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RobinZ comments on Of Exclusionary Speech and Gender Politics - Less Wrong
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Given the variety of ways people objected to "Sayeth the Girl", I suspect even firsthand "anatomical credentials" are ineffectual.
I'm not saying I won't help call out sexist remarks, but that "how would you know that's sexist?" is a Fully General Counterargument you will face whatever reproductive system you have.
That's why I'm suggesting a policy which says "We want to avoid writing that causes women (or any other gender) to flee", rather than a policy which says "Sexism is a bad, bad thing." You don't need to know what's sexist. You just need to know what makes you personally (not some hypothetical average woman) want to flee.
A policy that says we have to carefully monitor our writing lest we scare someone away makes me want to flee.
I already carefully monitor my writing so that it reads properly for the intended audience. It's called "writing well". Sometimes "editing" specifically.
You may be overestimating the effort involved here. I doubt you are in the habit of using - to draw an example from the French Revolution, as has been suggested - the phrases "clergy" and "enemies of the revolution" interchangeably, or any of the equivalent modern equivocations which can offend. If I were to try to make concrete rules, I would say to use the singular "they" or randomize pronouns for hypothetical persons, take care to be general when speaking in the second-person, and question any generalizations you propose not strongly backed by peer-reviewed evidence (particularly about nations and genders). That set of rules doesn't sound onerous.
It's not about the amount of effort it takes, it's about this whole mentality that when a certain turn of phrase or writing style risks 'offending' or 'scaring off' a person, the one who has to give way is always the writer, never the reader. In other words, it's assumed that the responsibility lies with the writer to change his wording, rather than with the reader to see past the offending words to the meaning behind them.
The mentality described above is similar to the one that has forced anyone speaking in public to use the childish euphemism "n-word" instead of saying "nigger", even when it's obvious from the context that they're not expressing a racist sentiment. People will even say, "Hey, don't use the n-word, you racist!" They have to speak this way because, where the word "nigger" is concerned, it's universally believed that it's the speaker's responsibility to censor himself rather than the listener's responsibility to actually use his brain and understand what the other guy is saying.
I think this mentality is lazy and anti-rational. The way I see it, if you're offended by the superficiality rather than by the substance of my words, it's your problem, not mine. Being able to overlook the surface of a message (and suppressing whatever feeling of offense it may have triggered in you) is an essential skill to a rationalist, and skewing the balance in favor of easily offended readers can only cause its atrophy.
If you find the kind of monitoring Eliezer is advocating natural, go for it, but don't pester the rest of us about it.
I think we actually agree with each other more than it seems. I agree with the following:
Do you disagree on any particular point? The details are up for grabs, but the gist sounds right to me.
Behold, the internet. It's full of people, and most of them have something to say. In a market of attention where people decide "should I bother to read this", the power is purely on the buyer's side. In other words, if you want to be taken seriously as a writer it's your responsibility to communicate effectively.
As a group, we all share an interest in keeping the quality of communication on Less Wrong high.
There's a difference between communicating effectively and catering to hypersensitive nuts.
I take it you're not a professional writer, then?
You sure as hell aren't a professional reader.
EDIT: I guess I'll clarify, just in case thomblake isn't the only who doesn't get it. I am not arguing that crafting your post, article, or comment to 'reach the widest audience possible' isn't the best thing to do. What I'm arguing against is the promotion of the mentality I've described at length in my previous post. Constantly pestering LW posters (however politely) to get them to change their wording promotes that mentality.
If all LW posters magically started using 'them' instead of 'him', and so forth, do you think I'd be saying "No, no, no, this is wrong, go back to using 'him'!" Of course not. It's the pestering about the wording I'm against, not the wording itself.
They have those?
You're right that people can be hypersensitive. It's a fool's errand trying to avoid offending such people, and if I were suggesting that you try, you'd have every right to tell me off.
But think about what you're sounding like for a moment. From what you said, you'd think it was an imposition to expect that you not call black people "niggers"! Why would you want to? Why would you want to anger a large part of your potential audience, why would you want to lose their respect and their attention?
I wouldn't call black people niggers in a sentence such as, "Niggers tend to be less well educated than whites", because that would clearly imply that I'm being racist (or a troll).
On the other hand, using 'him' instead of 'them' as a gender-neutral pronoun doesn't imply sexism. Maybe one day it will, but right now it doesn't. Anyone who is offended by this kind of wording is hypersensitive.
The word "sexism" is a distraction here - what we are discussing is what makes people uncomfortable, and the rules I suggested are addressing actual things which have a track record of making people uncomfortable.
To start with the example you give here, since you specifically state that it is mistaken: using "him" in a sentence primes the reader to assume the male, and is therefore intrinsically not gender-neutral. (I believe studies can be found to this effect, although as a mechanical engineer I do not know where to look.) Less rigorously, "him" as a default enshrines "her" as an exception, an aberration, rather than half the population of the globe. Finally, if you were to substitute race-specific terminology for sex-specific - as Douglas Hofstadter did in A Person Paper on Purity in Language - the legitimacy of taking offense would be obvious.
Similar arguments can be made with respect to hypotheticals in the second person - not everybody was working up the courage to talk to the girls in high school, even if you limit the pool to people who went to high school (I didn't). And generalizations about gender and nation (and race, and creed) are warned against because people are continually motivated to find evidence for generalizations matching their prejudices - meaning a lot of the evidence and generalizations you see are unmitigated bull.
I chose these examples to enshrine in rules because these are the easy ones, the well-established ones, the ones which we rationalists should think of instantly when someone says "biases associated with prejudice". If you don't know about them, you need to learn.
