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wedrifid comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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Does anyone know how to contact this blogger so I can correct em on my gender?!
How on earth did he get 'he' from 'Alicorn'?
I've gotten 'she' from 'Eliezer Yudkowsky' no less.
Interestingly, over the course of some time monitoring blog trackbacks for Overcoming Bias, I never saw Robin Hanson mistaken for a female Robin.
So... um... I realize that this isn't really what the whole point is about at all, but I didn't feel particularly insulted to be called a girl; what does it say about your opinion of men that you're insulted to be mistaken for male? :)
(And yes, I know, it probably wouldn't be annoying if it was only happening to you personally and no one else, it's the background social assumptions that are annoying.)
I automatically assumed Yvain was female for a while, because the name looks like "Yvonne".
Sir Yvain, Knight of the Lion.
that was interesting, and there was I thinking of alicorn as male and yvain as female, shuks..
Am I mistaken for female on here because of my username often, I wonder. It does look like it has the word "gal" embedded in it. Darn orthography not reflecting pronunciation.
(The pronunciation is /ˈwɔrɨɡl̩/ in IPA, uorygl in Lojban. Also, it took me ages to figure out a way to get the word "female" within five words of the beginning of that sentence.)
It's easy for me to see your name as Warriorgal.
I believe I was agnostic on the question, for one.
Is that from someone reading it as 'Eliza'?
No clue hath I, though your suggestion seems plausible enough.
It says nothing about my opinion of men (I think) - it just signifies to me that the person so profoundly does not even care. I don't want to be talked about without being considered. This is probably more of a pet peeve for me than for others. It would still be annoying even if it never happened to anyone else.
It also signifies that you care a lot, more than is normally expected, and so more than people normally adjust their behavior to accommodate.
What did the person who mistook me for a woman not care about with respect to me? What were they not considering about me that constitutes disrespect to me? If it's not an annoying social background assumption then I genuinely don't understand what's so terrible about this.
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.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1f4/less_wrong_qa_with_eliezer_yudkowsky_ask_your/19iw
About gender pronouns, your gender, gender politics in general or something more esoteric?
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.
It seems somewhat unreasonable to get so upset over the fact that a random person on the Internet doesn't care about you. I wonder what you think about this quote from my post The Nature of Offense:
But I admit that I'm still quite confused about the proper relationship between rationality, values, and emotions. "Too sensitively" above makes some sense to me intuitively, but if someone asks "too sensitive compared to what?" then I can't really give an answer. I'd be interested in any insights you (or anyone else) might have.
I wouldn't mind if the person had chosen not to blog about me at all. But having made the choice to a) blog about my article and b) couch this entry in terms of what puzzles me, etc., not checking up on my gender places the entire thing in a sort of uncanny valley of care. The blogger basically tried to order up my content a la carte, and there is a limit to how modular my contents are.
I tend to agree with Wei Dai, and it seems to me that your analogy between the way people behave on the internet and the way people behave in person is flawed. To illustrate this:
The internet behavior in question: the blogger didn't care enough about you to find out your gender, but did care enough about what you said to comment on it, also not realizing that you would read the blog post.
Real world behavior that would be actually analogous: two men (more likely to be uncaring) are walking down a street in a large city. Two other persons pass them, walking in the other direction and speaking with one another. The two men overhear something, but it is difficult for them to be sure of the gender of the two persons. Then, one of the two men comments to the other on what they overheard. He uses whatever gender pronoun seems to him slightly more likely, even while knowing that there is a good chance he is wrong, and he doesn't care.
Note the real analogy here: the two men don't care about the two persons they pass, but are interested in what they overhear, and so say something about it. They have no reason to expect that the persons will hear what they say, so, in their view, it doesn't matter whether they are right or not.
Of course, people may well underestimate the probability that other people will read blog posts about them, so maybe they should be more careful.
The other difference when calling a 'she' a he' in real life is: If you can actually see her with your eyes and you call her a 'he' then it probably means you haven't noticed her breasts, don't consider her facial features to be differentiated and don't even have a polite, respectful appreciation for her feminine form. That makes the situation extremely embarrassing for both parties.
Too sensitive compared to how you would want to feel if you knew more about your preferences (how low worlds rank where the offense was made) and more about what the world is like, e.g. the state of mind of those making the perceived offense?
I'm pretty sure that's a function of where you hang out.
My impression is that transgendered people have a hard time getting their choices taken seriously in most social circles.
Your impression is accurate. It's frequently an issue in gatherings of trans people, let alone in mixed groups or majority-cis spaces.
The user name "Alicorn" seems gender-indeterminate to me.
Maybe, but I certainly assumed she was female the first time I heard the name, and I had never heard it before... maybe associations with Alice or Allison or whatever. Anyway it sure seems determinately female to me.
Ali can be short for several female names, but it can also be a male name.
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.
User profiles good, pictures bad.
Frankly, the "problem" here really isn't very hard to solve: just don't assume you know a person's sex unless you actually know it!
