Well, honestly. Douglas_Reay posts something saying “if people attending LW meetings are creepy then that might be bad for the community’s gender balance”, and Filipe responds by suggesting that it’s “just one of those blank-slatey attempts to explain the gender ratio in High-IQ communities due to some sort of discrimination, without any evidence”.
It is absolutely beyond my understanding why Filipe’s comment has been voted up to +13 since what Douglas wrote was not an “attempt to explain” anything and he didn’t assert that anyone was discriminating against anyone. Filipe’s comment is based on two gross misrepresentations of what Douglas wrote, and on the basis of those gross misrepresentations he’s made an entirely unreasonable accusation, and apparently the consensus of the Less Wrong community is that this deserves to be at +13.
In what possible world is Filipe’s grotesque misrepresentation reasonable (and indeed worthy of all those upvotes) and gently pointing out its errors unreasonable (and deserving of drive-by downvotes)?
Note: “absolutely beyond my understanding” is not strictly correct. I have an obvious candidate explanation, but not one that speaks well of the portion of the LW community that’s active here: reflex-action anti-anti-sexism from people who have taken to upvoting everything they see that oh-so-daringly says that men are more often very intelligent than women. Comments saying that white people are more intelligent than black people also consistently attract high scores too. It seems to me that, seeing how common and how consistently upvoted these comments are, they shouldn’t any longer be considered either unusually insightful or courageous, any more than other comments that could get you in trouble elsewhere but would be widely agreed with here like “I think there is no God” or “a lot of what people say and do is best understood in terms of signalling rather than in terms of its explicit propositional content”. But evidently rather a lot of people disagree.
If anyone has a less depressing explanation of what’s going on here, then I would be very glad to hear it.
[EDITED to fix a misspelling—I keep writing “Felipe” instead of “Filipe”; no other changes.]
I think a few mutually-reinforcing things are going on, and the narcissistic pattern you describe is a big one. Another is feeling socially unsafe, in a way that’s hard for me to summarize, but easier to describe some features of:
Talk of how women are underrepresented at LW meetups (or whatever) pattern-matches to a moral demand that there be more women at LW meetups, otherwise LWers are bad sexist people. As is often the case with perceived moral demands, this feels threatening and defending oneself by attacking premises and identifying the demander as the Enemy is a really tempting response.
The perceived moral demand is seen as vague, which makes it feel more threatening — it feels like one can never know whether or not they’re subject to criticism.
The OP’s first link, for instance, says “no one’s required to inform you that you’re creeping” and “Not a complete instruction set on how not to be a creeper.” Even if these are true, saying them in that piece’s aggressive tone without indicating that doing something simple gets you a lot of the way (‘you don’t get cookies for being a decent person’) causes me, at least, to feel gut-level fear of doing Something Wrong without knowing it and being blamed. (This fear is easy for me now to ignore, not as easy for everyone.)
I think people often feel like “sexist” is only ever a term of extreme opprobrium, don’t distinguish/feel that other people distinguish between “behaving in a sexist way” and “being sexist”, and don’t feel like it’s possible/other people see it as possible for behaving in a sexist way to be slightly and forgivably bad, so they must defend themselves from arguments that might imply that they’re sexist. (This seems easier to illustrate for “racist”; the prototype racist in most(?) people’s minds is a Nazi or something equally awful, which makes the claim that it’s “racist” to, e.g., be more afraid of a black person on the street at night less thinkable.)
It is not obviously false that there are biological reasons that women would be less likely to be interested in LW absent any discrimination.
This possibility is a good way to claim that one isn’t or might not be subject to perceived moral demands, which makes endorsing it more attractive.
If this is true and the people making the perceived moral demand wouldn’t believe it if it were true (which it’s perceived that they certainly wouldn’t), then the demand will continue to be there forever even if all actual discrimination is addressed. This feels more threatening.
A common response (it feels to me like the most common by far on the Internet as a whole; this isn’t necessarily true but the feeling is a relevant data point) to this idea, by the people perceived as making the moral demand, is that it is obviously false and considering the hypothesis makes you a bad sexist person. Independent of anything else, for X to say this about a hypothesis Y thinks might be true is likely to make Y feel threatened and (if Y identifies as a truth-seeker) offended. This leads to polarization and increases Y’s identification with the hypothesis.
