True—but I prefer to advocate for adaptive behavior, rather than emotional response, in many cases. Pronouns is one such.
The problem with that is that the behaviour that needs adapting is that of other people (in this case, to a first approximation, all English speakers). The emotional response is ones own and therefore easier to change.
You might continue to lobby for others to change their behaviour once the emotional response has been brought under control but unless you think the emotional response is actually the optimal way to change the behaviour of others it is not desirable.
The problem with that is that the behaviour that needs adapting is that of other people (in this case, to a first approximation, all English speakers). The emotional response is ones own and therefore easier to change.
Not what I meant, surprisingly! The example I had in mind was someone changing their macroscopic reaction from “VERBAL HULK SMASH” to “icy courtesy” in order to leave a better impression without compromising the fervor of their principle. If you want to change the behavior of those around you—and you’re right, sometimes you don’t—then the emotional response is a good source of motivation.
If you want to change the behavior of those around you—and you’re right, sometimes you don’t—then the emotional response is a good source of motivation.
That depends on what you define as “good” and “motivation”. Most kinds of negative emotional responses don’t promote taking positive actions, and they’re strressful and harmful to the body as well.
The example I had in mind was someone changing their macroscopic reaction from “VERBAL HULK SMASH” to “icy courtesy” in order to leave a better impression
Note that this ignores the ongoing personally detrimental effect on the person having the reaction, which is unchanged by the change in external behavior. Even if nobody knows you’re angry, you still get to keep the health detriments (and reasoning deficits) of being angry.
without compromising the fervor of their principle.
Most people who are using the fervor of principle to motivate themselves would be better off having goals, instead. The distinction is that a principle’s Platonic purity can never truly be satisfied in an imperfect world, but goals actually have a chance.
Fervently-held principles are also often a convenient excuse to avoid doing the sometimes-difficult job of thinking about what results one would like to have existing in the real world, and what tradeoffs or compromises might have to be made in order to create those results.
In effect, I see “fervent” principles as a form of wireheading… one that, not incidentally, wasted many more years of my life than I care to think about.
(This should not be construed to be against acting on reasoned principles, just to choosing one’s principles based on fervor.)
Reading this comment this instant, I think we are talking past each other to some degree. I argue for two related propositions:
On occasion, anger is an appropriate response to a stimulus.
It is the right and responsibility of each person to determine what stimuli deserve to be responded to with anger.
I will grant that anger has negative effect on quality of life, but I maintain that anger is effective on many occasions, and can be wielded without compromising the powers of rational reason. And I argue that it is the right of the individual to decide when to do so.
Edit: If we agree on these propositions, whatever remains is minor.
I maintain that anger is effective on many occasions, and can be wielded without compromising the powers of rational reason.
This is a true statement for some definitions of its terms, and false for others. I maintain that actual anger is both less-than-effective for one’s considered goals and cannot be “wielded” because actual anger is something that wields you… and this applies as much to ongoing low-level infuriation as to a moment of rage.
(Strategic anger is only a simulation of anger: physiologically, it is not the same thing.)
I argue that it is the right of the individual to decide when to do so.
Sure it’s their right… as an individual. My argument is that they’ve got no business trying to claim that as a social right in a community of rationalists, without displaying major fail by doing so.
Otherwise, for example, I could demand the right to go berserk any time anybody spoke in favor of negative emotions. ;-)
This isn’t a hypothetical example, actually; I used to actually do that here. (Go berserk, I mean, not demanding the right to do so.)
But instead of demanding the right to my berserk button(s) I did the rational thing and got rid of them… which now allows me to be merely passionate in my response to you, rather than actually upset or frustrated or infuriated or any of the other buttons that I used to get pushed in circumstances like these.
And as you can see from my comment volume in the last hour or two, abandoning those feelings hasn’t hurt my motivation in the slightest. ;-)
(It also seems to have somewhat improved the humility and courtesy of my writing in this context, with a corresponding improvement in karma… though of course the latter can still change at any moment.)
