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Wag
 
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you've mixed silly examples up with plausible ones, I'm not alexander, this knot is beyond my time and patience and skillz. But I will say that I think you can sometimes, not all of the time be aware of why and how you do what you do, right down to which string is working which finger. Which synapse is a wee bit beyond most people I'll grant.
It's all got very philosophical about the nature of consciousness, a subject on which I had read just enough books to have achieved the level of complete ignoramus. I was trying to use very simple "silly" examples to ground the concepts in things that were very easy to relate to. Maybe it didn't work. However I did promise I wouldn't try again, so I won't.
Urgh this is conflating self knowledge and statistics its too messy for mi poor ape brain to fathom.
The point is that you only realise that men fancy women when you have more than one of them to look at. When looked at individual it's impossible to tell what is going on or why.
So if you can't feel things on a cellular level then you don't know yourself? am I being thick or are you being very very extreme?
If you accept that what goes on a cellular level affects every thought that goes through your brain then it seems rather important to me that we can't figure out (purely from self-inspection) why we think the things we think. On the subject of consciousness, experience and motivation, the great physicist Feynman had this to say.
"I wonder why, I wonder why,
I wonder why I wonder;
I wonder why, I wonder why,
I wonder why I wonder."
I maintain that we don't know why we think or feel the things we do. We're not conscious of the causes of our thoughts and we're incapable of being outside of our consciousness.
And that is absolutely critical to this issue, because if women (or men) are saying "I like X but it's not because I am a woman (man)" then my first thought is "How the hell can you know that?" How can you know that isn't because you are a man or a woman? Have you tried being born the other gender for a while? Was it different? The same?
*sigh* You made me try and explain it again. I'm going to sulk now...
Maybe by not going 'look!women! what do they want here?' and you know just getting on with it and waiting to see if someone gets in touch and says they are being sexually/racially whatever harrassed/ put off/encouraged etc.
Unfortunately I'm afraid my experience of trying to encourage women to be more forthcoming about sexual harassment is that it is like trying to wring blood from a stone. So the idea of just sitting back and waiting for it to happen rather than proactively seeking women out and trying to encourage them to make complaints does not seem well conceived to me. Maybe it's patronizing but in my defence I don't think it's a gender issue. If I heard of any men who felt they had been sexually harrassed at Maelstrom I would encourage them to speak to me about it also.
You also need to bare in mind that you run a large game that gives you influence oversome people'sso if Matt Pennington says women are something other than the norm (not saying you did but by creating another thread on the topic of the weaker vessel, it could be construed that chicks is speshul) you set up the potential to alienate, even if the attempt was to encourage, a section of your playerbase.
This thread was more about trying to find ways to write better LRP games to be honest. I fear it lost it's way a long time ago. I don't really have a defence to the "you're dead influential you should be more careful" other than to say that I try and be as careful as I can in what I post, as I expect all my fellow Rule7ers to be. And I encourage everyone to have a healthy disdain for the opinions of other people especially experts, academics, people with qualifications and anyone who is old, established and successful.
Have you ever heard of Fred Hoyle? Brilliant physicist, did some stunning early work in astrophysics. He served as the director of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge for a while. He also thought bacteria came to earth on comets. Fucking idiot. If you put people on pillars, you set them up for falls. We should respect ideas and the words used to convey them, not the people who have them. Because people are idiots. Like Fred Hoyle.
Yes it is, just like you can discuss bacon without mentioning eggs.
Not if bacon and eggs are polar opposites and you are talking about the statistical frequencies of comparisons of the two sets.
I think women as a group of thinking individuals can manage to get out of larp what they want, or change it by their presence to get what they want. Because women are larping I would assume they like what they get currently and maybe don't need help, other than more women need to play generally. Asplaying sports/games etc, is more often indulged in by blokes. Men play more than women in all walks of life, not just the path of the nerd, thats what you should be looking at maybe? increasing women playing.
You're assuming that women want to play more, which I don't think is a given. I've no interest in 50/50 raios. I'm just interested to know what women like about LRP and whether that is or isn't being addressed.
