Open thread for January 1-7, 2014

NancyLebovitz

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

It's not obvious that attention is being diverted to obscuring information.

It makes it harder for me to build a mental image of the situation that he's describing. If it's harder than I will put less attention on the situation.

Here it's a subtle choice. But it points to a pattern. A common general piece of advice on telling stories which draw listeners attention is to provide a lot of adjectives to make it more easy for the audience to picture what you are describing.

The kind that most people don't put to practice when they hear it. Instead of describing the principle abstractly, I pointed to an example.

It takes effort to provide listeners with details. It's still one of the pure white hat strategies to getting peoples attention when you speak.

As far as the information being relevant, when I give someone recommendation about testosterone, the gender of the person I'm interacting with matters.

I have a good idea that more testosterone in males will help with given attention. I'm less certain, that trying to increase testosterone is a good strategy for females.

I don't know whether you refer to a business partner, you are male and refer to a girlfriend or you are female and refer to a boyfriend.

You omit at least two possibilities: that he is male and referring to his boyfriend or that she is female and referring to her girlfriend. In these cases, word "boy/girlfriend" would have you interpreting the situation wrongly.

As others have commented, the fact that we do not know these unnecessary details is a feature, not a bug, of ungendered words.

0JayDee12y

In this case, it's deliberately non-gendered language. Lower-effort, as kalium says. In my case because I cultivated the habit, in years past. As both you and Douglas_Knight point out, there are tradeoffs involved. In the case of not gendering pronouns I expect I’ll continue thinking it worthwhile. But it’s a helpful thing to consider- I’ll bet there are other habits I’ve developed that I’ve never considered if it’s worth the costs. Especially when I contrast my teenaged self – “I don’t care what anyone thinks of me” + “I’ll choose my words for my own aesthetical pleasure” – with the me of today – who does care, and on balance values communication higher than self-expression. I doubt my conversational habits have shifted as far as my preferences have. I’m also interested by what you say about details. It’s not something I’d’ve thought of, worrying I tend more to being too verbose. But I like to write, and concrete detail / description is the area I’d consider my weakest there. I can think of some ways to practice this (started playing tabletop RPGs recently, for one.)