expected to be able to deal with mixed-gender groups, generally are able to deal with mixed-gender groups, and enforcing a single-gender membership would raise the weirdness perception for the club for a lot of people.
Single gender groups for adults would be worth trying as an experiment.
You’re guessing that adults are reliably able to handle mixed groups, especially if the groups are doing activities where the members might have bad memories related to gender roles.
Suppose that some women had been told repeatedly when they were girls that they were bad at math, and saw boys doing better and getting more attention in math class—they might do better in an all-women math class.
Similarly, if some men had been told as boys that they were less good at relationships than women, they might want to start out therapy in all-male therapy groups, or groups which aren’t exactly therapy—note that PUA is used for dealing with women, but the support structure seems to be typically all male.
In both cases, they would presumably want to build confidence and knowledge and then take both into being comfortable with the other sex.
The disadvantage of excluding women (or men) is far too large. Just like any other rationalist, they have information, experience and perspective that is valuable. And more so than rationalists of the same gender as you, they can share near insight about issues personal to women and far insight into issues personal to men, that is extremely rare to find among men or a group of men. There is a whole realm of gender related affective death spirals that are terribly easy to fall into in segregated gender groups. This applies to almost any other significant culture gap as well (black/white, rich/poor urban/rural etc.).
There’s a common error described some places as “privilege blindness” referring to how easy it is for those who are privileged in some way to go through life completely oblivious to the way the world works for those who do not share that good fortune. This is a classic example of an affective death spiral, and will be a huge potential pitfall for any all-male or even mostly male group.
It might make sense for larger groups with plenty of both genders to have some separate meetings, and that’s a worthy experiment. But keeping apart indefinitely seems extremely unwise.
Parent upvoted even though I disagree strongly, because this is an issue worth discussing and bringing in empirical data.
There are a lot of things that are counter-productive to the exercise of sound judgment. Getting rid of such things largely the point of rationality.
It may be that you are incapable of functioning well around women right now, but don’t you want to do better? By arguing for a “rationalist” group which explicitly cateres to this irrationality, you are already conceding the fight against it.
I’m reminded of how Ramit Sethi won’t accept anyone onto one of his courses who has credit card debt. If you do and he finds out, WHAM! you’re kicked off and your money is refunded.
The lesson I take from that is: “seriously—first things first.”
Whatever you may think about Brazil84′s opinion, this comment is being downvoted unreasonably. He has stated his preferences and the reasons for having them honestly and politely. You may disagree with him as much as you like, but he definitely didn’t commit any fault that would warrant treating him as if he were a troll, spammer, rude, or nonsensical.
I originally downvoted your comment but I’m reversing that to an upvote due to the reception it received. The behavior displayed in response to your comment demonstrated that the problem you mention is, in fact, a genuine one.
I pretty much agree with Adelene Dawner’s sibling comment here. I will go further and say that I find brazil84′s comment to be exclusionary speech because of its connotations. Now, some commenters here are taking the denotation of brazil84′s comment seriously and disagreeing with it; and I might be among them, if the comment had been phrased like so:
I would prefer to join a sex-segregated rationality club.
I also downvoted for that reason. I want to see less of people posting without thinking about the results of their comments (e.g. the apparent surprise that Alicorn was offended—that should have been really obvious as a likely outcome). I want to see less of people trying to maximize their own comfort at the expense of others, the group as a whole, or specific subgroups of the group as a whole (I strongly suspect that having two rationality groups, divided on gender lines, will be non-optimal in several ways, and that that non-optimality will probably disproportionately affect the womens’ group, since there tend to be fewer of us here). I want to see less rudeness. I want to see less non-meta focus on gender in the first place, though this particular desire is minor and would not have been sufficient to warrant a downvote on its own.
Exactly. This whole thing looks like someone generalized from one example, didn’t think before they posted, made some errors, and got downvoted—and then some people jump to their defense because he’s in a group that the lesswrong-persona empathizes with.
The comment that started this implies the poster didn’t remember that homosexuals exist, thinks everyone is like himself, and doesn’t know or care about the wider effects of excluding women from his rationality group. There are a lot of incorrect defenses of this, as well as ‘technically correct’ defenses that are being selectively applied (“don’t criticize him because gender segregation is not in general a universally negative idea”, “anything that doesn’t have a universally agreed-upon objective definition is a bad criterion”).
If someone came here and posted that they wanted a whites-only group because white people feel uncomfortable and irrational around black people (the only ethnicity other than white), I’d expect a very different response from the community.
If someone came here and posted that they wanted a whites-only group because white people feel uncomfortable and irrational around black people (the only ethnicity other than white), I’d expect a very different response from the community.
Yes, putting something into the reference class of “things that are politically incorrect to say regardless of whether they are correct” would force a different response than putting it in the reference class of “things that can be considered on their literal merit”.
I’ve noticed that differentiating speech based on nationality doesn’t seem to warrant much protection at all while differentiation based on ethnicity is almost inconceivable. So people who want to play reference class tennis can take their pick.
I don’t object to making something unacceptable to speak of due to the political implications, so long as it is clear that that is what is happening. It is the difference between claiming brazil’s ideal is utterly impractical and has undesired consequences and saying it is offensive even to consider those consequences.
his whole thing looks like someone generalized from one example [...] thinks everyone is like himself
This particular mistake (unlike the other objections you mentioned) does not quite fit. Even if Brazil himself is a perfectly mature person immune to bias the group dynamics still influence his experience. If everyone else is a being an ass it sucks for him. (Of course it would be rather arrogant if his aversion is because he thinks everyone else is not like himself! :P)
He makes a claim about a possible general competitive tendencies associated with various combinations of subtypes of the human species. What he fails to consider is that there is more than one factor at play. Typically all male groups, all female groups, mixed groups and various combinations of gender-atypical groups will produce different kinds of competition. But there is bias inherent in the all-male and all-female groups too (again separating out the dynamics of gender atypical hybrids into your next objection, which I accept). Combining the sexes actually eliminates a whole swath of competition types because you can’t get away with them in a mixed setting. In that way there is potential for the combination to be a stabilizing influence.
Yes, putting something into the reference class of “things that are politically incorrect to say regardless of whether they are correct” would force a different response than putting it in the reference class of “things that can be considered on their literal merit”.
Interesting. You seem to be saying that the bias goes the other way—that we’d be irrationally rejecting racially segregated groups? (That is, not that we’d be irrational to reject the proposal, but that we’d be rejecting it without giving it fair consideration.)
I also intended to convey the other errors in that example—I think that in other circumstances, the comment would be considered (recognized?) to be below the standards of discourse for this community.
Even if Brazil himself is a perfectly mature person immune to bias the group dynamics still influence his experience. If everyone else is a being an ass it sucks for him. (Of course it would be rather arrogant if his aversion is because he thinks everyone else is not like himself! :P)
True! This seems like an unlikely reading of the comment, but not a precluded one.
Combining the sexes actually eliminates a whole swath of competition types because you can’t get away with them in a mixed setting. In that way there is potential for the combination to be a stabilizing influence.
Good point. Is there any literature on this issue? (Can we call up Lukeprog, the Minister of Citations?)
To be clear: I thought it was a poor suggestion, made in a comment that demonstrated a lack of thought on the issue. If in fact rationalist men abandon their training to butt skulls at the advice of promiscuous monkey ghosts when women are present, I agree that’d be worth studying! But I don’t think it’s worthwhile to exclude women from rationality groups to cater to these preferences without a serious analysis of the drawbacks.
Interesting. You seem to be saying that the bias goes the other way—that we’d be irrationally rejecting racially segregated groups? (That is, not that we’d be irrational to reject the proposal, but that we’d be rejecting it without giving it fair consideration.)
Absolutely not! I would reject the idea of a gender segregated group and most certainly decline to participate in it or associate with it. The downsides are too great, both politically and practically and the advantages somewhat overstated.
What I would say is that it is important (to me) to either be consistent in applying a principle or to be clear about why there is a difference. The privilege of prohibition of exclusion is not universal and depends on the power that the group has claimed. To be clear I am not saying that the decision being political is bad, merely factual. I would apply it myself in this case.
I also intended to convey the other errors in that example—I think that in other circumstances, the comment would be considered (recognized?) to be below the standards of discourse for this community.
Whenever something related to the gender comes up the result is an ugly ‘sub standard’ mess. (With the only a couple of exceptions to that rule being when HughRistik was the primary participant.) I have a slightly different model of the causal factors at play.
