The nerd social rules as I know them include things like getting to the point faster and welcoming minor corrections mid-sentence, but don’t include hostile language.
Unfortunately, practical experience of what people mean when they advocate less politeness in the cause of more communication says otherwise. Follow that link and you’ll see people over and over defending not just being inconsiderate but actual hostility—blatant rudeness and direct intentional offensiveness—as “honest communication” and treating people wanting them to stop as “suppressing communication” or “being politically correct”. And this is just one set of examples.
As such, the argument in practice appears to be that people don’t like being asked to consider others when transmitting, and—and this is a key part—aren’t especially keen on listening unless it’s in the precise terms they want. That is, they are observably not filtering on output and are observably very fussy indeed on input.
Of course, you could argue that that’s not real nerd communication, but using a claim of “politeness hampers honest communication” seems to happen when people say “hey, could you, y’know, stop blatantly being a dick?”
So such an argument is slightly tainted in practice by the uses it’s been put to before. And perhaps that’s not how an ideal world works, but it does appear to be how this one with people in it works. It’s possible to make the argument honestly, and I’m not saying you’re not; I am saying that by using that argument, you’re welcoming others using the argument as an excuse for making the communication space much more hostile than it needs to be.
And it remains unclear to me how the repeated special pleading for bad communication skills in this thread constitutes a refinement in the art of human rationality.
I am reminded by this comment of Dan Ariely’s analysis of market norms versus social norms—namely that if you replace a social norm with a market norm and then try to remove the market norm, it takes a long time to re-establish social norms.
I think this is what tends to happen in nerd communities—not that social norms are being replaced by market norms but that social norms are removed on the grounds that they can make communication more difficult, and then people act badly because we’re not well-equipped to operate without norms. The successful nerd communities that I’ve seen (here and a couple of other places) have either involved the founder exercising strong control over the tone of the comments and banning the offensive ones, or strong social norms that were instituted as soon as the community was founded, so that people conformed to the new norm.
And it remains unclear to me how the repeated special pleading for bad communication skills in this thread constitutes a refinement in the art of human rationality
Implicit value judgement of what constitutes good and bad communication. The norms are different in different environments. One of my lecturers likes to use the example of when she lived in New York—she was verbally abused by the vendors there for wasting their time with small talk. This doesn’t mean that New Yorkers are rude (well, the ones that actually abused her may have been), it means they’re operating by different politeness conventions that prioritise brevity.
Question: do you consider the tone here at LW to be an example of bad communication? I find the vast majority of comments to be quite polite, pointing out flaws and other points to consider without resorting to personal attacks or empty statements of value like “this post was awesome/terrible”.
The successful nerd communities that I’ve seen (here and a couple of other places) have either involved the founder exercising strong control over the tone of the comments and banning the offensive ones, or strong social norms that were instituted as soon as the community was founded, so that people conformed to the new norm.
Question: do you consider the tone here at LW to be an example of bad communication? I find the vast majority of comments to be quite polite, pointing out flaws and other points to consider without resorting to personal attacks or empty statements of value like “this post was awesome/terrible”.
No, in fact it’s remarkably good. The comment section is fantastically good and the karma system here—vote up not for agreement but for “more like this”—seems to really work well.
This is why it surprises me to see so many people attempting to justify a lack of or wish not to bother learning communication skills or dismiss such as mere “polite words”, “noise” or “grease”, as if communication were not an incredibly important part of being effective in dealing with humans.
This is why it surprises me to see so many people attempting to justify a lack of or wish not to bother learning communication skills or dismiss such as mere “polite words”, “noise” or “grease”, as if communication were not an incredibly important part of being effective in dealing with humans.
My pet theory based on my own reaction is that Lionhearted erred too far in the other direction while trying to advocate politeness. Here are two methods of framing the same idea that I would find equally rude but for opposite reasons:
“this post would suck less if it had more examples”
“this post was great! It really gave me a lot to think about. Just one tiny thing, I’m really slow so I would appreciate it a lot if you just added a couple of examples to illustrate your points so that people like me can get it more easily :) Thanks!”
Lionhearted isn’t quite advocating the second type of comment but comes fairly close. Politeness is hugely important, but there comes a point where it crosses over into fakeness, passive-aggressiveness, and a bunch of other negative behaviours, and I felt like some of his examples crossed that line, or at least stuck a few toes over.
Intellectual authors crave audience engagement. A lack of examples is usually the result of the author being uncertain where they are required. Bulking up the text with unnecessary examples makes it worse and is work, so the natural tendency is to put in too few examples.
The author is really hoping for comments such as
When you say “a means of transport”, does that include a bicycle. It strikes me that a bicycle would be too slow. Some examples would make your article suck less.
or perhaps
When you say a “means of transport”, does that include a bicycle. It strikes me that a bicycle would be too slow. Some examples would perfect your already brilliant article.
Either of these would be much more welcome than any response that asked non-specifically for more examples, no matter how generically flattering. The author already knows that he didn’t put in enough examples. The information he is lacking is clues as to where his readers are getting lost through a lack of examples. That would let the author add the right examples. More important, evidence of the audience’s intellectual engagement would make the author happy.
“this post would suck less if it had more examples”
I would personally be inclined to downvote this on the principle of “less like this”, even if I agreed. It strikes me as unduly abrasive and more likely to cause not just the poster, but other people, to feel scared of posting. LessWrong is intimidating enough.
(I have been downvoted for such unhelpful abrasiveness before and, frankly, deserved it.)
“this post was great! It really gave me a lot to think about. Just one tiny thing, I’m really slow so I would appreciate it a lot if you just added a couple of examples to illustrate your points so that people like me can get it more easily :) Thanks!”
