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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

In an ideal world, yes. But I think we're finding that it's practically impossible to eliminate toxicity completely, and people are irrationally bothered by "the outgroup".

"I can tolerate anything except the outgroup" talks about how people more fiercely reject a group very similar to their own, yet slightly different, more than they reject groups that are actually very different.

It leads to stupid gatekeeping like "treat the male chess players better than the female ones" and small nudges will never overcome it.

If women feel put off by chess unless they have their own tournaments, then they can have their own tournaments. It literally hurts nobody.

If you want to have a chess game against women, I'm sure you can do so. They aren't stopping you from playing them.

They're just stopping you from playing in the tournament they created because others were toxic to them in the existing ones.

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"If women feel put off by chess unless they have their own tournaments, then they can have their own tournaments. It literally hurts nobody."

I'm not convinced that this is completely true.

The fact that there is a category reserved for women when there is no technical reason for such separation in that activity could make girls assume that women are somehow less proficient at that activity and other similar activities. That could discourage the best of them from even engaging in that activity or similar activities.

In some activities, such as power lifting, it's pretty obvious that such separation is essential as women would rarely, if ever, win at the most levels of competition in almost any age group (I don't know if this is true, for example, in the 1-3 month old category!). In these cases offering separation encourages participation.

In this particular case, who cares?! It's speedcubing and likely this girl will lose interest in the activity soon and move onto something else (or, more likely, I suspect her parents will push her into something else and drill her on that for a couple years).

you do have a point in that separate categories reduces or even prevents both groups from competing against each other. thus we'll not know if they are differently qualified. also competition drives effort, so having a larger pool of competitors pay push participants to increase their effort.

on the other hand, in this young age physical development between boys and girls can be very different. so maybe separation is necessary because of that.

What kind of toxicity are females experiencing when entering Rubik’s cube competitions?

I think it’s more likely that people often don’t like being in a noticeable out group, and that females experience that more negatively than males, so they skip it.

No need to blame anyone, and it doesn’t deny the attempt to help females participate.

and people are irrationally bothered by "the outgroup" - so is that not a problem worth solving? We just avoid it?

then they can have their own tournaments - of course, no one should actively stop them. I am more concerned that an organization managing the tournament decides to create a new category rather then putting in the effort to bring everyone to the same playing field. I mean is that not the decades long battle that made it all the way to the workplace? Should we also create female software engineering roles, and female CEO roles bc the CEO market is crowded by tech bros? If you have $1B, and you have to solve this problem, how do you split it, that's my question.

You are trying to extrapolate one single solution to all situations because they appear identical to your mind. Those situations are very different in their details.

how so?

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