In a counterfactual world where there was no political hotspot over the issue my prediction is that Brazil’s comment would remain stable at either 1 or 2 karma. There would be multiple comments replying to him variously pointing out the signalling implications of establishing such a group, the potential for negative externalities (particularly if only one of the sexes or gender atypical groups does not meet the population threshold to establish all three of all male, all female and mixed group), and an analysis of what the actual social dynamics at play involve. The high quality replies would reach around the 10 karma mark with perhaps one particularly good one making 20.
The problem with Brazil’s comment is that it is insufficient. It doesn’t go in to anything beyond expressing a desire for one thing that would remove a significant source of negative utility to him. That is ok, not every comment has to be an essay covering all the broader ramifications of a potential policy proposal. That is for posts.
In a different counterfactual where Brazil had made an actual policy proposal that we should establish gender segregated rationality groups—or an analogous proposal without the gender hotspot - then he would be downvoted significantly. Because once you make a policy proposal you have made a statement that should have considered all the pros and cons of the situation. But Brazil fell short of that—even if he may actually approve of such a policy he didn’t advocate it.
The difference between what is said and ‘all possible related things for which that statement could be associated’ matters here far more than it does elsewhere. Going from “I’d like to join” to “we should establish” is a rubicon. As soon as something has a ‘should’ or especially a ‘we should’ the suggestion has to be something that I fully agree with or I’ll launch a bucketload of punishment in that direction.
Good point. Is there any literature on this issue? (Can we call up Lukeprog, the Minister of Citations?)
There is literature out there, but my mind is better with concepts than with bibliographies. Lukeprog or maybe Hugh could suggest something. But there certainly isn’t as much literature out there as there ought to be!
If in fact rationalist men abandon their training to butt skulls at the advice of promiscuous monkey ghosts when women are present, I agree that’d be worth studying!
Yes, and if that was done without an analysis of how analogous female competitive instincts work then I would claim offense! Because it is not just guys who have evolutionary incentives toward bias.
But I don’t think it’s worthwhile to exclude women from rationality groups to cater to these preferences without a serious analysis of the drawbacks.
Nope, that’d be outright moronic. I’d like to think that nobody here with the initiative and influence to establish such a group would be dumb enough to actually do so.
I want to see less of people trying to maximize their own comfort at the expense of others
I upvoted brazil84′s comment because I want to see more of such things. To take an extreme example, if Genghis Khan used rationality tricks, I want to know them. A while ago, in a discussion of Schelling’s book, we had this exchange:
ajayjetti: so rationality doesn’t always mean “win-win”?
cousin_it: Neither actual human rationality nor its best available game-theoretic formalizations (today) necessarily lead to win-win.
Technologos: Indeed, the difference between Winning and “win-win” is important. Rationality wouldn’t be much of a martial art if we limited the acceptable results to those in which all parties win.
Imagine that someday brazil84 finds a way to make rationality training 200% more effective, but it only works in gender-segregated groups. (That was, after all, his stated rationale: to make his own training more effective.) Will you reconsider then? Are you so absolutely sure this is impossible that cutting the discussion short with an Alicorn-style “I don’t like what you just said” is the best response?
Unfortunately, much like on Reddit, I think that a lot of people (myself included, though I am working to correct this) treat the up/down buttons as though they were agree/disagree buttons
There’s some of that, but it seems that “upvote for agreement” is much more common than “downvote for disagreement”, except on hot-button topics (which covers brazil84′ post). Downvoting generally requires disagreement + rudeness or stupidity.
Nah. Even if you disagree with the LessWrong memes on just about everything, you can easily get to 20 karma with a few moderately interesting Rationality Quotes or some such.
I’ve seen plenty of forums / newsgroups / collective blogs / real-life social circles that developed a powerful groupthink despite the lack of any karma-like mechanic and despite a very hands-off or nonexisting moderation.
There’s far more buggy code in our brains than in our servers.
I don’t think so—comments seem much more likely to end up with positive karma than with negative karma, except on some hot-button topics (politics, gender relations and seduction …). So getting enough karma shouldn’t be a problem unless you’re systematically talking about “unwanted” topics, or write particularly bad comments … in which case, them not being able to post top-level posts is a feature, not a bug.
I had to impose myself the exact same warning. I was trying to use karma point to signal “rationalist status” instead of simply trying my best to comment intelligent things. There apparently is a little segment of my neurology that is constantly scanning what the median groupthink is and prompting me in that direction...
I agree it’s annoying and probably a problem, but I think there’s still less groupthink than on most forums I’ve seen. I do agree that it can definitely be frustrating; I have a post I want to write up on the value of starting things sooner rather than later, and I was all set to start typing it up back when I had 19 karma (you need 20 to make a full post), but then I started posting in this thread, and my karma score drifted back down to a single digit. It’s doubly frustrating because I can’t tell if people legitimately think my posts there are without merit or if they’re just using it as an agree/disagree button. If they do think my posts are terrible no one has said as such.
I was all set to start typing it up back when I had 19 karma (you need 20 to make a full post), but then I started posting in this thread, and my karma score drifted back down to a single digit.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Looks like you actually came out ahead from that thread, karma-wise.
In fact, I think that thread illustrates LW’s typical reaction to someone with an outlying opinion: initial rejection when it’s poorly put, followed by upvotes when it’s cogently fleshed out & defended. Looks OK to me.
(It’s not clear to me how this form of rationalism will survive contact with the real world. Are you strong enough to be able to think despite having testicles?)
It’s not clear to me how this form of rationalism will survive contact with the real world.
Perhaps better than some other form. By analogy, if I were teaching a soldier how to fight, I would first teach him how to operate his rifle without any distractions. Later he can practice firing with the added distraction of loud noises, people running and screaming, other people trying to shoot at him, and so on.
For a soldier analogy, how about women in the armed forces? Perhaps the IDF, who have a good reputation for kicking arse in practical tests. (Even if the War Nerd thinks they’re overrated.)
I am entirely unconvinced that a rationalism brought up without this bit of humanity will actually survive its first exposure to air, and your analogy doesn’t convince me. (You are of course entirely entitled not to care if I’m convinced.)
Though there may be, e.g., past data you can point to that shows this as the important criterion.
And, as Nancy Leibovitz points out, an experiment would be worth running.
So you’d want it to be straight men only. Presumably with the option to create a straight girls’ group. Gays would be able to form pairs only with opposite sex counterparts, and bisexuals would be shit out of luck, is that the idea?
I think you’re being a little unfair to brazil84′s comment. Adding a woman to a men-only group affects all (edit: many, not all) men because they feel an impulse to compete for her. A gay guy won’t cause this reaction.
Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Some mixed gender groups do have downsides, which may be important to some people. In my experience, being in a group with many males and few females feels slightly less comfortable than either an all-male group or an evenly mixed group.
Except the policy debates that actually come up in real life are not drawn uniformly from the space of all policy debates. The one-sided issues are typically not worth mentioning, simply because they are one-sided.
Exactly. Another way to put it would be—policy debates should not appear one-sided, so long as you do not consider all proposals about policy to constitute policy debates.
(“PDSNAOS” does not mean “people don’t have bad ideas”)
Well, if we’re being picky: for all natural numbers n, let P(n) be the proposal “all future policy decisions should be decided by a sack containing n potatoes”.
Right, but there really aren’t any good arguments for adopting P(n) for any n—none worth considering, at least. And that’s a countably infinite number of policy debates that we don’t need to have!
No cheaper than leaving out the sack and the potatoes. Do you really think that there are any benefits of P(n) for any n that would justify having a debate over it? I think all the arguments go the same way for sufficiently small values of “all”—that is, it’s “one-sided” enough that it shouldn’t even be brought up.
One reason to bring up argument X against policy P when policy P is clearly better is that there might be a slight modification of P that retains the advantages of P while addressing argument X.
Adding a woman to a men-only group affects all men because they feel an impulse to compete for her.
Speaking as a heterosexual male, no it doesn’t. People, even young human males, can be mature enough not to have an impulse to “compete” for every female they encounter.
Speaking as a heterosexual male, no it doesn’t. People, even young human males, can be mature enough not to have an impulse to “compete” for every female they encounter.
Describing it as an “impulse to compete” is inaccurate. It’s more like an increased desire to be seen/noticed, that results in increased competition, aggression, and risk-taking behaviors as a side-effect, with the strongest effects occurring when there’s only one or two females, and several males present. (Perhaps a lekking instinct is being triggered.)
Anyway, it’s certainly possible to suppress the behaviors the impulse is suggesting, but merely being aware that one is being biased in this direction is not the same thing as stopping the bias.
In fact, it’s likely to motivate one to try to show off just how not competing you are… i.e., to stand out by making a show of not standing out, by being… “mature” as you put it.
So, if you’ve been priding yourself on being more mature in such situations, it’s probably because your brain selected a display of “maturity” as your strategy for competing. ;-)
IOW, it is a “live fire exercise” in debiasing behavior.
