Whatever gender-neutral language may usually be like, in this case I don’t think the correction to ‘person’ is very stilted or distracting, IMO. (Would be even better to replace ‘he or she or it’ with ‘they’, but I realize some people dislike this style.) There were also other possible modifications to the text.
Assuming you agree (since you changed your post) - part of the problem is that even in a case where a good solution was relatively easily available, you didn’t look for it, even though you knew your phrasing might be offensive to some readers (or distracting or whatever you choose to call it). This implies, to those readers who are distracted by your phrasing and spend a few seconds thinking about the issue, that you didn’t bother not to give offense. And that’s what (some of them may be) really offended at, I think. Continuing this, your comment implies that any reader who takes offense is behaving “unintelligently”.
While you say,
I decided to write it from one gender’s point of view, and trust the reader to interpret it intelligently.
What you mean is, you trust readers of the “wrong” gender to interpret. Readers who are “like you” in this aspect, which ought to be completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand, don’t need to interpret anything at all. And gender-biased text distracts the “wrong” readers a lot more than most gender-neutral text distracts you or most other readers.
While “intelligently” means here “whatever I meant even if the text I write doesn’t express it well”. I wish this kind of communication worked. But it doesn’t. When people repeatedly tell you that some not-quite-literal turn of phrase you’re using is misinterpreted compared to what you mean, I think you should stop using it.
Dude. I could have used “person”, but would be left with a “he or she”. Stilted.
Assuming you agree (since you changed your post)
I didn’t realize that changing my post so as not to offend someone implies I agree with them. I will change it back.
you didn’t look for it
I didn’t? Funny, I thought I did. But I guess you know better.
What you mean is, you trust readers of the “wrong” gender to interpret.
Maybe I am a better source on what I mean than your malicious imagination.
If you look over previous things I’ve written, you’ll see that sometimes I say “he”, and sometimes I say “she”. I have been conscious of every single time I wrote “he” or “she” probably since before you were born. But I write one post, over 3000 words long, in which I have exactly one case of gendered speech, and the coin flip comes up so that I write “he” instead of she, and you’re all over me for being an insensitive sexist pig.
If all that my 20+ years of carefully writing gender-balanced text has done is to encourage people like you feel entitled to lecture me from your moral high horse on any occasion when I don’t measure up completely to your standards, then I’m done being gender-neutral. Apparently it just makes things worse.
I’m sorry that I originally replied flippantly. This whole exchange wouldn’t have happened if I’d just quietly changed the text.
Let’s hear from other readers. 2 readers are offended by non-gender-neutral language. If any of you think that authors should be allowed to use gendered language, let him or her speak, or forever hold his or her peace.
Maybe I am a better source on what I mean than your malicious imagination.
My comment was precisely about the fact that people can misunderstand what you actually mean because your words are open to another interpretation.
I hope my imagination isn’t particularly malicious (though as befits this site I won’t assume such a thing). I intended to comment not about your actual meaning but about the way others, like Alicorn, appear to perceive it.
As for the part about “you trust readers of the “wrong” gender to interpret”, I’m sure you didn’t mean to think about only some readers; in fact you didn’t think about only some of the readers. I was talking about the separate fact that hetero-male readers wouldn’t need to interpret your words in any but the literal way.
Please, let others comment. Even if there’s no consensus it’s better to reach a status quo to avoid hashing this out again every few days. (Going by what I’ve read in LW before I started commenting.)
If all that my 20+ years of carefully writing gender-balanced text has done is to encourage people like you feel entitled to lecture me from your moral high horse on any occasion when I don’t measure up completely to your standards, then I’m done being gender-neutral.
Does that mean that you are only gender neutral because you like approval from the gender neutrality cops, and if they stop approving of you, you have no reason to continue to pursue/improve your decades-long policy of trying to do the right thing?
It means that being gender neutral has encouraged you to feel like you have the right to tell other people how to write, and to look down on anyone who uses the word “he”.
I would not have objected to your use of a male-specific phrase if you had not written in the second person. I’d be willing to take your word for it that your choice was random and I wouldn’t care—if it were about some hypothetical person who was male. It was about a “you” addressed in the post, and I, as a reader, was therefore excluded.
I’d like to delete this conversation from Less Wrong. I’d rather have done this by email. Nobody else seems to be reading it anyway. You can reach me at @yahoo.
In my experience, disagreements get more heated when done in public posts than in private emails.
I don’t like to delete things that have gone on for this long. In the future, you could PM people who make comments you’d like to reply to but think may develop into “heated disagreements”. But if no one else is reading it, then some of the votes on the comments are unaccounted for.
One option is to always use female-gendered language. Then women won’t feel slighted by male-privileging language, and men will almost entirely not care or feel slighted.
What is it some folks have against additions to “old” discussions?
If you don’t want to re-join, don’t. The only negative effect that is apparent to me seems to be a piddlingly small amount of screen real estate under “Recent Comments” for a short period of time.
