Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych

52 Post author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 01:53AM

Daniel Dennett has advanced the opinion that the evolutionary purpose of the cuteness response in humans is to make us respond positively to babies.  This does seem plausible.  Babies are pretty cute, after all.  It's a tempting explanation.

Here is one of the cutest baby pictures I found on a Google search.

And this is a bunny.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the bunny is about 75,119 times cuter than the baby.

Now, bunnies are not evolutionarily important for humans to like and want to nurture.  In fact, bunnies are edible.  By rights, my evolutionary response to the bunny should be "mmm, needs a sprig of rosemary and thirty minutes on a spit".  But instead, that bunny - and not the baby or any other baby I've seen - strikes the epicenter of my cuteness response, and being more baby-like along any dimension would not improve the bunny.  It would not look better bald.  It would not be improved with little round humanlike ears.  It would not be more precious with thumbs, easier to love if it had no tail, more adorable if it were enlarged to weigh about seven pounds.

If "awwww" is a response designed to make me love human babies and everything else that makes me go "awwww" is a mere side effect of that engineered reaction, it is drastically misaimed.  Other responses for which we have similar evolutionary psychology explanations don't seem badly targeted in this way.  If they miss their supposed objects at all, at least it's not in most people.  (Furries, for instance, exist, but they're not a common variation on human sexual interest - the most generally applicable superstimuli for sexiness look like at-least-superficially healthy, mature humans with prominent human sexual characteristics.)  We've invested enough energy into transforming our food landscape that we can happily eat virtual poison, but that's a departure from the ancestral environment - bunnies?  All natural, every whisker.1

It is embarrassingly easy to come up with evolutionary psychology stories to explain little segments of data and have it sound good to a surface understanding of how evolution works.  Why are babies cute?  They have to be, so we'll take care of them.  And then someone with a slightly better cause and effect understanding turns it right-side-up, as Dennett has, and then it sounds really clever.  You can have this entire conversation without mentioning bunnies (or kittens or jerboas or any other adorable thing).  But by excluding those items from a discussion that is, ostensibly, about cuteness, you do not have a hypothesis that actually fits all of the data - only the data that seems relevant to the answer that presents itself immediately.

Evo-psych explanations are tempting even when they're cheaply wrong, because the knowledge you need to construct ones that sound good to the educated is itself not cheap at all. You have to know lots of stuff about what "motivates" evolutionary changes, reject group selection, understand that the brain is just an organ, dispel the illusion of little XML tags attached to objects in the world calling them "cute" or "pretty" or anything else - but you also have to account for a decent proportion of the facts to not be steering completely left of reality.

Humans are frickin' complicated beasties.  It's a hard, hard job to model us in a way that says anything useful without contradicting information we have about ourselves.  But that's no excuse for abandoning the task.  What causes the cuteness response?  Why is that bunny so outrageously adorable?  Why are babies, well, pretty cute?  I don't know - but I'm pretty sure it's not the cheap reason, because evolution doesn't want me to nurture bunnies.  Inasmuch as it wants me to react to bunnies, it wants me to eat them, or at least be motivated to keep them away from my salad fixings.

 

1It is possible that the bunny depicted is a domestic specimen, but it doesn't look like it to me.  In any event, I chose it for being a really great example; there are many decidedly wild animals that are also cuter than cute human babies.

Comments (823)

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 09 April 2015 09:17:52AM 0 points [-]

An article with a possible explanation of this:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-we-melt-at-puppy-pictures-1428504897

Comment author: ikrase 09 January 2013 10:35:43PM 2 points [-]

Yeah, that's really odd. Personally I have no awwwww response to human babies - in fact they actually disgust me a little - but I do have an awwwww response to human children and a sometimes-sexualized awwww response to some adult humans. In all cases my awwwww response is opposed to (although it can coexist with) an awe response.

It was mentioned that people are socialized to find bunnies cute, but I think that looking at gender differences in the same culture might reveal something since I don't think men are socialized that strongly.

Comment author: alex_zag_al 11 December 2012 06:39:30PM *  0 points [-]

Having a pet is a reliable signal that you'd take care of children, maybe?

People with a preference for pet owners end up with children with a caring parent, creating selection for attraction to pet owners.

Then, once there's attraction to pet owners, there's sexual selection for pet ownership.

So, if finding animals cute makes you more likely to be a pet owner, it gets selected for.

Predictions:

  • We find specifically the animals that make good pets to be cute. Animals that are violent or hard to access we find less cute.
  • Pet owners that take good care of their pets are more attractive than non pet owners, and bad pet owners.
  • Whichever sex is made more attractive by being a loving pet owner (I'd guess males) is also the sex that finds animals to be cuter.
Comment author: TuviaDulin 25 October 2012 08:47:25AM 2 points [-]

This may not be the best place to ask, but is Evolutionary Psychology actually falsifiable?

Comment author: ikrase 09 January 2013 10:19:35PM 1 point [-]

Probably depends on what you mean. It does make predictions, but it is very difficult to get away from what is already known.

Comment author: alttaab 24 October 2012 01:26:13AM 0 points [-]

It's really important to remember that there isn't an actual intelligence behind evolution. Finding your progeny cute and vulnerable is a huge evolutionary advantage. So specific traits are chosen for us to identify as 'young and vulnerable' markers. It makes sense that it's just a coincidence/side-effect that other young mammals have those same traits and we find them cute. Especially if those traits are exaggerated beyond what would be considered what is normal or healthy. (I mean look at those ungodly large dark eyes on that cute wittle wabbit - those would look freakish on a baby.)

I'll try to find it and post later but I remember reading this study about body proportions found attractive in woman. The study found that woman of a certain hip-to-waist ratio were the ideal, however when the woman's hip-to-waist ratio was skewed towards the ideal but even further to a point of being probably reproductively unhealthy men still found them attractive.

The evolutionary process even designs unideal physical traits. Such as eating, breathing, and communicating all through the same tube - or having our genitals right next-door to our waste disposal.

The lesson is to remember: evolution's only "goal" is to have you make as many babies as possible and to do as best you can to help them reach reproductive age and rinse and repeat. There's no intelligence behind it, and any seemingly elegant designs have literally millions of years of failures behind them.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 04:46:57AM 1 point [-]

It is possible that the bunny depicted is a domestic specimen, but it doesn't look like it to me.

Definitely not domestic. That's a wild cottontail of some kind.

In any event, I chose it for being a really great example; there are many decidedly wild animals that are also cuter than cute human babies.

I wonder what the distribution of cuteness-responsiveness as a trait looks like. I notice that some people just don't get much from pictures like that bunny, but they'll react much more "as expected" to the baby. Speaking personally, I routinely coo over moths, spiders and bees.

Comment author: Nornagest 23 October 2012 05:00:55AM *  0 points [-]

I wonder what the distribution of cuteness-responsiveness as a trait looks like. I notice that some people just don't get much from pictures like that bunny, but they'll react much more "as expected" to the baby.

Interesting question. I've met people that straight-up didn't get the cutes from human babies but did respond to baby animals, though, and I can't think of any for whom the reverse is true; n=1, but this is still somewhat surprising to me.

I can think of some sketchy evopsych reasons why this might be true without scrubbing the infantilism hypothesis -- perhaps a lot of the human cuteness response got wired in at an evolutionary stage when proto-human infants had fur. But I can also think of a number of countervailing points; baby chimpanzees are cute, for example, but there are cuter animals. Perhaps a simpler explanation is that certain animals serve purely by happenstance as superstimuli for the human cute response, but as a species we're sufficiently willing to kill and eat cute things that this didn't have any significant survival effects. This requires that there be things other than the cuteness response protecting human infants, but that seems obviously true to me.

(I maintain, however, that jumping spiders are objectively adorable.)

