I already carefully monitor my writing so that it reads properly for the intended audience. It’s called “writing well”. Sometimes “editing” specifically.
You may be overestimating the effort involved here. I doubt you are in the habit of using—to draw an example from the French Revolution, as has been suggested—the phrases “clergy” and “enemies of the revolution” interchangeably, or any of the equivalent modern equivocations which can offend. If I were to try to make concrete rules, I would say to use the singular “they” or randomize pronouns for hypothetical persons, take care to be general when speaking in the second-person, and question any generalizations you propose not strongly backed by peer-reviewed evidence (particularly about nations and genders). That set of rules doesn’t sound onerous.
It’s not about the amount of effort it takes, it’s about this whole mentality that when a certain turn of phrase or writing style risks ‘offending’ or ‘scaring off’ a person, the one who has to give way is always the writer, never the reader. In other words, it’s assumed that the responsibility lies with the writer to change his wording, rather than with the reader to see past the offending words to the meaning behind them.
The mentality described above is similar to the one that has forced anyone speaking in public to use the childish euphemism “n-word” instead of saying “nigger”, even when it’s obvious from the context that they’re not expressing a racist sentiment. People will even say, “Hey, don’t use the n-word, you racist!” They have to speak this way because, where the word “nigger” is concerned, it’s universally believed that it’s the speaker’s responsibility to censor himself rather than the listener’s responsibility to actually use his brain and understand what the other guy is saying.
I think this mentality is lazy and anti-rational. The way I see it, if you’re offended by the superficiality rather than by the substance of my words, it’s your problem, not mine. Being able to overlook the surface of a message (and suppressing whatever feeling of offense it may have triggered in you) is an essential skill to a rationalist, and skewing the balance in favor of easily offended readers can only cause its atrophy.
If you find the kind of monitoring Eliezer is advocating natural, go for it, but don’t pester the rest of us about it.
It’s not about the amount of effort it takes, it’s about this whole mentality that when a certain turn of phrase or writing style risks ‘offending’ or ‘scaring off’ a person, the one who has to give way is always the writer, never the reader. In other words, it’s assumed that the responsibility lies with the writer to change his wording, rather than with the reader to see past the offending words to the meaning behind them.
Behold, the internet. It’s full of people, and most of them have something to say. In a market of attention where people decide “should I bother to read this”, the power is purely on the buyer’s side. In other words, if you want to be taken seriously as a writer it’s your responsibility to communicate effectively.
As a group, we all share an interest in keeping the quality of communication on Less Wrong high.
You’re right that people can be hypersensitive. It’s a fool’s errand trying to avoid offending such people, and if I were suggesting that you try, you’d have every right to tell me off.
But think about what you’re sounding like for a moment. From what you said, you’d think it was an imposition to expect that you not call black people “niggers”! Why would you want to? Why would you want to anger a large part of your potential audience, why would you want to lose their respect and their attention?
I wouldn’t call black people niggers in a sentence such as, “Niggers tend to be less well educated than whites”, because that would clearly imply that I’m being racist (or a troll).
On the other hand, using ‘him’ instead of ‘them’ as a gender-neutral pronoun doesn’t imply sexism. Maybe one day it will, but right now it doesn’t. Anyone who is offended by this kind of wording is hypersensitive.
The word “sexism” is a distraction here—what we are discussing is what makes people uncomfortable, and the rules I suggested are addressing actual things which have a track record of making people uncomfortable.
To start with the example you give here, since you specifically state that it is mistaken: using “him” in a sentence primes the reader to assume the male, and is therefore intrinsically not gender-neutral. (I believe studies can be found to this effect, although as a mechanical engineer I do not know where to look.) Less rigorously, “him” as a default enshrines “her” as an exception, an aberration, rather than half the population of the globe. Finally, if you were to substitute race-specific terminology for sex-specific—as Douglas Hofstadter did in A Person Paper on Purity in Language—the legitimacy of taking offense would be obvious.