If you want to change the behavior of those around you—and you’re right, sometimes you don’t—then the emotional response is a good source of motivation.
It can also cloud judgement and lead to responding in a way likely to alienate your audience. I’m not convinced it is a net win in general, though it might be in the right circumstances / given the right audience.
It can also cloud judgement and lead to responding in a way likely to alienate your audience. I’m not convinced it is a net win in general, though it might be in the right circumstances / given the right audience.
And I am in complete agreement. My only caveat is that I grant each person the right to make that judgement call. ;)
I agree that everyone has the right to get angry if they wish. What I really don’t like is the extra step that is often taken to claim that because someone else’s behaviour angers or offends you, it is therefore your right to enforce different behaviour on them. The example that perhaps most annoys me is when some religious group claims that because they are so deeply angered / offended by the behaviour of some other group (homosexuals, atheists, Belgian cartoonists, etc.) that it is their right to demand that the other group refrain from the offensive behaviour. I think the right to offend is just as (if not more) important as the right to take offense.
Let is return to the specific, then: I would suggest using the gender-neutral singular they not because I or Alicorn or anyone else is offended, but because it reinforces the idea that everyone, not just men, can contribute to the conversation. Saying “he” by default reinforces the idea that everyone is men here, a condition which is usually associated with an uncomfortable environment for women.
It is the latter that leads to the former and the latter that should be discussed.
I don’t object to gender neutral pronouns when they don’t seem forced. That’s obviously a bit of a subjective call but I’m happy to use ‘they’, ‘one’ or ‘you’ when they fit the context. I actively try to use ‘one’ rather than ‘you’ when I’m saying something that could be seen as attacking a particular person rather than being a general comment after being made aware of the distinction in previous discussion.
I believe it is a fact about the English language that ‘he’/‘his’/‘him’ are the most natural pronouns to use in many contexts when gender is indeterminate however and I’m not willing to twist the language to use gender-neutral alternatives or subvert my meaning by using ‘she’/‘hers’/‘her’ when it doesn’t fit the context.
I also think that it is not an accident that certain gender assumptions are made in life. I don’t subscribe to the view that gender is a cultural concept. I believe that the gender discrepancy observed on lesswrong is more due to biology than culture and do not believe that if we all observed politically correct pronoun usage that the discrepancy would evaporate. I think our language reflects our biology. That is inconvenient for individuals who fall outside the norm but life is inconvenient for such individuals and I’m sure everyone who finds their way here has suffered in some way from lying in the tail of a distribution.
I don’t come here to bond over how unfair the world is however and I don’t think that is a productive avenue for discussion. The Internet abounds in venues to bitch about how stupid the rest of the world is. I come here in the hope of being less wrong, not to list the many and various ways in which the rest of the world is more wrong.
As for the rest: I don’t know if you were around during the PUA mess, but there were not a few comments suggesting that this community was obviously offputting to women. I can’t tell you what factors contributed to that with complete confidence, but given how many people have told me that they find improper pronouns irritating, that’s a place I would start.
The singular they may be a bit more subtle than you realize. I agree with linguist Geoff Pullum: it’s ok to use ‘they’ as a singular bound pronoun (someone lost their wallet) but not as a singular referring pronoun (Chris lost their wallet).
In this case, the blogger that Alicorn complained about needed a singular referring pronoun, since a specific person, namely Alicorn, was being referred to. I think all things considered, ‘he or she’ would have been most appropriate.
I’ll grant that “Chris lost their wallet” is a distinctly modern usage—if you prefer “Chris lost his or her wallet”, please use the latter. I think the extension of singular they is the more elegant solution to the problem of unknown genders (particularly in communities where the answer to “he or she?” is sometimes “no”—I have visited such online), but I’ll grant that it is a judgment call.
I think there can be no complete solution to the gendered language problem, since it comes down to respect and status, which is something people will always fight over. For example, if I start using an ungendered pronoun to refer to everyone I know, then some people might be offended because they think I don’t care enough about them to refer to them using the correct gendered pronouns (which takes more effort and therefore signals caring).