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 08:07:52PM 0 points [-]

Thinking about the sheer number of animals in different phyles who provide dedicated parental care for at least some portion of the offspring's life, it seems to me like the "cute response protects baby" explanation may be putting the cart before the horse, so to speak. There are poison dart frogs who make damn devoted daddies (housing their tadpoles in little pools of water that form in bromeliad leaves, maintaining the condition of the water, and begging for passing females to lay an unfertilized egg so baby can eat it); there are primates who kick the young out fairly early; octopus mothers stop eating altogether (even though they're still capable of it physiologically) and just guard their eggs until they die. Sure, if we want to squee over a helpless baby it WOULD probably improve that baby's survival chances, but I rather suspect that devoted infant care is not a good single-factor explanation here.

(I maintain, however, that jumping spiders are objectively adorable.)

Moths too!

Comment author: Nornagest 23 October 2012 08:58:20PM *  1 point [-]

Well, there are clearly behavioral traits other than the cute response that go into protecting human infants; if phenotypical cuteness was the only factor here, for example, there'd be little incentive to preferentially protect your own children. Parents that I've talked to have on occasion described their own kids as apocalyptically cute relative to pretty much anything else, but I'm pretty sure there are things other than phenotype involved here.

I don't think the evidence for a pedomorphic interpretation of cuteness is quite conclusive, but there do seem to be a serious dearth of competing hypotheses, and the evidence is certainly suggestive: the combination of small body size, a rounded body and head of large size relative to limbs, big eyes, soft features, playful behavior etc. all seem like they add up to a pretty good match. It also seems to be a culturally universal phenomenon, and those are quite rare.

Alicorn's point about cuteness giving us an unusual number of false positives relative to (say) sexiness is well taken, but I'm not sure how strong it actually is; superstimuli for sexiness that don't match real human phenotypes are definitely out there. Sexual selection's also under intense pressure relative to most other evolutionary cues, which might imply a need for our instincts in that area to be more accurate, although it seems (to my non-biologist self) like childrearing should be in the same ballpark.

Comment author: MixedNuts 24 October 2012 11:29:32PM 0 points [-]

Superstimuli for sexiness are like superstimuli for taste: take the reproductively best things in the ancestral environment, and exaggerate their characteristics outside of what was found there. For example, prominent sexual characteristics are sexy; Escher girls made mostly of breasts and buttocks are therefore sexier. Watanuki is such an example; the gangliness and androgyny are are but possible, the legs and facial structure are exaggerated but not that far from realistic equivalents.

Also, are many people sincerely attracted to Jessica Rabbit? It seems to me like she only represents sexiness, like we immediately understand a stick figure in a skirt to mean "woman".

Comment author: Epiphany 23 October 2012 01:43:02AM *  0 points [-]

Different explanation from what I saw in the comments:

Maybe it isn't that cuteness causes us to care for children, but that it stops us from destroying all other life in the vicinity. Considering that a lot of males have an aggressive instinct (testosterone is connected with violent behaviors in both genders, but males are more likely to have high levels), what would uncivilized people with no sense of cuteness do to animal populations? I have practically no aggressive instincts myself, being female and having the stereotypically low testosterone, but here's how I think that might go:

They might think it's a good idea to practice hunting skills by killing everything in sight.

When they're angry would they shoot the first thing they see even if it's a baby deer? In contrast, if they go out into the forest to shoot something in anger a few times and encounter cute baby deer, which calms them down and makes them feel bad for wanting to shoot them, this may condition them not to develop a habit of shooting things when angry.

When a cave person with no cuteness instinct feels ambitious, do they set out to kill everything they see for a week as a way of showing dominance over the jungle?

If a non-cute experiencing cave person sees a family of bears, do they launch their spear at the mother, not caring whether all of the cubs die or do they feel concern about orphaning cubs and wait to find a lone male? This is very important because if the cave person allows the first scenario, their hunting practices will reduce the edible bear population substantially. In the second, the cave person has minimized their impact. (Few male bears are can impregnate many females, meaning that the bears can reproduce at a similar pace even after losing most of them, while fewer female bears will certainly mean less reproductive capacity for the bears.)

When a cave man meets a cave woman he finds sexy, does he catch every animal he can find to show her how good he is at catching animals? Do the other men kill even more in order to compete? If she has an instinctive respect for life, then lots of dead bunnies and baby deer will upset her. This may encourage them to channel their urges to compete for her into a "quality over quantity" strategy by finding one really good trophy instead.

I might question here whether cuteness was necessary if they had empathy. However, empathy is triggered for things like verbal explanations, tears and certain facial expressions - behaviors that animals are very disadvantaged at accomplishing. Also, these would be difficult to detect from the distance at which you'd start stalking them, and they would be very brief, as they'd start running as soon as they notice you, so after that, all you'd see was the back of them. Also, cuteness works even after the animal is dead - it can trigger "Oh no! I killed something cute!" remorse when an empathetic equivalent might not be triggered because expressiveness isn't a likely characteristic of an inanimate face.

This might also explain why babies are less cute - we spend enough time close up to them to notice their facial expressions and empathize with them, and they have various advantages in being able to trigger specific empathetic reactions, so since empathy is frequently triggered, cuteness is less important.

Though, a much simpler explanation is also possible: Maybe your notions about how common it is for humans to find animals cuter than babies is based on a biased sample. I bit, just now, not even thinking about it, because I agreed with your idea that most people find animals cuter but then it dawned on me: maybe it's not that common for people to find babies less cute than animals. There could be some other reason our cuteness websites seem to focus on animals - parents don't like putting up pictures of babies for security reasons, they're concerned they'll look like braggarts, and on a website dominated by animals they don't want to upload pictures of a child because it makes the dehumanizing implication that their baby is just an amusing little animal.

Also, it could have to do with the supply and demand of cute little animals to cute human babies. There are 300 million Americans and probably only a few million of them are babies. To contrast, Americans probably have millions of cats and dogs and gerbils, etc plus there must be many times more bunnies and squirrels and such that they might see in their lawns than there are human babies. Also, animals are cute for longer - many of them are cute as adults - whereas cute babies are, by definition, only cute while they're babies.

And we can add goofy words to animal pictures without worrying about it humiliating them, or take dozens of videos of them jumping into boxes (like with Maru cat, my personal favorite) without anyone worrying about it damaging their future reputations or near-term mental health. That we can take more pictures of animals and do more things with them may increase the ratio of animal pictures to baby pictures by quite a bit.

Come to think of it, how often do you see cute animals in real life vs. how often do you see cute babies? I work in front of a window that looks out into a garden. I see cute birds and squirrels all day. I probably see at least a hundred times as many cute animals as babies in my daily life. Multiply this by a lot because I think bumblebees are cute. When I see people carrying their babies around at the supermarket, I might smile at them, but I don't stare at them the way I might watch a cute birdie because that's rude. I spend a lot less time appreciating cute babies than animals for this reason.

If my mind fills with images of cute animals and leaves me at a loss when coming up with cute baby images when I think about whether animals or babies are cuter, maybe that's why.

Comment author: Bugmaster 23 October 2012 02:15:52AM 0 points [-]

These are all interesting ideas, but are they true ? That is, is there any evidence to support any of them ?

Comment author: Epiphany 23 October 2012 03:18:37AM *  0 points [-]

Well sure. Observing humans, I think there is plenty of evidence that we do a lot of those things.

Teenage boys spend how many hours of their lives poaching monsters in video games? Sure, some games are designed for them to grind, but they find this to be recreational why? Maybe they really would use all the animals as target practice if there weren't some type of instinct to stop them.

We've all seen people taking out anger on others, or on the dog. No reason to think they wouldn't do that to a forest full of animals.

We've seen humans do class signaling - a lot of poor people will spend $100 on shoes to make themselves look richer. Some people get stuck in the "keeping up with the Jones's" cycle, spending ever more to look just as good. If killing animals was a way of class signaling for primitive people, there's no reason to think that they wouldn't be competitive about it like modern humans can be.

We know that humans sometimes hunt animals to extinction, so it's not implausible to suggest that humans without cuteness might have wreaked havoc on ecosystems.