So, if you’ve been priding yourself on being more mature in such situations, it’s probably because your brain selected a display of “maturity” as your strategy for competing. ;-)
It certainly can happen in virtual venues, but IME the experience is nowhere near as visceral. Until you mentioned the idea, it actually hadn’t occurred to me it could happen without actually seeing or hearing the people involved.
Speaking as a heterosexual male, no it doesn’t. People, even young human males, can be mature enough not to have an impulse to “compete” for every female they encounter.
Then you are unusual. This is a really standard ape behaviour effect.
It still triggers my “wtf” detector, but the single-sex rationalist group experiment may be worth running.
Then you are unusual. This is a really standard ape behaviour effect.
Not just unusual, mistaken about a general claim. Humans (of either sex) behave differently in a mixed group. The social rules and payoffs are entirely different. Not behaving differently would be a mistake, even for those people who can emulate a different personality expression consistently in the long term with no adverse effects. If others are being more competitive you need to push back just to hold your ground.
Mind you I consider rationalist meetups a terrible place to meet women. Apart from being a hassle to deal with all the other guys (and annoying for the swarmed girls) the gender imbalance inflates social value. Basic economics ensures that for a given amount of social capital you can get a more desirable mate at other locations. There are plenty of intelligent and rational women out there that don’t go to rationalist meetups and you encounter them when you are a breath of fresh air and a kindred spirit rather than one of a dozen walking stereotypes.Then there is the unfortunate tendency for people (of either gender) with inflated social value in a specific context to be kind of a pain in the ass.
Writing off that particular social domain could be considered lazy or otherwise low status but I prefer to consider it one of the MIN parts of the min max equation. While it is still necessary to behave differently in the mixed group and be somewhat more aggressive it frees up a bunch of background processing and eliminates a swath of social-political constraints. Although you still have to pay more attention to the approval of the scarce women. They have far more social power and influence than they otherwise would so can damage you by more than just their own personal disinterest. Not that social politics matters much at all for occasional meetups where there is not much of a hierarchy anyway. More of a work consideration.
“We are unusual” is not a licence to say “We have a significant chance of being unusual in this particular manner that just happens to be convenient to my argument.”
What evidence were you thinking of that this rule does not apply to LessWrong readers in particular?
What evidence were you thinking of that this rule does not apply to LessWrong readers in particular?
I wasn’t primarily arguing that it does not apply, more that it might not apply.
As for reasons that it might not apply—for starters, awareness of the issue enough to discuss it. Same way it works with awareness of all other biases.
Cutting out half the potential membership out of a rationalist group seems to me a high enough price to pay (especially given how few we are, especially given the impresison it’d give to outsiders) that we ought consider very carefully how big the downsides of gender inclusiveness really are, in the given situation. Not just say “standard ape behaviour”.
As for reasons that it might not apply—for starters, awareness of the issue enough to discuss it. Same way it works with awareness of all other biases.
That’s certainly an excellent start. But awareness of and being able to cope with a bias doesn’t make it go away—it takes considerable practice until you’re not just compensating for it. The mind is a very thin layer on top of a chimp—the biases run deep.
I agree that Cousin It’s statement is literally false due to his use of the word all, but given that not all men are perfectly mature in your sense, I expect the essential concern to remain valid: adding a woman to a male-only group will tend to change the social dynamics, in part due to the impulse that Cousin It mentions.
(I mention this for the sake of completeness; speaking only for myself, I think that explicitly single-sex groups are a terrible idea and would not participate in one.)
What exactly is your point here? Are you saying that my proposal is imperfect because it could never remove all sexual distractions for everyone? Are you saying that my proposal is unfair to homosexuals?
I think it would be valuable for you to spell out your argument.
I was mostly mocking you, rather than making an argument. The nearest item in argumentspace translates to something like “if sexual impulses are counter-productive, then non-straight people cannot work in groups without this handicap, which implies that asexuals are magic and gay/bi people are never going to be as effective at collective rationality as straight people who segregate their genders; empirically, asexuals are not magic, and there is no evidence that bisexuals/gay people are less effective in groups than straights who happen or arrange to group themselves with others of the same sex”.
AdeleneDawner is correct. I do not like it when people announce that they wish to form communities I would be unwelcome in because of a “protected” feature (sex/sexuality/race/whatever). (This is importantly different from forming communities based on non-protected features, like willingness to pay membership dues or expertise in a topic, and also importantly different from forming communities in which my presence would be pointless, e.g. I would have no reason whatsoever to be at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.)
I do not like it when people announce that they wish to form communities I would be unwelcome in because of a “protected” feature (sex/sexuality/race/whatever).
I would recommend that you make an attempt to free yourself of this dislike. While some ‘protected features’ have few real consequences (skin colour won’t make you out of place anywhere except possibly a tanning salon), many do, gender definitely being one of them. Sometimes it will be easy to ignore or work around those consequences, and sometimes it will not.
If brazil84 does sincerely find that his ability for rational discussion is hampered by female pheromones (metonymy), and you do happen to emit female pheromones, you certainly shouldn’t be blamed for that, but neither should he—it is a weakness of him, but one that falls well within the demands of a modern and open society. While you are absolutely required to behave in a civil manner even in the presence of romantic attraction, it is acceptable if it causes you to perform less than optimally.
As long as he (a) recognises that in a modern and open society, he will eventually need to learn to think and behave rationally even when surrounded by women, and (b) does not by his actions prevent women from joining a rationality club, I do not think he is going out of bounds when he wishes to establish a group that caters to this need of his.
I hate that I cannot come up with a better, less loaded example (I fall into a pretty damn privileged demographic), but: I would understand if I needed to join a rape victim support group and ran into one that wouldn’t let me in because the women members were uncomfortable to talk about these experiences around a 191cm / 90 kg bearded deep-voiced man. Of course, I would find it unacceptable if that were the only support group in my area and it chose to leave me completely in the cold rather than create some discomfort to other members.
I have nothing to say against this eminently upvotable comment, of course. It just so happens that (no doubt primed somewhat by a recent conversation with Vladimir_M) I feel the need to take note of a remarkable milestone:
the women members were uncomfortable to talk about these experiences
This is literally the very first non-native-English-speaker shibboleth that I’ve ever detected in any of your comments. (The more idiomatic construction is “uncomfortable talking”.) I think I’ve managed to “catch” all the other prominent near-perfect non-natives at some point long before now (Morendil, the various Vladimirs, even Kaj Sotala), but you were the last holdout, by a significant margin. Well done!
Can you say a little more about what a “protected” feature is in this context?
That is, suppose I wish to form a community in which Xes are unwelcome, and I want to predict whether you will dislike it if I announce that wish.
I’m pretty clear that you will dislike it if X in {woman, Caucasian, queer, attracted-to-men, attracted-to-women} and not (necessarily) if X in {unwilling-to-pay, non-expert-in-$FOO}.
What about X in {adult, American, non-recovering alcoholic, hearing, sighted}?
More generally: is there a rule I could apply to predict the result for given X, supposing I knew the relevant demographic facts about Alicorn?
I waver on to what extent age is a protected category but normally err on the side of not caring about age-specific community arrangements to the extent that these overlap with pointlessness or have equivalents for multiple age groups. (E.g. a nursing home is not obliged to have children’s classes if they have adult classes, because that would be silly, and a driving school does not need to admit twelve-year-olds, because for reasons that are not the school’s responsibility twelve-year-olds may not drive).
Disability status (sensory, mental, physical, and to a lesser extent disease/addiction related) is protected but interacts strongly with pointlessness. Disease/addiction are less protected to the point where one might exclude alcoholics from a wine tasting on that characteristic alone, or send a kid home from school because ey has a contagious disease which is incidentally causing a temporary disability.
Nationality is weakly protected but interacts (through geographic location and language/culture) with pointlessness and with non-protected features, so tends not to look protected in terms of my reaction to various items.
If I had to describe a rule, I’d describe it in terms of the voluntariness of the feature, the background likelihood that people discriminate against those with this feature (not just the individual likelihood that the community-former is being exclusive for discriminatory reasons), and the difficulty/intrusiveness of hiding the feature should one want to do so. So, for example, race is maximally protected, because it’s completely involuntary, racism is totally a thing humans do, and it’s difficult to conceal.
So if you moved to a community where people with your color hair were routinely discriminated against and hair dye illegal, you would dislike the idea of a not-your-hair-color-only club, but in a community without such constraints you would be all right with it?
If I had to describe a rule, I’d describe it in terms of the voluntariness of the feature, the background likelihood that people discriminate against those with this feature (not just the individual likelihood that the community-former is being exclusive for discriminatory reasons), and the difficulty/intrusiveness of hiding the feature should one want to do so.
