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moshez comments on How to Not Lose an Argument - Less Wrong
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I'm glad you brought that up.
I've thought about this a few times, and I agree with you that it promotes sexism and is bad, but I just really hate using the phrases "he or she" every time I have to use a pronoun. A sentence like "A rationalist should ensure he or she justifies his or her opinion to himself or herself" is just too awkward to understand. And I am too much of a grammar purist to use "them" as a singular.
I used to use the gender-neutral pronoun "ze", but people told me they didn't understand it or didn't like it or thought it sounded stupid. And I tried using "she" as the default for a while, but people kept getting confused because they weren't expecting it, and trying to figure out where I'd mentioned a female.
I'm willing to accept whatever the common consensus is here. Maybe Less Wrong-ers are open-minded enough to accept "ze" where the average reader isn't.
(I've heard some people here use "ve" a few times, but from the context I gathered it was more of a way to refer to aliens/AIs/transhumans than a normal gender-neutral pronoun. Is this true?)
Instead of gender neutrality, try to go for gender balance? I use alternate "he" or "she", and occasionally, semi-intentionally contradict myself [for example, in a talk about Bayes, I explained what I meant by "overconfidence" with an example -- the specific numeric example used a name, Sally, and the general definition used "he". For underconfidence, I used "Barry" and "she" respectively". I believe Eliezer used to physically flip a coin for he vs. she.
Eliezer still does.
I guess that's fairer than switching (there might be an unfair on/off pattern), but would take me out of my writing flow, which is why the strict-alternation compromise is what I adopted.
Idea: every once in a while just flip a coin or otherwise generate a bunch of random bits. Save them and load up the file or get out the piece of paper you wrote the results down on or such when you're ready to start writing. Then simply start peeling the bits off each time you need a new randomly assigned gender.
That doesn't fix the "flow" issue. When I'm writing, the last thing I want to do is to be flipping through my files, looking for the bit file, etc. etc...
Could you use whether the minute on your clock is odd or even?
It still means I need to break my typing to look at an external stimulus. Honestly, so far I've not seen many instances where strict alternation worked badly, so I'm not motivated to solve this non-problem.
It would be better to flip a coin at the beginning of a document to determine which pronoun to use when the gender is unspecified. That way there is no potential for the reader to be confused by two different pronouns referring to the same abstract entity.
Or we could flip a coin once for all of the English-speaking world, so that we aren't confused when we go from one document to another. Or we could just standardize on the male pronoun, which has backward-compatibility advantages.
I mean, if you go "I am about to write, so I'll load up the random male/female file right now" (though I admit, I haven't tried this and it may very well also be disruptive to quickly tab to that file, check the next random gender and then delete it).
Oh well, if that doesn't work, then... next idea then. (I don't have the "next idea", though, so you or someone else will have to come up with it. :))
Couldn't you just default to "he" when writing, then when finished, flip a coin (or refer to whatever randomized gender generator you prefer), and go back and change the gender if need be? It wouldn't interrupt the work flow; it would just be a little work after to revise.