As for whether specifically cave people / tribes would do any of these things if specifically their instinct for cuteness were removed and whether they'd end up with such a dearth of animals as to interfere with their survival is obviously not testable, but the things I suggested are plausible based on the way that people behave.

These things are not common knowledge?

Comment author: Bugmaster 23 October 2012 03:31:51AM 0 points [-]

Again, you have a hypothesis that sounds very plausible, but because it does sound so plausible, I'm instantly suspicious of it. Plausible things often turn out to be false.

Is there any quantitative test you can propose, or an experiment you could run, that would give you a number between 0 and 1, representing the probability of your hypothesis being true ? If the answer is "yes", then perhaps someone had already done the research ? If the answer is "no", then IMO it's not thinking about.

Comment author: zslastman 22 October 2012 05:27:15PM 1 point [-]

Why are we all assuming that finding animals cute represents an evolved trait and isn't, for instance, a freak consequence of all the books and cartoons we're exposed to which anthropomorphize animals? (No points for guessing the other candidate for that etiology).

Comment author: TimS 22 October 2012 05:58:13PM 0 points [-]

One argument for "evolved trait" is cross-cultural consistency. Thus, if just about every culture (past or present) finds rabbits cute, that's some evidence that there's something in our inherent neurological processes that applies the label / emotional reaction "cute" to things that look like rabbits.

Comment author: zslastman 23 October 2012 10:22:35AM -1 points [-]

And do we have evidence of cross cultural consistency? I mean you can take the modern world as pretty much a single culture. Has anyone asked isolated pygmy tribes if they find animals cute?

Comment author: first_fire 29 May 2011 06:41:50AM 1 point [-]

One possible explanation for finding babies and other small fluffy things cute is their vulnerability; babies are extremely vulnerable, and require protection. A cuteness reaction from caretakers would lead to a better standard of care and higher survivability. The caretakers find babies cute not because of any inherent cuteness of the baby, but because babies need to be taken care of and caretakers need to find ways to not find the caretaking onerous. We know we need babies to propagate the species, and we need to create reasons for ourselves to put up with the screaming and poop. Evolutionarily, thinking of babies as cute provides this reason.

It also provides a reason to find small fluffy animals cute: adult animals are a better food source, so it is advantageous for us to wish to nurture the small fluffy animals into large delicious animals.

Comment author: chaosmosis 22 October 2012 09:52:59PM *  2 points [-]

I agree that cuteness highly correlates with vulnerability, at least for me.

I'd also like to note that babies bring my cuteness meter into clash with my ugliness meter. Babies are simultaneously cute and repulsive, because they look like human beings who have been in an accident or who have been deformed. They're more cute than repulsive, though.

Comment author: DSimon 14 March 2011 01:19:33PM 5 points [-]

To the baby picture, my response is "aw, that's cute".

When I saw that bunny picture, my entire face scrunched with joy up for a good 15 seconds, no exaggeration. My hands rose to my face and covered my cheeks in the "Home Alone" configuration, although my expression was I'm quite sure one of joy rather than fear. I had to employ a fair amount of willpower to stop myself from saying "D'awwwww" out loud.

Consider me a data point in favor of your counter-hypothesis.

Comment author: mwaser 14 March 2011 10:57:24AM 0 points [-]

Actually, eating a baby bunny is a really bad idea when viewed from a long-term perspective. Sure, it's a tender tasty little morsel -- but the operative word is little. Far better from a long-term view to let it grow up, reproduce and then eat it. And large competent bunnies aren't nearly as cute as baby bunnies, are they? So maybe evo-psych does have it correct . . . . and maybe the short-sighted rationality of tearing apart a whole field by implication because you don't understand how something works doesn't seem as brilliant.

Comment author: DavidAgain 14 March 2011 12:32:55PM 2 points [-]

It's only a bad idea if there's a decent chance of you getting to eat that bunny or its offspring AND if there would otherwise be a shortage. Otherwise a small bunny in the hand is worth dozens of big ones in the bush. As a tribe, or better still a species, there might be benefits to not eating what you catch, but there's unlikely to be real benefits to the individual, so you'd need group selection here.

Even in modern society we can see this: look at the problem of over-fishing for instance. 'Fishermen' and indeed 'humankind' would benefit from more careful fishing, but you need strong international enforcement to try to make indivduals follow this route. As an individual, the food you get from a sprat is more on average than the miniscule chance of you getting bigger fish later because you release it.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 12 March 2011 06:57:45PM *  9 points [-]

Alicorn:

In fact, bunnies are edible.

Babies are edible too. Cannibalistic infanticide is a fairly common phenomenon throughout the animal world. It is widely practiced by chimpanzees, some of the closest evolutionary relatives of humans. (It's mostly done by male chimpanzees, but sometimes also females; see the linked paper for more details and references.)

Unless some group-selection mechanism is in operation (and such explanations are always controversial), there is no straightforward reason why one should care about unrelated babies. Killing them may well be adaptive behavior. Infanticide is thus unsurprisingly a widespread phenomenon in nature -- and once you kill a baby, you might as well eat it too; hence cannibalistic infanticide. Even when it comes to one's own kids and relatives, there are situations where killing them may be cost-effective in selfish gene terms, and parental and kin infanticide is also far from nonexistent among animals. All these behaviors are a regular subject of study in evolutionary biology, including evolutionary psychology.

Therefore, noting that babies can look less cute than other things whose only relevant characteristics are nutritional is hardly an argument against state-of-the-art evolutionary psychology. It is certainly a good argument against dilettantish dabbling in it, which is indeed all too common, even by otherwise formidable intellectual figures such as Dennett. Of course, the real academic evolutionary psychology has its own problems with sorting out well-substantiated theories from just-so stories, but they are at wholly different levels.

Comment author: Swimmer963 12 March 2011 02:53:36PM 6 points [-]

Actually, I find the baby about 75 000 cuter. This might have something to do with the fact that I'm a) a girl, and b) right at the age when, biologically speaking, I should be having kids. I see babies in the street and get warm fuzzy feelings. My (female) friends and I at work talk about how much we want to take home every baby in the Parent & Tot swimming classes. We show each other pictures of friends' babies and go completely gaga. Just wanted to point out that this may be something that varies with sex. (Although not for everyone, of course.)

Comment author: Alicorn 12 March 2011 03:43:20PM 4 points [-]

I'm a girl too, and I'm 22 (was 21 when I wrote the article) - I'm not sure if you categorize that as the biological age where I should be having babies, but it's not just a sex thing, although that might factor in weakly somehow.

Comment author: rabidchicken 12 March 2011 08:43:25PM 4 points [-]

Trying to determine what effect if any sex has is difficult, because the reaction of males / females to young children is highly influenced by exposure. Anecdotally, when families I know have had children, any girls who have some relation to the family are often encouraged to play with them / babysit them, or are given tutorials on things like changing diapers. I can only think of one guy who had the same treatment, although males may also just try to hide that they are good at dealing with babies. I have worked in a nursery with children around age 5 and up, and this is when it actually becomes possible for me to find them cute, I don't think its a coincidence.

Instead of getting taught from an early age, the general trend seems to be that men are just expected to pick it up on the spot when they get married. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds, and may account for the large number of guys who worry about commitment in the first place. When I hold a baby, I feel the same as i did when I first started playing an expensive instrument, or installed an OS on my computer, paranoid because I was worried I was going to break something. If it wasn't for that, then the odds of me finding babies cute would go up considerably.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 03:42:55AM 1 point [-]

I'm trans (assigned male at birth, female now) and can say that there's not the same kind of pressure on young men to react well to babies and young children and take an interest in them. I happen to have a fairly strong caretaker/teacher/playful interaction drive where kids are concerned; it was often seen as a bit weird, although once people saw me establishing a rapport with a child, they'd usually re-sort me into the "exception" box.