What about something like IQ? It satisfies all of your criteria for being maximally protected, but also seems relevant to many tasks. Plus somehow I don’t think you object to the existence on MENSA.
Using an arbitrary and subjective “pointlessness” exception, you can derive any conclusions you like. Just apply the general principle consistently as long as you like the conclusions, and otherwise proclaim that the “pointlessness” exception applies. And voila, you can bask in the glow of your high principles, which just happen to imply conclusions to your complete liking. (Of course, the general principle would produce absurd and impractical results if really applied consistently, so someone who subscribes to it has to operate with some such unprincipled exceptions.)
The distinction between “protected” and “non-protected” characteristics is of course similarly arbitrary and ultimately serves a similar purpose, though you don’t have personal control over that one, as the power of defining it is a prerogative of the state.
That said, I don’t mean to point a finger specifically at you by pointing this out. This mode of thinking is all-pervasive in modern society, and nobody is immune to it completely. But on a forum dedicated to exposing biases and fallacies, it should be pointed out.
Such criteria are always arbitrary, since there is no universally agreed definition. How exactly do you decide whether the presence and participation of a person in a group is “pointless” or not? Ask five different people, and you’ll get five different answers. Yes, you can point to extreme examples where almost all would agree, but the problem is that things are often not that clear.
The “protected” criterion is similarly arbitrary, except that the government gets to define that one. Even then, if you ask for a precise definition of when some category is considered protected in a given context, you must refer to a whole library of case law. (And you should also consult an expert lawyer who is knowledgeable about the unwritten norms and informal intricacies that usually apply.)
Unsurprisingly, humans being what they are, when they use such arbitrary criteria to answer problematic questions of law, ethics, etc., what they end up with are rationalizations for attitudes held for different reasons. Again, please note that I’m talking about something that practically everyone engages in, not some personal vice of yours.
Most people are heterosexual. Anyway, you obviously are angry at me from our exchange in the racism thread. Please don’t go around digging up my old posts to respond to just out of anger. Instead, you might ask yourself why exactly you are feeling angry. Could there be cognitive dissonance at work?
Most people demonstrate heterosexual behavior in modern heteronormative society. There is a huge difference between this and the generalization “most people are heterosexual”. In ancient Greece, “most people” (or men, anyway) were capable of having both pederastic relationships and productive heterosexual marriage. I have no data but I’d really like to see some, on how much societal norms affect orientation. Which is itself a relatively new concept.
Most people demonstrate heterosexual behavior in modern heteronormative society. There is a huge difference between this and the generalization “most people are heterosexual”.
If “is heterosexual” is determined by “sexually attracted to given gender” and sexual attraction to genders is mostly controlled by the sexual normativity of a society (is this the case? I believe so but I notice I have no evidence) then there is less of a difference between the two than you’d think.
Basically I distinguish “capable of experiencing sexual feelings towards” from “will ever actually have an experience with”, here. It’s like saying that “I’ll, like, never fall in love with a black man” (due to the demographics of my current location) versus “I never could fall in love with a black man”. It seems to me that the logical extension of these principles is that people may be capable of sexual feelings differing from the sexual norms of their society, to a greater extent than deviation already present, but do not articulate, understand, acknowledge, or have opportunity to experience these feelings. (There has to be a more sophisticated way to phrase this than “almost everyone is secretly a little bisexual”, because that of course dramatically oversimplifies the matter and gives the wrong mouthfeel, but.)
I guess “secretly a little bisexual, but due to society’s constraints will never consider or pursue a same-sex relationship” strikes me as heterosexual, not bisexual.
Sexuality is one of those areas where people want an abstract ‘core’ that is held separate and above environmental factors. For example a person may like to believe “I am the kind of person who could fall in love with a black man” and feel that never having fallen in love with a black man is a fact about their environment, not about their ability to love. I was wary of the difference you elucidated being something like “I like to believe that I am the kind of person who would be sexually attracted to both genders if only society was more permitting”.
Most people demonstrate heterosexual behavior in modern heteronormative society. There is a huge difference between this and the generalization “most people are heterosexual”.
Well my comment was kinda focused on modern society. I’m not sure how things were in Ancient Greece. Would Socrates or Plato have been particularly distracted if a Greek girl in a short toga had wandered into one of their Socratic sessions?
Probably! My intuition is that your art as a rationalist is most in need when it’s hardest to exercise (HJPEV, I think, possibly also in the Sequences) and that you shouldn’t expect the world to give you the peace of mind to apply all your skill to a question. I can bench-press more weight with a proper safety bar and a spotter, but the real world doesn’t often offer safety bars and spotters so I press less weight, without the bar and spotter, and have a better estimate of my capabilities.
I disagree, I think it’s better to practice stuff without distractions, at least at first. So for example I wouldn’t prefer to have rational club meetings at a construction site; or to have people talking on their cell phones during the meeting.
I disagree, I think it’s better to practice stuff without distractions, at least at first. So for example I wouldn’t prefer to have rational club meetings at a construction site; or to have people talking on their cell phones during the meeting.
That’s unexpected. In this comparison of sex based distractions to construction sites jackhammers turn out to be analogous to breasts. I’d usually expect something different.
It’s not so much a matter of comparison as a matter of applying shokwave’s reasoning to other distractions.
He didn’t make the argument that simply having girls present is only a mild distraction. Instead, his argument is that one should accept distractions because they are present in normal life.
He didn’t make the argument that simply having girls present is only a mild distraction. Instead, his argument is that one should accept distractions because they are present in normal life.
I know, I agree with your argument. (Without supporting sex segregated lesswrong meetups as being a remotely practical idea!)
Ah. The male-only problem is pretty much a permanent decision—it’s a Hard Problem to attract females to an all-male group. So if you had to decide between never any distractions or always distractions… I would pick distractions. Otherwise I feel training caps out too early.
it’s a Hard Problem to attract females to an all-male group.
Who cares? It’s like this is a ballroom dancing society. Besides, as a practical matter what I envision is occasional meetings where girls are excluded. I think it would also make sense to have girl-only meetings.
I care. I certainly care about attracting half of humanity to rationality groups more than I’d care about attracting that subset of males that would be significantly distracted in mixed-gender company.
Besides, as a practical matter what I envision is occasional meetings where girls are excluded. I think it would also make sense to have girl-only meetings.
At the start of this discussion you used the term “men-only”. But in contrast you’re consistently using the term “girl” to refer to a member of the opposite gender.
The corresponding term to “men” and “men-only” is “women” and “women-only”. If you’d used “male”, the corresponding term would be “female”. Only if you had used “boy” or “guy” could the corresponding term be “girl”.
Take care of the connotations of your word choices, especially given the content of your suggestions.
I care. I certainly care about attracting half of humanity to rationality groups more than I’d care about attracting that subset of males that would be significantly distracted in mixed-gender company
If that’s your preference, then I can’t really argue with it. In my opinion, people are too concerned about attracting girls (or women if you prefer) to meetings.
In my opinion, people are too concerned about attracting girls (or women if you prefer) to meetings.
Downvoted for failure to either correct or justify the insulting connotations of your word-choices.
Why do you think that I should care more about attracting easily distracted boys to meetings, than I should care about attracting adult female rationalists to such? To make it more specific, why would I choose to discuss with you, if that meant I had to trade away the capacity to discuss with Alicorn or AnnaSalamon or NancyLebovitz?
Frankly I think that your attitude would be much more distracting to me than the presence of boobs would be.
Why do you think that I should care more about attracting easily distracted boys to meetings, than I should care about attracting adult female rationalists to such
It’s just a matter of who you prefer. Anyway, I’m not going to get sidetracked in a debate over “girl” versus “woman.” If you prefer to say “boy,” I can’t control your use of language.
Serious answer from someone who’s in the NYC group:
in practice, people do care. Both guys and girls are more likely to attend an event with a less skewed gender balance. Gender balance helps attendance at events where there’s socializing.
I don’t know what kinds of topics you’re imagining, but usually we don’t focus on topics that need to be single-gender. Our topics are things like clustering algorithms and prediction markets and TED talks. Nothing you really need to shoo the girls or boys out of the room for.
Not that I wouldn’t mind a Rationalist Hen Party sometime.
If there comes a time when there are enough rationalists who want to go to rationalist meetups that there can simultaniously be all male, all female and mixed sex groups then that would work and even have some benefits for some members of either sex who could plausibly be slightly more comfortable. I don’t care if you also include a group for otherkin.
I approve of the ideological stand you are taking. Unfortunately evolution isn’t nearly as open minded. Of all the prevalent trends in human behavior to say “but it could just be cultural” sexual attraction is the most absurd. Evolution cares about babies, not political convenience.
