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DanArmak comments on Exterminating life is rational - Less Wrong
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Comments (272)
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.)
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.