[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]
I still don't think you understand what feminists mean by objectification. It's not the same thing as cognitive reductionism, which I think hardly anyone here would object to. I mean, yes, minds are causal systems made of parts embedded in the universal laws of physics and can be understood as such. Everyone knows that!---and given that everyone knows that, you should be able to deduce that whatever it is people really mean when they criticize this objectification-thing, it has to be something other than cognitive reductionism.
Let me explain what I understand by objectification. So, even though (as everyone here already knows) everything that exists, exists within physics, we still find it useful and necessary to distinguish structures within physics which we think are conscious and intelligent (whatever it is we refer to with those words), which we call minds or people, and structures that are not, which we call objects. So when we express the proposition that objectification is unethical, we mean that we have special ethical standards for dealing with physical-structures-deemed-people that do not apply when dealing with physical-structures-deemed-objects. For example, in matters of sexual relations, you shouldn't deceive people into doing things that they wouldn't on reflection want to do if they were better informed; rather, when dealing with a person, you should take into account the desires, beliefs, and autonomy of that person, even though (as everyone already knows) none of these things are ontologically fundamental.
Now, perhaps you don't hold this ethical standard yourself. In light of the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad truth, there's probably not a whole lot feminists can do to talk you into it. But in order to have a sane discussion, you should at least understand what it is your fellow discussants actually believe. And I really don't think you do.
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.