Actually, I came upon this post and this thread while digging around the site for posts relevant to rationalist community. Your post caught my attention while checking the comments thread.
If I were going to join a rationalist club, I would prefer it to be men only. Sexual impulses tend to be counter-productive to the exercise of sound judgment. If we can agree that politics is the mind-killer, the same holds true for sex.
There probably is something to that. Apparently single-sex education is one of the ways that actually work for getting more women into math and engineering, due to less self-consciousness about gender roles when studying as a teenager.
I don’t think it’d be worth the effort for adults though. Socializing people to behave in mixed-gender environments is pretty important in Western culture. Adults are expected to be able to deal with mixed-gender groups, generally are able to deal with mixed-gender groups, and enforcing a single-gender membership would raise the weirdness perception for the club for a lot of people.
Single gender groups for adults would be worth trying as an experiment.
You’re guessing that adults are reliably able to handle mixed groups, especially if the groups are doing activities where the members might have bad memories related to gender roles.
I’m guessing that adults will do mixed groups better than teenagers. Agree that single gender groups would be an interesting experiment.
Can you expand on that?
Suppose that some women had been told repeatedly when they were girls that they were bad at math, and saw boys doing better and getting more attention in math class—they might do better in an all-women math class.
Similarly, if some men had been told as boys that they were less good at relationships than women, they might want to start out therapy in all-male therapy groups, or groups which aren’t exactly therapy—note that PUA is used for dealing with women, but the support structure seems to be typically all male.
In both cases, they would presumably want to build confidence and knowledge and then take both into being comfortable with the other sex.
You are, of course, quite correct.
The disadvantage of excluding women (or men) is far too large. Just like any other rationalist, they have information, experience and perspective that is valuable. And more so than rationalists of the same gender as you, they can share near insight about issues personal to women and far insight into issues personal to men, that is extremely rare to find among men or a group of men. There is a whole realm of gender related affective death spirals that are terribly easy to fall into in segregated gender groups. This applies to almost any other significant culture gap as well (black/white, rich/poor urban/rural etc.).
There’s a common error described some places as “privilege blindness” referring to how easy it is for those who are privileged in some way to go through life completely oblivious to the way the world works for those who do not share that good fortune. This is a classic example of an affective death spiral, and will be a huge potential pitfall for any all-male or even mostly male group.
It might make sense for larger groups with plenty of both genders to have some separate meetings, and that’s a worthy experiment. But keeping apart indefinitely seems extremely unwise.
Parent upvoted even though I disagree strongly, because this is an issue worth discussing and bringing in empirical data.
There are a lot of things that are counter-productive to the exercise of sound judgment. Getting rid of such things largely the point of rationality.
It may be that you are incapable of functioning well around women right now, but don’t you want to do better? By arguing for a “rationalist” group which explicitly cateres to this irrationality, you are already conceding the fight against it.
Sure, if I didn’t have to give up something else. But perhaps it’s a matter of picking and choosing one’s battles.
I’m reminded of how Ramit Sethi won’t accept anyone onto one of his courses who has credit card debt. If you do and he finds out, WHAM! you’re kicked off and your money is refunded.
The lesson I take from that is: “seriously—first things first.”
What would you have to give up?
I usually dislike when other people say this, but “I wish I could upvote this multiple times”.
Whatever you may think about Brazil84′s opinion, this comment is being downvoted unreasonably. He has stated his preferences and the reasons for having them honestly and politely. You may disagree with him as much as you like, but he definitely didn’t commit any fault that would warrant treating him as if he were a troll, spammer, rude, or nonsensical.
I originally downvoted your comment but I’m reversing that to an upvote due to the reception it received. The behavior displayed in response to your comment demonstrated that the problem you mention is, in fact, a genuine one.
I downvoted because I want to see less of the grandparent.
Can you elaborate on what you would like to see less of?
I pretty much agree with Adelene Dawner’s sibling comment here. I will go further and say that I find brazil84′s comment to be exclusionary speech because of its connotations. Now, some commenters here are taking the denotation of brazil84′s comment seriously and disagreeing with it; and I might be among them, if the comment had been phrased like so:
I also downvoted for that reason. I want to see less of people posting without thinking about the results of their comments (e.g. the apparent surprise that Alicorn was offended—that should have been really obvious as a likely outcome). I want to see less of people trying to maximize their own comfort at the expense of others, the group as a whole, or specific subgroups of the group as a whole (I strongly suspect that having two rationality groups, divided on gender lines, will be non-optimal in several ways, and that that non-optimality will probably disproportionately affect the womens’ group, since there tend to be fewer of us here). I want to see less rudeness. I want to see less non-meta focus on gender in the first place, though this particular desire is minor and would not have been sufficient to warrant a downvote on its own.
Exactly. This whole thing looks like someone generalized from one example, didn’t think before they posted, made some errors, and got downvoted—and then some people jump to their defense because he’s in a group that the lesswrong-persona empathizes with.
The comment that started this implies the poster didn’t remember that homosexuals exist, thinks everyone is like himself, and doesn’t know or care about the wider effects of excluding women from his rationality group. There are a lot of incorrect defenses of this, as well as ‘technically correct’ defenses that are being selectively applied (“don’t criticize him because gender segregation is not in general a universally negative idea”, “anything that doesn’t have a universally agreed-upon objective definition is a bad criterion”).
If someone came here and posted that they wanted a whites-only group because white people feel uncomfortable and irrational around black people (the only ethnicity other than white), I’d expect a very different response from the community.
Yes, putting something into the reference class of “things that are politically incorrect to say regardless of whether they are correct” would force a different response than putting it in the reference class of “things that can be considered on their literal merit”.
I’ve noticed that differentiating speech based on nationality doesn’t seem to warrant much protection at all while differentiation based on ethnicity is almost inconceivable. So people who want to play reference class tennis can take their pick.
I don’t object to making something unacceptable to speak of due to the political implications, so long as it is clear that that is what is happening. It is the difference between claiming brazil’s ideal is utterly impractical and has undesired consequences and saying it is offensive even to consider those consequences.
This particular mistake (unlike the other objections you mentioned) does not quite fit. Even if Brazil himself is a perfectly mature person immune to bias the group dynamics still influence his experience. If everyone else is a being an ass it sucks for him. (Of course it would be rather arrogant if his aversion is because he thinks everyone else is not like himself! :P)
He makes a claim about a possible general competitive tendencies associated with various combinations of subtypes of the human species. What he fails to consider is that there is more than one factor at play. Typically all male groups, all female groups, mixed groups and various combinations of gender-atypical groups will produce different kinds of competition. But there is bias inherent in the all-male and all-female groups too (again separating out the dynamics of gender atypical hybrids into your next objection, which I accept). Combining the sexes actually eliminates a whole swath of competition types because you can’t get away with them in a mixed setting. In that way there is potential for the combination to be a stabilizing influence.
Interesting. You seem to be saying that the bias goes the other way—that we’d be irrationally rejecting racially segregated groups? (That is, not that we’d be irrational to reject the proposal, but that we’d be rejecting it without giving it fair consideration.)
I also intended to convey the other errors in that example—I think that in other circumstances, the comment would be considered (recognized?) to be below the standards of discourse for this community.
True! This seems like an unlikely reading of the comment, but not a precluded one.
Good point. Is there any literature on this issue? (Can we call up Lukeprog, the Minister of Citations?)
To be clear: I thought it was a poor suggestion, made in a comment that demonstrated a lack of thought on the issue. If in fact rationalist men abandon their training to butt skulls at the advice of promiscuous monkey ghosts when women are present, I agree that’d be worth studying! But I don’t think it’s worthwhile to exclude women from rationality groups to cater to these preferences without a serious analysis of the drawbacks.
Absolutely not! I would reject the idea of a gender segregated group and most certainly decline to participate in it or associate with it. The downsides are too great, both politically and practically and the advantages somewhat overstated.
What I would say is that it is important (to me) to either be consistent in applying a principle or to be clear about why there is a difference. The privilege of prohibition of exclusion is not universal and depends on the power that the group has claimed. To be clear I am not saying that the decision being political is bad, merely factual. I would apply it myself in this case.
Whenever something related to the gender comes up the result is an ugly ‘sub standard’ mess. (With the only a couple of exceptions to that rule being when HughRistik was the primary participant.) I have a slightly different model of the causal factors at play.