Your comment starts with, "what we are discussing is what makes people uncomfortable", but most of the rest of it talks about biases!
Fighting people's biases is a good reason to pester them about wording things differently; I've never said otherwise. But then let's make it clear that's the reason we're doing it, and cut all the chatter about offending the hypersensitive nuts out there.
As for Hostadter's essay, it doesn't work. All of his examples sound offensive to us because if they were introduced in a sentence in reality, we would have good reason to think that the person who spoke them is a racist. On the other hand, you can't rationally conclude that I'm a sexist because I wrote "him" instead of "them" two comments above. We legitimately take offense because of the implied racism, not because of the words themselves.
I thought that the extension from "implicitly excluding women" to "making women feel unwelcome" was evident. Likewise (often) from "drawing unjustified generalizations about a class of persons" to "making a class of persons uncomfortable". If it wasn't, I apologize - consider it hereby explicitly stated.
As for Hofstadter's essay, it explores a world in which linguistic genders do not exist and linguistic colors exist instead. The author isn't racist, not in any strong sense of the word - the author is just following the standard convention of their hypothetical world by using "white" both as a race-specific and a race-neutral term. It's obvious that you have a visceral distaste for calling black people white "in reality", but given that - and this is the point of the damn essay - why do you consider calling women men acceptable?
Actually, the n-word did not acquire unambiguously negative connotations until well into the 19th century. So you might run into a sentence like what you just quoted in a historical source, and the word would merely be denotative of black skin color.
This is unsurprising, as it's a straightforward derivation (probably via Spanish) from the latin word for "black", which can be found also in scientific names for species and such (for instance, the black pepper used on food is the seed of the plant Piper nigrum).
The negative connotations are purely based on use and social context, not the denotation of the word.
Why is that? And, more importantly, if you are not willing to think about the community before clicking "comment," why would the community mind if you flee?
Now, of course, "carefully monitor" is a bit relative. I would consider myself in thomblake's camp in the sense that I already try to monitor what I write. I also appreciate posts that let me know I accidently offended someone. Hopefully I am not in the minority with either of those behaviors.
You just need to know what makes you personally (not some hypothetical average woman) want to flee.
This assumes two things.
One: there being enough women available to identify the offputting behavior.
Two: there being no men capable of identifying the offputting behavior.
The first is false and the second offensive - and yes, offensive to me personally, as a black male social liberal. It's not the victim's job to fight unjust discrimination. It's everyone's.
Edit: As Eliezer Yudkowsky points out, "discrimination" is an unfairly loaded term in this context. I shouldn't have used it. To reword: offputting behavior can be recognized by more than just those it would make uncomfortable, and it is, in fact, everyone's responsibility to avoid it in their own writing and to point it out in others. (With the caveat, as thomblake and Jonathan_Graehl observed, that offensiveness should not be pointed out where it does not exist, and overzealous policing should be discouraged as well.)
But it's not about discrimination. It's about providing a non-gender-unfriendly environment. We are not assuming the speaker is guilty - of sexism, of deliberate intent, of anything. We are not on a crusade. We are just trying to avoid that sort of speech in the future.
If you've got a better word than "discrimination" to describe the problem, let me know, I want to hear it.
"obliviousness"
That assumes innoc...dagnabbit, why am I arguing about vocabulary? You're right, I shouldn't phrase it to present all gender-unfriendly speech as intentional. I'll edit in a disclaimer.
True, but Eliezer's point is well-taken. One wouldn't want to defend hypothetical people that don't even exist.
Women exist. Given that, your objection must be other than that expressed in the surface content of your words. Please make it explicit so it may be rationally discussed.
In the interests of full disclosure and not being deliberately obtuse: I suspect you may be concerned that kneejerk censorship of remarks perceived to be offensive to a given group by those ignorant of the feelings of members of that group towards said remarks (a phenomenon often pejoratively referred to as "political correctness") would inhibit the free exchange of ideas to an unacceptable degree. I propose that a reason why you might be concerned in this fashion is because "offensive" looks like a chaotic feature of the environment to you - the metaphor in this case being that of a minefield, with the pejorative political correctness being roping off the entire thing even though many topics you wish to discuss are within it.
If that's your concern, stop it. It's not a minefield. If you want to avoid accidentally giving offense, all you need is empathy and education. And if you think you have those things but you're still accidentally offending people, you're probably wrong. Now let's start getting less so.
The "hypothetical people that don't even exist" would be "people who are offended by comment X". Given how often people are mistaken about what might give offense, it's easy for some crusader to start campaigning on behalf of someone who doesn't want or need their help.
Another critique of offense once-removed comes from the comedian Bill Maher. He rails against what he calls "feigned outrage", which he takes to be mostly to be aimed at establishing one's status as a defender of the weak.
I don't think second-hand offense is all conscious signaling, but it's certainly sometimes inapt and even a little patronizing.
I've complained about racist comments in various net communities I've been a part of, and been met with the excuse "you're not even Mexican, don't be so intolerant" etc.
I don't mind leaving the "that's unfairly demeaning of X-people" argument as long as there are refutations available independent of that. But there are certain offenses which, when met with only silence, could result in every single offended person simply deciding that the community is not worth it, leaving without even a reply.
That's clearly not the case re: the pickup teapot's tempest.
When we find such crusaders, we should criticize and downvote them appropriately. We should all avoid being ones ourselves. And, on a different note, we should establish a norm in which declarations of offensiveness require justification.
None of these require that we restrict all complaints of offense to when we are personally insulted. That requirement would almost entirely eliminate complaints even in the face of endemic bad behavior, which is precisely what we do not want.
I don't think we actually have any points of disagreement here.