I disagree that it’s a more elegant solution. Suppose I say “While on vacation with a bunch of friends, Chris lost their money.” I bet almost everyone would interpret “their” to mean “Chris and friends’” instead of “Chris’s”. Even when the meaning can be correctly deduced from context, using “they” in place of “he or she” as a singular referring pronoun would probably cause a significant delay in reading as the reader tries to figure out what “they” might be referring to, and whether it’s an unintentional error.
In communities of people who prefer not to use either “he” or “she” to refer to themselves, they can set whatever community-specific rules they want. I have no objection to using “they” in that context, but it doesn’t seem like a good general solution for the problem of unknown genders.
Natural languages are full of ambiguity, and yes that use sounds wrong cause your talking about a particular person.
And if you really wanted to say that it was Chris’s money, how about “Chris lost Chris’s money.” It sounds awkward to me cause my English only allows use of they in the singular if it is an abstract person, not a particular real person.
I mean its not like “Chris lost his money” is unambiguous, it is not at all clear to me weather the he refers to Chris, or someone else. That would probably be clear in discourse because of context.
Do you agree that using ‘they’ as a singular referring pronoun is not yet a part of natural English (i.e., a majority of English speakers do not naturally use it that way, nor expect it to be used that way), but that usage is being proposed by some as a useful reform, while others oppose it?
My point is that making this change involves a large cost, including a period of confusion as some people start using ‘they’ as a singular referring pronoun while others are not expecting it to be used that way. And we can foresee that it will increase the amount of ambiguity in English even after this period of confusion is over. Is ‘he or she’ really so bad that this costly reform is worthwhile?
Most of the people I talk to accept ‘they’ as natural English. My highschool English teachers would probably be an exception, as was I until I decided to let it go. Wnoise probably has a point that ‘singular they’ is a matter of dialect, with most, perhaps unfortunately, having lost some of the more elegant subtleties.
And we can foresee that it will increase the amount of ambiguity in English even after this period of confusion is over. Is ‘he or she’ really so bad that this costly reform is worthwhile?
A good question. I’m happy to leave it with ‘singular they’ for most people but ‘he or she’ for people who want to signal sophistication (by speaking correctly). It is probably too late to hope to gain much relief from ambiguity except when you are familiar with your audience’s manner of speech.
EDIT: I missed the great, great grandparent about singular bound vs singular referring. Thanks Wei.
As wedrifid suggests, I think you overestimate the cost. Heck, English allows the verbing of nouns—screwing around with grammatical number is chump change.
I do not agree that there is a singular “natural English”, but rather many overlapping dialects and gradients. In many of them, some usages of “singular they” are completely accepted, in others, next to no usage is.
I mean its not like “Chris lost his money” is unambiguous, it is not at all clear to me weather the he refers to Chris, or someone else. That would probably be clear in discourse because of context.
In proper English, that would not be ambiguous; pronouns always refer to their antecedents, and no other applicable noun can come between the pronoun and the antecedent.
This causes a problem with “they” in this case; “Chris and Pat went to their car” becomes unambiguously “Chris and Pat went to Pat’s car” if “they” can refer to “Pat”, leaving us with no pronoun for “Chris and Pat”.
In proper English, that would not be ambiguous; pronouns always refer to their antecedents, and no other applicable noun can come between the pronoun and the antecedent.
nolrai explicitly specified “natural language,” not your “proper English.”
This causes a problem with “they” in this case; “Chris and Pat went to their car” becomes unambiguously “Chris and Pat went to Pat’s car” if “they” can refer to “Pat”, leaving us with no pronoun for “Chris and Pat”.
It sounds like all these (counterfactual?) people who speak “proper English” need to adapt their language.
I disagree that it’s a more elegant solution. Suppose I say “While on vacation with a bunch of friends, Chris lost their money.” I bet almost everyone would interpret “their” to mean “Chris and friends’” instead of “Chris’s”.