In a counterfactual world where there was no political hotspot over the issue my prediction is that Brazil’s comment would remain stable at either 1 or 2 karma. There would be multiple comments replying to him variously pointing out the signalling implications of establishing such a group, the potential for negative externalities (particularly if only one of the sexes or gender atypical groups does not meet the population threshold to establish all three of all male, all female and mixed group), and an analysis of what the actual social dynamics at play involve. The high quality replies would reach around the 10 karma mark with perhaps one particularly good one making 20.
The problem with Brazil’s comment is that it is insufficient. It doesn’t go in to anything beyond expressing a desire for one thing that would remove a significant source of negative utility to him. That is ok, not every comment has to be an essay covering all the broader ramifications of a potential policy proposal. That is for posts.
In a different counterfactual where Brazil had made an actual policy proposal that we should establish gender segregated rationality groups—or an analogous proposal without the gender hotspot - then he would be downvoted significantly. Because once you make a policy proposal you have made a statement that should have considered all the pros and cons of the situation. But Brazil fell short of that—even if he may actually approve of such a policy he didn’t advocate it.
The difference between what is said and ‘all possible related things for which that statement could be associated’ matters here far more than it does elsewhere. Going from “I’d like to join” to “we should establish” is a rubicon. As soon as something has a ‘should’ or especially a ‘we should’ the suggestion has to be something that I fully agree with or I’ll launch a bucketload of punishment in that direction.
There is literature out there, but my mind is better with concepts than with bibliographies. Lukeprog or maybe Hugh could suggest something. But there certainly isn’t as much literature out there as there ought to be!
Yes, and if that was done without an analysis of how analogous female competitive instincts work then I would claim offense! Because it is not just guys who have evolutionary incentives toward bias.
Nope, that’d be outright moronic. I’d like to think that nobody here with the initiative and influence to establish such a group would be dumb enough to actually do so.
I upvoted brazil84′s comment because I want to see more of such things. To take an extreme example, if Genghis Khan used rationality tricks, I want to know them. A while ago, in a discussion of Schelling’s book, we had this exchange:
Imagine that someday brazil84 finds a way to make rationality training 200% more effective, but it only works in gender-segregated groups. (That was, after all, his stated rationale: to make his own training more effective.) Will you reconsider then? Are you so absolutely sure this is impossible that cutting the discussion short with an Alicorn-style “I don’t like what you just said” is the best response?
Unfortunately, much like on Reddit, I think that a lot of people (myself included, though I am working to correct this) treat the up/down buttons as though they were agree/disagree buttons
There’s some of that, but it seems that “upvote for agreement” is much more common than “downvote for disagreement”, except on hot-button topics (which covers brazil84′ post). Downvoting generally requires disagreement + rudeness or stupidity.
Tell me about it. A newbie can only get enough karma to post by saying things people agree with, Nett result: groupthink.
Nah. Even if you disagree with the LessWrong memes on just about everything, you can easily get to 20 karma with a few moderately interesting Rationality Quotes or some such.
I’ve seen plenty of forums / newsgroups / collective blogs / real-life social circles that developed a powerful groupthink despite the lack of any karma-like mechanic and despite a very hands-off or nonexisting moderation.
There’s far more buggy code in our brains than in our servers.
I don’t think so—comments seem much more likely to end up with positive karma than with negative karma, except on some hot-button topics (politics, gender relations and seduction …). So getting enough karma shouldn’t be a problem unless you’re systematically talking about “unwanted” topics, or write particularly bad comments … in which case, them not being able to post top-level posts is a feature, not a bug.
I had to impose myself the exact same warning. I was trying to use karma point to signal “rationalist status” instead of simply trying my best to comment intelligent things. There apparently is a little segment of my neurology that is constantly scanning what the median groupthink is and prompting me in that direction...
I agree it’s annoying and probably a problem, but I think there’s still less groupthink than on most forums I’ve seen. I do agree that it can definitely be frustrating; I have a post I want to write up on the value of starting things sooner rather than later, and I was all set to start typing it up back when I had 19 karma (you need 20 to make a full post), but then I started posting in this thread, and my karma score drifted back down to a single digit. It’s doubly frustrating because I can’t tell if people legitimately think my posts there are without merit or if they’re just using it as an agree/disagree button. If they do think my posts are terrible no one has said as such.
This is the wrong metric to apply.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Looks like you actually came out ahead from that thread, karma-wise.
In fact, I think that thread illustrates LW’s typical reaction to someone with an outlying opinion: initial rejection when it’s poorly put, followed by upvotes when it’s cogently fleshed out & defended. Looks OK to me.
-- or that would warrant mocking him as one participant did (by her own admission).
Let us know how that works out for you.
(It’s not clear to me how this form of rationalism will survive contact with the real world. Are you strong enough to be able to think despite having testicles?)
Perhaps better than some other form. By analogy, if I were teaching a soldier how to fight, I would first teach him how to operate his rifle without any distractions. Later he can practice firing with the added distraction of loud noises, people running and screaming, other people trying to shoot at him, and so on.
For a soldier analogy, how about women in the armed forces? Perhaps the IDF, who have a good reputation for kicking arse in practical tests. (Even if the War Nerd thinks they’re overrated.)
I am entirely unconvinced that a rationalism brought up without this bit of humanity will actually survive its first exposure to air, and your analogy doesn’t convince me. (You are of course entirely entitled not to care if I’m convinced.)
Though there may be, e.g., past data you can point to that shows this as the important criterion.
And, as Nancy Leibovitz points out, an experiment would be worth running.
This warrants for better judgement, not less sex.
So you’d want it to be straight men only. Presumably with the option to create a straight girls’ group. Gays would be able to form pairs only with opposite sex counterparts, and bisexuals would be shit out of luck, is that the idea?
I think you’re being a little unfair to brazil84′s comment. Adding a woman to a men-only group affects all (edit: many, not all) men because they feel an impulse to compete for her. A gay guy won’t cause this reaction.
Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Some mixed gender groups do have downsides, which may be important to some people. In my experience, being in a group with many males and few females feels slightly less comfortable than either an all-male group or an evenly mixed group.
Yes, the vast majority of debates in the space of possible policy debates should appear one-sided.
Except the policy debates that actually come up in real life are not drawn uniformly from the space of all policy debates. The one-sided issues are typically not worth mentioning, simply because they are one-sided.
Exactly. Another way to put it would be—policy debates should not appear one-sided, so long as you do not consider all proposals about policy to constitute policy debates.
(“PDSNAOS” does not mean “people don’t have bad ideas”)
“One-sided”, as I understand it, doesn’t mean that, on net, one side wins by a comfortable margin; it means all the arguments go the same way.
Well, if we’re being picky: for all natural numbers n, let P(n) be the proposal “all future policy decisions should be decided by a sack containing n potatoes”.
I meant that as saying all the considerations for deciding any given issue go the same way, not all issues to be decided go the same way.
Right, but there really aren’t any good arguments for adopting P(n) for any n—none worth considering, at least. And that’s a countably infinite number of policy debates that we don’t need to have!
But that’s an example of “wins by a comfortable margin”, not “all the arguments go the same way”. For example, P(n) is cheap to implement for low n.
No cheaper than leaving out the sack and the potatoes. Do you really think that there are any benefits of P(n) for any n that would justify having a debate over it? I think all the arguments go the same way for sufficiently small values of “all”—that is, it’s “one-sided” enough that it shouldn’t even be brought up.
One reason to bring up argument X against policy P when policy P is clearly better is that there might be a slight modification of P that retains the advantages of P while addressing argument X.
Speaking as a heterosexual male, no it doesn’t. People, even young human males, can be mature enough not to have an impulse to “compete” for every female they encounter.
Describing it as an “impulse to compete” is inaccurate. It’s more like an increased desire to be seen/noticed, that results in increased competition, aggression, and risk-taking behaviors as a side-effect, with the strongest effects occurring when there’s only one or two females, and several males present. (Perhaps a lekking instinct is being triggered.)
Anyway, it’s certainly possible to suppress the behaviors the impulse is suggesting, but merely being aware that one is being biased in this direction is not the same thing as stopping the bias.
In fact, it’s likely to motivate one to try to show off just how not competing you are… i.e., to stand out by making a show of not standing out, by being… “mature” as you put it.
So, if you’ve been priding yourself on being more mature in such situations, it’s probably because your brain selected a display of “maturity” as your strategy for competing. ;-)
IOW, it is a “live fire exercise” in debiasing behavior.
This is depressing.
Question: is this the depressing bit?
(My tentative solution: figure myself out before others do. Then I feel much better about it.)
Wouldn’t what you are describing be happening to some extent on this forum as well?
It certainly can happen in virtual venues, but IME the experience is nowhere near as visceral. Until you mentioned the idea, it actually hadn’t occurred to me it could happen without actually seeing or hearing the people involved.
Then you are unusual. This is a really standard ape behaviour effect.
