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Alicorn comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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Comments (823)
How on earth did he get 'he' from 'Alicorn'?
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.
"Political"?
I think it may have been a few decades ago, when the pronouns were invented, but at this point Spivak is generally used for courtesy purposes, as Alicorn said.
Breaking the flow I'll agree is a valid objection, however. I have opted to avoid neologistic pronouns for that reason, save in cases where such are requested. If someone wants to be a "xe", that's their business, I say.
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?
There is a difference between those situations. "You" is the only modern second person singular pronoun, whereas the third person singular has "he" and "she" in addition to the oft-used "they," the latter obviously being the one which doesn't fit.
Personally, I do feel it would be better to have some separation among the singular and plural second person pronouns, to avoid awkward constructions like "you all" and similar things. However, "thou" doesn't seem to be a very viable option, given its current formal, Biblical connotations.
Also, the English language is missing a possessive form of the pronoun "which" (compare "who" and "whose"), if anyone wants to work on that problem.
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.
Presumably you mean pronoun and antecedent. Clearly, subject and object need not agree in number (what you call "quantity"); such a requirement would in fact be logically impossible.
I don't consider the creation of words to fall under the auspices of grammar. That happens in English and other languages all the time, because new or different concepts frequently need to be expressed in ways that are unavailable in the current state of the language. Using new words promotes clarity, in the long term, but misusing current words does the opposite.
"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)
Language Log and Strunk and White are not playing the same game.
Strunk and White are playing "Does this look right nowadays?"
Language Log apparently thinks there are official rules determined by history.
I, of course, think the singular "they" looks just fine, nowadays.
They may be wrong on this particular matter, but it hardly follows that they "don't deserve our attention". White (of Strunk and White) is the author of Charlotte's Web, still popular after six decades, so, not quite a literary failure.
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.
So a female werewolf should actually be a wifwolf? Excellent!
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?
This is sort of where I'm at on the issue. I understand that you don't like being referred to as 'he', and I agree that you shouldn't be.
However, my perspective is that 'he' is the default, and if someone refers to me as 'he', that is the only reason. With the handle 'byrnema', I expect people to assume I'm male. Well, it's more subtle than that. I don't expect anyone to make a positive prediction that I'm male -- they shouldn't know -- but since people assign gender in their minds when they consider a person, I expect that assignment to be male.
Does it bother you, specifically, that the default assignment is male?
Or in your case, with the handle Alicorn, that it seems unusual not to update the probability that you're female? If the latter then you really must just ask this person to find out what they were thinking (if they were). Possibly the person is either a little linguistically/socially naive or they were thinking of the name 'Ali' perhaps with an Arabic origin and the 'orn' ending is unclear -- if you don't think of unicorns.
(Why should it be though that a unicorn-associated handle must be a female? Nevertheless, that's the way it is.)
No, I would estimate that to be roughly equal. I don't think females use 'man' or 'boy' to insult other females in the same way as males use 'woman' or 'girl' to insult each other.
The explanation I give suggests only that the use of 'girl' as an insult is not intended to be of the form "You are a girl. Girls are bad, therefore you are bad." It is inteded to be of the form "You have female traits. Female traits on a male are extremely low status. You have status below both other males and females".
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 am not so sure "No" is an indefensible response.
"so it doesn't even necessarily imply any gender assumption." may be a false claim. For example, if you were reading something about a generic, ostensibly nongendered "he", and then a mention of "his wife", I imagine that wouldn't be too jarring. But if instead, say, the text went on to talk about him giving birth, I imagine most people would be a little confused.
So there are some assumptions implicit in the male pronoun.
The probability that anyone would (non-jokingly) refer to me as "he" while knowing (or even strongly suspecting!) that I am in fact female is miniscule; the probability that I am female (even given locally appropriate priors) isn't; and if I were male and known to be so, the probability that I'd be referred to as "he" would approach 1. Referring to someone as "he" constitutes Bayesian evidence to one's audience that the referred-to individual is male. Be not thou casual with the Bayesian evidence.
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.