Similar arguments can be made with respect to hypotheticals in the second person—not everybody was working up the courage to talk to the girls in high school, even if you limit the pool to people who went to high school (I didn’t). And generalizations about gender and nation (and race, and creed) are warned against because people are continually motivated to find evidence for generalizations matching their prejudices—meaning a lot of the evidence and generalizations you see are unmitigated bull.
I chose these examples to enshrine in rules because these are the easy ones, the well-established ones, the ones which we rationalists should think of instantly when someone says “biases associated with prejudice”. If you don’t know about them, you need to learn.
Your comment starts with, “what we are discussing is what makes people uncomfortable”, but most of the rest of it talks about biases!
Fighting people’s biases is a good reason to pester them about wording things differently; I’ve never said otherwise. But then let’s make it clear that’s the reason we’re doing it, and cut all the chatter about offending the hypersensitive nuts out there.
As for Hostadter’s essay, it doesn’t work. All of his examples sound offensive to us because if they were introduced in a sentence in reality, we would have good reason to think that the person who spoke them is a racist. On the other hand, you can’t rationally conclude that I’m a sexist because I wrote “him” instead of “them” two comments above. We legitimately take offense because of the implied racism, not because of the words themselves.
I thought that the extension from “implicitly excluding women” to “making women feel unwelcome” was evident. Likewise (often) from “drawing unjustified generalizations about a class of persons” to “making a class of persons uncomfortable”. If it wasn’t, I apologize—consider it hereby explicitly stated.
As for Hofstadter’s essay, it explores a world in which linguistic genders do not exist and linguistic colors exist instead. The author isn’t racist, not in any strong sense of the word—the author is just following the standard convention of their hypothetical world by using “white” both as a race-specific and a race-neutral term. It’s obvious that you have a visceral distaste for calling black people white “in reality”, but given that—and this is the point of the damn essay—why do you consider calling womenmen acceptable?
I recently read Jaquez Barzun’s “From Dawn to Decadence”, which includes a digression on the word “man”. He notes that in its origins it actually is a gender-neutral word indicating person, with “woman” deriving from “wife-man” (man who is a wife). To use racial terms, this is not like appending “white” to words, because “white” means a color rather than person. It is like deeming non-whites “colored”, however nonsensical the practice may be (as illustrated in the poem “White Fella”).
I can’t recommend the book as a whole, when I hear the word “culture” I reach for my gun.
I used to mention that derivation whenever the subject came up IRL (with the rather unfortunate gloss that therefore “man” really was gender-neutral and women should not feel left out by its exclusive use), until I realized that usage 800+ years ago has little to no influence on the current meaning of the word.
No one ever noticed the fallacy, which is depressing now that I think about it. Don’t count on others to fix your thinking is the lesson, I guess.
The etymology of the word “man” is completely irrelevant to its present use. This isn’t some obscure term like “ironic” for which it would be reasonable to claim that common usage is mistaken—this is one of the ten most common nouns in the English language. The common usage is as the only formal term for male human beings.
Were this thread a discussion of the evolution of gendered terms in English, your remarks would be apt. Were it a novel argument in the dialectic of gender in English, your remarks would be apt. It is neither.
It’s obvious that you have a visceral distaste for calling black people white “in reality”, but given that—and this is the point of the damn essay—why do you consider calling women men acceptable?
Because it’s obvious from the context that by ‘men’ I mean human beings. If you put aside the chance that it will trigger certain biases in the reader, there is no reason to feel offended by the use of words like mailman… no reason except the unthinking reflex of political correctness that drives certain people to get hysterical when they read the word ‘nigger’, or to get offended when they hear Neil Armstrong’s legendary phrase (even the version with an ‘a’).
And yes, if we lived in a world where ‘mailwhite’ had the same (widely agreed-upon) meaning that mailman has in our world, it would be silly to be offended by it.
I thought that the extension from “implicitly excluding women” to “making women feel unwelcome” was evident.