It still triggers my “wtf” detector, but the single-sex rationalist group experiment may be worth running.
Not just unusual, mistaken about a general claim. Humans (of either sex) behave differently in a mixed group. The social rules and payoffs are entirely different. Not behaving differently would be a mistake, even for those people who can emulate a different personality expression consistently in the long term with no adverse effects. If others are being more competitive you need to push back just to hold your ground.
Mind you I consider rationalist meetups a terrible place to meet women. Apart from being a hassle to deal with all the other guys (and annoying for the swarmed girls) the gender imbalance inflates social value. Basic economics ensures that for a given amount of social capital you can get a more desirable mate at other locations. There are plenty of intelligent and rational women out there that don’t go to rationalist meetups and you encounter them when you are a breath of fresh air and a kindred spirit rather than one of a dozen walking stereotypes.Then there is the unfortunate tendency for people (of either gender) with inflated social value in a specific context to be kind of a pain in the ass.
Writing off that particular social domain could be considered lazy or otherwise low status but I prefer to consider it one of the MIN parts of the min max equation. While it is still necessary to behave differently in the mixed group and be somewhat more aggressive it frees up a bunch of background processing and eliminates a swath of social-political constraints. Although you still have to pay more attention to the approval of the scarce women. They have far more social power and influence than they otherwise would so can damage you by more than just their own personal disinterest. Not that social politics matters much at all for occasional meetups where there is not much of a hierarchy anyway. More of a work consideration.
If we’re not unusual, we wouldn’t be in Less Wrong. We supposedly pride ourselves on being more sane than the average population, no?
“We are unusual” is not a licence to say “We have a significant chance of being unusual in this particular manner that just happens to be convenient to my argument.”
What evidence were you thinking of that this rule does not apply to LessWrong readers in particular?
I wasn’t primarily arguing that it does not apply, more that it might not apply.
As for reasons that it might not apply—for starters, awareness of the issue enough to discuss it. Same way it works with awareness of all other biases.
Cutting out half the potential membership out of a rationalist group seems to me a high enough price to pay (especially given how few we are, especially given the impresison it’d give to outsiders) that we ought consider very carefully how big the downsides of gender inclusiveness really are, in the given situation. Not just say “standard ape behaviour”.
That’s certainly an excellent start. But awareness of and being able to cope with a bias doesn’t make it go away—it takes considerable practice until you’re not just compensating for it. The mind is a very thin layer on top of a chimp—the biases run deep.
I agree that Cousin It’s statement is literally false due to his use of the word all, but given that not all men are perfectly mature in your sense, I expect the essential concern to remain valid: adding a woman to a male-only group will tend to change the social dynamics, in part due to the impulse that Cousin It mentions.
(I mention this for the sake of completeness; speaking only for myself, I think that explicitly single-sex groups are a terrible idea and would not participate in one.)
Agreed. Edited the comment. Sorry.
What exactly is your point here? Are you saying that my proposal is imperfect because it could never remove all sexual distractions for everyone? Are you saying that my proposal is unfair to homosexuals?
I think it would be valuable for you to spell out your argument.
I was mostly mocking you, rather than making an argument. The nearest item in argumentspace translates to something like “if sexual impulses are counter-productive, then non-straight people cannot work in groups without this handicap, which implies that asexuals are magic and gay/bi people are never going to be as effective at collective rationality as straight people who segregate their genders; empirically, asexuals are not magic, and there is no evidence that bisexuals/gay people are less effective in groups than straights who happen or arrange to group themselves with others of the same sex”.
Or, put more simply, brazil84′s model appears to be flawed.
(This doesn’t necessarily imply that the effect he’s claiming to have observed doesn’t exist, though.)
And why exactly were you mocking me if you (mostly) weren’t making an argument? I really would like to know.
My guess is that my post pushed some emotional button with you.
This is a fairly predictable result of telling someone you don’t consider them welcome.
AdeleneDawner is correct. I do not like it when people announce that they wish to form communities I would be unwelcome in because of a “protected” feature (sex/sexuality/race/whatever). (This is importantly different from forming communities based on non-protected features, like willingness to pay membership dues or expertise in a topic, and also importantly different from forming communities in which my presence would be pointless, e.g. I would have no reason whatsoever to be at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.)
I would recommend that you make an attempt to free yourself of this dislike. While some ‘protected features’ have few real consequences (skin colour won’t make you out of place anywhere except possibly a tanning salon), many do, gender definitely being one of them. Sometimes it will be easy to ignore or work around those consequences, and sometimes it will not.
If brazil84 does sincerely find that his ability for rational discussion is hampered by female pheromones (metonymy), and you do happen to emit female pheromones, you certainly shouldn’t be blamed for that, but neither should he—it is a weakness of him, but one that falls well within the demands of a modern and open society. While you are absolutely required to behave in a civil manner even in the presence of romantic attraction, it is acceptable if it causes you to perform less than optimally.
As long as he (a) recognises that in a modern and open society, he will eventually need to learn to think and behave rationally even when surrounded by women, and (b) does not by his actions prevent women from joining a rationality club, I do not think he is going out of bounds when he wishes to establish a group that caters to this need of his.
I hate that I cannot come up with a better, less loaded example (I fall into a pretty damn privileged demographic), but: I would understand if I needed to join a rape victim support group and ran into one that wouldn’t let me in because the women members were uncomfortable to talk about these experiences around a 191cm / 90 kg bearded deep-voiced man. Of course, I would find it unacceptable if that were the only support group in my area and it chose to leave me completely in the cold rather than create some discomfort to other members.
Your point with the support group example is well-taken. I will reevaluate and possibly revise my dispositions here.
I have nothing to say against this eminently upvotable comment, of course. It just so happens that (no doubt primed somewhat by a recent conversation with Vladimir_M) I feel the need to take note of a remarkable milestone:
This is literally the very first non-native-English-speaker shibboleth that I’ve ever detected in any of your comments. (The more idiomatic construction is “uncomfortable talking”.) I think I’ve managed to “catch” all the other prominent near-perfect non-natives at some point long before now (Morendil, the various Vladimirs, even Kaj Sotala), but you were the last holdout, by a significant margin. Well done!
What do you think the gender demographics are for lesswrong?
To clarify: I would expect that a men-only rationality club would indeed limit women’s access to rationality clubs.
Can you say a little more about what a “protected” feature is in this context?
That is, suppose I wish to form a community in which Xes are unwelcome, and I want to predict whether you will dislike it if I announce that wish.
I’m pretty clear that you will dislike it if X in {woman, Caucasian, queer, attracted-to-men, attracted-to-women} and not (necessarily) if X in {unwilling-to-pay, non-expert-in-$FOO}.
What about X in {adult, American, non-recovering alcoholic, hearing, sighted}?
More generally: is there a rule I could apply to predict the result for given X, supposing I knew the relevant demographic facts about Alicorn?
I waver on to what extent age is a protected category but normally err on the side of not caring about age-specific community arrangements to the extent that these overlap with pointlessness or have equivalents for multiple age groups. (E.g. a nursing home is not obliged to have children’s classes if they have adult classes, because that would be silly, and a driving school does not need to admit twelve-year-olds, because for reasons that are not the school’s responsibility twelve-year-olds may not drive).
Disability status (sensory, mental, physical, and to a lesser extent disease/addiction related) is protected but interacts strongly with pointlessness. Disease/addiction are less protected to the point where one might exclude alcoholics from a wine tasting on that characteristic alone, or send a kid home from school because ey has a contagious disease which is incidentally causing a temporary disability.
Nationality is weakly protected but interacts (through geographic location and language/culture) with pointlessness and with non-protected features, so tends not to look protected in terms of my reaction to various items.
If I had to describe a rule, I’d describe it in terms of the voluntariness of the feature, the background likelihood that people discriminate against those with this feature (not just the individual likelihood that the community-former is being exclusive for discriminatory reasons), and the difficulty/intrusiveness of hiding the feature should one want to do so. So, for example, race is maximally protected, because it’s completely involuntary, racism is totally a thing humans do, and it’s difficult to conceal.
(nods) I think I follow.
So if you moved to a community where people with your color hair were routinely discriminated against and hair dye illegal, you would dislike the idea of a not-your-hair-color-only club, but in a community without such constraints you would be all right with it?
Actually, I disapprove of hair dye for unrelated reasons, but yeah, you seem to have the gist of it.
What about something like IQ? It satisfies all of your criteria for being maximally protected, but also seems relevant to many tasks. Plus somehow I don’t think you object to the existence on MENSA.
