While I think these behaviours are antisocial, it seems preemptive to label them as sexist without looking at whether they’re unique to women. As a man, I’ve had many men and some (though a smaller proportion of) women talk over me or dismiss my ideas. I consider it jerkish behaviour—and quite possibly more common among EAs than the population at large—and I try to discourage it when I see it done to others (I usually don’t it mind too much in a 1-on-1) but it doesn’t seem obviously mysogynistic.
(Borderline aggressive physical closeness sounds more likely to be gender specific)
I’m not super familiar with the idea, but I think the idea here is that many people (unconsciously or otherwise) think that women are easier to interrupt, dismiss, or talk over. It’s the bias that’s sexist, not the act itself.
You could make that claim, but then it should be evidenced. Personally I have noticed my tendency (which I try to suppress!) is more readily to interrupt/dismiss people who are shorter than me, which seems to accord with the data.
I think the evidence is there to the same extent as your height evidence:
We find a number of significant differences, including the fact that women are more often interrupted overall and that men interrupt more often women than other men, in particular using speech overlap to grab the floor (Eecke & Fernández, 2016 “On the Influence of Gender on Interruptions in Multiparty Dialogue”)
It also matches my personal experience.
I think there’s a natural reason to feel defensive when faced with this since it carries the label “sexist” which kinda takes a wide range of badness of behavior under one label, but I think this is frequently an unconscious bias people have so I don’t mean it to suggest you or others are bad people, but just that we can do better.
That evidence wouldn’t explain why (or show that) EAs would be more sexist. The behaviour James Ozden describes sounds consistent with, for example, EA containing a higher proportion of aspy types who, generally lacking some awareness of social norms, are more inclined to talk over everyone.
You seem to be really hung up on the term “sexist” and I think I get that. I think it’s very clear there is unintentional and unconscious sexism in the EA movement, like there is everywhere else. I’m not calling anyone bad. But I am going to throw a “Isolated Demand For Rigor, Five Yard Penalty” at your argument here.
Of course there’s sexism (unconscious and otherwise) in the EA movement.
But with the very strong caveat that I believe citing logical fallacies can lead to nothing more productive than arguments over whether the fallacy was correctly cited, I submit that this whole thread is a discussion about whether sexism is more than averagely prevalent in EA (for healthy reference classes), and, therefore whether EAs should put more resources into the problem.
In that context, I would argue the latter is the isolated demand for rigour, for which I’m making an in-context demand for justification.
[ETA: for the record I weakly agree that we should put more resources into the problem. I just don’t want us to sabotage our epistemics while making that determination]
I’m sorry I’m very confused what we are supposed to be discussing. I thought earlier you were arguing that there’s no sexism in EA because people who are interrupting women could just be interrupting people with lower height or just interrupting everyone equally. I was arguing against that.
I’m personally not saying “EA is more sexist than relevant reference classes”. I don’t think I believe that, or it would depend a lot on the reference class… and there appears to be notable within-EA variation.
I probably am saying “we should put more resources into figuring out sexism in EA”, but that’s not what I thought we were talking about, and of course I’d want to think a lot more about what that’s supposed to look like, what “more” means, what “resources” means, what “figuring out sexism” means, etc.
I certainly didn’t mean to claim that. I’ve known of multiple examples of sexism in EA. I think the comment to which I originally replied might not have been another such example, and wanted to guard against assuming it was.
While I think these behaviours are antisocial, it seems preemptive to label them as sexist without looking at whether they’re unique to women. As a man, I’ve had many men and some (though a smaller proportion of) women talk over me or dismiss my ideas. I consider it jerkish behaviour—and quite possibly more common among EAs than the population at large—and I try to discourage it when I see it done to others (I usually don’t it mind too much in a 1-on-1) but it doesn’t seem obviously mysogynistic.
(Borderline aggressive physical closeness sounds more likely to be gender specific)
I’m not super familiar with the idea, but I think the idea here is that many people (unconsciously or otherwise) think that women are easier to interrupt, dismiss, or talk over. It’s the bias that’s sexist, not the act itself.
You could make that claim, but then it should be evidenced. Personally I have noticed my tendency (which I try to suppress!) is more readily to interrupt/dismiss people who are shorter than me, which seems to accord with the data.
I think the evidence is there to the same extent as your height evidence:
It also matches my personal experience.
I think there’s a natural reason to feel defensive when faced with this since it carries the label “sexist” which kinda takes a wide range of badness of behavior under one label, but I think this is frequently an unconscious bias people have so I don’t mean it to suggest you or others are bad people, but just that we can do better.
That evidence wouldn’t explain why (or show that) EAs would be more sexist. The behaviour James Ozden describes sounds consistent with, for example, EA containing a higher proportion of aspy types who, generally lacking some awareness of social norms, are more inclined to talk over everyone.
You seem to be really hung up on the term “sexist” and I think I get that. I think it’s very clear there is unintentional and unconscious sexism in the EA movement, like there is everywhere else. I’m not calling anyone bad. But I am going to throw a “Isolated Demand For Rigor, Five Yard Penalty” at your argument here.
Of course there’s sexism (unconscious and otherwise) in the EA movement.
But with the very strong caveat that I believe citing logical fallacies can lead to nothing more productive than arguments over whether the fallacy was correctly cited, I submit that this whole thread is a discussion about whether sexism is more than averagely prevalent in EA (for healthy reference classes), and, therefore whether EAs should put more resources into the problem.
In that context, I would argue the latter is the isolated demand for rigour, for which I’m making an in-context demand for justification.
[ETA: for the record I weakly agree that we should put more resources into the problem. I just don’t want us to sabotage our epistemics while making that determination]
I’m sorry I’m very confused what we are supposed to be discussing. I thought earlier you were arguing that there’s no sexism in EA because people who are interrupting women could just be interrupting people with lower height or just interrupting everyone equally. I was arguing against that.
I’m personally not saying “EA is more sexist than relevant reference classes”. I don’t think I believe that, or it would depend a lot on the reference class… and there appears to be notable within-EA variation.
I probably am saying “we should put more resources into figuring out sexism in EA”, but that’s not what I thought we were talking about, and of course I’d want to think a lot more about what that’s supposed to look like, what “more” means, what “resources” means, what “figuring out sexism” means, etc.
I certainly didn’t mean to claim that. I’ve known of multiple examples of sexism in EA. I think the comment to which I originally replied might not have been another such example, and wanted to guard against assuming it was.
Lol, and now I’m wondering how much I do of that as someone over six foot/ 185cm