As a rationalist who happens to be female, here is my take on this:
1) On an ideal amount of agreement vs disagreement : while it may be true that female dominated segments of the internet have much more agreement in their comments than male dominated ones, these same segments are significantly less rational, on average, and to a degree so are the topics they revolve around.
Rationalists tend not to bother with stating the obvious, and there isn’t much “nice post” type commentary around here, so even if the amount of agreeing were higher on this community, it would not be obvious. This “invisible agreement” issue has been discussed before isn’t really all that tied to gender as far as I can tell.
2) Can’t comment on this because obviously, LW and OB do not contain significant turn offs for me.
3) If a recruit is attracted because the poster shares their sex organs, they aren’t a very promising recruit.
How about an experiment where a male writer posts under a more feminine name?
As for recruiting Japanese rationalists, good luck doing that in English. Maybe some of your key posts ought to be translated instead. Hire a professional.
4) Agreed.
5) Sad, but probably correct. (Though I can only say this by observation and not by biological study.)
6) Not all that different from 4), and again all I can do is agree.
7) Your armchair evopsych again… Have you read Cochran and Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion? It might significantly improve the quality of these thoughts.
8) Like 5), sad but probably true.
9) Seems very plausible to me. Female readers have probably experienced the GIRL reaction quite often.
Conclusion : There will, in all likelyhood, always be a higher proportion of males to females in rationalist communities. However, putting more rationality into the world at large is a good in itself regardless.
I would vastly prefer to see the recruitment efforts continue to deal with people as individuals. Focusing on recruiting women is not likely to work very well, and is quite likely to cause backlash, especially if done badly. The rationaly inclined women, if anything like me, will not react positively to attempts to feminize the community.
I have my own issues with armchair evolutionary psychology, and to a much lesser degree, with Eliezer’s armchair evolutionary psychology, but he said nothing very rationally questionable here IMHO, and certainly nothing that “The 10,000 Year Explosion” (well written but not very persuasive on most of the claims that I didn’t already agree with and occasionally flat-out poorly reasoned) would call into question.
Female readers have probably experienced the GIRL reaction quite often.
Yup. In fact I recall, in the early days of the internet, pretending to be male most of the time. I found it annoying to be continually hassled by a mob of lecherous boys when I just wanted to kick back and blow of steam bogging about on the local MUD or with a few rounds of networked doom.
These days, of course, it’s different. For one thing—even here there is a considerably higher proportion of women that are actually likely to be women IRL. :)
As a rationalist who happens to be female, here is my take on this:
1) On an ideal amount of agreement vs disagreement : while it may be true that female dominated segments of the internet have much more agreement in their comments than male dominated ones, these same segments are significantly less rational, on average, and to a degree so are the topics they revolve around.
Rationalists tend not to bother with stating the obvious, and there isn’t much “nice post” type commentary around here, so even if the amount of agreeing were higher on this community, it would not be obvious. This “invisible agreement” issue has been discussed before isn’t really all that tied to gender as far as I can tell.
2) Can’t comment on this because obviously, LW and OB do not contain significant turn offs for me.
3) If a recruit is attracted because the poster shares their sex organs, they aren’t a very promising recruit.
How about an experiment where a male writer posts under a more feminine name?
As for recruiting Japanese rationalists, good luck doing that in English. Maybe some of your key posts ought to be translated instead. Hire a professional.
4) Agreed.
5) Sad, but probably correct. (Though I can only say this by observation and not by biological study.)
6) Not all that different from 4), and again all I can do is agree.
7) Your armchair evopsych again… Have you read Cochran and Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion? It might significantly improve the quality of these thoughts.
8) Like 5), sad but probably true.
9) Seems very plausible to me. Female readers have probably experienced the GIRL reaction quite often.
Conclusion : There will, in all likelyhood, always be a higher proportion of males to females in rationalist communities. However, putting more rationality into the world at large is a good in itself regardless. I would vastly prefer to see the recruitment efforts continue to deal with people as individuals. Focusing on recruiting women is not likely to work very well, and is quite likely to cause backlash, especially if done badly. The rationaly inclined women, if anything like me, will not react positively to attempts to feminize the community.
Just treat people as people.
I have my own issues with armchair evolutionary psychology, and to a much lesser degree, with Eliezer’s armchair evolutionary psychology, but he said nothing very rationally questionable here IMHO, and certainly nothing that “The 10,000 Year Explosion” (well written but not very persuasive on most of the claims that I didn’t already agree with and occasionally flat-out poorly reasoned) would call into question.
Yup. In fact I recall, in the early days of the internet, pretending to be male most of the time. I found it annoying to be continually hassled by a mob of lecherous boys when I just wanted to kick back and blow of steam bogging about on the local MUD or with a few rounds of networked doom.
These days, of course, it’s different. For one thing—even here there is a considerably higher proportion of women that are actually likely to be women IRL. :)