The minimum number of words I would respond with would likely be “Good post. Could do with examples for each point. Tell, then show.”
Commenting on LessWrong is difficult because smart nerd audiences are incredibly picky, so one must write anticipating as many possible objections as one can come up with. This is why I end up post-editing a lot. (Could really do with a “preview” button to check it renders as intended.) But good communication always takes effort.
Unfortunately, practical experience of what people mean when they advocate less politeness in the cause of more communication says otherwise.
That is a rather offensive piece of pattern completion you just did there. If you want to characterize what you have seen on this thread as “repeated special pleading for bad communication skills” then you may be putting your finger on something important. But when you try to conflate that with the incidents reported in your link, then you are engaging in a particularly inappropriate form of stereotyping. Where, on this thread, have you seen overt hostility to women? Or any other form of nastiness?
As with any other male-dominated community, we exhibit traces of sexism. But I see no evidence that rationalizations against politeness here are some kind of cryptic anti-woman signaling. Some of us, of both sexes, really do prefer to receive our negative feedback undiluted.
It’s not the incidents themselves—its the arguments about the incidents. That there are arguments, and the style of those arguments, shows the hypocrisy.
It was, of course, posted as a real-world example of how the “let’s be unvarnished” meme tends to work out in practice: people who claim they want unvarnished communication tend to lash out when they actually get some back.
I see no evidence that rationalizations against politeness here are some kind of cryptic anti-woman signaling.
And, of course, I didn’t say that, or anything like it. I said that people who demand unvarnished speech tend to mean they want to transmit it, and tend to show little sign of being able to receive it and decode it sensibly.
Put it this way: if erratio got it and you didn’t, your inward filtering may need adjustment.
I’ve noticed over the past week just how often LW posters talk about (to create a typical example) a “generic rational agent, who does something, then he...”, attributing all generic rational agents the male gender. It’s extremely irritating to read that being rational means one is ¬¬male! (modus tollens).
(But David_Gerard wasn’t making a point about sexism; rather, a point about defending for too long signalling that other people find impolite.)
At this point, anything one can do with third person pronouns has the potential of being seen as impolite by a fair number of people.
I look at that sentence, and it’s true, and I know how the situation happened, and there’s a virtue in not being shocked at the real world..… but this is a very weird situation.
In other news, I considered making a button that said “red is the new blue” with the words printed in reverse colors, but too many people thought it was intended as a political reference.
The pronoun in the English language for a person of indeterminate gender is “he”. Yes, it’s spelled the same way as the pronoun for a person of specifically male gender; it’s far from the only case of different words being spelled the same way. (I was about to say minor defects like that are part of using languages that were evolved instead of designed, but then, designed languages have them too.)
Now, if somebody was always using “he” for rational agents and “she” for irrational ones, or vice versa, that could reasonably be taken as insulting. I don’t think anyone has been doing that?
I’ve thought a little bit about gender pronouns (and other gendered language.)
There are circumstances where using “he” to mean “indeterminate gender” is misleading. To say, in 2007, “Whoever wins the US election, he will be a wartime president” is inaccurate because Hillary Clinton was a candidate for president. The writer is referring to a small group of people, that is known to include women, as if there were no women. That’s using language to obscure the truth. (Another example: addressing an audience that visibly contains women as “Gentlemen.”)
There are examples where using male words for humans in general is much better for language flow. “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” I like the sentence just fine like that. It’s obvious that it means humankind, but the language has a deliberately historical feel.
Everything else is intermediate. If hypothetical examples are given as “he”, I generally don’t have a problem with it—it’s understood to mean “he or she.” If nobody, ever, gives female hypothetical examples, though, I might start to worry that it’s spreading the impression that there are no female rationalists. My own preference is for a mix of hypothetical “he”s and hypothetical “she”s, instead of the clunky “he or she” or the ungrammatical “they.” If your post has more than one hypothetical example, make some male and some female.
But aren’t most rationalists male? Aren’t most scientists? Entrepreneurs? etc. Isn’t it appropriate to assume a male norm when there actually is a male majority? Isn’t it just “PC fantasy” that a hypothetical individual in any group is female? Well, how much you decide to treat the majority as if it were the norm is a judgment call. My own perspective is that where women are a minority, it does not mean women are absent or anomalous.
Everything else is intermediate. If hypothetical examples are given as “he”, I generally don’t have a problem with it—it’s understood to mean “he or she.” If nobody, ever, gives female hypothetical examples, though, I might start to worry that it’s spreading the impression that there are no female rationalists. My own preference is for a mix of hypothetical “he”s and hypothetical “she”s, instead of the clunky “he or she” or the ungrammatical “they.” If your post has more than one hypothetical example, make some male and some female.
I tend to divide my constructed hypothetical actors approximately equally. I bias the distribution such that females are more likely to receive the more impressive sounding roles because that is more politically correct (and it also just seems more natural and polite to me to put the ‘other group’ actors into the more positive position.)
The pronoun in the English language for a person of indeterminate gender is “he”.
Or singular they.
Yes, it’s spelled the same way as the pronoun for a person of specifically male gender; it’s far from the only case of different words being spelled the same way.
Claiming that they are different words that just happen to be spelled the same is disingenuous when they deflect the same. It’s the same word with two different meanings / usages.
Language is convention, and conventions can be changed. Yes, usage following the existing convention need not be sexist even when that convention itself is somewhat sexist, it may be merely conservative. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect people not to be even so much as slightly annoyed when when you follow the sexist convention. And the fact that people on this site are regularly provoking this slight annoyance rather than make the effort to rephrase or accept the minor aesthetic displeasure of using a non-standard pronoun also speaks for itself.
I don’t particularly object to singular “they”; while not strictly grammatical, it at least lacks the obnoxious clumsiness of “he or she”.