Even if none of this sort of crap is present in a particular discussion, if someone has seen it before, they’re likely to pattern-match to it and become more defensive.
All of this is true or not independently of how justified the feeling of unsafety is. Any actual risk is almost always small and the mature thing to do is to feel its smallness, but rolling a saving throw for Not Trying to Please Everyone Unless They’re Tagged as an Enemy — at least, that’s what not being triggered by this feels like to me — is really hard for some people.
Any actual risk is almost always small and the mature thing to do is to feel this, but rolling a saving throw for Not Trying to Please Everyone Unless They’re Tagged as an Enemy — at least, that’s what not being triggered by this feels like to me — is really hard for some people.
This made me feel condescended to. Compare “being creeped on in this and that particular setting carries only very small objective risks, and the mature thing to do is feel this, but not trying to please everyone (or whatever is the analogous irrational decision policy here) is really hard for some people”.
OK, I agree that that’s a good reason. (Though I personally wouldn’t upvote a question on those grounds if it were already at a large positive score; in so far as others have the same quirks as I do, your explanation can only be part of the story.)
It is absolutely beyond my understanding why Filipe’s comment has been voted up to +13 since what Douglas wrote was not an “attempt to explain” anything and he didn’t assert that anyone was discriminating against anyone. Filipe’s comment is based on two gross misrepresentations of what Douglas wrote, and on the basis of those gross misrepresentations he’s made an entirely unreasonable accusation, and apparently the consensus of the Less Wrong community is that this deserves to be at +13.
In what possible world is Filipe’s grotesque misrepresentation reasonable (and indeed worthy of all those upvotes) and gently pointing out its errors unreasonable (and deserving of drive-by downvotes)?
Personally, I upvoted Filipe’s comment for the reason Emile gave here, I agree with Manfred’s comment here, and while the second part of Filipe’s comment could be taken as overly politicizing, I feel that your comments have acted to degenerate the situation further. For reasons Nick Tarleton has outlined in this comment, “blank-statey attempts to explain the gender ratio in High-IQ communities due to some form of discrimination, without any evidence” are something that some people in this community have become rather sensitive to.
If you had responded by saying, for example, “I don’t think that this article is arguing that the gender disparity in this community rests primarily on behavioral issues of the members, but considering the self-confessed social fluency issues many of our members have, I think it’s likely there are people here who would benefit from it,” I think you could have de-escalated hostility in the discussion. The reply you gave to Manfred, though, appears far more hostile to me than Filipe’s original comment, and it looks to me like you’re doing more to blow out of proportion a possible cause for offense.
I upvoted Filipe’s comment because it asked a question the answer to which I was also interested in, and I have downvoted a number of yours because I feel that you have done an inappropriately poor job assuming good faith.
Well, honestly. Douglas_Reay posts something saying “if people attending LW meetings are creepy then that might be bad for the community’s gender balance”, and Filipe responds by suggesting that it’s “just one of those blank-slatey attempts to explain the gender ratio in High-IQ communities due to some sort of discrimination, without any evidence”.
Douglas_Reay didn’t provide any evidence for his theory. Not even what one would expect to be the minimal standard, i.e., an assertion that creepy behaviors do in fact take place at LW meetups.
Filipe was pointing this out and presented the obvious candidate explanation for Douglas_Reay’s action, i.e., the one that makes his actions look bad. How is this any different from what you just did in your comment?
Douglas_Reay didn’t provide any evidence for his theory.
What theory? The one Filipe just made up out of thin air, where Imaginary Douglas Reay proposed discrimination as a blank-slate explanation for “the gender ratio in High-IQ communities”? Or some actual theory that he actually claimed was likely to be true?
(It looks to me as if the only theory anywhere in this region of ideaspace that he endorsed was this one: “If people act creepily towards others and nothing is done about it, that might contribute to gender imbalance in offline LW communities.” This doesn’t look to me like the sort of claim for which I’d expect evidence to be provided before anyone’s even challenged it, still less the sort for which if someone makes it without such accompanying evidence I’d go looking for nefarious explanations. Of course your opinion may diverge from mine; if so, and if you can say anything about why, I’d be interested.)
the obvious candidate explanation for Douglas_Reay’s action, i.e., the one that makes his actions look bad
Either I’m seriously misunderstanding you, or you have what seems to me a seriously broken heuristic for how to generate candidate explanations for people’s actions. It seems like you’re saying that when you’re trying to understand why someone did something, “the obvious candidate explanation” is “the one that makes his actions look bad”. Why?