That particular case could be reworded with “Chris lost some money”. On the other hand, that doesn’t convey that Chris had no money left, so I don’t know.
It is always possible to create ambiguity if ambiguity is what you seek—“they” is no richer a source of such than any other. I don’t think either of us is going to convince the other to change their mode of speech (no flaunting of my particular preference intended).
Edit: How did you find out that Chris lost their money without finding out Chris’s gender, anyway? I don’t advocate singular-they in cases where you know the gender.
You’re not flaunting your preference (at least not to me), since the “their” in that sentence is a singular bound pronoun, not a singular referring pronoun.
How did you find out that Chris lost their money without finding out Chris’s gender, anyway?
Perhaps Chris wrote a blog post about it?
I don’t advocate singular-they in cases where you know the gender.
The problem with that is that the behaviour that needs adapting is that of other people (in this case, to a first approximation, all English speakers). The emotional response is ones own and therefore easier to change.
You might continue to lobby for others to change their behaviour once the emotional response has been brought under control but unless you think the emotional response is actually the optimal way to change the behaviour of others it is not desirable.
Not what I meant, surprisingly! The example I had in mind was someone changing their macroscopic reaction from “VERBAL HULK SMASH” to “icy courtesy” in order to leave a better impression without compromising the fervor of their principle. If you want to change the behavior of those around you—and you’re right, sometimes you don’t—then the emotional response is a good source of motivation.
That depends on what you define as “good” and “motivation”. Most kinds of negative emotional responses don’t promote taking positive actions, and they’re strressful and harmful to the body as well.
Note that this ignores the ongoing personally detrimental effect on the person having the reaction, which is unchanged by the change in external behavior. Even if nobody knows you’re angry, you still get to keep the health detriments (and reasoning deficits) of being angry.
Most people who are using the fervor of principle to motivate themselves would be better off having goals, instead. The distinction is that a principle’s Platonic purity can never truly be satisfied in an imperfect world, but goals actually have a chance.
Fervently-held principles are also often a convenient excuse to avoid doing the sometimes-difficult job of thinking about what results one would like to have existing in the real world, and what tradeoffs or compromises might have to be made in order to create those results.
In effect, I see “fervent” principles as a form of wireheading… one that, not incidentally, wasted many more years of my life than I care to think about.
(This should not be construed to be against acting on reasoned principles, just to choosing one’s principles based on fervor.)
Reading this comment this instant, I think we are talking past each other to some degree. I argue for two related propositions:
On occasion, anger is an appropriate response to a stimulus.
It is the right and responsibility of each person to determine what stimuli deserve to be responded to with anger.
I will grant that anger has negative effect on quality of life, but I maintain that anger is effective on many occasions, and can be wielded without compromising the powers of rational reason. And I argue that it is the right of the individual to decide when to do so.
Edit: If we agree on these propositions, whatever remains is minor.
This is a true statement for some definitions of its terms, and false for others. I maintain that actual anger is both less-than-effective for one’s considered goals and cannot be “wielded” because actual anger is something that wields you… and this applies as much to ongoing low-level infuriation as to a moment of rage.
(Strategic anger is only a simulation of anger: physiologically, it is not the same thing.)
Sure it’s their right… as an individual. My argument is that they’ve got no business trying to claim that as a social right in a community of rationalists, without displaying major fail by doing so.
Otherwise, for example, I could demand the right to go berserk any time anybody spoke in favor of negative emotions. ;-)
This isn’t a hypothetical example, actually; I used to actually do that here. (Go berserk, I mean, not demanding the right to do so.)
But instead of demanding the right to my berserk button(s) I did the rational thing and got rid of them… which now allows me to be merely passionate in my response to you, rather than actually upset or frustrated or infuriated or any of the other buttons that I used to get pushed in circumstances like these.
And as you can see from my comment volume in the last hour or two, abandoning those feelings hasn’t hurt my motivation in the slightest. ;-)
(It also seems to have somewhat improved the humility and courtesy of my writing in this context, with a corresponding improvement in karma… though of course the latter can still change at any moment.)