But as for whether the correct usage is sexist: Do you think a significant number of people here actually regard one sex as inherently inferior to the other and signal that view by their choice of pronoun?
If you do, well, I think you are mistaken, but I can see how someone who holds that belief on the fact of the matter could reasonably hold your view on the language issue.
But if not, then you are effectively claiming that the primary purpose of language is to be perverted into a weapon in political power struggles. If that is the case, then suffice it to say we have resolved our disagreement down to a difference of moral axioms.
I explicitly said that usage need not be sexist (the convention itself is to a degree), just that it’s understandably annoying.
Do you think a significant number of people here actually regard one sex as inherently inferior to the other and signal that view by their choice of pronoun?
No, but they may, well, not exactly forget that female people exist, but something to me inexplicable happens that makes it look like they do forget that. I can remember only one specific example that led to a flame war, but then I’m male and it doesn’t annoy me anywhere near as much.
And that’s not even the issue. One time I was debating something with another poster here and started talking about an unspecified psychologist. I intentionally didn’t use any gendered pronouns at first, but in the reply the other poster started using male pronouns for the psychologist so I made a point of using female ones in my reply, and subsequently both of us used them for the rest of the debate without either of us commenting on it explicitly. I don’t think the other poster was sexist, let alone intentionally sexist, but once the male pronouns were used I simply found it impossible to think of my psychologist as an ungendered generic psychologist and I found both that and the fact that the psychologist should deterministically end up as male in my imagination just because of an artifact of language highly annoying. If anything I imagine that these and similar things annoy the female posters here a lot more than me.
But if not, then you are effectively claiming that the primary purpose of language is to be perverted into a weapon in political power struggles.
Languages primary purpose is communication, obviously. It undeniably also is a weapon in political power struggles and it should not be. I don’t see how using the male third person singular pronoun as indeterminate gender third person singular pronoun either helps communication (as far as I can tell it obstructs slightly) or is power struggle neutral.
Are you asserting that if I start talking about person X in a conversation… talk about what he does for a living, how he raises his children, how he gets along with his parents and so forth, that a typical listener will reliably understand person X’s gender to have not been specified? Will, for example, not be at all startled if I talk about him going in for a gynecological or prostrate exam?
Because I suspect that that claim is demonstrably wrong.
On the other hand, if you’re instead claiming that although a typical listener will reliably assume person X is male, they’d be incorrect to do so, because “he” is also a gender-neutral pronoun… well, OK. I won’t contest that claim, and I’ll agree that it matters in any situation where I’m not primarily interested in the actual meanings that get reliably communicated to other people by my speech.
“He” can refer to a person who is known to be male, or a person whose gender is indeterminate or unknown. In your example, the gender is neither indeterminate nor unknown.
You claim to know Person X; do you not know his gender? I don’t know anything about him, so I would refer to him as “he” until you inform me of his gender, at which point I would use one of the gender specific pronouns.
I never claimed to know person X’s gender, and in fact I don’t, so I can’t inform you of it.
Anyway, to repeat my original question: are you asserting that, after I spend a conversation talking about person X’s job and his family and various other aspects of his life, a typical listener will understand his gender to not have been specified?
(On the theme of the post, I think that bluntness is most polite here—this conversation doesn’t look like it’s about to progress further without prodding.)
TheOtherDave did claim to know person X’s gender? Unlikely, given the point of the example.
TheOtherDave did inform you of person X’s gender? Then, to repeat the question: What is that gender?
The pronoun in the English language for a person of indeterminate gender is “he”. Yes, it’s spelled the same way as the pronoun for a person of specifically male gender; it’s far from the only case of different words being spelled the same way.
This may be true according to official grammatical rules, but it isn’t true for the purposes of conveying an understanding. When I hear the word “he” used with no other identifying characteristics, I don’t imagine a person of indeterminate gender. Even if I’m actively trying to avoid assigning a gender to the person, my immediate reaction is to imagine a man, because that’s what the word “he” usually means when I see it in writing. My conscious control means that I can afterwards respond as if the person is ungendered, but my mental impression is of a male.
For most people, reading and comprehending text has become an automatic process. It can’t be easily controlled by an order from the conscious mind to “always interpret pronoun ‘he’ as if gender indeterminate when in X context.” I expect most people don’t even try, because it isn’t worth the mental effort.
I generally get around this problem by using the singular “they,” which I expect will eventually become accepted by the grammatical establishment, since it’s already becoming common in colloquial speech. And then for cases where “they” is awkward, I simply alternate between using “he” and “she.” Gender neutral pronouns like “ze” and “ey” are an option too, but parsing them can also take too much mental effort for some readers and break the flow, so I usually don’t use them.
Why was this downvoted? Seems to make sense to me...
To me the only thing that charges a usage of “he” with sexism is the people who comment on it to artificially make a big deal of it. Until that occurs, it’s just a way of presenting an example, and does not interfere with understanding of what is being said, or exclude the possibility of a female example.
Well, unless someone’s primed themselves to be sensitive to it instead of just focusing on the content of the text they’re reading. But that’s about as valid an objection as “religious feelings”: just because you choose to get worked up about something trivial, doesn’t mean anyone else is obliged to take it seriously...
Maybe, I wouldn’t know. Slapping a not-nice-sounding label on what I said doesn’t tell me what’s wrong with it, though.
The way I see it, if you actually see sexes as equal and don’t discriminate, then things like this don’t need much thought. Unless the author of a given text is trying to say something about sex differences, or making the male-ness of the hypothetical agent somehow necessary (as in, painting a stereotype), hypothetical male and female agents are equivalent. I don’t have a problem with when someone’s example agent is a “she” in it rather than “he”—what’s the big deal?