This is undoubtedly the case. However, the opposite choice is also quite popular -- choosing masculine usernames to avoid being harassed for being female.
I assume that is without knowing that the word "alicorn" is related to unicorns? Or are you not confident enough in females liking unicorns much more so than males to be able to give a probability estimate?
When I once wasn't sure about Alicorn's gender, I googled "alicorn", saw alicorn was a word related to unicorns and assigned a 95% probability then that Alicorn was female, which was confirmed by seeing someone refer to her as she on here.
That's a 95% female probability, even accounting for the fact that LW is mostly male? 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.
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.
"Alicorn" sounds much more feminine than either "Unicorn" or "Aliborn".
I sold my unicorn when I realized why the guys would never believe my locker-room stories of sexual conquest.
Yup-- didn't know "alicorn" was a word.
Alicorn ends with a consonant. This doesn't guarantee that it will be seen as male, but I think it increases the odds.
How in the earth did you get 'he' from 'Sharon'?
I have no idea how the Wedrifid from nearly three years ago selected 'he'. It doesn't seem the kind of detail one would encode indefinitely in long term memory.
The last prominent world leader of that name was male, I believe.
You mean Ariel Sharon? That is his last name (which he actually chose himself. He was born Ariel Scheinermann, then he changed it to Sharon, probably because Scheinermann sounded too much German).
In fairness, his given name Ariel sound femmine to me, thanks to a certain cartoon character, but according to Hebrew grammar it's actually a male name and it literally means 'Lion of God'. Blame ignorant Disney.
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.)
"Last names don't encode gender" -- Claude Shannon
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.
I don't know how it keeps happening. How did you get "he" from the blog post? (Or is it indicated somewhere else?)
It (she) was a girl it is highly unlikely that (she) would have made the mistake. Apart from defaulting to writing 'she', she would have blogged since 2003 and would have had her own identity confused more than once.
But mostly I fell back on my prior for people who write blogs on these topics:
This prior screens off my more general prior for the sex of bloggers in general. Beyond that I have a prior for the types of signalling that I expect to find humans engaging in based on their respective reproductive motivations.
At what odds would you bet against me if I was betting that the blogger in question was male?
Oh, the blogger is probably male. But from eir perspective, so was I: I blogged about "refining the art of human rationality" and ey could have been ever-so-responsibly screening off priors and making eir best guess and ey was wrong and I am pissed off. So, I decline to do the same thing.
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.
The singular they has a long and illustrious history. I know I've said it four or five times in the recent comments, but that's what I'd recommend.
Really? I use 'they' quire frequenly but feel bad every time. I'll stop feeling bad now. Thanks. ;)
Glad to be of service!
I'm sorry you find "ey" irritating; I promise not to refer to you a la Spivak. And I'm glad you're good at detecting gender from writing style. And someday you may piss someone off very badly.
It doesn't appear to have occurred to you that some people find Spivak pronouns very annoying. They annoy me immensely because it feels like someone is deliberately obstructing my reading in an uncomfortable way to make some kind of political point almost entirely unrelated to the context of the post itself. I usually just stop reading and go elsewhere to calm down.
I promise not to refer to you with Spivak pronouns either.
"I don't know what gender the person I'm talking about is and wouldn't care to get it wrong" is not a political point, though.
It's not me being referred to with them that bothers me, it is them being used at all. I find it difficult and uncomfortable to read, like trying to read 1337 5p34k, and it breaks my reading flow in an unpleasant way. It's like bad grammar or spelling but with the additional knowledge that someone is doing it deliberately for reasons that I consider political.
Thanks for the detailed description of why you find invented pronouns annoying.
I'm pretty flexible about new words, so I react to invented pronouns as a minor novelty.
I don't know what people who use invented pronouns have in mind-- they could be intending to tweak people, or they could be more like me and generalizing from one example.
I trained myself to use Spivak pronouns in less than a month. As far as lingual/grammatical conventions go, they flow very naturally. Singular "they" does not, because a plural verb does not belong with a singular subject. I find that much more annoying.
Dost thou also find the use of "singular you" annoying?
You're not the only person I know to make this claim, but I will admit to never having understood it.
That is, I can understand objecting to "If my neighbor visits I'll give them a cookie" because it violates the English grammatical convention that the subject and object must match in quantity -- singular "neighbor" doesn't go with plural "them." I don't have a problem with that, myself, but I accept that some people do.
And I can understand endorsing "If my neighbor visits I'll give em a cookie" despite it violating the English grammatical convention that "em" isn't a pronoun. I don't have a problem with that either.
But doing both at once seems unmotivated. If I'm willing to ignore English grammatical conventions enough to make up new pronouns altogether, I don't see on what grounds I can object to someone else ignoring subject/object matching rules.
Mostly, when people say this sort of thing I understand it to be an aesthetic judgment, on a par with not liking the color blue. Which is fine, as long as they aren't too obnoxious about trying to impose their aesthetic judgments on me.
