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Error comments on 16 types of useful predictions - Less Wrong
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Comments (53)
I think Eliezer mentioned once that he flips a coin for such cases. I think it's a pretty good policy.
Note that a 6/2 split (as in this post) would happen fairly frequently when tossing coins (~20% of the time, unless I miss my guess). Since alicey found that jarring, I expect that purposeful alternation would be a better strategy.
Maybe make 4 ♂ symbols and 4 ♀ symbols (if you know there will be 8 cases together) and shuffle them? Oh, I guess even in that case someone would complain if one set of symbols happened to get predominantly at the top of the article, and other set at the bottom of the article...
So probably it is best to alter them like this: ABABABAB... or maybe like this: ABBAABBA... with a coin flip deciding who is A and who is B.
You can also simply use standard names:
Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave, Erin, Frank...
More jarring than that is if one set of gender pronouns gets used predominantly in negative examples, and the other set gets used predominantly in positive examples.
I try to deliberately switch based on context. If I wrote an example of someone being wrong and then someone being right. I will stick with the same gender for both cases, and then switch to the other gender when I move to the next example of someone being wrong, right, or indifferent.
Occasionally, something will be so inherently gendered that I cannot use the non-default gender and feel reasonable doing it. In these cases, I actually don't think I should. (Triggers: sexual violence. I was recently writing about violence, including rape, and I don't think I could reasonable alternate pronouns for referring to the rapist because, while not all perpetrators are male, they are so overwhelmingly male that it would be unreasonable to use "she" in isolation. I mixed "he" with an occasional "he or she" for the extremely negative examples in those few paragraphs.)
That seems like it'd interrupt the flow of writing.
It'd be interesting if there was some sort of compiler that did this for you :)
Precisely for this reason, there was a time when I wrote in Elverson pronouns (basically, Spivak pronouns) for gender ambiguous cases. So, if I was writing about Bill Clinton, I would use "he," and if I was writing about Grace Hopper, I would use "she," but if I was writing about somebody/anybody in would use, I would use "ey" instead. This allows one to easily compile the pronouns according to preference without mis-attributing pronouns to actual people... I've always planned on getting around to hosting my own blog running on my own code which would include an option to let people set a cookie to store their gender preference so they could get "she by default", "he by default", "Spivak by default", or randomization between he and she -- with a gimmick option for switching between different sets of gender neutral pronouns at random. The default default being randomization between he and she. But I haven't gotten around to writing the website to host my stuff yet, and I just use unmodified blogger, so for now I'm doing deliberate switching by hand as described above.
(I think I could write a script like that for blogger too, but I haven't bothered looking into how to customize blogger because I keep planning to write my own website anyways because there are a lot of things I want to differently, and that's not necessarily the one that's at the top of my list.)