It’s when “she” is fine, yet “he” is a big deal, or when people feel the need to go to great lengths to pursue this silly notion of political correctness (like needing a special method to decide what pronoun they’ll use this time), that they shoot the whole idea of equality in the foot by showing that gender should be made a big deal out of in discussions that have inherently nothing to do with gender.
It was particulary weird to see someone say this:
I bias the distribution such that females are more likely to receive the more impressive sounding roles because that is more politically correct
I had to read that twice to realize this was serious. I don’t know what this is, but doesn’t strike me as egalitarian.
I do have a feeling I stepped into one of those mind-killer minefields, though.
Maybe, I wouldn’t know. Slapping a not-nice-sounding label on what I said doesn’t tell me what’s wrong with it, though.
Here’s the cached version of the counter-response, then.
Practically every equality movement deals with the belief that, “If only these people wouldn’t make a big deal out of being X, there wouldn’t be a problem!” The problem with this belief is that all kinds of things get conflated with “big deal”.
Since you invoke mind-killer later, I’ll do the standard thing and pick an anachronistic example. I would be unsurprised if somewhere in Caesar’s “Commentaries on the Gallic War” he said somewhere, “If only the Gauls stopped making a big deal out of their territorial soverignty, they could be a colony of Rome and enjoy practically the same authority.” The difference is that as a separate nation, the Gauls are first-class citizens, whereas as a colony of Rome, they become second-class citizens (with possible social mobility, but that’s another story).
This situation is directly analogous with the gender pronoun situation. The Blues believe that the status quo doesn’t harm the Greens because being a Blue means rarely being in a position in which the problem comes up. So of course to a Blue the resulting Green outrage seems ridiculous, when really it’s justified.
The way I see it, if you actually see sexes as equal and don’t discriminate, then things like this don’t need much thought.
That’s exactly the wrong way to go about doing things, though! Just because you think you’re ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away. Just because something’s a mind-killer doesn’t mean you stop thinking about it. One just has to be a bit more careful.
Hm… okay, that’s not a bad example to work with. Let me see if I can make sense in response.
It seems to me that your argument would apply if I were saying that gender equality isn’t an issue to make a big fuss about. Re-reading myself, I can see that perhaps you could in good faith think so, that that’s what I believe. I will clarify that it is not the case. Equality, in general, is something I see as a Big Deal. There are real issues with gender discrimination that could use looking at: women not getting equal pay for equal work, men being denied custody rights over children unfairly, etc. This stuff matters.
However, using your analogy, I don’t object to Gauls clamoring for their territorial souvereinty. I object to Gauls making a fuss because some Roman thinker used an example of a Roman citizen in some mathematical problem or philosophical parable of his, rather than a Gaul. Which is a trivial thing to make a big deal of, wouldn’t you say? (Especially if—by analogy—the language they’re using doesn’t let him just say “a man”, he has to specifiy -some- nationality if he wants to use singular). It’s not one of the things that matter, it’s not relevant to their territorial souvereinty except in a way so remote, that to try to impose cultural norms on how you should speak based on such weak relevance is something I find silly, and when it gets aggressive, offensive.
Consider the ideal society where genders and races are equal. To members of such a society, equality would be obvious, wouldn’t it? Now I, following the ideal of equality, try to emulate such an ideal citizen (“If I can predict what i’ll think in the future, I might as well think it now”). I find I have little trouble taking women on their merit without needing to let others tell me how to choose my pronouns, so I obviously resist people trying to tell me how to speak in the name of “political correctness” because it doesn’t strike me as doing anything useful.
In fact I suspect one could make a case about this sort of a thing reinforcing the image of woman as the second class citizen, in need of special protections and norms, rather than to be treated straightforwardly as a fellow human being.
Consider the ideal society where genders and races are equal. To members of such a society, equality would be obvious, wouldn’t it? Now I, following the ideal of equality, try to emulate such an ideal citizen (“If I can predict what i’ll think in the future, I might as well think it now”).
This is not a correct application of the reflection principle you invoke. 1) You do not have reliable information to the effect that the ideal society you have in mind is on the horizon. 2) Some policies might be necessary or appropriate in some circumstances but not others, even if the goal of the policy is to bring about the counterfactual circumstance. 3) I find it unlikely that you have enough information about what an ideal citizen would be like that you can unbiasedly choose features of such a person to emulate.
I find I have little trouble taking women on their merit without needing to let others tell me how to choose my pronouns, so I obviously resist people trying to tell me how to speak in the name of “political correctness” because it doesn’t strike me as doing anything useful.
There’s a quote somewhere… I can’t seem to dig up the exact wording, but it’s something about how if there’s an (obviously artificial) object lying around and you don’t see the use of it, you shouldn’t discard it; only when you know what it was supposed to be for (and can say that the task is no longer necessary or is being better accomplished by something else) is that safe to do.
In fact I suspect one could make a case about this sort of a thing reinforcing the image of woman as the second class citizen, in need of special protections and norms, rather than to be treated straightforwardly as a fellow human being.
This looks to me like bottom-line thinking (starting with the conclusion that going out of one’s way to choose gender-neutral pronouns is a bad idea).
There’s a quote somewhere… I can’t seem to dig up the exact wording, but it’s something about how if there’s an (obviously artificial) object lying around and you don’t see the use of it, you shouldn’t discard it; only when you know what it was supposed to be for (and can say that the task is no longer necessary or is being better accomplished by something else) is that safe to do.
Sounds like you’re thinking of Chesterton’s fence. “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up” is the concise version, commonly attributed to him (although those don’t seem to actually be his words). The longer version that he did write:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.