It's easy to say that "women don't need you to help them", but I'm not interested in running a better LRP game for women's sake, I'm interested in doing it for my sake. Partly because it pays my money and partly because having lots of people enjoy my game flatters my ego enormously and gives me a sense of achievement and satisfaction. It seems unlikely that women are going to help me do either of these, so I'll have to help myself. By talking to them, or if necessary, about them. The ultimate goal is just to try and find a different way of looking at things to see if that can reveal something that has been missed or overlooked.
For balance when are you going to invite men and women to discuss men as an unknown species? It's the lack of parity that highlights inequality.
As I've tried to point out, my data is not physically capable of revealing anything about women without simultaneously revealing the same thing about men. It compares men and women's choices. Everything in the data is expressed as a comparison between men and women. You simply cannot get anything out of that data that isn't simultaneously a comment about men and women at the same time.
I kinda thought this was obvious, clearly it wasn't or apparently isn't.
Matt
So I was really looking to discuss the data about what men and women want from LRP abstracted away from the personal experience of being a man or a woman in LRP. In a very real sense I was looking for everyone, men and women to think about women (and men) as an unknown species and part of the "not we".
You've lost me there although if you wanted people to think about both men and women you should have added men to the title, picky I know.
My point is that individual women are no more capable of expressing anything meaningful about what women want out of LRP than men are. All they can do is express what they as an individual want out of LRP. If you can't use a statistic about what women choose on average to say anything about what an individual woman wants from LRP, do you see why an individual woman can't use her personal experiences to say anything about what women choose on average? You can only find out what women (in the plural) want by putting a lot of them together and averaging their answers in some statistically meaningful way. An individual person can be a man or a woman, but they can't be "men" or "women" because they can't be a category. So in a very real sense "women" is as big a mystery to individual women as it is to individual men.
I accept that my title was poorly chosen, I've already admitted that. But really "Gender bias in LRP, an overview of poor quality data" sounds way too much like an academic paper. There has to be a balance between being "thorough" and being "sublimely boring" surely? Although I did warn people it was kind of a dull thread. Which it probably was til we started arguing... 
my bad, I always take it as a given that if you put a post up on a forum and don't lock it you are therefore inviting people to comment.
Yes, but you don't expect to be held accountable for what they say. I put up some data and some people were interested and asked for more data. Others were interested and offered personal experiences. I think the forum benefits from people having the right to choose how they respond to what you've posted, but that the corollary is that you are not really accountable for what they say, they are.
As I said I think opening a debate is asking for comment and unless it's going to get really dull most people will be quoting their own experiences (anecdotal) rather than statistical data.
*shrug* I can't control what people find dull or interesting. If I'd wanted to encourage people to discuss their personal experiences however I'd have put up a thread saying "I'm interested in why women LRP, can you all give me your personal experiences". I put up some data, which I feel entitles me to the defence that I was anticipating discussing that data with people. I feel it's fair to claim that if you make a post, the point of your post is the content within it, not the content within other people's posts.
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Prodigal
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Lavlin (6/25/2008)
The company of women can be very stimulating in many ways, but constantly having to treat them as something special can be very off putting, too.So dont. As to gender preferences: tastes, preferences and capabilities of men have a wider spread than those of women, *blinks* Can you clarify this statement please? You seem to be suggesting that men in general have a wider set of interests and that they are in general more capable. As that is so blatantly sexist, I would really prefer to think that I've misinterpreted what you've said.
So I`m back to what I`ve always said, that LRP is basically a boys` game and that anybody who appreciates it as such is more than welcome, and that those that don`t would be wasting their time with it. The women on this thread seem to want pretty similar things out of LRP to what men want, which doesnt suggest that its 'basically a boys' game.' When I was at school, the girls played the proto-LRP type games as much as the boys. So I dont consider it useful or relevant to call LRP a boys' game.