How is this any different from what you just did in your comment?
It looks to me as if you just pointed out one similarity between what I said and what Filipe said, namely that we both speculated that someone might be doing something for not-very-impressive reasons. I agree: we both did that. Aside from that, I see many differences and no other similarities. I can try to list some differences, but there are so many that I think it would be helpful if you’d first explain what inferences you want drawn from the alleged similarity.
What theory? The one Filipe just made up out of thin air, where Imaginary Douglas Reay proposed discrimination as a blank-slate explanation for “the gender ratio in High-IQ communities”? Or some actual theory that he actually claimed was likely to be true?
The theory that creepy behavior is happening at LW meetups and that it’s responsible for the skewed gender ratios.
the obvious candidate explanation for Douglas_Reay’s action, i.e., the one that makes his actions look bad
Either I’m seriously misunderstanding you, or you have what seems to me a seriously broken heuristic for how to generate candidate explanations for people’s actions. It seems like you’re saying that when you’re trying to understand why someone did something, “the obvious candidate explanation” is “the one that makes his actions look bad”. Why?
I could ask you the same question about the heuristic generating your explanation.
It looks to me as if you just pointed out one similarity between what I said and what Filipe said, namely that we both speculated that someone might be doing something for not-very-impressive reasons. I agree: we both did that. Aside from that, I see many differences and no other similarities. I can try to list some differences, but there are so many that I think it would be helpful if you’d first explain what inferences you want drawn from the alleged similarity.
They’re similar in that they both share the property you just criticized above.
The theory that creepy behavior is happening at LW meetups and that it’s responsible for the skewed gender ratios.
So, in fact, a theory composed of two parts, neither of which Douglas_Reay either stated nor implied. Why, then, call it “his theory” and object to his not having provided evidence for it?
I could ask you the same question about the heuristic generating your explanation.
I suppose you could, but since you don’t know what that heuristic is I’m not sure what the point would be. (But you seem to be claiming—I am completely unable to think of a good reason why—that my heuristic was something like “pick something nasty if possible”. If that really is what you’re saying, then once again I would love to know why.)
They’re similar in that they both share the property you just criticized above.
What property, exactly?
I’m curious about where you’re heading with this, anyway. I mean, let’s suppose you convince me that what I’m doing in this discussion is exactly the same as what Filipe was doing. What then? Perhaps you think I would say: “Oh, OK, so Filipe was right after all”. No, I would say “Oh, damn, I’ve been being completely unreasonable”. Or perhaps you think I would say “Oh, OK, that answers my question about upvotes and downvotes”. No, because the thing that puzzled me there was that Filipe’s comment was at +13, which is a really unusually high score; “gjm and Filipe were being unreasonable in the same way” is no sort of explanation of that.
So, in fact, a theory composed of two parts, neither of which Douglas_Reay either stated nor implied. Why, then, call it “his theory” and object to his not having provided evidence for it?
Your interpretation of seems to be different from that of most of the other people here. You might want to consider the possibility that the problem is on your end.
But you seem to be claiming—I am completely unable to think of a good reason why—that my heuristic was something like “pick something nasty if possible”.
Sorry, what I meant was the heuristic is pick what appears to be the obvious explanation, which in a case like this is likely to turn out to be nasty.
You might want to consider the possibility that the problem is on your end.
For sure, it might be. If you think it is, you might want to consider the possibility of convincing me, rather than pointing out the (obvious) fact that I might be wrong.
the heuristic is pick what appears to be the obvious explanation
See, it doesn’t look to me even slightly like “the obvious explanation” and I don’t see how to make it look like t.o.e. without the kind of bizarre misreading that I think Filipe engaged in. Of course (see above) I could be wrong. I’ll explain—and this is why this is going to be so long—why the “Filipe-Nier explanation” seems so strange to me. Perhaps you can show me where I’m going terribly amiss.
So you claim, IIUC, that the obvious explanation for Douglas_Reay’s writing what he did was that he wanted to offer “one of those blank-slatey attempts to explain the gender ratio in High-IQ communities due to some form of discrimination”. That is, that (1) what he was primarily doing was explaining, (2) that the explanation he offered was “blank-slatey”, and (3) that he was presenting it as “some form of discrimination”.