If there are women who are made to feel unwelcome by my use of ‘him’ instead of ‘them’, and similar conventions, they’re hypersensitive, because it doesn’t implicitly exclude them: I don’t mean to exclude them, and anyone who reads my posts will understand what I mean; anyone who wants to understand and isn’t looking for an excuse to be offended, that is.
drawing unjustified generalizations about a class of persons
… is wrong because if we value truth (and we do), holding a false belief when it’s in our power to do otherwise is wrong. This being the website that it is, we don’t need additional justification to avoid such generalizations; there’s no need to bring offensiveness into it.
Actually, the n-word did not acquire unambiguously negative connotations until well into the 19th century. So you might run into a sentence like what you just quoted in a historical source, and the word would merely be denotative of black skin color.
This is unsurprising, as it’s a straightforward derivation (probably via Spanish) from the latin word for “black”, which can be found also in scientific names for species and such (for instance, the black pepper used on food is the seed of the plant Piper nigrum).
The negative connotations are purely based on use and social context, not the denotation of the word.
it’s assumed that the responsibility lies with the writer to change his wording, rather than with the reader to see past the offending words to the meaning behind them.
I think this mentality is lazy and anti-rational. The way I see it, if you’re offended by the superficiality rather than by the substance of my words, it’s your problem, not mine.
EDIT: I guess I’ll clarify, just in case thomblake isn’t the only who doesn’t get it. I am not arguing that crafting your post, article, or comment to ‘reach the widest audience possible’ isn’t the best thing to do. What I’m arguing against is the promotion of the mentality I’ve described at length in my previous post. Constantly pestering LW posters (however politely) to get them to change their wording promotes that mentality.
If all LW posters magically started using ‘them’ instead of ‘him’, and so forth, do you think I’d be saying “No, no, no, this is wrong, go back to using ‘him’!” Of course not. It’s the pestering about the wording I’m against, not the wording itself.
Why is that? And, more importantly, if you are not willing to think about the community before clicking “comment,” why would the community mind if you flee?
Now, of course, “carefully monitor” is a bit relative. I would consider myself in thomblake’s camp in the sense that I already try to monitor what I write. I also appreciate posts that let me know I accidently offended someone. Hopefully I am not in the minority with either of those behaviors.
A policy that says we have to carefully monitor our writing lest we scare someone away makes me want to flee.
I already carefully monitor my writing so that it reads properly for the intended audience. It’s called “writing well”. Sometimes “editing” specifically.
You may be overestimating the effort involved here. I doubt you are in the habit of using—to draw an example from the French Revolution, as has been suggested—the phrases “clergy” and “enemies of the revolution” interchangeably, or any of the equivalent modern equivocations which can offend. If I were to try to make concrete rules, I would say to use the singular “they” or randomize pronouns for hypothetical persons, take care to be general when speaking in the second-person, and question any generalizations you propose not strongly backed by peer-reviewed evidence (particularly about nations and genders). That set of rules doesn’t sound onerous.
It’s not about the amount of effort it takes, it’s about this whole mentality that when a certain turn of phrase or writing style risks ‘offending’ or ‘scaring off’ a person, the one who has to give way is always the writer, never the reader. In other words, it’s assumed that the responsibility lies with the writer to change his wording, rather than with the reader to see past the offending words to the meaning behind them.
The mentality described above is similar to the one that has forced anyone speaking in public to use the childish euphemism “n-word” instead of saying “nigger”, even when it’s obvious from the context that they’re not expressing a racist sentiment. People will even say, “Hey, don’t use the n-word, you racist!” They have to speak this way because, where the word “nigger” is concerned, it’s universally believed that it’s the speaker’s responsibility to censor himself rather than the listener’s responsibility to actually use his brain and understand what the other guy is saying.
I think this mentality is lazy and anti-rational. The way I see it, if you’re offended by the superficiality rather than by the substance of my words, it’s your problem, not mine. Being able to overlook the surface of a message (and suppressing whatever feeling of offense it may have triggered in you) is an essential skill to a rationalist, and skewing the balance in favor of easily offended readers can only cause its atrophy.
If you find the kind of monitoring Eliezer is advocating natural, go for it, but don’t pester the rest of us about it.