Comment author: Swimmer963 12 March 2011 04:28:34PM 0 points [-]

Of course it's not JUST a sex thing. That would make no sense, either in evolutionary terms or in terms of actual evidence (there are a lot of very loving fathers in the world). But I suspect that when we're talking about random babies on the street, the tendency to go gaga over them is more than weakly a sex thing. I've met maybe 2 guys who do that, but maybe 25% of girls (this is a guesstimation). It probably varies more between individuals than between the genders, though. (Note: my mother tells me she also had a strong gaga-over-babies reflex when she was in her teens.)

Have you EVER had a warm fuzzy feeling looking at babies? Also, do you spend a lot of time with children? Do you have warm fuzzy feelings for friends' and relatives' babies? I see the same children every week when teaching them swimming lessons, and it's probably the "making friends" part that makes me want to take them home at the end of the day.

Comment author: Alicorn 12 March 2011 04:37:45PM 1 point [-]

A friend of mine has a three-year-old who is so cute that she looks like she walked out of an illustrated fairy tale. I met this three-year-old when she was one, and while she wasn't precisely awful to look at then, she was definitely less cute than she is now and less cute than the bunny. Another friend of mine has a new baby, and while this baby is unprecedented for me in the sense that I can identify her as looking like her parents, she is not as cute as the bunny.

Note that I do like holding and interacting with babies. They are small and warm and have itty-bitty fingers and toes to play with and soft hair to pet. But visually, bunnies win.

Comment author: Swimmer963 12 March 2011 04:51:35PM 0 points [-]

Note that I do like holding and interacting with babies. They are small and warm and have itty-bitty fingers and toes to play with and soft hair to pet. But visually, bunnies win.

I guess I lump all of those in with "general tendency towards cuteness" since when I think "baby" I think of the whole experience: holding, feeding, changing, bouncing up and down, the first time they hold up their head, the first time you smile and they smile back... Visually, yeah, some bunnies can be cuter than some babies. If you had chosen different images, I might have agreed that the bunny was cuter.

Agreed that in some ways, three-year-olds are cuter than one-year-olds. All babies look about the same (except to their parents) and although they're cute, from what I've their cuteness doesn't vary as much. Whereas some three-year-olds are walk-out-of-a-fairy-tale cute and some, well, aren't. (Again, except to their parents.)

I'm going to stop commenting about babies now because the I-want-a-baby-now thing is a preoccupation of mine that I doubt many people on this site share. (Not to mention inconvenient in our current society that strongly penalizes teen mothers.)

Comment author: DavidAgain 12 March 2011 05:12:03PM 0 points [-]

If the teen mother comment implies that you yourself are a teenager, I'd be interested in your source for saying you're 'right at the age when, biologically speaking, I should be having kids'. I can't find stats on this because babies in general are one of the areas where internet searches create too much noise for easy research, but a friend who studied some social demography stuff once told me that fertility doesn't peak until the 20s.

On the main topic, there's a big danger of generalising from one example: whether you find babies cute is likely to relate to a whole host of your personal experiences and feelings about babies as well as the instinctive cuteness response. But beyond that, I don't think there would be strong selective pressure against a cuteness response that also encompassed baby animals. Farmers don't seem to find the cuteness of lambs to be a barrier to killing them, after all. If I was making up just-so stories, I'd guess that cuteness serves to get attention, increase patience and prevent boredom during childcare, rather than to make us want to look after them.

You could do some interesting studies on this, though. I wouldn't be surprised if some subconscious effects of cuteness responses (whether direct physical correlates or side effects on future actions etc.) would link more to bunnies, while people felt they should claim that babies are cuter.

Comment author: Swimmer963 12 March 2011 05:41:52PM 2 points [-]

I am 19, and apparently I had a cached belief that 16 is the ideal age for childbirth. (I've tried to track down the source, and I think it's from a novel I read a really, really long time ago, where a character was 'legally too young, but biologically the ideal age for childbirth'.) A quick Google search suggested 25-35 years of age as the period of peak fertility. Which I did not know. And which makes me feel better about having to delay having kids until then.

On the main topic, there's a big danger of generalising from one example: whether you find babies cute is likely to relate to a whole host of your personal experiences and feelings about babies as well as the instinctive cuteness response.

No doubt. But in general, I think a LOT of people (especially females) will have had the personal experiences that lead them to think babies are cute. And I wouldn't be surprised if mothers whose 'cuteness' instinctive response is lower would have more trouble raising children, no matter how good their intentions. (I have a very sad story about this, actually, but I'm saving it for a top-level post.)

If I was making up just-so stories, I'd guess that cuteness serves to get attention, increase patience and prevent boredom during childcare, rather than to make us want to look after them.

This reminds me of the area of qualitative research (in nursing, but you can do it anywhere I assume.) You go out and interview a whole bunch of people (mothers with babies in this case) and ask them a lot of questions about the emotions they feel surrounding their child and how their warm fuzzy feelings affect the way they care for your child. Then you compile the results, pick out common trends, and you have some empirical evidence to justify your just-so stories. (Assuming that baby-cuteness serves the same purpose now as it did during our evolution, which I think is safe.)

As an aside, I really don't have much of a cuteness response to animals. I occasionally feel guilty eating meat because of a top-down moral belief that they have some form of consciousness and ability to feel pain, but on a purely emotional level I doubt I would have any trouble killing and eating a rabbit.

Comment author: JenniferRM 12 March 2011 06:55:19PM *  4 points [-]

If you're not running on instincts then you might want to be particularly careful with your beliefs in this area...

Peak fertility is different that the optimal age for a first child. Fertility is much easier to measure (based simply on the probability of getting pregnant given an standard opportunity to do so) whereas the best age to have your first child is a ridiculously complicated calculation having to do with your values and goals plus: the current and future state of medicine, the current and future state of the economy, your current and future pool of partnering opportunities, and probably other stuff as well.

Azathoth (who doesn't know about fertility medicine or transhumanism or the singularity yet, and was informed of the pill one or two "clock cycles" ago) probably thinks it is a good idea to be very fertile near the end of one's period of fertility because it's your last chance to have your last kid, even if the probability of birth defects is substantially higher.

In the modern democratic/industrialized environments, women don't have replacement levels of children. This might be "good" if we're all looking around and correctly determining that the population should be lower and 0,1, or 2 "really well raised" kids are better than 8 "poorly raised" kids. Alternatively, this might be "bad" if our parenting instincts are just going crazy in this environment. Like it could be that if/when we're well informed 70 year olds who resist cognitive dissonance we might look back on current reproductive decisions with justifiable regret.

In the (justifiably controversial) book The Bell Curve, the authors claim that before the advent of SATs, merit-based scholarships, and a universal college expectation for smart people, society was different in many ways, including that people in college were more likely to have rich parents but otherwise had the same intelligence as everyone else, and also that higher IQ predicted early marriage, early parenthood, less divorce, and larger total family sizes. I have never been able to find something peer-reviewed to back their historical claims, but it's one of those head scratchers that make me wonder sometimes about the larger socio-demographic picture and whether there is some kind of mass craziness going on with respect to family planning in WEIRD countries.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 March 2011 01:15:33PM 1 point [-]

One more factor-- I think people are less likely to have children (or many children) if they trust that larger social structures (private and/or public pensions and provisions for care) will support them when they get old.

I believe that WEIRD (and we probably drop the "white" because the meme definitely spreads to other races) cultures are unsustainable at present tech because the birth rate is too low.

Comment author: DavidAgain 12 March 2011 05:49:32PM 1 point [-]

The 'younger the better' belief is quite common. I assume that it's because most people worrying about age and childrens are at the older end and thinking they should be younger, and so they project that backwards. Also it fits with some popular myths of 'everyone used to have kids at 14'.

On the generalising from one example, I was actually addressing Alicorn's original point. That babies are cute is pretty generally accepted, but I wouldn't be able to guess how many people prefer bunnies.

Surveys sound interesting, but there are also areas where people misreport, either because they think there's a 'right response' or because they simply mistake their own views.

I'm squeamish about killing animals, and mammals more than lizards etc., but I don't think cute baby mammals would be harder to kill.

