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kluge comments on How to Not Lose an Argument - Less Wrong
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Yvain, I enjoy your posts, and generally find them useful, informative, and well written.
I also recognize that this view is controversial in some circles, but one thing that would make me enjoy them rather more is if you managed to ferret out the implicit assumption that crops up every now and then that your rationalist protagonists are necessarily male. (Or at least predominantly so, I haven't been back to do an exhaustive stock-take of your gender specific pronoun usage, but I do recall being struck by this at least once before, so I figured it was worth a comment this time.)
Just to clarify, I don't mean Theo here. If you want to use a specifically male example, that's fine. But phrases like "the most important reason to argue with someone is to change his mind" and "[e]ither a person has enough of the rationalist virtues to overcome it, or he doesn't" strike me as problematic.
I'm not for a moment suggesting that you're being consciously sexist here. In fitting with the theme of this post, I spent a fair while rejecting others' calls for gender neutral language under the mistaken (largely emotional) impression that agreeing with them would have be an admission of some deep moral flaw in me, rather than merely a small and relatively painless step towards inclusiveness - and ultimately better communication.
I find it very hard to consider that anything but nitpicking. Although that's probably because my native language is Finnish and it doesn't have separate third person pronouns for different genders. I don't think that distinction is worth making.
Then again, since English does have he and she, perhaps one can't avoid it.
I agree. And after studying Japanese, I started to find it silly that English (like most Western languages) makes the distinction between 'singular' and 'plural'. Like whether we're talking about exactly 1 thing or any number other than 1 is information important enough to encode with every noun, but it's usually not worth mentioning what the particular number is.
ETA: exactly what Nebu said below.
I feel like mentioning that English seems to be quite tolerant of not making the singular/plural distinction. When borrowing from languages that don't make this distinction (in my experience, Japanese and Lojban), it seems that people simply use the existing form for both singular and plural: "This gismu is different from all other gismu in that instead of taking just one sumti or finitely many sumti, it can take infinitely many sumti."
Doesn't even have to be non-english words:
"this sheep is different from other sheep in that it thinks that it is a fish unlike these fish that think they are sheep"
/contrived_example
In everyday life, the difference between one and several often is important enough to mention, but it would be too complex to create special grammatical categories for individual numbers.
I'm amazed that ancient people put enough emphasis on past/present/future to justify having irregular verbs. They must have had a very strange conception of time.
But then I'm also amazed that Russian doesn't have a definite article...
I think what Thomblake would like (and which is how I understand Japanese to work) is to be to use a noun without specifying whether or not it is plural, and have extra (not necessarily "grammatical categories") contructs for adding the extra information of whether it is plural or not.
E.g.
So it's not new grammatical categories (as long as you don't consider just prefixing the word "three" to be a new grammatical category).
The way English works, there's no way to use a noun while leaving the "1 vs not 1" information ambiguous. If you leave off the "s", you must be referring to exactly one instance. If you put the "s", you must be referring to a non-1 instance (possibly zero instances).