Behold, the internet. It’s full of people, and most of them have something to say. In a market of attention where people decide “should I bother to read this”, the power is purely on the buyer’s side. In other words, if you want to be taken seriously as a writer it’s your responsibility to communicate effectively.
As a group, we all share an interest in keeping the quality of communication on Less Wrong high.
There’s a difference between communicating effectively and catering to hypersensitive nuts.
I think we actually agree with each other more than it seems. I agree with the following:
Generally speaking, it is better to not offend than to offend
All other things being equal, use the non-offensive word
Worrying about not offending everyone is pointless and impossible
There is a line somewhere between avoiding potentially offensive words/language/topics and freaking out over every offense
Accept pointers about being less offensive when the less offensive route is rather trivial
Use common sense
Do you disagree on any particular point? The details are up for grabs, but the gist sounds right to me.
You’re right that people can be hypersensitive. It’s a fool’s errand trying to avoid offending such people, and if I were suggesting that you try, you’d have every right to tell me off.
But think about what you’re sounding like for a moment. From what you said, you’d think it was an imposition to expect that you not call black people “niggers”! Why would you want to? Why would you want to anger a large part of your potential audience, why would you want to lose their respect and their attention?
I wouldn’t call black people niggers in a sentence such as, “Niggers tend to be less well educated than whites”, because that would clearly imply that I’m being racist (or a troll).
On the other hand, using ‘him’ instead of ‘them’ as a gender-neutral pronoun doesn’t imply sexism. Maybe one day it will, but right now it doesn’t. Anyone who is offended by this kind of wording is hypersensitive.
The word “sexism” is a distraction here—what we are discussing is what makes people uncomfortable, and the rules I suggested are addressing actual things which have a track record of making people uncomfortable.
To start with the example you give here, since you specifically state that it is mistaken: using “him” in a sentence primes the reader to assume the male, and is therefore intrinsically not gender-neutral. (I believe studies can be found to this effect, although as a mechanical engineer I do not know where to look.) Less rigorously, “him” as a default enshrines “her” as an exception, an aberration, rather than half the population of the globe. Finally, if you were to substitute race-specific terminology for sex-specific—as Douglas Hofstadter did in A Person Paper on Purity in Language—the legitimacy of taking offense would be obvious.
Similar arguments can be made with respect to hypotheticals in the second person—not everybody was working up the courage to talk to the girls in high school, even if you limit the pool to people who went to high school (I didn’t). And generalizations about gender and nation (and race, and creed) are warned against because people are continually motivated to find evidence for generalizations matching their prejudices—meaning a lot of the evidence and generalizations you see are unmitigated bull.
I chose these examples to enshrine in rules because these are the easy ones, the well-established ones, the ones which we rationalists should think of instantly when someone says “biases associated with prejudice”. If you don’t know about them, you need to learn.
Your comment starts with, “what we are discussing is what makes people uncomfortable”, but most of the rest of it talks about biases!
Fighting people’s biases is a good reason to pester them about wording things differently; I’ve never said otherwise. But then let’s make it clear that’s the reason we’re doing it, and cut all the chatter about offending the hypersensitive nuts out there.
As for Hostadter’s essay, it doesn’t work. All of his examples sound offensive to us because if they were introduced in a sentence in reality, we would have good reason to think that the person who spoke them is a racist. On the other hand, you can’t rationally conclude that I’m a sexist because I wrote “him” instead of “them” two comments above. We legitimately take offense because of the implied racism, not because of the words themselves.
I thought that the extension from “implicitly excluding women” to “making women feel unwelcome” was evident. Likewise (often) from “drawing unjustified generalizations about a class of persons” to “making a class of persons uncomfortable”. If it wasn’t, I apologize—consider it hereby explicitly stated.
As for Hofstadter’s essay, it explores a world in which linguistic genders do not exist and linguistic colors exist instead. The author isn’t racist, not in any strong sense of the word—the author is just following the standard convention of their hypothetical world by using “white” both as a race-specific and a race-neutral term. It’s obvious that you have a visceral distaste for calling black people white “in reality”, but given that—and this is the point of the damn essay—why do you consider calling women men acceptable?