Comment author: Swimmer963 12 March 2011 05:57:32PM 1 point [-]

I have been attempting a Google search to find out the average age of first-time mothers in the year 1500. I'm guessing it would tend to be younger in rural regions, but my search so far as turned up nothing but noise.

Surveys sound interesting, but there are also areas where people misreport, either because they think there's a 'right response' or because they simply mistake their own views.

This is one of the skepticisms I had when we first learned about qualitative research in my nursing class. But I guess the point is less to be objective and more just to gather descriptive data. Later on you can choose your variables and find reliable ways to measure them, and your research becomes quantitative.

Comment author: gwern 12 March 2011 06:22:14PM 2 points [-]

You can find some relevant data about pre-Industrial and Industrial England in chapter 12 of Clark's Farewell to Alms. (Interestingly, age of marriage - which implies first pregnancy since illegitimacy was so rare - dropped around 2-3 years for women between the 1600s and 1800s.)

Comment author: MichaelHoward 11 March 2010 02:07:17PM 7 points [-]

This study suggests looking at kitten pictures makes you more careful, improving performance in fine-motor dexterity tasks such as mock surgery.

I wonder if this could lower the error rate of computer programmers, and whether I should buy Eliezer a kitten.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 March 2011 01:09:26PM 2 points [-]

You'd have to give Eliezer a sequence of kittens unless you're hoping that the cuteness of the kitten will have an imprinting effect which will affect Eliezer's reaction to the eventual cat.

Comment author: DSimon 14 March 2011 01:23:55PM 2 points [-]

It would probably be more efficient (and less cruel to the kittens who would eventually lose importance) to just have Eliezer look at a filtered-for-cuteness lolcats picture stream each morning.

Comment author: DaFranker 23 October 2012 04:35:04PM 0 points [-]

Has this been tested and/or implemented? I'd totally volunteer to do the filtering. Some unknown odds of possibly improving Eliezer's efficiency by up to 2% up to a third of the time still sounds like a hell of a lot more expected utility than other stuff I happen to be doing.

Comment author: DSimon 24 October 2012 01:10:28AM 1 point [-]
Comment author: DaFranker 24 October 2012 02:02:32PM 0 points [-]

Hah, thanks. That made my day better.

Comment author: pelius 07 March 2010 12:12:10PM 1 point [-]

Psychological conditioning, rather than simple evolutionary instinct, is a major factor in our modern Western viewpoint concerning baby human vs. baby animal cuteness. We must consider the impact a century of books, cartoons, movies, and teddy bears has on our perception of this matter. This programming begins at infancy before we are even conscious of it, familiarizing and humanizing creatures that our ancestors not far back in time would have slaughtered, eaten, or killed for sport without guilt.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 08:22:08PM 1 point [-]

There's probably something to that. While pets are kept all over the world, there definitely seems to be a big difference made by culture. I imagine socioeconomic status has something to do with it as well. I've had friends, both continental European and from various other parts of the world, who thought American society, having so many pets so visibly, was weird and possibly a bit disturbingly neotenic. Working class folks and people from early-generation diaspora families seem to rate especially likely to be weirded by it, in my experience. One of my Somali friends found the fact that I keep a cat weird, and kept worrying she was going to bite her randomly (to be fair, reading cat body language is a skill not everyone possesses). They have cats in Somalia, of course, and she was raised in North America, but the position and frequency of pets in Somali culture is just not the same...it's different enough that a lot of Somali people I talk to will profess that Somali people just don't keep pets. Not because it's a true universal statement, just because white American norms around pets seem odd.

Comment author: joaolkf 05 March 2010 01:05:45PM *  16 points [-]

A cognitive module for cuteness only needs to make us find babies a nice thing and enhance the probability of parental care. It simply doesn’t matter if, besides doing that, the same cognitive module make us find bunnies or orthorhombic sulfur crystals at low temperature cute, so long this doesn’t have any deleterious effects. Probably a cognitive module that can find cute only human babies and not bunnies is more evolutionary improbable and developmental costly having the same relevant behavioral results of a more cheap and universal cognitive module for cuteness. Evolution only needs to shape cognition in order to generate, more or less, the right type of behavior. It DOESN’T have to, and in most cases it doesn’t, shape cognition nicely, in a way we would look at it and say “nice work”.

Comment author: MixedNuts 24 October 2012 11:03:30PM 0 points [-]

Bunnies exist in the ancestral environment. Finding them cute makes us less likely to hunt and eat them, and more likely to waste resources capturing and feeding them. It's possible we don't actually find them cute when we're used to hunting them, though.

Comment author: TimS 24 October 2012 11:33:17PM 2 points [-]

Or bunnies happen to take advantage of the evolutionarily useful baby-cute sense, and it was never maladaptive enough that evolutionary processes narrowed baby-cute sense.

Sort of like how humans seem to have an automatic mental process to recognize faces even when there are no faces.

Comment author: joaolkf 18 September 2013 01:43:22PM *  1 point [-]

Bunnies prevalence on EEA is uncertain, at best. There are few species so widely hunted as the bunny, but it might be the case that the cute ones were slightest less hunted and reproduced more. Or, we might have selected then for neoteny, as we do whenever we have a chance (dogs, cats, cows, donkey), it makes them more docile and easy to slaughter and enslave. We finding them cute would be then both a side effect of (1) evolutionary pressures for not wasting energy in building an excessively fine tuned cuteness-taste and (2) the fact the most easy way to select for easiness-to-slaughter-and-enslave is to select for baby-like faces. Evolution is a nasty, lazy, immoral mistress."Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder."

Comment author: johnsonmx 24 October 2012 10:55:38PM 2 points [-]

Yes, and I would say finding bunnies cuter than human babies isn't a strong argument against Dennett's hypothesis. Supernormal Stimuli are quite common in humans and non-humans.

I think this argument could be analogously phrased: "The reason why exercise makes us feel good can't be to get us to exercise more, because cocaine feels even better than exercise." Seems wrong when we put it that way.

Comment author: adamisom 15 January 2012 12:48:23AM 1 point [-]

Upvoted for a better understanding of ev psych.

That's kind of the whole point of ev psych, at least for me: our minds are kluges, and side effects hardly factor in if they have little survival disadvantage.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 25 February 2010 01:57:41PM -1 points [-]

Here's a pop evo-psych possibility:

Baby animals appear cute to us so that we prefer to eat the adults instead of the babies. Eating the babies would destroy the population, whether domesticated or in the wild.

Possibly human groups who never domesticated animals would feel differently about bunnies.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 12 March 2011 03:55:53PM 3 points [-]

Here's a pop evo-psych possibility:

Baby animals appear cute to us so that we prefer to eat the adults instead of the babies. Eating the babies would destroy the population, whether domesticated or in the wild.

This seems to smell a bit too much of group selection. Remember, extremely large selection pressures are needed for group selection to work.

Comment author: jimrandomh 12 March 2011 04:13:03PM 1 point [-]

No group selection is necessary if the animals in question are a herd of livestock. The same effect would apply to wild animals only because our reflexes can't distinguish the two cases.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 12 March 2011 04:21:23PM 2 points [-]

Destroying a population of livestock is a group problem that gives its negative selection on the local tribe. For wild animals this is even worse since the selection pressure is then spread over at least all humans in the region and probably over other species that would be using those wild species as prey. Worse, there's a clear individual negative to not eating a young wild animal when one has a chance; it is easy food that won't fight back.

Comment author: jimrandomh 13 March 2011 04:08:37AM 1 point [-]

Destroying a population of livestock is a group problem that gives its negative selection on the local tribe.

Not in societies that have a notion of property ownership, and not for herders that travel alone or with a group composed only of genetic relatives. That there would be group selection too does not matter much.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 13 March 2011 04:48:05AM 0 points [-]

Granted. But in order for that to matter one would need that to be the primary form of herding for a very large amount of human history.

Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 10:55:44PM 0 points [-]

Does anyone know how to contact this blogger so I can correct em on my gender?!

