steven0461 comments on Religion, Mystery, and Warm, Soft Fuzzies - Less Wrong

17 Post author: Psychohistorian 14 May 2009 11:41PM

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Comment author: MBlume 15 May 2009 02:29:13AM *  4 points [-]

Of course, including the example at all excludes asexuals. Do we have any of those here?

Excluding half your audience when there's an obvious counterpart for the other half is silly. Excluding a small minority is inevitable. That's part of the reason you use a cluster of examples -- you hope that each reader will identify strongly with at least one.

I think the best fix here is "Women will still be alluring, men will still be [insert-adjective-here], food will still ..." etc.

Preserves the specificity of the original while making clear that you're to take what you like.

Comment author: steven0461 15 May 2009 05:52:56AM *  4 points [-]

Not sure I disagree in principle, definitely would have used a sex-neutral phrasing in the original post, but calling women "half the audience" is off by an entire order of magnitude.

(If anybody's keeping count, I'm a-curious, don't enjoy food, think David is just some random naked guy made out of rock, and was more distracted by this comment thread than anyone was by the thing the comment thread was about.)

Comment author: MBlume 15 May 2009 06:28:54AM *  2 points [-]

Entirely true, but they're still half the potential audience. Writing with a mostly-male audience in mind is a good way to maintain a mostly-male audience

Comment author: steven0461 15 May 2009 07:04:39AM *  6 points [-]

They quite obviously aren't anywhere remotely close to half the potential audience, because to be part of the potential audience, you need certain background knowledge, interests, personality features/bugs, and other things that apparently are very lopsidedly distributed between genders. I assume you're not actually claiming that 90% of one gender was chased away because once in a while someone makes an off-hand comment that, if implicit disclaimers are removed, seems to assume a heterosexual male audience.

Comment author: MBlume 15 May 2009 07:22:54AM *  0 points [-]

I assume you're not actually claiming that 90% of one gender was chased away because once in a while someone makes an off-hand comment that, if implicit disclaimers are removed, seems to assume a heterosexual male audience.

Of course not.

Honestly, I don't think we're disagreeing on any significant point of fact or policy, so if it's all the same, I think I'll leave this here.

Comment author: steven0461 15 May 2009 07:27:25AM *  1 point [-]

OK. Sorry if I sounded testy, random bad mood or something.

Comment author: MBlume 15 May 2009 07:49:13AM 0 points [-]

random bad mood or something

on both our parts, I think -- sorry for trying to defend more than I needed to.