Why did Eliezer tell everyone here about another blogger who doesn’t care enough about Alicorn to find out and use her preferred pronoun, instead of, say, just contacting that blogger directly? And why did people vote it up? Do they want to see more instances of such lack of caring to be reported here? I think I’m missing something here...
Do they want to see more instances of such lack of caring to be reported here? I think I’m missing something here...
I found the mere fact that a lesswrong post got that much external reference was interesting.
I don’t think my personal vote should be taken as support of any ‘lack of caring’ about Alicorn, as that is not an inference I have made about the state of the mind of the blogger based on the evidence available. That is, I reject the framing of the question.
While I generally get pissed off when people find my frustration entertaining, I’m not sure that’s the correct inference here. I can be amused by my friends frustration in a way that, far from diminishing my sympathy for them, is actually borne of it. This is part of what amuses us about the Bill Hicks of this world.
I think we should steer a lot further from high-school tropes. Right now you seem a whisker away from grabbing her stuff, offering it back to her, then throwing it to a mate when she reaches for it. I don’t think that’s exactly the atmosphere we’re aiming for, do you?
With that said, note that the scienceblogs author and most of the commenters were female, and didn’t make the inference, “alicorn = unicorn-related = probably female”.
I’m a little curious why you care so much about people getting your gender correct online.
Speaking personally, I generally use my actual name in my screen name which to native English speakers shows my gender clearly. But even then, some non-native speakers see a name ending in “a” and apparently conclude that that’s female.
Also, I have a very high-pitch voice for a male, so I regularly get mistaken for a female over the phone. But this isn’t really that annoying except when it becomes an actual inconvenience (as in “I’m sorry ma’am, but I need to speak to your husband about this.” and then refusing to believe that they really are speaking to Joshua Zelinsky).
So I’m curious why this preference issue is one that you place so much emphasis on.
I have never been mistaken for male in person or on the phone, ever. Additionally, people who identify me as male (or choose to express their uncertainty with male pronouns) on the Internet aren’t typically doing so because there’s positive evidence to that effect; they’re guessing based on my location (“the Internet” or the specific site), which amounts to careless, casual stereotyping and rankles horribly. If people tended to only identify me as male after I dropped a casual reference to an ex-girlfriend without mentioning in the same context that I’m bi, that would bother me less, albeit still some, because it would be a reasonable update to make on the basis of information I’d provided beyond simply having wandered into an area that they suppose to be the province of males.
I know what I said about unicorns above, and I think that’s still relevant, but I disagree with your characterization of the gender misidentification as “stereotyping”.
Given that there are more men than women on Internet discussion sites, and especially on Less Wrong, wouldn’t it be reasonable to guess that any given poster is male, unless there’s evidence to the contrary ? By analogy, if I knew that a bag contained 75 black marbles and 25 white marbles, why shouldn’t I guess that a random marble, that I pulled out of the bag without looking, is black ?
I’m not sure how the looking would work in practice. I would feel incredibly creepy if, every time I wanted to quote someone’s blog post, I had to first contact the poster and inquire about his/her/etc. gender. Conversely, assuming I ever posted anything of consequence (unlikely, I know), I’d feel uncomfortable if someone asked me, “hey, I liked your blog post and I want to respond to it; BTW, what is your gender ?”.
I am not upset if people write in or around their uncertainty about my gender. “He/his” does not do either, but “(s)he” or “ey” or “they” or “Alicorn” or “the OP” or whatever would be all fine and no contact would be necessary.
I’m not sure how the looking would work in practice.
She mentioned that a simple google search would have done the job. Granted, the gender-inquiry step often bypasses one’s consciousness completely, and it happened to me here and elsewhere on more than one occasion.
This link is not stable. Google uses filter bubbles. I don’t have the same first results as you do.
In fact, the first two results for me point to LessWrong directly, the third to an MLP fan wiki, and the fourth to a random news article that apparently misspelled “unicorn”.
“alicorn gender site:lesswrong.com″ with the date restriction of before Feb 24 2010 (when she posted a question about correcting her gender in someone’s blog) gives me a pretty unambiguous second hit.
But you have to know that the person who uses the nickname ‘alicorn’ has posted something about her gender.
The word ‘alicorn’ itself doesn’t seem associated with anything femmine, other than the ‘unicorns are girly’ stereotype which is itself far from obvious.
(...) other than the ‘unicorns are girly’ stereotype which is itself far from obvious.
You mean the monstrous, superpowered godlike entity of human-level intelligence that purely selfishly rewards with mystical life-enhancing divine gifts those that save it, and those who would threaten it find themselves and all their relatives and descendents forever cursed, including any innocent offspring five generations removed from a single unicorn-threatening ancestor?
The first time I knew I’d probably encounter a unicorn in a game of D&D, I started rolling my next character.
All in all, I think the “unicorns are girly” stereotype isn’t all that widespread outside of certain typical US populations. For most populations, I’d figure the question of unicorn genderness never even occurs in the first place—unicorns are just one of those many “mythical creature” thinghies. Then again, I’m from a rather young generation and I have an extended family that is rather high standards in terms of gender cultural programming and social expectations (or prevention thereof).