If the state of our conversation after this reply is not sufficient to justify dropping this thread, please let me know.
It can also cloud judgement and lead to responding in a way likely to alienate your audience. I’m not convinced it is a net win in general, though it might be in the right circumstances / given the right audience.
And I am in complete agreement. My only caveat is that I grant each person the right to make that judgement call. ;)
I agree that everyone has the right to get angry if they wish. What I really don’t like is the extra step that is often taken to claim that because someone else’s behaviour angers or offends you, it is therefore your right to enforce different behaviour on them. The example that perhaps most annoys me is when some religious group claims that because they are so deeply angered / offended by the behaviour of some other group (homosexuals, atheists, Belgian cartoonists, etc.) that it is their right to demand that the other group refrain from the offensive behaviour. I think the right to offend is just as (if not more) important as the right to take offense.
Let is return to the specific, then: I would suggest using the gender-neutral singular they not because I or Alicorn or anyone else is offended, but because it reinforces the idea that everyone, not just men, can contribute to the conversation. Saying “he” by default reinforces the idea that everyone is men here, a condition which is usually associated with an uncomfortable environment for women.
It is the latter that leads to the former and the latter that should be discussed.
I don’t object to gender neutral pronouns when they don’t seem forced. That’s obviously a bit of a subjective call but I’m happy to use ‘they’, ‘one’ or ‘you’ when they fit the context. I actively try to use ‘one’ rather than ‘you’ when I’m saying something that could be seen as attacking a particular person rather than being a general comment after being made aware of the distinction in previous discussion.
I believe it is a fact about the English language that ‘he’/‘his’/‘him’ are the most natural pronouns to use in many contexts when gender is indeterminate however and I’m not willing to twist the language to use gender-neutral alternatives or subvert my meaning by using ‘she’/‘hers’/‘her’ when it doesn’t fit the context.
I also think that it is not an accident that certain gender assumptions are made in life. I don’t subscribe to the view that gender is a cultural concept. I believe that the gender discrepancy observed on lesswrong is more due to biology than culture and do not believe that if we all observed politically correct pronoun usage that the discrepancy would evaporate. I think our language reflects our biology. That is inconvenient for individuals who fall outside the norm but life is inconvenient for such individuals and I’m sure everyone who finds their way here has suffered in some way from lying in the tail of a distribution.
I don’t come here to bond over how unfair the world is however and I don’t think that is a productive avenue for discussion. The Internet abounds in venues to bitch about how stupid the rest of the world is. I come here in the hope of being less wrong, not to list the many and various ways in which the rest of the world is more wrong.
The singular they doesn’t actually constitute “twist[ing] the language”—it is as valid as “everyone knows each other”.
As for the rest: I don’t know if you were around during the PUA mess, but there were not a few comments suggesting that this community was obviously offputting to women. I can’t tell you what factors contributed to that with complete confidence, but given how many people have told me that they find improper pronouns irritating, that’s a place I would start.
The singular they may be a bit more subtle than you realize. I agree with linguist Geoff Pullum: it’s ok to use ‘they’ as a singular bound pronoun (someone lost their wallet) but not as a singular referring pronoun (Chris lost their wallet).
In this case, the blogger that Alicorn complained about needed a singular referring pronoun, since a specific person, namely Alicorn, was being referred to. I think all things considered, ‘he or she’ would have been most appropriate.
I’ll grant that “Chris lost their wallet” is a distinctly modern usage—if you prefer “Chris lost his or her wallet”, please use the latter. I think the extension of singular they is the more elegant solution to the problem of unknown genders (particularly in communities where the answer to “he or she?” is sometimes “no”—I have visited such online), but I’ll grant that it is a judgment call.
Indeed—I dislike “he or she” because it makes assumptions about gender and just puts off the “gendered language” problem.