How plausible is this analysis of Douglas_Reay’s purposes, and how do other explanations of his posting what he did stack up? I’ll consider only one other explanation (not because I think it’s the only possible one but because this is going to be too long in any case): that he posted what he did because he thinks it’s possible that some people at some LW meetups may act creepily, thus putting off some other people we’d rather not put off, and he wants to do what he can to make this less likely to happen. According to this explanation, (1) what he was primarily doing was attempting to shape the culture of LW meetups a bit, (2) there’s nothing particularly “blank-slatey” about it, and (3) if discrimination is involved then it’s tangential to what Douglas_Reay was saying.
First question, then: Was he primarily offering an explanation, or attempting to influence behaviour so as to reduce “creepiness”? I think the latter is much more plausible, for the following reasons. (a) Everything DR explicitly said points that way. The title: “How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy”. What he actually said about his purposes: “not just so the people potentially causing problems get to read them, but also so everyone else knows the resource is here”, etc. The only connection DR draws between “creepiness” and gender ratio is what I’ve quoted before: ”… addressing one social skills issue that might be affecting this …”. As distinct from, say, “the issue that is probably causing this”. (b) DR’s posting history, which has lots about how to run LW meetups and very little about, e.g., the causes of gender imbalance in “High-IQ communities”. (c) DR’s other comments in this discussion, which again seem to indicate that his goal is to make LW meetups less likely to put people off. (d) Posting what DR actually did—full of things that have nothing to do with “explaining the gender ratio”—seems like a really weird way to attempt to influence opinions on that explanatory question, but entirely comprehensible as an attempt to influence behaviour (“creepiness” and reactions thereto).
Second question: Is he pushing some sort of “blank-slatey” agenda? [[Semi-digression: I confess that I’m not certain what Filipe meant by this, but among the ideas Pinker’s famous book criticizes under that heading two seem potentially relevant: (a) that differences between people and groups are purely environmental in origin and not fixed at birth by, e.g., genetics; (b) that human behaviour is infinitely malleable. Of these, (b) would be relevant if we were talking about DR’s attempts to influence behaviour (e.g., someone might argue that it’s futile to try to stop people being “creepy”) but that’s explicitly what Filipe (and, I take it, you) think was “obviously” not his real purpose, so it’d better be (a). In combination with Filipe’s choice of terminology—“High-IQ communities”—I therefore take it his point was something like this: “Communities that draw their membership from the upper tails of the intelligence distribution are inevitably going to be male-dominated because most exceptionally intelligent people are male; this looks like just one more attempt to deny that fact in the service of the false idea that there are no innate differences between the sexes.”.]] I’ve looked very carefully at everything Douglas_Reay wrote there, and I can find (a) nothing even slightly resembling a statement that there are no innate differences between men and women, (b) nothing that assumes that there are no such differences, and (c) nothing that makes more sense if we assume there are no such differences. So the only evidence for a “blank-slatey” agenda is, it seems to me, the alleged fact that Douglas_Reay posted an “explanation” for gender imbalance that isn’t “there are fewer women because most of the very cleverest people are men”. Except that—see above—he didn’t in fact do any such thing, and the absolute most he said was that “creepiness” might have something to do with it, which of course is perfectly consistent with any number of other contributing factors. All in all, I’m really not seeing any grounds for calling what Douglas wrote “blank-slatey”.
Third question: is Douglas_Reay complaining, explicitly or implicitly, about “discrimination” and using it as an explanation for gender imbalances in LW meetups? Well, explicitly at least, Douglas seems to have gone out of his way to avoid making what he said anything of the sort. (Third paragraph, which I’ll summarize as “This isn’t only about men being creepy at women; let’s focus on the behaviour and not on what group is doing it to what other group”.) He assumes—so it looks to me, at least—that his audience wants to avoid “creepiness”, which seems like the reverse of what you’d assume if you were taking the issue to be one of discrimination. I’m fairly sure (from, e.g., the positive-sounding mention of “rape culture”) that Douglas does, in fact, consider that discrimination against women is a real thing—and if there’s supposed to be something wrong with that opinion, I’d be interested to know what—but that is not at all the same as saying that such discrimination is the cause of gender imbalance in the LW community.