There’s a quote somewhere… I can’t seem to dig up the exact wording, but it’s something about how if there’s an (obviously artificial) object lying around and you don’t see the use of it, you shouldn’t discard it; only when you know what it was supposed to be for is that safe to do.
Yes yes yes yes yes yes YES YES YES. Exactly this. And don’t be too quick to think you know, either.
The way I see it, if you actually see sexes as equal and don’t discriminate, then things like this don’t need much thought.
Yes, if. But that’s not the default state, and it’s observably a hard state to reach, even if one wants to.
For people who do want to—actually want to, not just want to signal that they want to—changing language is a popular tool, because it acts as a full-time mindfulness exercise and highlights situations where the user still needs to make an effort to reach their goals. (It’s a popular signaling tool, for those who want to signal, and of course it’s popular with people who want to do both; my point is that signaling is not the only reason for it.)
It’s possible, I suppose, that one might be so enlightened with regards to gender that one can use gender-biased language without that indicating anything in particular about one’s internal states of mind regarding gender. I don’t find that very plausible, but I suppose it’s possible. Since that seems to be what you’re claiming, though, I’d like to ask this, which might make my incredulity clearer if your answer is as I expect it to be: Do you find it just as natural and automatic to use the supposedly-nongendered ‘he’ to describe nurses, kindergarten teachers, flight attendants, and parents of small children?
Unfortunately, practical experience of what people mean when they advocate less politeness in the cause of more communication says otherwise. Follow that link and you’ll see people over and over defending not just being inconsiderate but actual hostility—blatant rudeness and direct intentional offensiveness—as “honest communication” and treating people wanting them to stop as “suppressing communication” or “being politically correct”. And this is just one set of examples.
As such, the argument in practice appears to be that people don’t like being asked to consider others when transmitting, and—and this is a key part—aren’t especially keen on listening unless it’s in the precise terms they want. That is, they are observably not filtering on output and are observably very fussy indeed on input.
Of course, you could argue that that’s not real nerd communication, but using a claim of “politeness hampers honest communication” seems to happen when people say “hey, could you, y’know, stop blatantly being a dick?”
So such an argument is slightly tainted in practice by the uses it’s been put to before. And perhaps that’s not how an ideal world works, but it does appear to be how this one with people in it works. It’s possible to make the argument honestly, and I’m not saying you’re not; I am saying that by using that argument, you’re welcoming others using the argument as an excuse for making the communication space much more hostile than it needs to be.
And it remains unclear to me how the repeated special pleading for bad communication skills in this thread constitutes a refinement in the art of human rationality.
I am reminded by this comment of Dan Ariely’s analysis of market norms versus social norms—namely that if you replace a social norm with a market norm and then try to remove the market norm, it takes a long time to re-establish social norms.
I think this is what tends to happen in nerd communities—not that social norms are being replaced by market norms but that social norms are removed on the grounds that they can make communication more difficult, and then people act badly because we’re not well-equipped to operate without norms. The successful nerd communities that I’ve seen (here and a couple of other places) have either involved the founder exercising strong control over the tone of the comments and banning the offensive ones, or strong social norms that were instituted as soon as the community was founded, so that people conformed to the new norm.
Implicit value judgement of what constitutes good and bad communication. The norms are different in different environments. One of my lecturers likes to use the example of when she lived in New York—she was verbally abused by the vendors there for wasting their time with small talk. This doesn’t mean that New Yorkers are rude (well, the ones that actually abused her may have been), it means they’re operating by different politeness conventions that prioritise brevity.
Question: do you consider the tone here at LW to be an example of bad communication? I find the vast majority of comments to be quite polite, pointing out flaws and other points to consider without resorting to personal attacks or empty statements of value like “this post was awesome/terrible”.
Maintaining a non-repellent tone is part of tending the garden.
No, in fact it’s remarkably good. The comment section is fantastically good and the karma system here—vote up not for agreement but for “more like this”—seems to really work well.
This is why it surprises me to see so many people attempting to justify a lack of or wish not to bother learning communication skills or dismiss such as mere “polite words”, “noise” or “grease”, as if communication were not an incredibly important part of being effective in dealing with humans.
My pet theory based on my own reaction is that Lionhearted erred too far in the other direction while trying to advocate politeness. Here are two methods of framing the same idea that I would find equally rude but for opposite reasons:
“this post would suck less if it had more examples”
“this post was great! It really gave me a lot to think about. Just one tiny thing, I’m really slow so I would appreciate it a lot if you just added a couple of examples to illustrate your points so that people like me can get it more easily :) Thanks!”
Lionhearted isn’t quite advocating the second type of comment but comes fairly close. Politeness is hugely important, but there comes a point where it crosses over into fakeness, passive-aggressiveness, and a bunch of other negative behaviours, and I felt like some of his examples crossed that line, or at least stuck a few toes over.
Intellectual authors crave audience engagement. A lack of examples is usually the result of the author being uncertain where they are required. Bulking up the text with unnecessary examples makes it worse and is work, so the natural tendency is to put in too few examples.
The author is really hoping for comments such as
or perhaps
Either of these would be much more welcome than any response that asked non-specifically for more examples, no matter how generically flattering. The author already knows that he didn’t put in enough examples. The information he is lacking is clues as to where his readers are getting lost through a lack of examples. That would let the author add the right examples. More important, evidence of the audience’s intellectual engagement would make the author happy.
Oh yeah, happy medium for sure.
I would personally be inclined to downvote this on the principle of “less like this”, even if I agreed. It strikes me as unduly abrasive and more likely to cause not just the poster, but other people, to feel scared of posting. LessWrong is intimidating enough.
(I have been downvoted for such unhelpful abrasiveness before and, frankly, deserved it.)
The minimum number of words I would respond with would likely be “Good post. Could do with examples for each point. Tell, then show.”