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 February 2010 04:00:07AM 6 points [-]
Comment author: Wei_Dai 26 February 2010 10:02:50AM 1 point [-]

Why did Eliezer tell everyone here about another blogger who doesn't care enough about Alicorn to find out and use her preferred pronoun, instead of, say, just contacting that blogger directly? And why did people vote it up? Do they want to see more instances of such lack of caring to be reported here? I think I'm missing something here...

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 February 2010 03:15:27PM 3 points [-]

I think I'm missing something here...

Er... a sense of humor? I regret only that I didn't get to see the look on her face in person, but I was kind of hoping for an AAAAAAAHHH in reply.

Comment author: Alicorn 26 February 2010 04:53:48PM 7 points [-]

Oh, I didn't realize my frustration was so entertaining. Should I stop exhibiting it, to create better incentives?

Comment author: ciphergoth 26 February 2010 06:28:36PM *  4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: thomblake 26 February 2010 06:13:03PM 0 points [-]

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

Comment author: ciphergoth 26 February 2010 06:21:03PM *  8 points [-]

I think we should steer a lot further from high-school tropes. Right now you seem a whisker away from grabbing her stuff, offering it back to her, then throwing it to a mate when she reaches for it. I don't think that's exactly the atmosphere we're aiming for, do you?

Comment author: SilasBarta 26 February 2010 06:30:16PM *  2 points [-]

Agreed, and voted up.

With that said, note that the scienceblogs author and most of the commenters were female, and didn't make the inference, "alicorn = unicorn-related = probably female".

Comment author: Alicorn 26 February 2010 06:13:50PM 1 point [-]

What would be a clear, non-amusing, ideally empathy-inspiring expression of frustration?

Comment author: Kevin 27 February 2010 03:53:34AM 2 points [-]

A :( probably wouldn't hurt

Comment author: Alicorn 27 February 2010 03:54:29AM *  10 points [-]

People keep mistaking my gender and it makes me sad :(

Comment author: Bugmaster 22 October 2012 06:19:47PM -1 points [-]

I mistook your gender as well, initially. In my defence, I had no idea what "Alicorn" meant, except that it sounded like "Unicorn". Unicorns are male more often than not, and the word "Unicorn" is male-gendered in my native language, which tipped my gender assignment all the way toward "male".

My point is, the people who are mistaking your gender may not be making any assumptions about you. They may just be making assumptions about unicorns.

Comment author: Raemon 14 March 2011 01:49:16AM *  1 point [-]

I think it's an unfortunate but inescapable fact that people are unlikely to assume a given poster on a rationality site is female unless said poster has an obviously-female-name (and honestly, I don't think "Alicorn" counts. I had no idea what it meant until you explained).

But I AM genuinely offended by the Isgoria blogger proclaiming that male pronouns were "neutral", even when applied to a specific person. I'm not sure it was the optimal use of my time given the year old status of this discussion, but I sent an e-mail saying so. It gave me warm fuzzies, at least.

I think the male bias in the english language is a ridiculously obvious problem, and I am extremely frustrated whenever a someone says "hey, it'd be cool if you made a small effort to use gender neutral language" and the response is "dude, what's YOUR problem?"

(Originally I used male pronouns to refer to the Isgoria blogger, then realized I didn't actually know for sure. I'm 90% sure the blogger is male, and I don't think it's necessarily wrong to guess someone's gender wrong. But it also didn't take much effort to avoid the use of pronouns in the first place, and if we had an official actually neutral pronoun it wouldn't have been an issue.)

Comment author: JoshuaZ 12 March 2011 04:05:34PM 8 points [-]

I'm a little curious why you care so much about people getting your gender correct online.

Speaking personally, I generally use my actual name in my screen name which to native English speakers shows my gender clearly. But even then, some non-native speakers see a name ending in "a" and apparently conclude that that's female.

Also, I have a very high-pitch voice for a male, so I regularly get mistaken for a female over the phone. But this isn't really that annoying except when it becomes an actual inconvenience (as in "I'm sorry ma'am, but I need to speak to your husband about this." and then refusing to believe that they really are speaking to Joshua Zelinsky).

So I'm curious why this preference issue is one that you place so much emphasis on.

Comment author: Dufaer 01 March 2010 10:01:48PM 6 points [-]

How is it even reasonable to expect some arbitrarily visitor to notice (or guess correctly) your gender?

Do you evaluate your writing style or your expressed thoughts to be so typically female as to yield to no other conclusion? Or do you count on the “obvious” connotations of a name like “Alicorn” - for it is surely obvious that anyone naming oneself thus must be thinking about some fluffy, girly sparkling unicorn instead of, for example, making a reference to the Invisible Pink Unicorn - or something (especially on a rationality website!).

There is no personal information on the user pages here on LS, and decidedly no gender marks on top of the posts themselves. Also, you are obviously not willing to provide any info to make you identifiable in RL and yet expect all people to infer that you are female anyway, even given the prior probability distribution (“there are no girls on the internet”, “a contributor on some intellectual/academia website”)?

Even when one does not think of people on the internet strictly as male, it is simply usually a better guess to refer to them as “he”, given that i) one is unwilling to use “he/she” or a similarly artificial form, and ii) there is no other information one is willing to look up.

Thus I conclude that as long as you do not change your nickname into something like “Alicorn(female!)” or change your expectations, you will be sad like this time and time again. [ :( ]

Comment author: ciphergoth 26 February 2010 10:34:11AM 5 points [-]

The blog post is of independent interest aside from the gender mixup.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 26 February 2010 10:58:43AM 0 points [-]

Ah, thanks. I guess my brain was so primed to think about the gender mixup that I missed the obvious.

Comment author: wedrifid 26 February 2010 10:10:03AM 3 points [-]

Do they want to see more instances of such lack of caring to be reported here? I think I'm missing something here...

I found the mere fact that a lesswrong post got that much external reference was interesting.

I don't think my personal vote should be taken as support of any 'lack of caring' about Alicorn, as that is not an inference I have made about the state of the mind of the blogger based on the evidence available. That is, I reject the framing of the question.

Comment author: RobinZ 26 February 2010 04:09:22AM 2 points [-]
Comment author: Kevin 26 February 2010 06:56:18AM 2 points [-]

Go go feminism police!

Comment author: Alicorn 26 February 2010 04:19:35AM 0 points [-]

Thank you!

Comment author: CronoDAS 25 February 2010 07:39:50PM 4 points [-]

Wow, that's quite a discussion thread that's hanging below this comment; interesting, but completely unrelated to the top-level post. I want to jump in with a few words about anger but I'm completely at a loss as to where to put them.

Anyway, said blogger has now changed his post.

Comment author: Rain 25 February 2010 04:56:23PM *  7 points [-]

Edit: this comment has been rewritten; please see wnoise's comment below for original context.

I feel that the topic of gender identity is not as important as this discussion and others like it on LW seem to make it. In a text based environment, using pseudonyms, we are genderless until we reveal ourselves. And unless we intend to employ mating signals between posters here, it has little relevance even after it has been revealed.

I have operated for years in communities where the gender of participants is highly relevant, but where there were taboos against attempts to discover true genders (online, text-based roleplaying). In such environments, I've developed a severe lack of concern for the topic at large, and instead read what the person has to say and contribute without a gender filter. Many times, I don't even read the name of a poster except as a pattern that allows me to place the comment in context with those around it.

Alicorn's focus on gender identity has, several times now, generated very large discussion threads and at least one top level post. I do not understand why this is accepted by the rest of the LW community as important and relevant to the topic of rationality.

Comment author: komponisto 25 February 2010 06:08:12PM 5 points [-]

Alicorn's focus on gender identity

I don't perceive Alicorn as "focusing" on "gender identity". I perceive Alicorn as getting annoyed when people (out of carelessness) get her gender identity wrong.