Overall question: Which explanation of Douglas_Reay’s words is more credible? On what appears to be Filipe’s (and your?) theory, his purpose in writing what he did was to push a “blank-slatey” explanation of gender imbalances in LW meetings, in which case presumably the stuff about how to avoid “creepiness”—ostensibly the entire point of the post—was just some sort of distraction. On the other theory I propose, his purpose was to influence behaviour, and the possibility of a link to gender imbalances was just a way of introducing the topic. I am at a loss to see why, if his purpose was as Filipe proposes, he would have written anything like what he did. On the other hand, conditional on the other theory I proposed, that problem goes away and what replaces it (“then why did he even mention gender ratio?”) seems far less puzzling: he mentioned gender ratio because he expects some readers to want a less skewed gender ratio at meetups and to find it plausible that avoiding “creepiness” might help with that.
[EDITED to fix a typographical screwup related to LW’s handling of underscores. No substantive changes.]
Glad to be of service. I confess to being rather bemused at some of what’s going on in this thread. (Perhaps that’s because, as Eugene Nier suggests, I’ve got it all wrong, but if so it’s odd that no one seems willing to refute me rather than insulting me.)
If anyone has a less depressing explanation of what’s going on here, then I would be very glad to hear it.
No, I think you pretty much nailed it. It’s been going on from Day 1, it was endemic in LWs founder population, it’s very common within the cultural core demographics that LW attracts, and even folks here who are aware of it and find it a little unseemly often underestimate the extent and significance of the issue.
Well, honestly. Douglas_Reay posts something saying “if people attending LW meetings are creepy then that might be bad for the community’s gender balance”, and Filipe responds by suggesting that it’s “just one of those blank-slatey attempts to explain the gender ratio in High-IQ communities due to some sort of discrimination, without any evidence”.
It is absolutely beyond my understanding why Filipe’s comment has been voted up to +13 since what Douglas wrote was not an “attempt to explain” anything and he didn’t assert that anyone was discriminating against anyone. Filipe’s comment is based on two gross misrepresentations of what Douglas wrote, and on the basis of those gross misrepresentations he’s made an entirely unreasonable accusation, and apparently the consensus of the Less Wrong community is that this deserves to be at +13.
In what possible world is Filipe’s grotesque misrepresentation reasonable (and indeed worthy of all those upvotes) and gently pointing out its errors unreasonable (and deserving of drive-by downvotes)?
Note: “absolutely beyond my understanding” is not strictly correct. I have an obvious candidate explanation, but not one that speaks well of the portion of the LW community that’s active here: reflex-action anti-anti-sexism from people who have taken to upvoting everything they see that oh-so-daringly says that men are more often very intelligent than women. Comments saying that white people are more intelligent than black people also consistently attract high scores too. It seems to me that, seeing how common and how consistently upvoted these comments are, they shouldn’t any longer be considered either unusually insightful or courageous, any more than other comments that could get you in trouble elsewhere but would be widely agreed with here like “I think there is no God” or “a lot of what people say and do is best understood in terms of signalling rather than in terms of its explicit propositional content”. But evidently rather a lot of people disagree.
If anyone has a less depressing explanation of what’s going on here, then I would be very glad to hear it.
[EDITED to fix a misspelling—I keep writing “Felipe” instead of “Filipe”; no other changes.]
I think a few mutually-reinforcing things are going on, and the narcissistic pattern you describe is a big one. Another is feeling socially unsafe, in a way that’s hard for me to summarize, but easier to describe some features of:
Talk of how women are underrepresented at LW meetups (or whatever) pattern-matches to a moral demand that there be more women at LW meetups, otherwise LWers are bad sexist people. As is often the case with perceived moral demands, this feels threatening and defending oneself by attacking premises and identifying the demander as the Enemy is a really tempting response.
The perceived moral demand is seen as vague, which makes it feel more threatening — it feels like one can never know whether or not they’re subject to criticism.
The OP’s first link, for instance, says “no one’s required to inform you that you’re creeping” and “Not a complete instruction set on how not to be a creeper.” Even if these are true, saying them in that piece’s aggressive tone without indicating that doing something simple gets you a lot of the way (‘you don’t get cookies for being a decent person’) causes me, at least, to feel gut-level fear of doing Something Wrong without knowing it and being blamed. (This fear is easy for me now to ignore, not as easy for everyone.)
