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Comment by ahoyhere | Hacker News Reader

Don't worry, the discussion about women is because people (aka men) are having a hard time getting laid, keeping a woman, dealing with the woman they have or the feelings they have about her -- or, on the other hand, understanding the appeal of women to start with.

In my experience, those men prefer to throw up their hands and act as if women are mystical instead of totally explicable (like all human beings are, if you look closely enough). That way they don't have to admit they're too lazy/incapable of understanding anyone who has a different viewpoint and priorities ;)

The "I'm ultra logical and uber rational" posture is part and parcel of it.

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My "counterargument": women who complain about sexism in technology are just fatties and uglies who wish they could find a real man instead of getting pump and dumped by the occasional desperate loser.

We can try to lower the status of people we disagree with, or we could actually have a rational discussion which might teach us something.

(Oh, very clever! You've preemptively applied the "loser" label to people who aspire to rationality. I guess I lose the status competition.)

Way to keep it classy and prove me wrong. Very rational and measured of you. It served your purposes exactly.

Are you one of the people who engage in conversations around "Women: Does society screw them up or is there just something weird with their brains (on average of course, let's be PC here)? Dudes speculate." ?

Would it have been more acceptable if he had said "women who complain about sexism in technology are just having a hard time getting laid or keeping a man"?

The "I'm ultra logical and uber rational" posture is part and parcel of it.

Heh, true. And to the extent that we fail to achieve our goals with women and relationships, we're not being rational. http://lesswrong.com/lw/7i/rationality_is_systematized_winni...

You want rationality, look at pickup artists. They have (questionable at best) goals, and they do whatever it takes to achieve them with maximum effectiveness.

After checking out that PUA stuff, it appears to me that the goals you call "questionable" are not grounded in rationality at all - it's all about not meeting the emotional needs of the women involved, and they mostly smell like men whose emotional needs have not been met by the prior women in their life (maybe even starting with their first woman, their mother). Lots of "popular" PUAs just seem vengeful to me, and I take that as a sign that it's their emotions that ultimately motivate them.

I think orangecat's point is that rationality and the moral correctness are distinct (assuming you haven't solved the is-ought problem). "Rationality" is just taking actions which are most likely to lead to your goal, whatever that goal may be.

Now, that still leaves us to explain the correlation between (a) rationality in the pursuit of relationships and (b) having "questionable" goals like pure sex rather than love. And I think it can be explained this way:

First, sex is a much easier to define and measure goal; it's hard to gather data about how well you have achieved ephemeral things like "love". This makes it less amenable to rational attack. Second, people who are initially rational are more likely to see the rather unpleasant realities of love (tracing it back to evolution-driven competition) and become cynical of even the existence of love (and so settle for sex). Third--and I think this is close to what you were getting at--men who have been shunned by women may become so bitter that they don't really want to the love of a woman while still acknowledging that they want sex.

"Don't worry, the discussion about women is because people (aka men) are having a hard time getting laid, keeping a woman, dealing with the woman they have or the feelings they have about her..."

They would do better than discussing those issues here... whatever insight they get is going to be grossly skewed by the 15:1 m/f ratio...

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