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Johnicholas comments on The Third Alternative - Less Wrong
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'They' is a gender neutral pronoun and like Schrodinger's cat it shows the superposition of he and she in an unknown state. Until observed, the human is simultaneously male and female.
It's ugly, though. "They" is a plural. I just used it in my last post, but I didn't like doing it; now it is gender-sensitive, but ungrammatical.
I also used the phrase "a new man", because "a new person" doesn't have the history of use that invokes the noble/creepy feelings that I wanted to communicate. I couldn't think of any gender-neutral way around it.
If we took a vote, I'd vote for "it". It also has a nice, dehumanizing ring to it, which would probably be good, given our anthropic tendencies.
I can't help linking Hofstadter's very funny and apropos "Person Paper":
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
Wikipedia points out that the singular or indeterminate-number "they" has a pretty long history in the english language - Shakespeare used it, for example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they