I think people often feel like “sexist” is only ever a term of extreme opprobrium, don’t distinguish/feel that other people distinguish between “behaving in a sexist way” and “being sexist”, and don’t feel like it’s possible/other people see it as possible for behaving in a sexist way to be slightly and forgivably bad, so they must defend themselves from arguments that might imply that they’re sexist. (This seems easier to illustrate for “racist”; the prototype racist in most(?) people’s minds is a Nazi or something equally awful, which makes the claim that it’s “racist” to, e.g., be more afraid of a black person on the street at night less thinkable.)
It is not obviously false that there are biological reasons that women would be less likely to be interested in LW absent any discrimination.
This possibility is a good way to claim that one isn’t or might not be subject to perceived moral demands, which makes endorsing it more attractive.
If this is true and the people making the perceived moral demand wouldn’t believe it if it were true (which it’s perceived that they certainly wouldn’t), then the demand will continue to be there forever even if all actual discrimination is addressed. This feels more threatening.
A common response (it feels to me like the most common by far on the Internet as a whole; this isn’t necessarily true but the feeling is a relevant data point) to this idea, by the people perceived as making the moral demand, is that it is obviously false and considering the hypothesis makes you a bad sexist person. Independent of anything else, for X to say this about a hypothesis Y thinks might be true is likely to make Y feel threatened and (if Y identifies as a truth-seeker) offended. This leads to polarization and increases Y’s identification with the hypothesis.
This point about ‘privilege’ language.
Even if none of this sort of crap is present in a particular discussion, if someone has seen it before, they’re likely to pattern-match to it and become more defensive.
All of this is true or not independently of how justified the feeling of unsafety is. Any actual risk is almost always small and the mature thing to do is to feel its smallness, but rolling a saving throw for Not Trying to Please Everyone Unless They’re Tagged as an Enemy — at least, that’s what not being triggered by this feels like to me — is really hard for some people.
This made me feel condescended to. Compare “being creeped on in this and that particular setting carries only very small objective risks, and the mature thing to do is feel this, but not trying to please everyone (or whatever is the analogous irrational decision policy here) is really hard for some people”.
I do! Filipe wrote:
I would genuinely like to know the answer to that question, so I upvoted it.
OK, I agree that that’s a good reason. (Though I personally wouldn’t upvote a question on those grounds if it were already at a large positive score; in so far as others have the same quirks as I do, your explanation can only be part of the story.)
Personally, I upvoted Filipe’s comment for the reason Emile gave here, I agree with Manfred’s comment here, and while the second part of Filipe’s comment could be taken as overly politicizing, I feel that your comments have acted to degenerate the situation further. For reasons Nick Tarleton has outlined in this comment, “blank-statey attempts to explain the gender ratio in High-IQ communities due to some form of discrimination, without any evidence” are something that some people in this community have become rather sensitive to.
If you had responded by saying, for example, “I don’t think that this article is arguing that the gender disparity in this community rests primarily on behavioral issues of the members, but considering the self-confessed social fluency issues many of our members have, I think it’s likely there are people here who would benefit from it,” I think you could have de-escalated hostility in the discussion. The reply you gave to Manfred, though, appears far more hostile to me than Filipe’s original comment, and it looks to me like you’re doing more to blow out of proportion a possible cause for offense.
I upvoted Filipe’s comment because it asked a question the answer to which I was also interested in, and I have downvoted a number of yours because I feel that you have done an inappropriately poor job assuming good faith.
Douglas_Reay didn’t provide any evidence for his theory. Not even what one would expect to be the minimal standard, i.e., an assertion that creepy behaviors do in fact take place at LW meetups.
Filipe was pointing this out and presented the obvious candidate explanation for Douglas_Reay’s action, i.e., the one that makes his actions look bad. How is this any different from what you just did in your comment?
What theory? The one Filipe just made up out of thin air, where Imaginary Douglas Reay proposed discrimination as a blank-slate explanation for “the gender ratio in High-IQ communities”? Or some actual theory that he actually claimed was likely to be true?
(It looks to me as if the only theory anywhere in this region of ideaspace that he endorsed was this one: “If people act creepily towards others and nothing is done about it, that might contribute to gender imbalance in offline LW communities.” This doesn’t look to me like the sort of claim for which I’d expect evidence to be provided before anyone’s even challenged it, still less the sort for which if someone makes it without such accompanying evidence I’d go looking for nefarious explanations. Of course your opinion may diverge from mine; if so, and if you can say anything about why, I’d be interested.)
