Comment on Narrow your answer space

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 11:17:52 GMT

I can say that in the context it is overwhelmingly clear that Phil is not making this mistake.

Overwhelmingly clear to you, perhaps. The context I had for his original claim was:

If this is a gender-specific thing that drives women away, then the obvious solution would be to have users identify themselves as women at signup, and have their usernames show up in pink, so we know to be nice to them. Yet I don't think this would be less offensive to women! If I treat everybody the same, I'm discriminating against women; if I treat them differently, I'm also discriminating against women.

This to me strongly suggests that men are the default, and women are an aberrant case, with the implication that treating everyone the same means treating everyone like a man (since no one currently has a pink username).

Now, Alicorn could have worded her response better- it wasn't clear she was saying "why not be nicer to everyone?"- and that could have cleared up some of the confusion much earlier.

Note that this interpretation is giving the maximal benefit of the doubt. That is, not assuming that the people Phil is talking to actually lack comprehension skills.

Then... why did you use words like "misinterpretation" instead of "miscommunication"? Saying "oh, both people were unclear, it looks like we were talking past one another " is far better than the approach you took. To me, your comment reads like defensiveness in response to an accusation of sexism, as well as dismissal by bringing up "social politics" in contrast to "logical reasoning." (If you were to gender those two phrases, which would be which?)

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