Also, I didn’t actually contribute any flaming (no tearing down of anyone else’s suggestions or behaviors). Only an attempt at a constructive solution to a recurrent problem that no one else seems to have suggested yet.
I agree that adding to old discussions isn’t in itself bad, and that you didn’t contribute to any flaming. What bothers me is there’s a chance that others will read the thread and feel the need to respond, and then things might balloon.
If you don’t want to re-join, don’t. The only negative effect that is apparent to me seems to be a piddlingly small amount of screen real estate under “Recent Comments” for a short period of time.
So if I post a “Make Money Fast” ad every day, that is OK because the only negative effeect is a piddlingly small amount of screen real estate for a short period of time every day?
Yes, I see a difference. And agree with you that GGGGGP was an attempt at constructive posting.
When I saw your argument of the second paragraph of GGGP, I became worried that it would encourage people to lower their posting standards and consequently over time drive busy thoughtful readers away. And the first refutation of your argument that occured to me was to point out that the argument could be used to justify spam as well as to justify your comment.
What I neglected to notice is that the tone of my comment and the fact that I implicitly compare you to a spammer had a high probability of making you conclude that I do not welcome you here. That’s not true, and please forgive my clumsiness.
I’m not downvoting you for adding the comment to an old thread, I’m downvoting you for the “hooray thread necromancy” sentence which completely distracted from anything actually meaningful you had to say in your comment and turned the whole subthread into a discussion of whether it’s okay to add comments to old thread.
Yes, it’s okay to add comments to old threads. If your comment has utility enough to be part of the thread, then it’ll have utility enough for people rereading the old thread after a few years too. Opposition to such is the product of the mechanics of other forums where revived old threads get boosted up thus drowning the newer ones—this isn’t the case here, so it doesn’t apply.
But it’s NOT OKAY to waste space patting yourself on the back about how you added a comment to an old thread. That causes distraction and disutility, as this subthread clearly proves.
The first time I posted on an old thread, the reply (from CronoDAS) was “Hooray thread necromancy” in sarcasm tags. So I was just pre-emptively recognizing that some people seem to think posting on old threads is a action not to be taken. Not patting myself on the back.
Whatever gender-neutral language may usually be like, in this case I don’t think the correction to ‘person’ is very stilted or distracting, IMO. (Would be even better to replace ‘he or she or it’ with ‘they’, but I realize some people dislike this style.) There were also other possible modifications to the text.
Assuming you agree (since you changed your post) - part of the problem is that even in a case where a good solution was relatively easily available, you didn’t look for it, even though you knew your phrasing might be offensive to some readers (or distracting or whatever you choose to call it). This implies, to those readers who are distracted by your phrasing and spend a few seconds thinking about the issue, that you didn’t bother not to give offense. And that’s what (some of them may be) really offended at, I think. Continuing this, your comment implies that any reader who takes offense is behaving “unintelligently”.
While you say,
What you mean is, you trust readers of the “wrong” gender to interpret. Readers who are “like you” in this aspect, which ought to be completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand, don’t need to interpret anything at all. And gender-biased text distracts the “wrong” readers a lot more than most gender-neutral text distracts you or most other readers.
While “intelligently” means here “whatever I meant even if the text I write doesn’t express it well”. I wish this kind of communication worked. But it doesn’t. When people repeatedly tell you that some not-quite-literal turn of phrase you’re using is misinterpreted compared to what you mean, I think you should stop using it.
Dude. I could have used “person”, but would be left with a “he or she”. Stilted.
I didn’t realize that changing my post so as not to offend someone implies I agree with them. I will change it back.
I didn’t? Funny, I thought I did. But I guess you know better.
Maybe I am a better source on what I mean than your malicious imagination.
If you look over previous things I’ve written, you’ll see that sometimes I say “he”, and sometimes I say “she”. I have been conscious of every single time I wrote “he” or “she” probably since before you were born. But I write one post, over 3000 words long, in which I have exactly one case of gendered speech, and the coin flip comes up so that I write “he” instead of she, and you’re all over me for being an insensitive sexist pig.
If all that my 20+ years of carefully writing gender-balanced text has done is to encourage people like you feel entitled to lecture me from your moral high horse on any occasion when I don’t measure up completely to your standards, then I’m done being gender-neutral. Apparently it just makes things worse.
I’m sorry that I originally replied flippantly. This whole exchange wouldn’t have happened if I’d just quietly changed the text.
Let’s hear from other readers. 2 readers are offended by non-gender-neutral language. If any of you think that authors should be allowed to use gendered language, let him or her speak, or forever hold his or her peace.
My comment was precisely about the fact that people can misunderstand what you actually mean because your words are open to another interpretation.
I hope my imagination isn’t particularly malicious (though as befits this site I won’t assume such a thing). I intended to comment not about your actual meaning but about the way others, like Alicorn, appear to perceive it.
As for the part about “you trust readers of the “wrong” gender to interpret”, I’m sure you didn’t mean to think about only some readers; in fact you didn’t think about only some of the readers. I was talking about the separate fact that hetero-male readers wouldn’t need to interpret your words in any but the literal way.