_____________________________________________________ It is not a competition. It is a web forum.
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Wag
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Sarah (6/26/2008)
You seem to be suggesting that men in general have a wider set of interests and that they are in general more capable. As that is so blatantly sexist, I would really prefer to think that I've misinterpreted what you've said.
He said 'spread' - I assumed he was referring to the fairly well documented tendency for male distributions to have fatter tails (i.e. I've heard that IQ tests have fairly similar means by gender, but the male distribution has a much larger standard deviation - ditto things like birth weight - not too surprising given the differences in distribution of the number of progeny by gender).
Where did he say 'more capable'? Personally, I happen to get on better with people at the extremes (borderline autists with minds like flick knives - so I'm fairly discriminatory about _which_ extreme) - but I don't think there's any sense in which people agree that it's _good/better_ to be on an extreme. If the traits of men are 'wider spread' then the traits of women are 'more balanced and reliable'.
Discrimination!=sexism. Noting that genders differ - even having personal preferences for one over the other - is not the same thing as asserting that one is necessarily inferior/superior to the other. If you have to invoke macrosocial effects to explain why it's not ok for someone to have different opinions than you then I think it's helpful to distinguish that from 'observable sexism'.
Marios
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Prodigal
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| Lavlin said 'capabilities' in the sentence that reads As to gender preferences: tastes, preferences and capabilities of men have a wider spread than those of women I took it to imply 'more capable' which why i asked Lavlin to clarify the point. I have no experience to call upon that suggests that women like fewer things than men like, or that women are good at fewer things than men, and so on.
_____________________________________________________ It is not a competition. It is a web forum.
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Wag
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Sarah (6/26/2008)
I took it to imply 'more capable' whichwhy i asked Lavlin to clarify the point.
Given the number of posts demanding a response from Lavlin it seemed unlikely that he'd be able to respond to you any time soon so I took it upon myself to put forward a less risible interpretation of what he'd said. I'm not claiming to be able to speak _for_ him.
Sarah (6/26/2008)
I have no experience to call upon that suggests that women like fewer things than men like, or that women are good at fewer things than men, and so on.
That sounds like a basic misinterpretation of statistics. If it is the case that the distribution the IQ of women has a smaller standard deviation/spread than that of men that doesn't mean that individual women have (i) a lower IQ or (ii) that women who have an IQ of 160 are in some sense distinct from men who have an IQ of 160 - it's just that there's less of them. I don't think much of IQ as a measure of anything, but it's convenient for these sort of examples.
A real world example would by my Maths department in Bath. It's a very good department and there are some brilliant students and brilliant lecturers of both genders. But the distribution isn't even slightly similar. This isn't to say that they don't have a decent gender balance or that the women do badly - generally speaking from years spent in various levels of math education, women seem to absolutely dominate when it comes to getting work done and getting a decent grade (high 2:1/low first). Men on the hand do much worse in the sense that people with more or less similar aptitudes get a much broader range of grades.
Where things differ is when you look at the top end of the spectrum - 90%+ students/professors with Fields awards. As much as women dominated in the classroom as regards to getting 60%+, men seem to dominate at 90%+. This in now way implies that brilliant female mathematicians don't exist or that they aren't somehow as brilliant as similarly skilled male mathematicians - they just don't exist in anything like a similar proportion.
You could argue that this is due to complicated invisible social biases (which somehow don't seem to operate in all the ealier stages!) - or you could note that a very large proportion of brilliant mathematicians show very clear signs of forms of autism thought to be associated with recessive genes on the X chromosome.
I don't think the distribution of haemophilia is a secret patriarchal conspiracy to usurp women's right to bleed by shaming women bleeders into prematurely coagulating, regardless of the historical fact that haemophilia has been strongly associated with Western European power structures! In the absence of convincing evidence to the contrary, I'm inclined to think that it's probably on the X.
Marios
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Wag
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Short version: Equality of Opportunity means treating male and female haemophiliacs equally, with regards to their haemophilia at least. It doesn't mean pretending that men and women are just as likely to suffer from haemophilia.
Marios
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