"The pronoun form 'they' is anaphorically linked in the discourse to 'this person'. Such use of forms of they with singular antecedents is attested in English over hundreds of years, in writers as significant as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, and Wilde. The people (like the perennially clueless Strunk and White) who assert that such usage is "wrong" simply haven't done their literary homework and don't deserve our attention." (Language Log)
(Examples)
Singular they may be less distracting than Spivak, much as I like the latter.
I use singular "they" sometimes, although I find it makes many sentences awkward, especially if I'm also talking about some plural items or persons.
Fair enough - I only mentioned it because I happened to have a period where I avoided singular-they because I thought it was forbidden. I'll trust your judgement on style.
It is a reasonable default assumption, not adjusted with negative effect of a mistake in mind.
But you don't need to invoke a default assumption here - the singular "they" is a perfectly well-established alternative.
As a rule of thumb, it's annoying to be talked about without being considered.
People at this end of the internet tend to have 'male' as the default gender for everyone.
Yes. It's very annoying.
On average, less annoying than the alternatives.
There are few good reasons to object to the singular they - the usual ones make less sense than objecting to the word "giraffe". Were I writing a style guide for LessWrong...
I find the opposition to singular they baffling -- I don't know who started it, but whoever they are, they have a funny sense of what sounds awkward.
How do you even gauge this? Do you know how annoyed I am on some absolute scale so you can make such a comparison?
Based on what I think are reasonable assumptions: that it is at least as annoying for a male to be referred to as 'she' as vice-versa, that there are many more males than females posting at lesswrong, that the proportion of gender-indeterminate usernames is roughly equal between men and women.
Historically, 'he' has been more commonly used than 'she' when referring to gender indeterminate individuals in English so it doesn't even necessarily imply any gender assumption.
Perhaps interestingly, J.S. Mill tried to argue that "Man" is historically gender-neutral, and so women already have the right to vote in England, since the law refers to "man". He did not win that battle.
My understanding is that "man" is historically gender neutral. Old English used wer (wereman) for adult males and wif (wifman) for adult females. Wif is etymologically related to wife and eventually changed into woman (from wimman). Wer got dropped and all we have left of it is "werewolf".
The use of "man" to refer to only adult males is relatively late, like 1000 A.C.E. -ish.
If you are talking about a hypothetical or gender-unknown person, using "he" will make it much more likely that people will imagine this person as male. How it's historically been used, and even how it's conventionally used now, are irrelevant if we're talking about its actual cognitive effects.
(For what it's worth, I think this is the best exposition of sexist language I've read. It's fascinating (yet not all that surprising) how some commonplace linguistic patterns become immediately and intuitively appalling to most people if they are simply applied to a different personal attribute.)
(Probably somewhat more so given that referring to each other as 'girls' is a common form of insult among males given that it asserts traits that while rewarded in females are easy targets of abuse in males.)
You don't think females are socially punished for exhibiting "male" traits, or you think it's comparatively insignificant?
If nothing else, priming would put the lie to that.
Probably. But it gets more annoying the more it happens. I have become more annoyed every time it's happened to me. And it happens more to women than it does to men. So this assumption loses validity over time for any given person. And it is just not that hard to avoid guessing!
AAAAAAAAAAAUGH
Ahem. I mean:
No.
Assuming history to be unswayed by politics and the meaning of common words to be determined by their usage wouldn't this be "Yes. But I vehemently object and anyone using pronouns in this way should be punished with unimaginable hoards of dust specks and furthermore be socially disapproved of"?
I actually think 'AAAAAAAAAAAUGH' fits better! :)
I think I knew YOU were female... However, I apparently mis-remembered this article as being by Eliezer, and had that in mind when I made my earlier comment about gender links. Maybe because the perspective it takes feels more like the perspectives of my male friends than of my female friends.
According to the GenderAnalyzer, that blog post was written by a man. I tested your original post as well and it was correctly guessed as being written by a woman.
I tried it on some other pages and if anything the thing is underconfident-- it's right more often than it supposes.
[/me googles "GenderAnalyzer" and checks own blog.]
Woo-hoo! (I'm male, but it seems to me a bad thing for that to be obvious from my writing.)
It's probably not fair to the tool to use it on a community blog, but:
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.)
Darn - claims my blog is 63% woman. Not sure how to take that!
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.
Just clicked through to the following screen after selecting "no - it didn't get it right" to see the resulting poll:
Yes - 63% No - 32% Don't know - 5%
This is based on all the estimates that people have voted on. So it's not strange if it's only getting 63 - 70% correct; it's giving many estimates which are less certain than this.
What was the percentage? The tests I've done have range from 31% to 73% for the correct answer.
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.
I'm sorry - I meant the percentage for the blog post and for Alicorn's post.
66% for the blog post, 56% for Alicorn's original post. For this comment : http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ss/babies_and_bunnies_a_caution_about_evopsych/1ofp , it gave 70% female, which is reasonable: it's much more obvious than in the original post (apart from the fact that she says so explicitly which I assume the thing doesn't know.)
My livejournal gets 58% female; my synopsis of my webcomic gets 81% female; and my serial fiction, which I coauthor with another woman, gets 75% female.