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PhilGoetz comments on Exterminating life is rational - Less Wrong
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Comments (272)
I was aware that I was writing a gender-biased description when I wrote the original post. I decided to write it from one gender's point of view, and trust the reader to interpret it intelligently. I find gender-neutral text is usually stilted and distracting.
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.
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.
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 <my username here>@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.
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.)
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.
Bravo! Thank you :)
Your audience consists mostly of people other than you. You may write solely for your own preferences without annoying anyone when the venue is your diary.