That is an interesting number to have in mind when posting. It would also be a hint to how balanced or not the positions we take here are and if not balanced at all how severe the sex related bias is in all things posted.

If you wish to make this a thread for discussion instead of a simple poll lets try to imagine in what ways a forum devoted to Math Science and Philosophy that is dominated by one sex (female or male) can have a bias in opinions or interests. Do we need to auto calibrate what we read due to the existence of a natural bias? Hopefully when it comes to science and math and analytical philosophy probably sex shouldn't matter in terms of objective results and data but it may still matter in style or topics preferred . Is there some more pronounced bias in issues related to philosophy though?

Yeah. Men are better thinkers!

There's my provocation post of the month.

I would guess that the most likely form of bias is in the favored tone of posts. I do think that there is a style of argumentation that is more favored by males than females, although female nerds might be more inclined to argue like stereotypical dudes.

This place is a mast fest.

anyone want to start sidebetting over/under on how many guys vote before 1 girl does? i think 25-30 would be a solid line

Should be an option for transgendered folk imo

Well it already looks pretty ugly so given that i placed male after female on purpose that very first one may easily be a mistake click with some probability close to the real ratio. That is indeed depressing. There is nothing sexier than a brilliant intelligent self confident and yet still physically attractive ,without necessarily being a supermodel type, woman.

Keep in mind that any bias may also be not be a result of attention interest but also of how intelligent educated and curious women spend their time (ie frequency of being here ) and how this correlates also with the fact it has started with an interest in poker to begin with. But it does look nasty doesnt it?

Well thats why i had a 3rd option. Maybe someone doesnt want to disclose which is kind of strange since its private anyway but possible. Maybe someone has changed but doesnt want to define it , maybe someone hasnt changed but wished they could . Maybe someone is a true hermaphrodite and doesnt wish to define in binary sense. But in my opinion almost all people regardless (even those that made a change) would have already settled to define themselves as one of the two by some age typical of people posting here so this is why i was secure there was no need for such option.

How is this depressing? If this was a pick up bar, yes, it would be bad.

Personal preference.

The women I know who are decent in poker (live games) would not be interested in smp. They are, as a general rule, too busy to play here.

I asked this question a few years ago and there was one female respondent but it turned out she didn't really post here.

Maybe smart inquiring women are more hard working than us and do not have as much "free" time as we do that we tend to follow the model of ancient Athens in exchanging ideas, information , opinions and debating as part of enjoying life in relative serenity even if briefly lol. Maybe they are all taken and married with children and busy multitasking to death or heavily involved in advancing their careers in a man dominated world? Bottom line this is of course not a pick up bar but its a pick your brain forum often. I would prefer if the bias in active members was not severe towards the male population as a matter of balance in style but it was a suspected detail. Thats all.


A funny note is also that out of 160 distinct member views there are only 32 votes in a totally trivial question , only 20%. That is also telling something.

Wait, did you have the crazy idea of finding a date on SMP? lol

This just in - male-dominated discipline subforum of male-dominated game forum has few females.

The "views" column on the home page does not reflect number of viewers, but the number of times the thread has been opened (with some server lag). So that ratio tells you something, but not what you might think.

I dont know about that. Maybe if the lag time is significant like many minutes to 15-30 i could be wrong in how i interpret it. But if its smaller than that in the seconds or only a few minutes, i can deduce from experiments and prior experience when creating threads in less frequent forums and at late night hours (for most of say North-South America and then also some early am Europe) that multiple visits to the same thread by same person do not register as extra views which might imply that either lag time is very big or it only registers once for each ip or member identity.

I mean maybe for the first few hours of a thread my interpretation is somewhat valid . Maybe it starts double counting only after several hours the additional visits. If we knew the total members of the site we could get an idea what is going on by looking very active threads. I guess taking nerdiness to a new level one could perform some analysis of views vs number of days or hours since creation of active threads, vs posts etc and get some idea , instead of actually asking a programmer lol.

Robots

masque, you can go ahead and not know about that and speculate about experimental methods, or you can ask those who run the forum. Except you may not want to bother with that because I already did a while ago. (Can't find the link atm.) Views = views, not viewers.

Want an obvious example? Here:



I promise you that almost anyone who gives a damn about that thread has posted in it at some point. Moreover, even if you don't accept that, I hope you'll agree that the number of people who have viewed it is not somewhere north of 900,000, but instead a lot closer to the number of total posters (which is 334).