Commenting on LessWrong is difficult because smart nerd audiences are incredibly picky, so one must write anticipating as many possible objections as one can come up with. This is why I end up post-editing a lot. (Could really do with a “preview” button to check it renders as intended.) But good communication always takes effort.
That is a rather offensive piece of pattern completion you just did there. If you want to characterize what you have seen on this thread as “repeated special pleading for bad communication skills” then you may be putting your finger on something important. But when you try to conflate that with the incidents reported in your link, then you are engaging in a particularly inappropriate form of stereotyping. Where, on this thread, have you seen overt hostility to women? Or any other form of nastiness?
As with any other male-dominated community, we exhibit traces of sexism. But I see no evidence that rationalizations against politeness here are some kind of cryptic anti-woman signaling. Some of us, of both sexes, really do prefer to receive our negative feedback undiluted.
I upvoted for the the rest of the comment but object to this:
Lesswrong exhibits traces of sexism (of more than one kind) and this is an example of it.
It’s not the incidents themselves—its the arguments about the incidents. That there are arguments, and the style of those arguments, shows the hypocrisy.
It was, of course, posted as a real-world example of how the “let’s be unvarnished” meme tends to work out in practice: people who claim they want unvarnished communication tend to lash out when they actually get some back.
And, of course, I didn’t say that, or anything like it. I said that people who demand unvarnished speech tend to mean they want to transmit it, and tend to show little sign of being able to receive it and decode it sensibly.
Put it this way: if erratio got it and you didn’t, your inward filtering may need adjustment.
“Or any other form of nastiness?”
I’ve noticed over the past week just how often LW posters talk about (to create a typical example) a “generic rational agent, who does something, then he...”, attributing all generic rational agents the male gender. It’s extremely irritating to read that being rational means one is ¬¬male! (modus tollens).
(But David_Gerard wasn’t making a point about sexism; rather, a point about defending for too long signalling that other people find impolite.)
At this point, anything one can do with third person pronouns has the potential of being seen as impolite by a fair number of people.
I look at that sentence, and it’s true, and I know how the situation happened, and there’s a virtue in not being shocked at the real world..… but this is a very weird situation.
In other news, I considered making a button that said “red is the new blue” with the words printed in reverse colors, but too many people thought it was intended as a political reference.
The pronoun in the English language for a person of indeterminate gender is “he”. Yes, it’s spelled the same way as the pronoun for a person of specifically male gender; it’s far from the only case of different words being spelled the same way. (I was about to say minor defects like that are part of using languages that were evolved instead of designed, but then, designed languages have them too.)
Now, if somebody was always using “he” for rational agents and “she” for irrational ones, or vice versa, that could reasonably be taken as insulting. I don’t think anyone has been doing that?
I’ve thought a little bit about gender pronouns (and other gendered language.)
There are circumstances where using “he” to mean “indeterminate gender” is misleading. To say, in 2007, “Whoever wins the US election, he will be a wartime president” is inaccurate because Hillary Clinton was a candidate for president. The writer is referring to a small group of people, that is known to include women, as if there were no women. That’s using language to obscure the truth. (Another example: addressing an audience that visibly contains women as “Gentlemen.”)
There are examples where using male words for humans in general is much better for language flow. “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” I like the sentence just fine like that. It’s obvious that it means humankind, but the language has a deliberately historical feel.
Everything else is intermediate. If hypothetical examples are given as “he”, I generally don’t have a problem with it—it’s understood to mean “he or she.” If nobody, ever, gives female hypothetical examples, though, I might start to worry that it’s spreading the impression that there are no female rationalists. My own preference is for a mix of hypothetical “he”s and hypothetical “she”s, instead of the clunky “he or she” or the ungrammatical “they.” If your post has more than one hypothetical example, make some male and some female.
But aren’t most rationalists male? Aren’t most scientists? Entrepreneurs? etc. Isn’t it appropriate to assume a male norm when there actually is a male majority? Isn’t it just “PC fantasy” that a hypothetical individual in any group is female? Well, how much you decide to treat the majority as if it were the norm is a judgment call. My own perspective is that where women are a minority, it does not mean women are absent or anomalous.
I tend to divide my constructed hypothetical actors approximately equally. I bias the distribution such that females are more likely to receive the more impressive sounding roles because that is more politically correct (and it also just seems more natural and polite to me to put the ‘other group’ actors into the more positive position.)
He who hesitates is lost. She who hesitates just asks for directions.
Or singular they.
Claiming that they are different words that just happen to be spelled the same is disingenuous when they deflect the same. It’s the same word with two different meanings / usages.
Language is convention, and conventions can be changed. Yes, usage following the existing convention need not be sexist even when that convention itself is somewhat sexist, it may be merely conservative. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect people not to be even so much as slightly annoyed when when you follow the sexist convention. And the fact that people on this site are regularly provoking this slight annoyance rather than make the effort to rephrase or accept the minor aesthetic displeasure of using a non-standard pronoun also speaks for itself.
I don’t particularly object to singular “they”; while not strictly grammatical, it at least lacks the obnoxious clumsiness of “he or she”.
But as for whether the correct usage is sexist: Do you think a significant number of people here actually regard one sex as inherently inferior to the other and signal that view by their choice of pronoun?
If you do, well, I think you are mistaken, but I can see how someone who holds that belief on the fact of the matter could reasonably hold your view on the language issue.
But if not, then you are effectively claiming that the primary purpose of language is to be perverted into a weapon in political power struggles. If that is the case, then suffice it to say we have resolved our disagreement down to a difference of moral axioms.
I explicitly said that usage need not be sexist (the convention itself is to a degree), just that it’s understandably annoying.