Comment author: Rain 25 February 2010 06:14:52PM *  11 points [-]

Annoyance is one thing, and I have no problem with it; expressing that annoyance in such a way as to fuel a 118 post thread (and growing) on the topic in an otherwise unrelated article is what I disagree with.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 08:26:44PM 1 point [-]

Surely if the thread's grown unwieldy, that's not simply because Alicorn expressed her annoyance? There's a whole bunch of other people involved here, whose contribution matters even if it all stems off of one of her comments.

Comment author: Kevin 25 February 2010 06:02:52PM *  10 points [-]

It's because we want more women to post here so we need to listen to Alicorn and keep her happy!!! We respect her opinions. Diversity is good. If we can't keep Alicorn happy, we're generally screwed as far as attracting (and subsequently not alienating) more women to this site.

See Eliezer's post on this topic. http://lesswrong.com/lw/13j/of_exclusionary_speech_and_gender_politics/

Comment author: V_V 23 October 2012 09:20:40PM *  0 points [-]

Being non-anglo-saxon, I'm in a minority here. So you need to listen to me and keep me happy!!! You have to respect my opinions. Diversity is good. If you can't keep me happy, you're generally screwed as far as attracting (and subsequently not alienating) more non-anglo-saxons to this site.

Comment author: Kevin 23 October 2012 09:31:37PM -1 points [-]

Are you happy?

Comment author: thomblake 25 February 2010 05:59:04PM *  0 points [-]

Alicorn's focus on gender identity has, several times now, generated very large discussion threads and at least one top level post. I do not understand why this is accepted by the rest of the LW community as important and relevant to the topic of rationality.

Questions of appropriate standards for our community are on-topic to a limited extent. If you disagree, please refrain from making comments like this one, on pain of contradiction.

Comment author: Rain 25 February 2010 06:33:40PM *  3 points [-]

As pointed out by Kevin, this discussion has been had several times before on LW, and community norms should have already been established, in which case continued large threads on the topic are likely unproductive.

I also do not see why contradiction should be painful.

Comment author: thomblake 25 February 2010 07:08:43PM *  1 point [-]

I also do not see why contradiction should be painful.

I can't tell if you meant this humorously, so I'll take it as a serious statement of confusion...

"On pain of X" is an idiom in English which roughly means, "or else you will experience X", where X is something bad.

example

Comment author: Rain 25 February 2010 07:41:14PM *  0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: komponisto 26 February 2010 01:10:58AM *  3 points [-]

"Pain" in this expression means "penalty". Though I haven't looked it up to confirm, I'm pretty confident the word "pain" itself comes from Latin poena via French peine, meaning just that.

(The first time I heard this idiom, the phrase was "on pain of imprisonment".)

Comment author: Rain 25 February 2010 05:13:57PM 3 points [-]

If you downvoted this comment, please explain why you feel that the topic of gender identity is so important as to merit top level posts and long discussions in many other posts.

Comment author: MugaSofer 09 November 2012 12:08:50PM 0 points [-]

I didn't downvote, but considering that many people are confused about gender identity, applying rationality to it seems a reasonable topic for posting here.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 08:38:29PM 0 points [-]

Pragmatically: It's important because the fact that this keeps coming up again and again suggests it's not going to go away just because it's annoying to many when it happens, and a mechanism to channel, redirect or settle the matter in the form of community norms hasn't yet been found. Meanwhile, there's clearly people who find it relevant, both to their participation in LW and not infrequently to life experiences that have bearing on what they can contribute to refining the art of rationality. Some of those people are major contributors here; some of them may still be lurking. Some of them haven't even found te site yet. A global norm that rejects the topic altogether seems like a great path to evaporative cooling in an area where LW has real potential for PR issues, and which may be a long-term impediment to its success. Restricting the topic to Discussion only (regardless of the potential quality of the post and ensuing discussion) or attempting to limit the length of threads directly seems like a bad idea.

You can always downvote it if you don't want to see it.

Comment author: Kevin 25 February 2010 06:00:22PM *  0 points [-]

I downvoted it. This was already discussed in depth on the site a while ago. See the fall-out posts and discussion related to the PUA stuff (googling for PUA site:lesswrong.com should give you most of it) Basically, the answer to your statement (and then some!) is contained in that thousands of words worth of discussion, and I thought your comment was little more than being a likely trigger for a discussion that's already been beaten into the ground here, even though that wasn't your intention and your intention was in fact exactly opposite.

I will state that summarizing this discussion for postery's sake (in the wiki) so we can stop having it is a good idea.

Comment author: Rain 25 February 2010 06:07:08PM *  4 points [-]

Yes, I read those discussions, and those posts, which is why I'm surprised it's still generating threads this large on unrelated articles.

When reading, I noticed that this particular thread had a button labeled "load more comments (106 replies)", and that struck me as very wrong for a comment I would have labeled "off-topic" at best.

Comment author: brazil84 25 February 2010 05:50:32PM 2 points [-]

I didn't downvote your comment; I think you actually make an interesting point.

For me, it's not just that people obsess over issues of gender (and race, and sexual preference). It's that their gender (or race) sometimes becomes like the team they are on and (arguably) warps their views.

For example, let's suppose you did a poll and asked people if they think women should have the right to vote. I'm pretty confident that the percentage which says "yes" would be higher among women than among men. So it seems likely that peoples' group membership colors their judgments.

Comment author: wnoise 25 February 2010 05:29:12PM 2 points [-]

I have not downvoted it. But the original phrasing "You are too focused on the topic of gender identity; I suggest that the topic is not nearly so worthy of concern." differs from the one here in that it suggests concern to oneself, rather than the concern to the community that this post makes clear. The first is telling other people what they should be concerned with, violating a clear norm, and helping no one.

Comment author: wedrifid 24 February 2010 11:15:56PM 1 point [-]

How on earth did he get 'he' from 'Alicorn'?

Comment author: V_V 23 October 2012 09:26:25PM 1 point [-]

How in the earth did you get 'he' from 'Sharon'?

Comment author: wedrifid 24 October 2012 01:25:48AM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: gwern 23 October 2012 10:58:45PM 0 points [-]

The last prominent world leader of that name was male, I believe.

Comment author: V_V 24 October 2012 01:16:00AM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 October 2012 01:00:12PM 0 points [-]

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.)

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 24 October 2012 12:57:55PM *  0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: gwern 24 October 2012 01:57:41AM 0 points [-]

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

Comment author: shminux 23 October 2012 11:46:08PM *  -1 points [-]

"Last names don't encode gender" -- Claude Shannon

Comment author: gwern 24 October 2012 12:23:18AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 March 2011 11:36:43AM 2 points [-]

Alicorn ends with a consonant. This doesn't guarantee that it will be seen as male, but I think it increases the odds.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 February 2010 02:28:26AM *  8 points [-]

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.)

Comment author: Sniffnoy 25 February 2010 07:52:06AM 8 points [-]

I automatically assumed Yvain was female for a while, because the name looks like "Yvonne".

Comment author: RichardKennaway 25 February 2010 08:54:20AM 2 points [-]
Comment author: h-H 01 March 2010 03:10:40AM 0 points [-]

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

Comment author: [deleted] 25 February 2010 04:48:06AM *  4 points [-]

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.)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 March 2011 12:58:19PM 2 points [-]

It's easy for me to see your name as Warriorgal.

Comment author: RobinZ 25 February 2010 05:02:40AM 1 point [-]

I believe I was agnostic on the question, for one.

Comment author: Alicorn 25 February 2010 03:42:12AM *  1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 February 2010 01:17:33PM *  8 points [-]

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.

Comment author: RobinZ 25 February 2010 01:24:54PM *  3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: arundelo 25 February 2010 02:12:26PM 2 points [-]
Comment author: wedrifid 25 February 2010 09:28:28AM *  5 points [-]

it just signifies to me that the person so profoundly does not even care.

About gender pronouns, your gender, gender politics in general or something more esoteric?

Comment author: Alicorn 25 February 2010 06:04:20PM *  1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 March 2011 12:56:43PM 1 point [-]

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.

