I will delete my account and re-register under a different username. I would recommend that Alicorn do the same.
It would be fascinating to learn why you think I'm going to take this recommendation as anything but an attack on my project and the identity I have established here. I maintain a consistent identity under the same name everywhere on the Internet because I stand by the things I write and value the ability to build a reputation and a history over time.
I would also implore everyone to just not bring this issue up again. If someone uses language in a way that mildly annoys you (hint: they probably didn't do this on purpose)
That's an interesting "hint", since you deliberately pointed out a sentence as an instance of the objectification I've complained about earlier in your post. Interestingly, that sentence isn't an example of the objectification I've complained about, although I do think it is false.
crippled by a blood-feud between a feminist faction and a masculinist faction.
This seems like an unduly dire prediction. What it looks like to me is there are three basic groups: people who actively support gender-neutrality (me, the "some lovely people"); people who never gave it much thought but appreciate having their attention called to the problem because they had not noticed it but now recognize it as a problem (I think this is most people on the site); and some people who, after the fashion of fish who cannot notice water, think that sexist language which does not typically annoy them must be the natural way of things.
To leave the conversation unhad is to leave the things just the way they are, and thanks to the demographic makeup of this site and the state of the gender dynamics in society in general, "the way things are" when left alone is "masculinist" - not neutral.
Alicorn:
I would be interested to hear your reply to the more substantive charges that Roko levels. I am in general in agreement with him that while the issue you raise is worth thinking about and discussing, your method of talking about it is thoroughly and consistently disingenuous. To wit: In your classification you left out a fourth group of people, of which I would consider myself one: people who actively support gender-neutrality but have a completely different definition of it and who consider people with your definition to be the ones similar to fis...
It seems that LessWrong has a nascent political problem brewing. Firstly, let me re-iterate why politics is bad for our rationality:
Politics is especially bad for the community if people begin to form political factions within the community. Specifically, if LessWrong starts to polarize along a "feminist/masculinist" fault-line, then every subsequent debate will become a proxy war for the crusade between the masculinist jerks and the femenazis.
Alicorn has contributed in several ways to the emerging politicization of LessWrong. She has started name-calling against the other side ("Jerkitude" "disincentivize being piggish"), started to attempt to form a political band of feminist allies ("So can I get some help? Some lovely people have thrown in their support,"), implicitly asked these new allies to downvote anyone who disagrees with her position ("There is still conspicuous karmic support for some comments that perpetuate the problems"), and asks her faction to begin enforcing her ideas, specifically by criticising, ostracizing or downvoting anyone who engages in a perfectly standard use of langage and thought: modeling the generic human female as a mechanical system and using that model to make predictions about reality. She has billed this effort as a moral crusade ("unethical"). I am sure she isn't doing this on purpose: like all humans, her brain is hard-wired to see any argument as a moral crusade where she is objectively right, and to seek allies within the tribe to move against and oppress the enemy. [notice how I objectified her there, leaving behind the language of a unified self or person in favour of a collection of mechanical motivations and processes whose dynamics are partially determined by evolutionary pressures, and what a useful exercise this can be for making sense of reality]
We should expend extreme effort to nip this problem in the bud. As part of this effort, I will delete my account and re-register under a different username. I would recommend that Alicorn do the same. I would also recommend that anyone who feels that they have played a particularly large part in the debate on either side do the same, for example PJeby. That way, when we talk to each other next in a comment thread, we won't be treating the interaction as a proxy war in the great feminist/masculinist crusade, because we will be anonymous again.
I would also implore everyone to just not bring this issue up again. If someone uses language in a way that mildly annoys you (hint: they probably didn't do this on purpose), rather than precipitating a major community feud over it, just ignore it. The epistemic rationality of LessWrong is worth more than the gender ratio we have. A 95% male community that manages to overcome a whole host of problems in instrumental and epistemic rationality is worth more to the world than a 80% male community that is crippled by a blood-feud between a feminist faction and a masculinist faction.