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Bugmaster comments on Local Ordinances of Fun - Less Wrong
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Um, I don't want to change my mind just to change it, I want to change it to make my current beliefs less wrong (tm). I agree that studying the actual history of the language could help, but I'm more concerned with present-day usage as a practical matter, than with the historical perspective regarding the evolution of languages in general, and English in particular.
Whether it's a good idea to utter a particular sentence “as a practical matter” depends on what your listeners will think upon hearing it, which depends very much on what set of linguistic inputs they've been exposed to so far and very little about any purported stone tablets in the sky determining whether something is good style regardless of what any users of language do.
I wasn't talking about any kind of prescriptivist stone tablets, just my own preference. In my experience, which may not be representative, the gender of a person or people I'm talking about matters a lot less than the number of people, most of the time. Thus, sacrificing gender recognition fidelity is a good tradeoff, most of the time.
On the other hand, in English the number of people is usually already encoded in the antecedent of the pronoun, whereas whether the gender matters isn't usually encoded anywhere else.