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 04:25:57AM *  1 point [-]

Your impression is accurate. It's frequently an issue in gatherings of trans people, let alone in mixed groups or majority-cis spaces.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 26 February 2010 01:49:53AM 10 points [-]

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:

On the other side of this interaction, we should consider the possibility that our offensiveness sense may be tuned too sensitively, perhaps for an ancestral environment where mass media didn’t exist and any offense might reasonably be considered both personal and intentional.

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.

Comment author: andreas 26 February 2010 02:09:10AM *  0 points [-]

"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.

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?

Comment author: Alicorn 26 February 2010 02:09:00AM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: Unknowns 26 February 2010 10:24:48AM 6 points [-]

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.

Comment author: wedrifid 26 February 2010 10:35:45AM 3 points [-]

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.

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.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 25 February 2010 09:17:56AM 9 points [-]

It says nothing about my opinion of men (I think) - it just signifies to me that the person so profoundly does not even care.

It also signifies that you care a lot, more than is normally expected, and so more than people normally adjust their behavior to accommodate.

Comment author: mattnewport 25 February 2010 02:29:02AM 2 points [-]

Is that from someone reading it as 'Eliza'?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 February 2010 02:39:30AM *  0 points [-]

No clue hath I, though your suggestion seems plausible enough.

Comment author: Bindbreaker 24 February 2010 11:26:14PM *  3 points [-]

The user name "Alicorn" seems gender-indeterminate to me.

Comment author: Unknowns 25 February 2010 07:22:54AM 5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Bindbreaker 25 February 2010 09:52:42AM 1 point [-]

Ali can be short for several female names, but it can also be a male name.

Comment author: Kevin 25 February 2010 11:02:51AM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: komponisto 25 February 2010 05:51:19PM *  7 points [-]

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!

Comment author: wnoise 25 February 2010 05:39:57PM 1 point [-]

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.

This is undoubtedly the case. However, the opposite choice is also quite popular -- choosing masculine usernames to avoid being harassed for being female.

Comment author: Kevin 25 February 2010 05:17:41AM 5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Blueberry 25 February 2010 07:00:02AM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: wedrifid 25 February 2010 09:41:52AM 5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: mattnewport 25 February 2010 07:07:43AM 9 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 February 2010 01:08:51PM *  0 points [-]

"Alicorn" sounds much more feminine than either "Unicorn" or "Aliborn".

Comment author: Bindbreaker 25 February 2010 05:35:58AM 1 point [-]

Yup-- didn't know "alicorn" was a word.

Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 11:19:35PM *  0 points [-]

I don't know how it keeps happening. How did you get "he" from the blog post? (Or is it indicated somewhere else?)

Comment author: Swimmer963 12 March 2011 04:31:32PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Unknowns 25 February 2010 08:44:33PM *  0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Leafy 25 February 2010 09:40:03PM 0 points [-]

Darn - claims my blog is 63% woman. Not sure how to take that!

Comment author: Unknowns 25 February 2010 09:47:19PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Leafy 25 February 2010 09:55:39PM 0 points [-]

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%

Comment author: Unknowns 26 February 2010 04:08:20AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: arundelo 25 February 2010 09:31:38PM 2 points [-]

[/me googles "GenderAnalyzer" and checks own blog.]

We think http://arundelo.livejournal.com is written by a woman (67%).

Woo-hoo! (I'm male, but it seems to me a bad thing for that to be obvious from my writing.)

Comment author: JGWeissman 25 February 2010 09:40:29PM 4 points [-]

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.)

Comment author: RobinZ 25 February 2010 09:22:44PM 0 points [-]

What was the percentage? The tests I've done have range from 31% to 73% for the correct answer.

Comment author: Unknowns 25 February 2010 09:29:40PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: RobinZ 25 February 2010 09:35:25PM 0 points [-]

I'm sorry - I meant the percentage for the blog post and for Alicorn's post.

Comment author: Unknowns 25 February 2010 09:42:44PM 0 points [-]

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.)

Comment author: Alicorn 25 February 2010 10:11:04PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: wedrifid 24 February 2010 11:51:43PM *  3 points [-]

How did you get "he" from the blog post?

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:

Isegoria - From the ancient Greek, equality in freedom of speech; an eclectic mix of thoughts on Policy, War, Economics, Business, Technology, Science, Fitness, Martial Arts, and more

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?

Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 11:55:08PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: RobinZ 25 February 2010 12:05:47AM 3 points [-]

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

Comment author: Alicorn 25 February 2010 12:06:49AM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: RobinZ 25 February 2010 12:10:30AM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: wedrifid 25 February 2010 12:03:29AM *  7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Alicorn 25 February 2010 12:05:08AM *  1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: mattnewport 25 February 2010 12:36:00AM 10 points [-]

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.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 March 2011 12:49:11PM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 13 March 2011 04:13:34AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Morendil 13 March 2011 08:53:23AM *  2 points [-]

"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)

Comment author: wnoise 13 March 2011 07:11:31AM 4 points [-]

Dost thou also find the use of "singular you" annoying?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 13 March 2011 05:34:48AM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Alicorn 25 February 2010 12:38:24AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: mattnewport 25 February 2010 12:43:15AM 8 points [-]

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.

Comment author: RobinZ 25 February 2010 12:05:00AM 8 points [-]

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.

Comment author: wedrifid 25 February 2010 12:16:52AM 2 points [-]

Really? I use 'they' quire frequenly but feel bad every time. I'll stop feeling bad now. Thanks. ;)

Comment author: RobinZ 25 February 2010 12:28:00AM 0 points [-]

Glad to be of service!

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 24 February 2010 11:47:14PM 2 points [-]

It is a reasonable default assumption, not adjusted with negative effect of a mistake in mind.

Comment author: RobinZ 24 February 2010 11:49:28PM 2 points [-]

But you don't need to invoke a default assumption here - the singular "they" is a perfectly well-established alternative.

Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 11:49:09PM 1 point [-]

As a rule of thumb, it's annoying to be talked about without being considered.

Comment author: Jack 24 February 2010 11:39:13PM 2 points [-]

People at this end of the internet tend to have 'male' as the default gender for everyone.

Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 11:43:13PM 1 point [-]

Yes. It's very annoying.

Comment author: mattnewport 24 February 2010 11:48:47PM 6 points [-]

On average, less annoying than the alternatives.

Comment author: RobinZ 24 February 2010 11:54:51PM 4 points [-]

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...

Comment author: [deleted] 23 October 2012 04:34:41AM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 11:49:52PM -1 points [-]

How do you even gauge this? Do you know how annoyed I am on some absolute scale so you can make such a comparison?

Comment author: mattnewport 24 February 2010 11:52:56PM *  4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: ata 01 March 2010 02:21:34PM *  3 points [-]

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.

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.)

Comment author: thomblake 25 February 2010 01:45:21PM 7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Jack 25 February 2010 08:29:04PM *  8 points [-]

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.

Comment author: wedrifid 25 February 2010 12:14:22AM 2 points [-]

that it is at least as annoying for a male to be referred to as 'she' as vice-versa

(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.)

Comment author: Alicorn 25 February 2010 12:19:57AM 1 point [-]

You don't think females are socially punished for exhibiting "male" traits, or you think it's comparatively insignificant?

Comment author: RobinZ 25 February 2010 12:03:34AM 3 points [-]

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.

If nothing else, priming would put the lie to that.

Comment author: Alicorn 24 February 2010 11:59:00PM 1 point [-]

that it is at least as annoying for a male to be referred to as 'she' as vice-versa

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!

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.

AAAAAAAAAAAUGH

Ahem. I mean:

No.

Comment author: wedrifid 25 February 2010 12:11:47AM 1 point [-]

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! :)

Comment author: wedrifid 24 February 2010 03:27:26AM 4 points [-]

The problem with popularity: I've just been searching the web hoping to find someone linking to an investigation into cuteness that delved a bit deeper than spouting 'just so' stories. What I found is that not only are the most prominent results LessWrong.com links, most of the next in line links are external responses on the topic that link here.