Either I’m seriously misunderstanding you, or you have what seems to me a seriously broken heuristic for how to generate candidate explanations for people’s actions. It seems like you’re saying that when you’re trying to understand why someone did something, “the obvious candidate explanation” is “the one that makes his actions look bad”. Why?
It looks to me as if you just pointed out one similarity between what I said and what Filipe said, namely that we both speculated that someone might be doing something for not-very-impressive reasons. I agree: we both did that. Aside from that, I see many differences and no other similarities. I can try to list some differences, but there are so many that I think it would be helpful if you’d first explain what inferences you want drawn from the alleged similarity.
The theory that creepy behavior is happening at LW meetups and that it’s responsible for the skewed gender ratios.
I could ask you the same question about the heuristic generating your explanation.
They’re similar in that they both share the property you just criticized above.
So, in fact, a theory composed of two parts, neither of which Douglas_Reay either stated nor implied. Why, then, call it “his theory” and object to his not having provided evidence for it?
I suppose you could, but since you don’t know what that heuristic is I’m not sure what the point would be. (But you seem to be claiming—I am completely unable to think of a good reason why—that my heuristic was something like “pick something nasty if possible”. If that really is what you’re saying, then once again I would love to know why.)
What property, exactly?
I’m curious about where you’re heading with this, anyway. I mean, let’s suppose you convince me that what I’m doing in this discussion is exactly the same as what Filipe was doing. What then? Perhaps you think I would say: “Oh, OK, so Filipe was right after all”. No, I would say “Oh, damn, I’ve been being completely unreasonable”. Or perhaps you think I would say “Oh, OK, that answers my question about upvotes and downvotes”. No, because the thing that puzzled me there was that Filipe’s comment was at +13, which is a really unusually high score; “gjm and Filipe were being unreasonable in the same way” is no sort of explanation of that.
Your interpretation of seems to be different from that of most of the other people here. You might want to consider the possibility that the problem is on your end.
Sorry, what I meant was the heuristic is pick what appears to be the obvious explanation, which in a case like this is likely to turn out to be nasty.
[Attention conservation notice: This is long.]
For sure, it might be. If you think it is, you might want to consider the possibility of convincing me, rather than pointing out the (obvious) fact that I might be wrong.
See, it doesn’t look to me even slightly like “the obvious explanation” and I don’t see how to make it look like t.o.e. without the kind of bizarre misreading that I think Filipe engaged in. Of course (see above) I could be wrong. I’ll explain—and this is why this is going to be so long—why the “Filipe-Nier explanation” seems so strange to me. Perhaps you can show me where I’m going terribly amiss.
So you claim, IIUC, that the obvious explanation for Douglas_Reay’s writing what he did was that he wanted to offer “one of those blank-slatey attempts to explain the gender ratio in High-IQ communities due to some form of discrimination”. That is, that (1) what he was primarily doing was explaining, (2) that the explanation he offered was “blank-slatey”, and (3) that he was presenting it as “some form of discrimination”.
How plausible is this analysis of Douglas_Reay’s purposes, and how do other explanations of his posting what he did stack up? I’ll consider only one other explanation (not because I think it’s the only possible one but because this is going to be too long in any case): that he posted what he did because he thinks it’s possible that some people at some LW meetups may act creepily, thus putting off some other people we’d rather not put off, and he wants to do what he can to make this less likely to happen. According to this explanation, (1) what he was primarily doing was attempting to shape the culture of LW meetups a bit, (2) there’s nothing particularly “blank-slatey” about it, and (3) if discrimination is involved then it’s tangential to what Douglas_Reay was saying.
First question, then: Was he primarily offering an explanation, or attempting to influence behaviour so as to reduce “creepiness”? I think the latter is much more plausible, for the following reasons. (a) Everything DR explicitly said points that way. The title: “How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy”. What he actually said about his purposes: “not just so the people potentially causing problems get to read them, but also so everyone else knows the resource is here”, etc. The only connection DR draws between “creepiness” and gender ratio is what I’ve quoted before: ”… addressing one social skills issue that might be affecting this …”. As distinct from, say, “the issue that is probably causing this”. (b) DR’s posting history, which has lots about how to run LW meetups and very little about, e.g., the causes of gender imbalance in “High-IQ communities”. (c) DR’s other comments in this discussion, which again seem to indicate that his goal is to make LW meetups less likely to put people off. (d) Posting what DR actually did—full of things that have nothing to do with “explaining the gender ratio”—seems like a really weird way to attempt to influence opinions on that explanatory question, but entirely comprehensible as an attempt to influence behaviour (“creepiness” and reactions thereto).