Could your take it on be near to valid for a short time? Maybe, but given that we know it's completely wrong over the long haul, the simplest explanation is to trust that the forum owners know the answer and told the truth in giving an explanation that actually does explain things like the image I just posted.

Why is views so much higher than posts? I know that many people, myself included, open any thread that has new posts if it's in a forum they frequent. It strikes me that that's a much simpler explanation than trying to shoehorn a uniqueness criterion into the data.

Yeah, I'm betting most everyone who opened the thread has voted. Seems like a fine ratio to me, but then, I'm a raging misogynist.

There is a biological reason why men would tend to be more interested with technical and abstract things and women would tend to be more interested with social and tangible things. Internet in general tends to represent more the technical and abstract than the social and tangible, but this forum represents downright a degree of interest bordering on obsession in various completely technical abstract things. A weak female presence is predictable.

It is inevitable, that people tend to get better at things they are interested in. Therefore, it is inevitable that men actually tend to be better in technical and abstract things.

It is not "unfair" to say this in the slightest. I do not have the equipment to grow a zygote into a baby, nor the equipment to feed it for the next few years after. I do not have half the world's population's willingness to do me considerable favours in exchange for hardly demanding participation in a simple act of physical intimacy. Many highly profitable social tasks that are completely effortless for women are absolutely excruciating to me.

Now just let me have this one thing. I am better at rational analysis. I have only spent ten times more energy in perfecting it my whole life, you really think it would be fair if we were equally good at it?

Of course, I only feel safe expressing this particular technical and abstract thought here because it is a forum meant for the technical and abstract. I am good enough at rational analysis, to realise that it would be unprofitable for me to express this in a social and tangible setting.

holy **** its a dick fest

This poll is shaped like a dick.

I think you mean minimal (implies number), not weak. This is not nitpicking; it has implications to your main point(s) which you can easily figure out for yourself. This is aside from the always annoying fact that language is everything. Or so I’ve been informed by various posters and other sundry experts on these matters.

-Zeno

I know men love to say that we have biological advantage when it come to abstract thinking, but is there really any reason to believe so? Women do pretty much as well as men in all IQ tests and young girls are starting to beat boys in pretty much everything in schools and colleges. Men seem to have more outliers in math and science, but I am not so sure that there is any reason to belive that it has any biological basis either and wont reverse in the future.

Men have more outliers across the board, verbal, IQ, you name it.

Occasionally, entertainment takes priority over informativity even on this dry, humourless forum.

I do not mean that men have an advantage in abstract thinking in the same way as they have in say muscle mass, where even a lazy slob who never uses his muscles can easily have more muscle mass and be stronger than many women who do a lot of excercise.

I mean that men have an advantage in abstract thinking in their willingness to excercise, and in that alone. They don't have more "raw strength" in terms of abstract thinking (I mean not that I know of, they could have slightly more, slightly less, or the exact same amount for all I know), but they have more interest in using what they have for the purpose of abstract thinking.

Same way as I say men are better in abstract thinking, I will also say that women are better at uh, in lack of a better expression, "social thinking". And again not because they have more "raw strength", but more willingness to excercise it for social purposes.

People tend to get better at things they do a lot. I think we can all agree men spend more time thinking about technical abstract stuff, and women spend more time socialising. It would not make sense if as a result men did not get better at technical abstract stuff and women did not get better at social stuff.

Is there any reason to believe that it does not have a biological basis? To believe that it has a biological basis sees more like the null hypothesis here IMO. I don't see any pressure in the society which would prevent women going into maths or physics or whatever science. I don't see any pressure in the society which would prevent women playing computer games. I don't see any pressure in the society which would prevent women from visiting this forum. Yet, they just won't do these things nearly as much as men. If anything, I would say there is social pressure to eliminate these differences. Yet, that doesn't seem to be helping.

The biological reason is also not difficult to see. Ugh, it's really hard to put it into words but it really does make a lot of sense to me why men would be more likely to be interested in "dead" abstract tasks and women at social tasks. I mean I assume you understand what I mean, right?

I don't know about IQ tests, but education results have little to do with your ability of abstract thinking, and more to do with being obedient and going through the hoops. Guess who has the advantage there. For some anecdotal evidence, we had a test in "technical thinking" or something in high school in a class of half boys half girls, and the best girl was like 7th. Despite all the boys being more cocky and lazy as usual.

If girls will actually start to beat boys in almost anything, I will just say they have more "raw power", but still less interest in using it for abstract technical purposes

As far as outliers go, I think men have more outliers because they have a higher tendency to get obsessed with "dead" abstract tasks. Obsession is what you need to be an outlier.