Will reasonable and intelligent people who are new visitors to LW be potentially discouraged by examples like this?
Would they be discouraged more or less if instead they found a website with completely abstract and unspecific examples (to avoid offending anyone, because some people are sensitive about food)? How about a website with no articles at all? Perfect is the enemy of good.
Or, from a different angle: Would some other reasonable and intelligent people be discouraged by a website with strict self-censorship norms?
You can't make everyone happy. There is always a trade-off. Whatever choice you make, someone will always criticize you for making it. (Then you might optimize for people who are most loud about their dislikes; but they are probably the people who would dislike you anyway, so that would probably be a bad choice.)
I'd rather be places where I am an intellectual peer though.
Uh, this will be offensive, but I don't know how to express it otherwise: If you want to be treated as an adult person, then behave like an adult person; and not whining is a good way to do that!
If someone has a problem to read an example using sexiness as a 2-place word, then I have a problem to consider them my intellectual peer. I could probably make the person happy by treating them like a child and walking on my toe tips around them... but that certainly is not like I behave towards my peers.
If someone has a problem to read an example using sexiness as a 2-place word, then I have a problem to consider them my intellectual peer
How confident are you that none of the people you unproblematically consider your intellectual peers also find it offputting to choose agents as illustrative objects of desire in contexts where their agency is irrelevant, and simply don't articulate that judgment in public?
Today's post, Of Gender and Rationality was originally published on 16 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Bayesians vs. Barbarians, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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