Using an arbitrary and subjective “pointlessness” exception, you can derive any conclusions you like. Just apply the general principle consistently as long as you like the conclusions, and otherwise proclaim that the “pointlessness” exception applies. And voila, you can bask in the glow of your high principles, which just happen to imply conclusions to your complete liking. (Of course, the general principle would produce absurd and impractical results if really applied consistently, so someone who subscribes to it has to operate with some such unprincipled exceptions.)
The distinction between “protected” and “non-protected” characteristics is of course similarly arbitrary and ultimately serves a similar purpose, though you don’t have personal control over that one, as the power of defining it is a prerogative of the state.
That said, I don’t mean to point a finger specifically at you by pointing this out. This mode of thinking is all-pervasive in modern society, and nobody is immune to it completely. But on a forum dedicated to exposing biases and fallacies, it should be pointed out.
It’s reasonable for people to care about how much of the world they’re welcome in.
What is your evidence that my pointlessness criterion is arbitrary?
Such criteria are always arbitrary, since there is no universally agreed definition. How exactly do you decide whether the presence and participation of a person in a group is “pointless” or not? Ask five different people, and you’ll get five different answers. Yes, you can point to extreme examples where almost all would agree, but the problem is that things are often not that clear.
The “protected” criterion is similarly arbitrary, except that the government gets to define that one. Even then, if you ask for a precise definition of when some category is considered protected in a given context, you must refer to a whole library of case law. (And you should also consult an expert lawyer who is knowledgeable about the unwritten norms and informal intricacies that usually apply.)
Unsurprisingly, humans being what they are, when they use such arbitrary criteria to answer problematic questions of law, ethics, etc., what they end up with are rationalizations for attitudes held for different reasons. Again, please note that I’m talking about something that practically everyone engages in, not some personal vice of yours.
Could you characterize what you mean by a “protected” feature?
Most likely one that is difficult to change / not obviously under conscious control.
Aren’t most human “features” of such a nature?
“Most” depends on what set of features you consider, but I would happily agree with “many.”
Your club’s motto: “Humans need not apply.”
That should work great, as long as there’s no such thing as same-sex attraction in humans!
Wait...
Most people are heterosexual. Anyway, you obviously are angry at me from our exchange in the racism thread. Please don’t go around digging up my old posts to respond to just out of anger. Instead, you might ask yourself why exactly you are feeling angry. Could there be cognitive dissonance at work?
Most people demonstrate heterosexual behavior in modern heteronormative society. There is a huge difference between this and the generalization “most people are heterosexual”. In ancient Greece, “most people” (or men, anyway) were capable of having both pederastic relationships and productive heterosexual marriage. I have no data but I’d really like to see some, on how much societal norms affect orientation. Which is itself a relatively new concept.
If “is heterosexual” is determined by “sexually attracted to given gender” and sexual attraction to genders is mostly controlled by the sexual normativity of a society (is this the case? I believe so but I notice I have no evidence) then there is less of a difference between the two than you’d think.
Basically I distinguish “capable of experiencing sexual feelings towards” from “will ever actually have an experience with”, here. It’s like saying that “I’ll, like, never fall in love with a black man” (due to the demographics of my current location) versus “I never could fall in love with a black man”. It seems to me that the logical extension of these principles is that people may be capable of sexual feelings differing from the sexual norms of their society, to a greater extent than deviation already present, but do not articulate, understand, acknowledge, or have opportunity to experience these feelings. (There has to be a more sophisticated way to phrase this than “almost everyone is secretly a little bisexual”, because that of course dramatically oversimplifies the matter and gives the wrong mouthfeel, but.)
I guess “secretly a little bisexual, but due to society’s constraints will never consider or pursue a same-sex relationship” strikes me as heterosexual, not bisexual.
Sexuality is one of those areas where people want an abstract ‘core’ that is held separate and above environmental factors. For example a person may like to believe “I am the kind of person who could fall in love with a black man” and feel that never having fallen in love with a black man is a fact about their environment, not about their ability to love. I was wary of the difference you elucidated being something like “I like to believe that I am the kind of person who would be sexually attracted to both genders if only society was more permitting”.
Well my comment was kinda focused on modern society. I’m not sure how things were in Ancient Greece. Would Socrates or Plato have been particularly distracted if a Greek girl in a short toga had wandered into one of their Socratic sessions?
Probably! My intuition is that your art as a rationalist is most in need when it’s hardest to exercise (HJPEV, I think, possibly also in the Sequences) and that you shouldn’t expect the world to give you the peace of mind to apply all your skill to a question. I can bench-press more weight with a proper safety bar and a spotter, but the real world doesn’t often offer safety bars and spotters so I press less weight, without the bar and spotter, and have a better estimate of my capabilities.
Would the same reasoning apply to noises, like jackhammering, people talking on their cell phones, etc?
Yes. Also to time-pressured situations like a question requiring an immediate answer, and emotionally charged situations.
I disagree, I think it’s better to practice stuff without distractions, at least at first. So for example I wouldn’t prefer to have rational club meetings at a construction site; or to have people talking on their cell phones during the meeting.
That’s unexpected. In this comparison of sex based distractions to construction sites jackhammers turn out to be analogous to breasts. I’d usually expect something different.
It’s not so much a matter of comparison as a matter of applying shokwave’s reasoning to other distractions.
He didn’t make the argument that simply having girls present is only a mild distraction. Instead, his argument is that one should accept distractions because they are present in normal life.
I know, I agree with your argument. (Without supporting sex segregated lesswrong meetups as being a remotely practical idea!)
Ah. The male-only problem is pretty much a permanent decision—it’s a Hard Problem to attract females to an all-male group. So if you had to decide between never any distractions or always distractions… I would pick distractions. Otherwise I feel training caps out too early.
Who cares? It’s like this is a ballroom dancing society. Besides, as a practical matter what I envision is occasional meetings where girls are excluded. I think it would also make sense to have girl-only meetings.
I care. I certainly care about attracting half of humanity to rationality groups more than I’d care about attracting that subset of males that would be significantly distracted in mixed-gender company.
At the start of this discussion you used the term “men-only”. But in contrast you’re consistently using the term “girl” to refer to a member of the opposite gender.
The corresponding term to “men” and “men-only” is “women” and “women-only”. If you’d used “male”, the corresponding term would be “female”. Only if you had used “boy” or “guy” could the corresponding term be “girl”.
Take care of the connotations of your word choices, especially given the content of your suggestions.
If that’s your preference, then I can’t really argue with it. In my opinion, people are too concerned about attracting girls (or women if you prefer) to meetings.
Downvoted for failure to either correct or justify the insulting connotations of your word-choices.
Why do you think that I should care more about attracting easily distracted boys to meetings, than I should care about attracting adult female rationalists to such? To make it more specific, why would I choose to discuss with you, if that meant I had to trade away the capacity to discuss with Alicorn or AnnaSalamon or NancyLebovitz?
Frankly I think that your attitude would be much more distracting to me than the presence of boobs would be.
I wish I could say the same about myself! That is admirable.
It’s just a matter of who you prefer. Anyway, I’m not going to get sidetracked in a debate over “girl” versus “woman.” If you prefer to say “boy,” I can’t control your use of language.
I do NOT so prefer it. My point is that words with bad connotations distract too, unless one fully intends said bad connotations.
Why did you engage in that type of distraction, a distraction you could easily remove without any negative repercussions I can think of?
Serious answer from someone who’s in the NYC group:
in practice, people do care. Both guys and girls are more likely to attend an event with a less skewed gender balance. Gender balance helps attendance at events where there’s socializing.
I don’t know what kinds of topics you’re imagining, but usually we don’t focus on topics that need to be single-gender. Our topics are things like clustering algorithms and prediction markets and TED talks. Nothing you really need to shoo the girls or boys out of the room for.
Not that I wouldn’t mind a Rationalist Hen Party sometime.
Is the goal simply to maximize attendance?
Not at all costs, but it is a goal.
Is the goal simply to maximize attendance?
If there comes a time when there are enough rationalists who want to go to rationalist meetups that there can simultaniously be all male, all female and mixed sex groups then that would work and even have some benefits for some members of either sex who could plausibly be slightly more comfortable. I don’t care if you also include a group for otherkin.
I approve of the ideological stand you are taking. Unfortunately evolution isn’t nearly as open minded. Of all the prevalent trends in human behavior to say “but it could just be cultural” sexual attraction is the most absurd. Evolution cares about babies, not political convenience.
Because it’s not like there’s clear evolutionary evidence for other potential reasons to have sexual attraction, right?
Actually, I came upon this post and this thread while digging around the site for posts relevant to rationalist community. Your post caught my attention while checking the comments thread.
Because not getting laid is one of the main precepts of instrumental rationality...?
(Currently seeing someone I met through the NYLW group.)