No, but they may, well, not exactly forget that female people exist, but something to me inexplicable happens that makes it look like they do forget that. I can remember only one specific example that led to a flame war, but then I’m male and it doesn’t annoy me anywhere near as much.
And that’s not even the issue. One time I was debating something with another poster here and started talking about an unspecified psychologist. I intentionally didn’t use any gendered pronouns at first, but in the reply the other poster started using male pronouns for the psychologist so I made a point of using female ones in my reply, and subsequently both of us used them for the rest of the debate without either of us commenting on it explicitly. I don’t think the other poster was sexist, let alone intentionally sexist, but once the male pronouns were used I simply found it impossible to think of my psychologist as an ungendered generic psychologist and I found both that and the fact that the psychologist should deterministically end up as male in my imagination just because of an artifact of language highly annoying. If anything I imagine that these and similar things annoy the female posters here a lot more than me.
Languages primary purpose is communication, obviously. It undeniably also is a weapon in political power struggles and it should not be. I don’t see how using the male third person singular pronoun as indeterminate gender third person singular pronoun either helps communication (as far as I can tell it obstructs slightly) or is power struggle neutral.
The singular they well predates the genderless he, which gained popularity largely due to the efforts of the grammarian Ann Fisher in the 18th century . I see no reason to object to a shift back in the other direction.
Which other direction is this? I lost track with the negatives. Are you advocating ‘he’, ‘they’ or something else?
I understood desrtopa as referring to a reversal of the shift from singular they to genderless he… that is, as advocating ‘they’.
That was it.
Are you asserting that if I start talking about person X in a conversation… talk about what he does for a living, how he raises his children, how he gets along with his parents and so forth, that a typical listener will reliably understand person X’s gender to have not been specified? Will, for example, not be at all startled if I talk about him going in for a gynecological or prostrate exam?
Because I suspect that that claim is demonstrably wrong.
On the other hand, if you’re instead claiming that although a typical listener will reliably assume person X is male, they’d be incorrect to do so, because “he” is also a gender-neutral pronoun… well, OK. I won’t contest that claim, and I’ll agree that it matters in any situation where I’m not primarily interested in the actual meanings that get reliably communicated to other people by my speech.
“He” can refer to a person who is known to be male, or a person whose gender is indeterminate or unknown. In your example, the gender is neither indeterminate nor unknown.
Person X’s gender sure seems unknown to me. Do you know it? What is it, and how did you figure that out?
You claim to know Person X; do you not know his gender? I don’t know anything about him, so I would refer to him as “he” until you inform me of his gender, at which point I would use one of the gender specific pronouns.
I never claimed to know person X’s gender, and in fact I don’t, so I can’t inform you of it.
Anyway, to repeat my original question: are you asserting that, after I spend a conversation talking about person X’s job and his family and various other aspects of his life, a typical listener will understand his gender to not have been specified?
It seems like a simple question to me.
As a matter of fact, you did.
(On the theme of the post, I think that bluntness is most polite here—this conversation doesn’t look like it’s about to progress further without prodding.)
TheOtherDave did claim to know person X’s gender? Unlikely, given the point of the example.
TheOtherDave did inform you of person X’s gender? Then, to repeat the question: What is that gender?
Hofstadter on language and defaults The essay has a postscript that I don’t think I’ve seen before.
I think the evidence is that using “he” to mean people in general evokes a powerful default which leads to less accurate thinking.
This may be true according to official grammatical rules, but it isn’t true for the purposes of conveying an understanding. When I hear the word “he” used with no other identifying characteristics, I don’t imagine a person of indeterminate gender. Even if I’m actively trying to avoid assigning a gender to the person, my immediate reaction is to imagine a man, because that’s what the word “he” usually means when I see it in writing. My conscious control means that I can afterwards respond as if the person is ungendered, but my mental impression is of a male.
For most people, reading and comprehending text has become an automatic process. It can’t be easily controlled by an order from the conscious mind to “always interpret pronoun ‘he’ as if gender indeterminate when in X context.” I expect most people don’t even try, because it isn’t worth the mental effort.
I generally get around this problem by using the singular “they,” which I expect will eventually become accepted by the grammatical establishment, since it’s already becoming common in colloquial speech. And then for cases where “they” is awkward, I simply alternate between using “he” and “she.” Gender neutral pronouns like “ze” and “ey” are an option too, but parsing them can also take too much mental effort for some readers and break the flow, so I usually don’t use them.
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
Why was this downvoted? Seems to make sense to me...
To me the only thing that charges a usage of “he” with sexism is the people who comment on it to artificially make a big deal of it. Until that occurs, it’s just a way of presenting an example, and does not interfere with understanding of what is being said, or exclude the possibility of a female example.
Well, unless someone’s primed themselves to be sensitive to it instead of just focusing on the content of the text they’re reading. But that’s about as valid an objection as “religious feelings”: just because you choose to get worked up about something trivial, doesn’t mean anyone else is obliged to take it seriously...
You realize your criticism is textbook standard anti-egalitarian rhetoric.
Maybe, I wouldn’t know. Slapping a not-nice-sounding label on what I said doesn’t tell me what’s wrong with it, though.
The way I see it, if you actually see sexes as equal and don’t discriminate, then things like this don’t need much thought. Unless the author of a given text is trying to say something about sex differences, or making the male-ness of the hypothetical agent somehow necessary (as in, painting a stereotype), hypothetical male and female agents are equivalent. I don’t have a problem with when someone’s example agent is a “she” in it rather than “he”—what’s the big deal?
It’s when “she” is fine, yet “he” is a big deal, or when people feel the need to go to great lengths to pursue this silly notion of political correctness (like needing a special method to decide what pronoun they’ll use this time), that they shoot the whole idea of equality in the foot by showing that gender should be made a big deal out of in discussions that have inherently nothing to do with gender.
