While I generally get pissed off when people find my frustration entertaining, I'm not sure that's the correct inference here. I can be amused by my friends frustration in a way that, far from diminishing my sympathy for them, is actually borne of it. This is part of what amuses us about the Bill Hicks of this world.

Perhaps you should at least stop exhibiting it so amusingly. Lately it's sounded like something out of Peanuts.

I would categorize it as 10 percent humor, 60 percent temporary interest in the vague threat implied by the "don't do this... or else" definition and why that context was appropriate when applied to the topic of contradiction, and 30 percent etymological interest, as I have "on pain of death" as the most-associated thought when hearing the phrase (Google agrees, with that as the top suggestion to complete "on pain of"), and was curious as to how the permutation may have originated.

ETA: I disagree with the sentiment that contradiction is a negative, undesirable, or potentially painful event; instead, I view it as an opportunity to update maps, assuming that the contradiction is supported by the weight of the evidence.

that was interesting, and there was I thinking of alicorn as male and yvain as female, shuks..

Do you remember whoever-it-was that was talking about not having the kind of attachment to sexual identity that other people claimed? (She - I believe it was she - mentioned that she would be more likely to report but not as emotionally traumatized by rape.)

I think this is an inverse of this. Some people - me, for example - are unperturbed by being assigned the wrong gender. Not everyone.

About me.

In person, I'm fairly obviously girl-shaped. No one has ever made this mistake when interacting with me in person, and I don't have to do Obvious Girl Things™ to get that accuracy - don't have to swish around in crinoline, don't have to conveniently quote third parties who refer to me as "she", don't have to carry my purse everywhere I go, or even say my name (which is a girls' name). People don't assume based on where I am or what I'm doing or how surprising it would be for me to be a girl before they figure out that I am one anyway and pronoun me accordingly.

And - in person, when people can't tell what gender someone is, they don't guess, unless they feel able to rely on visual cues or maybe being married to someone of a known gender (and when they are wrong they are mortified). People will bend over backwards to avoid using the wrong pronoun for someone who's in the room with them. They'll ask third parties or construct their sentences to avoid making the assumption or learn the person's name to get a clue. It's just not socially acceptable to get it wrong.

Online, people feel free to guess, and on the geeky parts of the Internet I frequent this is most likely to affect women negatively. (I also frequent various anti-prejudice parts of the Internet, but there a) I generally lurk and b) under the circumstances they take the trouble to be careful about that sort of thing!)

Now, I recognize this disparity is because it's considered insulting to say that someone looks like the opposite gender, and not so with writing like the opposite gender... except that when people talk about third parties one of them knows in person and the other doesn't, the one who doesn't know doesn't casually hurl pronoun caution to the wind even though someone is right there to correct them should they be wrong without any implications about anyone's looks having been made. When there is a mechanism to find out a real person's gender, it gets taken advantage of. With real people, you don't guess, you find out, and if you're wrong, that's not okay.

Getting my gender wrong when it would have been pretty easy to get it right (for crying out loud, ask me! Or someone else! Or do the most cursory of searches for "alicorn gender" on this very site - it's in the second result!) signifies that I am not a "real person" in the above sense. It's okay to guess. It doesn't matter if you get it wrong. He won't care, and if she does, it's about eir politics or something dismissible like that, not about whether you took four seconds to fact-check. Not about identity, or consideration, or the fact that this happens about once a week and the blogger, unlike most people who make the mistake, doesn't even have a way for me to correct em.

This is a cultural norm kind of thing, but in the cultural norms where Alicorn chose her name, I think it really was intended to be a feminine username. I think women do have a tendency to try and choose somewhat feminine usernames, because otherwise a lot of the time on the internet they will be mistaken for men which gets annoying quickly.

I think something that would allow us to definitely solve this problem is profile pictures (which don't have to be your actual picture) or user profiles.

That's 95% confidence that the username would be picked by a female. Not at all the same thing as a 95% confidence that a person who likes unicorns is female. You are ignoring the fact that picking such a username is a powerful signal (to people who know what it means). I think unicorns are kind of cool but that doesn't mean I would pick a username that references unicorns.

You're amazingly confident that female persons like unicorns much more, considering that unicorns have a huge sharp pointy phallic weapon sticking out of their foreheads.

I sold my unicorn when I realized why the guys would never believe my locker-room stories of sexual conquest.

Shakespeare's "Ariel" (from the Tempest) is also often depicted as a female character (though originally referred to as a male character). This graph does seem to imply however that its popularity as a female name may have been indeed influenced by Disney.

I forgot that Ariel sounds female, too. I don't know if that undermines or reinforces my point!

BTW, that Sharon was pronounced with a stress on the second syllable, whereas the feminine first name has a stress on the first syllable. (Similarly, if I read that someone's first name is Andrea I can't tell whether they are male or female unless I know where they come from, but if I hear it pronounced I can.)

If one fails to invoke System 2 processing and reflect that world leaders are rarely known by their first names (assuming one even realizes that that example is where the 'Sharon may be male' thought is coming from), then they certainly do.

Meanwhile I find 'ey' just irritating so my approach is to sometimes just avoid pronouns while other times I randomly generate pronouns based on my prediction, biased towards 0.5. I don't recall being dramatically mistaken thus far and seem to have a reasonably good track record for guessing right based on writing style. At least, that is, in cases where I get later confirmation.

Singular they may be less distracting than Spivak, much as I like the latter.

On average, less annoying than the alternatives.

It's probably not fair to the tool to use it on a community blog, but:

lesswrong.com is probably written by a male somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is academic and happy most of the time.

The age result is interesting.

(This is a different web site that uses the same underlying service. It is based on the most recent posts, so the result will likely change over time.)

These percentages are supposedly Bayesian estimates, so it basically just means that it isn't easy to tell one way or another but the thing was more inclined to take it as female. If the thing is well calibrated it would be right 63% of the time and wrong 37% of the time with this estimate. But at least for my tests it was right even more often-- it seems other people had different experiences.

I wasn't referring to the total percentage but to ranges: for example when it estimated from 65-75%, it seemed to be wrong 1 in 4 to 1 in 6 times instead of 1 in 3 to 1 in 4. But maybe my sample was still too small.