Please, let others comment. Even if there’s no consensus it’s better to reach a status quo to avoid hashing this out again every few days. (Going by what I’ve read in LW before I started commenting.)
No; your comment claimed to know what I think and what I mean.
You’re doing it again! And you’re wrong, again.
First I said that you said, or your words implied, that you thought only about some of the readers. And you said I was wrong:
Then I said, OK, I believe you, you did think about all of the readers. And you say I’m wrong again:
Now I’m just confused. Possibly it’s my mistake/misunderstanding.
Sorry. I parsed your sentence to mean something else.
This is my karmic payback for things I said to Eliezer.
I find gender-neutral language nit-picking off-putting. This thread persuades me that LessWrong is a waste of my time and I should stay away.
That is valid logic if you’re looking for pleasure from LessWrong. It is not valid if you are interested in being less wrong.
lrn 2 they
Does that mean that you are only gender neutral because you like approval from the gender neutrality cops, and if they stop approving of you, you have no reason to continue to pursue/improve your decades-long policy of trying to do the right thing?
It means that being gender neutral has encouraged you to feel like you have the right to tell other people how to write, and to look down on anyone who uses the word “he”.
I would not have objected to your use of a male-specific phrase if you had not written in the second person. I’d be willing to take your word for it that your choice was random and I wouldn’t care—if it were about some hypothetical person who was male. It was about a “you” addressed in the post, and I, as a reader, was therefore excluded.
I can understand that a little better.
I’d like to delete this conversation from Less Wrong. I’d rather have done this by email. Nobody else seems to be reading it anyway. You can reach me at @yahoo.
In my experience, disagreements get more heated when done in public posts than in private emails.
I don’t like to delete things that have gone on for this long. In the future, you could PM people who make comments you’d like to reply to but think may develop into “heated disagreements”. But if no one else is reading it, then some of the votes on the comments are unaccounted for.
Hooray thread necromancy!
One option is to always use female-gendered language. Then women won’t feel slighted by male-privileging language, and men will almost entirely not care or feel slighted.
I voted this comment down because it wasn’t good enough to justify digging up an old flame war.
What is it some folks have against additions to “old” discussions?
If you don’t want to re-join, don’t. The only negative effect that is apparent to me seems to be a piddlingly small amount of screen real estate under “Recent Comments” for a short period of time.
Also, I didn’t actually contribute any flaming (no tearing down of anyone else’s suggestions or behaviors). Only an attempt at a constructive solution to a recurrent problem that no one else seems to have suggested yet.
I agree that adding to old discussions isn’t in itself bad, and that you didn’t contribute to any flaming. What bothers me is there’s a chance that others will read the thread and feel the need to respond, and then things might balloon.
I guess you fear other folks wasting their time via flaming each other more than I do.
I would hope we get to worry less about that sort of thing on this site.
Upvoted. Thanks for the explanation.
So if I post a “Make Money Fast” ad every day, that is OK because the only negative effeect is a piddlingly small amount of screen real estate for a short period of time every day?
Depends. Can I do it from home, part time?
Yes. And you can be your own boss and set your own hours, too.
You don’t see a distinction between attempts at constructive posting and spam? Or you just felt like being snarky?
Yes, I see a difference. And agree with you that GGGGGP was an attempt at constructive posting.
When I saw your argument of the second paragraph of GGGP, I became worried that it would encourage people to lower their posting standards and consequently over time drive busy thoughtful readers away. And the first refutation of your argument that occured to me was to point out that the argument could be used to justify spam as well as to justify your comment.
What I neglected to notice is that the tone of my comment and the fact that I implicitly compare you to a spammer had a high probability of making you conclude that I do not welcome you here. That’s not true, and please forgive my clumsiness.
To paragraph 2: Point taken. To paragraph 3: Forgiven-and-forgotten and appreciated. Thanks for clarifying.
Bad idea, donwnvoted.
Men shouldn’t be considered obligated not to care any more than women should.
It’s not a preference or a ‘should’ on my part; it’s a fact about the vast majority of men. They won’t feel slighted. (I didn’t downvote you.)
I’m not downvoting you for adding the comment to an old thread, I’m downvoting you for the “hooray thread necromancy” sentence which completely distracted from anything actually meaningful you had to say in your comment and turned the whole subthread into a discussion of whether it’s okay to add comments to old thread.
Yes, it’s okay to add comments to old threads. If your comment has utility enough to be part of the thread, then it’ll have utility enough for people rereading the old thread after a few years too. Opposition to such is the product of the mechanics of other forums where revived old threads get boosted up thus drowning the newer ones—this isn’t the case here, so it doesn’t apply.
But it’s NOT OKAY to waste space patting yourself on the back about how you added a comment to an old thread. That causes distraction and disutility, as this subthread clearly proves.
The first time I posted on an old thread, the reply (from CronoDAS) was “Hooray thread necromancy” in sarcasm tags. So I was just pre-emptively recognizing that some people seem to think posting on old threads is a action not to be taken. Not patting myself on the back.
Bravo! Thank you :)