eternal_neophyte comments on The horrifying importance of domain knowledge - Less Wrong

15 Post author: NancyLebovitz 30 July 2015 03:28PM

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Comment author: eternal_neophyte 02 August 2015 01:27:02AM 3 points [-]

What's the expected ROI for making all this effort to accommodate a tiny minority? And what of the ethical implications concerned with enabling what could very well be a mental illness?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 02 August 2015 02:56:42PM *  4 points [-]

How large is the investment ? Do websites need to have a gender field? Not including one would be a slight saving. It might make sense to just have an optional title field.

Comment author: ChristianKl 03 August 2015 02:58:30PM 2 points [-]

Knowing gender means that it's possible to use the proper pronoun. Having a lot of demographic information is also useful to understand user behavior better. You can show women different ads then men.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 03 August 2015 07:31:40PM 1 point [-]

You could ask for preferred pronouns, and possibly take the risk of having a text field for pronouns that aren't on your list.

I have no idea whether you'd do better with ads that are targeted to preferred title and pronouns rather than to stated gender, but you might.