It was particulary weird to see someone say this:
I had to read that twice to realize this was serious. I don’t know what this is, but doesn’t strike me as egalitarian.
I do have a feeling I stepped into one of those mind-killer minefields, though.
Here’s the cached version of the counter-response, then.
Practically every equality movement deals with the belief that, “If only these people wouldn’t make a big deal out of being X, there wouldn’t be a problem!” The problem with this belief is that all kinds of things get conflated with “big deal”.
Since you invoke mind-killer later, I’ll do the standard thing and pick an anachronistic example. I would be unsurprised if somewhere in Caesar’s “Commentaries on the Gallic War” he said somewhere, “If only the Gauls stopped making a big deal out of their territorial soverignty, they could be a colony of Rome and enjoy practically the same authority.” The difference is that as a separate nation, the Gauls are first-class citizens, whereas as a colony of Rome, they become second-class citizens (with possible social mobility, but that’s another story).
This situation is directly analogous with the gender pronoun situation. The Blues believe that the status quo doesn’t harm the Greens because being a Blue means rarely being in a position in which the problem comes up. So of course to a Blue the resulting Green outrage seems ridiculous, when really it’s justified.
That’s exactly the wrong way to go about doing things, though! Just because you think you’re ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away. Just because something’s a mind-killer doesn’t mean you stop thinking about it. One just has to be a bit more careful.
Hm… okay, that’s not a bad example to work with. Let me see if I can make sense in response.
It seems to me that your argument would apply if I were saying that gender equality isn’t an issue to make a big fuss about. Re-reading myself, I can see that perhaps you could in good faith think so, that that’s what I believe. I will clarify that it is not the case. Equality, in general, is something I see as a Big Deal. There are real issues with gender discrimination that could use looking at: women not getting equal pay for equal work, men being denied custody rights over children unfairly, etc. This stuff matters.
However, using your analogy, I don’t object to Gauls clamoring for their territorial souvereinty. I object to Gauls making a fuss because some Roman thinker used an example of a Roman citizen in some mathematical problem or philosophical parable of his, rather than a Gaul. Which is a trivial thing to make a big deal of, wouldn’t you say? (Especially if—by analogy—the language they’re using doesn’t let him just say “a man”, he has to specifiy -some- nationality if he wants to use singular). It’s not one of the things that matter, it’s not relevant to their territorial souvereinty except in a way so remote, that to try to impose cultural norms on how you should speak based on such weak relevance is something I find silly, and when it gets aggressive, offensive.
Consider the ideal society where genders and races are equal. To members of such a society, equality would be obvious, wouldn’t it? Now I, following the ideal of equality, try to emulate such an ideal citizen (“If I can predict what i’ll think in the future, I might as well think it now”). I find I have little trouble taking women on their merit without needing to let others tell me how to choose my pronouns, so I obviously resist people trying to tell me how to speak in the name of “political correctness” because it doesn’t strike me as doing anything useful.
In fact I suspect one could make a case about this sort of a thing reinforcing the image of woman as the second class citizen, in need of special protections and norms, rather than to be treated straightforwardly as a fellow human being.
This is not a correct application of the reflection principle you invoke. 1) You do not have reliable information to the effect that the ideal society you have in mind is on the horizon. 2) Some policies might be necessary or appropriate in some circumstances but not others, even if the goal of the policy is to bring about the counterfactual circumstance. 3) I find it unlikely that you have enough information about what an ideal citizen would be like that you can unbiasedly choose features of such a person to emulate.
There’s a quote somewhere… I can’t seem to dig up the exact wording, but it’s something about how if there’s an (obviously artificial) object lying around and you don’t see the use of it, you shouldn’t discard it; only when you know what it was supposed to be for (and can say that the task is no longer necessary or is being better accomplished by something else) is that safe to do.
This looks to me like bottom-line thinking (starting with the conclusion that going out of one’s way to choose gender-neutral pronouns is a bad idea).
Sounds like you’re thinking of Chesterton’s fence. “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up” is the concise version, commonly attributed to him (although those don’t seem to actually be his words). The longer version that he did write:
G.K. Chesterton, The Thing: Why I am a Catholic
Yes! That’s it. Thank you.
Yes yes yes yes yes yes YES YES YES. Exactly this. And don’t be too quick to think you know, either.
Sorry, I posted the Chesterton quote without scrolling down far enough.
Yes, if. But that’s not the default state, and it’s observably a hard state to reach, even if one wants to.
For people who do want to—actually want to, not just want to signal that they want to—changing language is a popular tool, because it acts as a full-time mindfulness exercise and highlights situations where the user still needs to make an effort to reach their goals. (It’s a popular signaling tool, for those who want to signal, and of course it’s popular with people who want to do both; my point is that signaling is not the only reason for it.)
It’s possible, I suppose, that one might be so enlightened with regards to gender that one can use gender-biased language without that indicating anything in particular about one’s internal states of mind regarding gender. I don’t find that very plausible, but I suppose it’s possible. Since that seems to be what you’re claiming, though, I’d like to ask this, which might make my incredulity clearer if your answer is as I expect it to be: Do you find it just as natural and automatic to use the supposedly-nongendered ‘he’ to describe nurses, kindergarten teachers, flight attendants, and parents of small children?
You may be immune to male-as-default, but a lot of people aren’t. I’m still trying not to have that reaction.
It’s at least plausible that using “he” for people in general reinforces male-as-default.
This is well put and a principle that applies far beyond any bickering about ‘eirs’.
But there should be a counterpart: “Just because you choose to see something as trivial, doesn’t mean anyone else is obliged to treat it that way.”
Thank you. I more or less stole that from Richard Dawkins.