Second question: Is he pushing some sort of “blank-slatey” agenda? [[Semi-digression: I confess that I’m not certain what Filipe meant by this, but among the ideas Pinker’s famous book criticizes under that heading two seem potentially relevant: (a) that differences between people and groups are purely environmental in origin and not fixed at birth by, e.g., genetics; (b) that human behaviour is infinitely malleable. Of these, (b) would be relevant if we were talking about DR’s attempts to influence behaviour (e.g., someone might argue that it’s futile to try to stop people being “creepy”) but that’s explicitly what Filipe (and, I take it, you) think was “obviously” not his real purpose, so it’d better be (a). In combination with Filipe’s choice of terminology—“High-IQ communities”—I therefore take it his point was something like this: “Communities that draw their membership from the upper tails of the intelligence distribution are inevitably going to be male-dominated because most exceptionally intelligent people are male; this looks like just one more attempt to deny that fact in the service of the false idea that there are no innate differences between the sexes.”.]] I’ve looked very carefully at everything Douglas_Reay wrote there, and I can find (a) nothing even slightly resembling a statement that there are no innate differences between men and women, (b) nothing that assumes that there are no such differences, and (c) nothing that makes more sense if we assume there are no such differences. So the only evidence for a “blank-slatey” agenda is, it seems to me, the alleged fact that Douglas_Reay posted an “explanation” for gender imbalance that isn’t “there are fewer women because most of the very cleverest people are men”. Except that—see above—he didn’t in fact do any such thing, and the absolute most he said was that “creepiness” might have something to do with it, which of course is perfectly consistent with any number of other contributing factors. All in all, I’m really not seeing any grounds for calling what Douglas wrote “blank-slatey”.
Third question: is Douglas_Reay complaining, explicitly or implicitly, about “discrimination” and using it as an explanation for gender imbalances in LW meetups? Well, explicitly at least, Douglas seems to have gone out of his way to avoid making what he said anything of the sort. (Third paragraph, which I’ll summarize as “This isn’t only about men being creepy at women; let’s focus on the behaviour and not on what group is doing it to what other group”.) He assumes—so it looks to me, at least—that his audience wants to avoid “creepiness”, which seems like the reverse of what you’d assume if you were taking the issue to be one of discrimination. I’m fairly sure (from, e.g., the positive-sounding mention of “rape culture”) that Douglas does, in fact, consider that discrimination against women is a real thing—and if there’s supposed to be something wrong with that opinion, I’d be interested to know what—but that is not at all the same as saying that such discrimination is the cause of gender imbalance in the LW community.
Overall question: Which explanation of Douglas_Reay’s words is more credible? On what appears to be Filipe’s (and your?) theory, his purpose in writing what he did was to push a “blank-slatey” explanation of gender imbalances in LW meetings, in which case presumably the stuff about how to avoid “creepiness”—ostensibly the entire point of the post—was just some sort of distraction. On the other theory I propose, his purpose was to influence behaviour, and the possibility of a link to gender imbalances was just a way of introducing the topic. I am at a loss to see why, if his purpose was as Filipe proposes, he would have written anything like what he did. On the other hand, conditional on the other theory I proposed, that problem goes away and what replaces it (“then why did he even mention gender ratio?”) seems far less puzzling: he mentioned gender ratio because he expects some readers to want a less skewed gender ratio at meetups and to find it plausible that avoiding “creepiness” might help with that.
[EDITED to fix a typographical screwup related to LW’s handling of underscores. No substantive changes.]
Thank you, gjm. I’m pretty awed by how well you explained that. Hats off to you.
Glad to be of service. I confess to being rather bemused at some of what’s going on in this thread. (Perhaps that’s because, as Eugene Nier suggests, I’ve got it all wrong, but if so it’s odd that no one seems willing to refute me rather than insulting me.)
No, I think you pretty much nailed it. It’s been going on from Day 1, it was endemic in LWs founder population, it’s very common within the cultural core demographics that LW attracts, and even folks here who are aware of it and find it a little unseemly often underestimate the extent and significance of the issue.