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Jack comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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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!
Or wyfwulf... or something. There was no standardized spelling.
Also, I think woman used to mean wife, in the same way it is occasionally used in casual (grrr) American dialect English today. There might be a different word for an unmarried female (and an unmarried female wolf-person!).
Casual?
With the amount of attention causality gets around here, I have to ask.
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.)
I'd never heard of the word 'alicorn' until I started reading lesswrong and I'm comfortable saying that I am not linguistically naive. It didn't occur to me that it was an actual word until Alicorn posted in a thread that it should be obvious she is female with that user name. Consider that for the same reasons a unicorn-associated handle is associated with being female it might not be an effective handle to signal to males that one is female.
It is probably wise if one is particularly offended by incorrect gender assumptions to pick a username that clearly signals ones gender to the majority of ones audience.
I was not, when I started using this handle, aware of how non-present in popular vocabulary the word "alicorn" is. I thought it was a pretty girly username - maybe not up there with, I dunno, "PinkFlowerPrincess", but perhaps on a par with "Cerise" (a shade of pink), or something subtler like "Purl" (a knitting stitch, also hinting at "Pearl"). It doesn't and was never meant to declare my gender, but I always thought it suggested it. If nothing else, I think "Allison" is a more likely sound-alike than "Ali"-plus-unidentified-suffix, because that actually happened.
It bothers me that there is a default assignment. If one were going to make a brand new default in a situation where none existed, it's my impression that there would be a better (if still very weak) case for making it female instead, but I don't think it's appropriate to make such assumptions.
Thanks for the not-particularly-annoyed-by-"he" datum - but I worry that you imply Alicorn should not be annoyed. Even if this is not your intent, I think it's a good idea to support the right to have a berserk button.
I don't, and here's why: having a negative emotional response to something kills rationality dead. It causes people to forget their well-thought out goals and engage in compulsive, stereotyped behaviors attached to the specific emotion involved, whether it's going off to sulk in a corner, flaming, plotting revenge, or loudly lecturing everyone on proper behavior... ALL of which are unlikely to support rational goals, outside the evolutionary environment that drove the development of those emotions.
(And let's not even get started on motivated reasoning... which, AFAICT, is motivated almost exclusively to avoid negative emotions rather than to obtain positive ones.)
Anyway, if you allow yourself to have a "berserk button" that hijacks your rationality on a regular basis, (and aren't doing anything about it), you're only giving lip service to rationality. Okay, modify that slightly: maybe you don't know HOW to get rid of or work around your button. But you sure as heck shouldn't be arguing for a right to keep it!
(I expect that objections to this comment will largely focus on individual boo lights that people will put forth in support of the idea that some things should be allowed to set off "berserk buttons". But I hope that those people won't bother, unless they can explain why their particular boo light requires them to have a compulsive, fixated response that's faster than their conscious minds can consider the situation and evaluate their options. And I also hope they'll consider why they feel the need to use boo lights to elevate their failings as a rationalist to the status of a moral victory! Lacking a compulsive emotional response to a boo light doesn't alter one's considered outlook or goals, only one's immediate or compulsive reactions.)
It is hard to extract that implication given:
I hope that my comment wouldn't be interpreted that way -- I support how Alicorn feels about the issue even if I don't feel the same way. (I might anyway if my handle name was Alicorn -- or Cerise.)
However, I've been told by close friends that the most annoying trait about me is that I'm a "spin doctor" -- that I think that problems can be 'fixed' just by framing them differently.
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".
It looked like you were using the fact that males insult each other by insinuating that they have female traits to back up the hypothesis that it is more insulting for a male to be referred to with the wrong pronoun. If you think that the reverse scenario is about equal, why would this make it more insulting, rather than just as insulting?
For the same reason that I would take offence at being called a 'bastard' even though I actually couldn't care less that my parents happened to be married at the time of my conception.
If something is commonly used as an insult then that can be expected to cause offence independently of any factual content. So my claim is:
It's a typical insult. Insults bad. That's all.
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.
"Doesn't even necessarily" is different from "appropriate in every possible situation including when the gender is not indeterminate". Matthew's claim was:
If you think that is incorrect, you're just wrong. If you disapprove and are distressed by that historical fact then that is a legitimate position of the kind that can be expressed by vocalized but non verbal expressions of distress.
I take the "doesn't even necessarily apply [..]" to be equivalent to the claim that use of the male pronoun is never in itself sufficient to establish some assumption with respect to gender or sex, which claim I disagree with; if the pronoun would be surprising in some circumstances, for reasons of sex or gender, then it carries those connotations everywhere.
Eh... that's not "necessarily" right. The historical usage of "he" to refer to gender indeterminate individuals doesn't imply that there isn't a necessary (to the extent that that term is meaningful in discussions of this sort) gender assumption in modern usage. In fact, that's the problem - the "indeterminate" individual is by default male (white, middle class, straight, cisgendered, whatevs).
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.
That is evidence in favor of that usage of pronouns being undesirable for efficient communication of evidence. It doesn't comment particularly on whether or not that particular usage has been traditionally accepted.
I'm not trying to argue with your objection to that kind of usage. I certainly don't consider using 'he' by default any better than using 'she' by default. I think "AAAAAAAAAAUGH" is a valid response. It is just ironically more valid than 'No'.