Intellectual authors crave audience engagement. A lack of examples is usually the result of the author being uncertain where they are required. Bulking up the text with unnecessary examples makes it worse and is work, so the natural tendency is to put in too few examples.

The author is really hoping for comments such as

When you say "a means of transport", does that include a bicycle. It strikes me that a bicycle would be too slow. Some examples would make your article suck less.

or perhaps

When you say a "means of transport", does that include a bicycle. It strikes me that a bicycle would be too slow. Some examples would perfect your already brilliant article.

Either of these would be much more welcome than any response that asked non-specifically for more examples, no matter how generically flattering. The author already knows that he didn't put in enough examples. The information he is lacking is clues as to where his readers are getting lost through a lack of examples. That would let the author add the right examples. More important, evidence of the audience's intellectual engagement would make the author happy.

Oh yeah, happy medium for sure.

"this post would suck less if it had more examples"

I would personally be inclined to downvote this on the principle of "less like this", even if I agreed. It strikes me as unduly abrasive and more likely to cause not just the poster, but other people, to feel scared of posting. LessWrong is intimidating enough.

(I have been downvoted for such unhelpful abrasiveness before and, frankly, deserved it.)

"this post was great! It really gave me a lot to think about. Just one tiny thing, I'm really slow so I would appreciate it a lot if you just added a couple of examples to illustrate your points so that people like me can get it more easily :) Thanks!"

The minimum number of words I would respond with would likely be "Good post. Could do with examples for each point. Tell, then show."

Commenting on LessWrong is difficult because smart nerd audiences are incredibly picky, so one must write anticipating as many possible objections as one can come up with. This is why I end up post-editing a lot. (Could really do with a "preview" button to check it renders as intended.) But good communication always takes effort.

I've thought a little bit about gender pronouns (and other gendered language.)

1. There are circumstances where using "he" to mean "indeterminate gender" is misleading. To say, in 2007, "Whoever wins the US election, he will be a wartime president" is inaccurate because Hillary Clinton was a candidate for president. The writer is referring to a small group of people, that is known to include women, as if there were no women. That's using language to obscure the truth. (Another example: addressing an audience that visibly contains women as "Gentlemen.")

2. There are examples where using male words for humans in general is much better for language flow. "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." I like the sentence just fine like that. It's obvious that it means humankind, but the language has a deliberately historical feel.

3. Everything else is intermediate. If hypothetical examples are given as "he", I generally don't have a problem with it -- it's understood to mean "he or she." If nobody, ever, gives female hypothetical examples, though, I might start to worry that it's spreading the impression that there are no female rationalists. My own preference is for a mix of hypothetical "he"s and hypothetical "she"s, instead of the clunky "he or she" or the ungrammatical "they." If your post has more than one hypothetical example, make some male and some female.

4. But aren't most rationalists male? Aren't most scientists? Entrepreneurs? etc. Isn't it appropriate to assume a male norm when there actually is a male majority? Isn't it just "PC fantasy" that a hypothetical individual in any group is female? Well, how much you decide to treat the majority as if it were the norm is a judgment call. My own perspective is that where women are a minority, it does not mean women are absent or anomalous.

The pronoun in the English language for a person of indeterminate gender is "he".

Or singular they.

Yes, it's spelled the same way as the pronoun for a person of specifically male gender; it's far from the only case of different words being spelled the same way.

Claiming that they are different words that just happen to be spelled the same is disingenuous when they deflect the same. It's the same word with two different meanings / usages.

Language is convention, and conventions can be changed. Yes, usage following the existing convention need not be sexist even when that convention itself is somewhat sexist, it may be merely conservative. But I don't think it's reasonable to expect people not to be even so much as slightly annoyed when when you follow the sexist convention. And the fact that people on this site are regularly provoking this slight annoyance rather than make the effort to rephrase or accept the minor aesthetic displeasure of using a non-standard pronoun also speaks for itself.

The singular they well predates the genderless he, which gained popularity largely due to the efforts of the grammarian Ann Fisher in the 18th century . I see no reason to object to a shift back in the other direction.

Hofstadter on language and defaults The essay has a postscript that I don't think I've seen before.

I think the evidence is that using "he" to mean people in general evokes a powerful default which leads to less accurate thinking.

Are you asserting that if I start talking about person X in a conversation... talk about what he does for a living, how he raises his children, how he gets along with his parents and so forth, that a typical listener will reliably understand person X's gender to have not been specified? Will, for example, not be at all startled if I talk about him going in for a gynecological or prostrate exam?

Because I suspect that that claim is demonstrably wrong.

On the other hand, if you're instead claiming that although a typical listener will reliably assume person X is male, they'd be incorrect to do so, because "he" is also a gender-neutral pronoun... well, OK. I won't contest that claim, and I'll agree that it matters in any situation where I'm not primarily interested in the actual meanings that get reliably communicated to other people by my speech.

The pronoun in the English language for a person of indeterminate gender is "he". Yes, it's spelled the same way as the pronoun for a person of specifically male gender; it's far from the only case of different words being spelled the same way.

This may be true according to official grammatical rules, but it isn't true for the purposes of conveying an understanding. When I hear the word "he" used with no other identifying characteristics, I don't imagine a person of indeterminate gender. Even if I'm actively trying to avoid assigning a gender to the person, my immediate reaction is to imagine a man, because that's what the word "he" usually means when I see it in writing. My conscious control means that I can afterwards respond as if the person is ungendered, but my mental impression is of a male.

For most people, reading and comprehending text has become an automatic process. It can't be easily controlled by an order from the conscious mind to "always interpret pronoun 'he' as if gender indeterminate when in X context." I expect most people don't even try, because it isn't worth the mental effort.

I generally get around this problem by using the singular "they," which I expect will eventually become accepted by the grammatical establishment, since it's already becoming common in colloquial speech. And then for cases where "they" is awkward, I simply alternate between using "he" and "she." Gender neutral pronouns like "ze" and "ey" are an option too, but parsing them can also take too much mental effort for some readers and break the flow, so I usually don't use them.

Why was this downvoted? Seems to make sense to me...

To me the only thing that charges a usage of "he" with sexism is the people who comment on it to artificially make a big deal of it. Until that occurs, it's just a way of presenting an example, and does not interfere with understanding of what is being said, or exclude the possibility of a female example.

Well, unless someone's primed themselves to be sensitive to it instead of just focusing on the content of the text they're reading. But that's about as valid an objection as "religious feelings": just because you choose to get worked up about something trivial, doesn't mean anyone else is obliged to take it seriously...