I think there can be no complete solution to the gendered language problem, since it comes down to respect and status, which is something people will always fight over. For example, if I start using an ungendered pronoun to refer to everyone I know, then some people might be offended because they think I don’t care enough about them to refer to them using the correct gendered pronouns (which takes more effort and therefore signals caring).
I disagree that it’s a more elegant solution. Suppose I say “While on vacation with a bunch of friends, Chris lost their money.” I bet almost everyone would interpret “their” to mean “Chris and friends’” instead of “Chris’s”. Even when the meaning can be correctly deduced from context, using “they” in place of “he or she” as a singular referring pronoun would probably cause a significant delay in reading as the reader tries to figure out what “they” might be referring to, and whether it’s an unintentional error.
In communities of people who prefer not to use either “he” or “she” to refer to themselves, they can set whatever community-specific rules they want. I have no objection to using “they” in that context, but it doesn’t seem like a good general solution for the problem of unknown genders.
Natural languages are full of ambiguity, and yes that use sounds wrong cause your talking about a particular person.
And if you really wanted to say that it was Chris’s money, how about “Chris lost Chris’s money.” It sounds awkward to me cause my English only allows use of they in the singular if it is an abstract person, not a particular real person.
I mean its not like “Chris lost his money” is unambiguous, it is not at all clear to me weather the he refers to Chris, or someone else. That would probably be clear in discourse because of context.
Do you agree that using ‘they’ as a singular referring pronoun is not yet a part of natural English (i.e., a majority of English speakers do not naturally use it that way, nor expect it to be used that way), but that usage is being proposed by some as a useful reform, while others oppose it?
My point is that making this change involves a large cost, including a period of confusion as some people start using ‘they’ as a singular referring pronoun while others are not expecting it to be used that way. And we can foresee that it will increase the amount of ambiguity in English even after this period of confusion is over. Is ‘he or she’ really so bad that this costly reform is worthwhile?
Most of the people I talk to accept ‘they’ as natural English. My highschool English teachers would probably be an exception, as was I until I decided to let it go. Wnoise probably has a point that ‘singular they’ is a matter of dialect, with most, perhaps unfortunately, having lost some of the more elegant subtleties.
A good question. I’m happy to leave it with ‘singular they’ for most people but ‘he or she’ for people who want to signal sophistication (by speaking correctly). It is probably too late to hope to gain much relief from ambiguity except when you are familiar with your audience’s manner of speech.
EDIT: I missed the great, great grandparent about singular bound vs singular referring. Thanks Wei.
As wedrifid suggests, I think you overestimate the cost. Heck, English allows the verbing of nouns—screwing around with grammatical number is chump change.
I do not agree that there is a singular “natural English”, but rather many overlapping dialects and gradients. In many of them, some usages of “singular they” are completely accepted, in others, next to no usage is.
In proper English, that would not be ambiguous; pronouns always refer to their antecedents, and no other applicable noun can come between the pronoun and the antecedent.
This causes a problem with “they” in this case; “Chris and Pat went to their car” becomes unambiguously “Chris and Pat went to Pat’s car” if “they” can refer to “Pat”, leaving us with no pronoun for “Chris and Pat”.
nolrai explicitly specified “natural language,” not your “proper English.”
It sounds like all these (counterfactual?) people who speak “proper English” need to adapt their language.
That particular case could be reworded with “Chris lost some money”. On the other hand, that doesn’t convey that Chris had no money left, so I don’t know.
It is always possible to create ambiguity if ambiguity is what you seek—“they” is no richer a source of such than any other. I don’t think either of us is going to convince the other to change their mode of speech (no flaunting of my particular preference intended).
Edit: How did you find out that Chris lost their money without finding out Chris’s gender, anyway? I don’t advocate singular-they in cases where you know the gender.
You’re not flaunting your preference (at least not to me), since the “their” in that sentence is a singular bound pronoun, not a singular referring pronoun.
Perhaps Chris wrote a blog post about it?
Ok, I didn’t think that you did.
“Chris said on their blog that they lost their money while vacationing with friends.”