I recently read Jaquez Barzun’s “From Dawn to Decadence”, which includes a digression on the word “man”. He notes that in its origins it actually is a gender-neutral word indicating person, with “woman” deriving from “wife-man” (man who is a wife). To use racial terms, this is not like appending “white” to words, because “white” means a color rather than person. It is like deeming non-whites “colored”, however nonsensical the practice may be (as illustrated in the poem “White Fella”).
I can’t recommend the book as a whole, when I hear the word “culture” I reach for my gun.
I used to mention that derivation whenever the subject came up IRL (with the rather unfortunate gloss that therefore “man” really was gender-neutral and women should not feel left out by its exclusive use), until I realized that usage 800+ years ago has little to no influence on the current meaning of the word.
No one ever noticed the fallacy, which is depressing now that I think about it. Don’t count on others to fix your thinking is the lesson, I guess.
The etymology of the word “man” is completely irrelevant to its present use. This isn’t some obscure term like “ironic” for which it would be reasonable to claim that common usage is mistaken—this is one of the ten most common nouns in the English language. The common usage is as the only formal term for male human beings.
Were this thread a discussion of the evolution of gendered terms in English, your remarks would be apt. Were it a novel argument in the dialectic of gender in English, your remarks would be apt. It is neither.
Because it’s obvious from the context that by ‘men’ I mean human beings. If you put aside the chance that it will trigger certain biases in the reader, there is no reason to feel offended by the use of words like mailman… no reason except the unthinking reflex of political correctness that drives certain people to get hysterical when they read the word ‘nigger’, or to get offended when they hear Neil Armstrong’s legendary phrase (even the version with an ‘a’).
And yes, if we lived in a world where ‘mailwhite’ had the same (widely agreed-upon) meaning that mailman has in our world, it would be silly to be offended by it.
If there are women who are made to feel unwelcome by my use of ‘him’ instead of ‘them’, and similar conventions, they’re hypersensitive, because it doesn’t implicitly exclude them: I don’t mean to exclude them, and anyone who reads my posts will understand what I mean; anyone who wants to understand and isn’t looking for an excuse to be offended, that is.
… is wrong because if we value truth (and we do), holding a false belief when it’s in our power to do otherwise is wrong. This being the website that it is, we don’t need additional justification to avoid such generalizations; there’s no need to bring offensiveness into it.
It is evident that further conversation would be tiring and mostly ineffective for the both of us.
Actually, the n-word did not acquire unambiguously negative connotations until well into the 19th century. So you might run into a sentence like what you just quoted in a historical source, and the word would merely be denotative of black skin color.
This is unsurprising, as it’s a straightforward derivation (probably via Spanish) from the latin word for “black”, which can be found also in scientific names for species and such (for instance, the black pepper used on food is the seed of the plant Piper nigrum).
The negative connotations are purely based on use and social context, not the denotation of the word.
I take it you’re not a professional writer, then?
You sure as hell aren’t a professional reader.
EDIT: I guess I’ll clarify, just in case thomblake isn’t the only who doesn’t get it. I am not arguing that crafting your post, article, or comment to ‘reach the widest audience possible’ isn’t the best thing to do. What I’m arguing against is the promotion of the mentality I’ve described at length in my previous post. Constantly pestering LW posters (however politely) to get them to change their wording promotes that mentality.
If all LW posters magically started using ‘them’ instead of ‘him’, and so forth, do you think I’d be saying “No, no, no, this is wrong, go back to using ‘him’!” Of course not. It’s the pestering about the wording I’m against, not the wording itself.
They have those?
Why is that? And, more importantly, if you are not willing to think about the community before clicking “comment,” why would the community mind if you flee?
Now, of course, “carefully monitor” is a bit relative. I would consider myself in thomblake’s camp in the sense that I already try to monitor what I write. I also appreciate posts that let me know I accidently offended someone. Hopefully I am not in the minority with either of those behaviors.