All in all, I think the “unicorns are girly” stereotype isn’t all that widespread outside of certain typical US populations. For most populations, I’d figure the question of unicorn genderness never even occurs in the first place—unicorns are just one of those many “mythical creature” thinghies.
In whatever population I am part of (not a US one), it isn’t the beast itself that is considered female, but rather that females are more likely to be associated with it. Probably a selection effect because they are slightly less likely to be impaled on sight.
Perhaps the unicorn suffers from a similar problem as the angel. When I hear the word “Angel” I think “Enormously powerful, ruthless, highly masculine yet somewhat pretty enforcer that is quite likely to slaughter you on sight”. I don’t think “scantily clad girl with harp”. Unicorns are somewhat analogous albeit being territorial beasts rather than henchman.
I associate the word “Angel” with an eldritch inhuman monstrosity, the very sight of which will drive you mad, if you’re lucky. It is a messenger of an inscrutable divine omni-power, and it only ever carries one message: annihilation.
It is a messenger of an inscrutable divine omni-power, and it only ever carries one message: annihilation.
Angels carry at least two types of message: Annihilation and threats of annihilation if compliance with arbitrary demands is not immediate! Sometimes they are also scouts come to investigate whether said annihilation is necessary. Tip: if large flawlessly beautiful men walk up to your city don’t try to gang rape them. Offering your daughters up to the would-be rapists as a compromise is frowned upon but not penalized.
One of my most salient associations with unicorns is dangerous men. One of my friends was a social worker, and he found that nearly every time he saw the lodgings of a male serial rapist or other such severely disturbed male, they were decorated with unicorn posters.
Hah, yeah, that’s exactly the kind of usage I would come up with if I had to pick something unicorns would be a symbol for.
My image of unicorns as incredibly monstrous, scary supernatural creatures first came from the question: “Okay, it’s a white horse with a long, pointy, sometimes serrated or with screw-like sharp spiral edges, horn, but… what the hell do they use that horn for?”
they’re guessing based on my location (“the Internet” or the specific site), which amounts to careless, casual stereotyping and rankles horribly
My prior probability that someone is male is about 50%, knowing that they read Less Wrong amounts to about +10 dB of evidence that they are male (as of the last survey), so the posterior probability that someone is male given that they read Less Wrong is about 90%. How does Bayesian updating amount to careless, casual stereotyping?
I completely agree. Well, it doesn’t rankle for me in the same way because I probably post a lot less on the Internet than you do, and thus get a lot fewer assumptions. (Also, I kind of like the thought of people not knowing my gender.) But I completely agree that the Internet, and especially sites like LessWrong, is assumed to be populated by males.
Additionally, people who identify me as male (or choose to express their uncertainty with male pronouns) on the Internet aren’t typically doing so because there’s positive evidence to that effect...
Have you considered that your writing style might be unusual for a woman? Even based on a small sample of writing that has no obvious clues, it’s usually possible to guess the author’s sex much better than chance. You write in a very technical matter-of-fact style, with long, complex, and yet very precisely constructed sentences, and take unusual care to avoid ambiguities and unstated implications. (You’d probably be a great textbook writer.) Whatever the reason for this state of affairs might be, people who write like that are overwhelmingly men.
Also, why not simply use a female name if you’re bothered by this?
Perhaps I should stress that it’s not that you write in a typical masculine style. Rather, you write in a style that’s altogether unusual, and the minority of people who write like that are predominantly men. So it does constitute some evidence, unless I’m completely mistaken about the facts of the matter (and I pretty confident I’m not).
Regarding the typical male/female style, it’s hard to give a simple description. It’s an intuitive impression that’s not amenable to detailed introspection. Somehow a given text usually sounds more natural in male voice than female or vice versa, unless perhaps it’s a completely dry technical discussion, and while far from being 100% reliable, these guesses are also far better than chance. As for those clues that can be analyzed explicitly, I’m not sure if it would be a good idea to get into that topic, since it’s mostly about (statistically accurate) sex-stereotypes, which is clearly a hot-button issue.
It’s been my experience that writing style isn’t especially gendered. I used to think I could tell, but I can’t actually guess accurately based on writing style alone. (Topic choice, sure.) And, of course, women have successfully written under male pseudonyms many times. Lots of behaviors are gendered, but there’s psychological evidence that people are biased towards seeing gender differences in everything, and I think the “female writing style” is one of those supposed gender differences that doesn’t actually exist. If you want, though, we can see if you can guess the gender of the authors of a few writing samples where the choice of topic doesn’t give it away.
I initially thought Alicorn was male too, but that’s because she has a genderless username and writes on a majority-male site. I’ve been mistaken for a guy on the internet, when I thought my username was plenty girly, but, you know, I was on the internet so the priors are skewed.
I used to think I could tell, but I can’t actually guess accurately based on writing style alone. (Topic choice, sure.)
Writing style can’t be strictly separated from the choice of topic (or rather sub-topics addressed when writing on a given topic), and some of the most powerful clues come exactly from where these things blend into each other. Moreover, in interactive back-and-forth writing on forums and blogs, typical male and female behaviors and attitudes often quickly become apparent, just like in a live conversation, and are clearly detectable in writing.
Someone has already posted a link to a paper whose authors claim to have found measurable statistical differences between male and female styles, but I’m not sure how much (if at all) the usual human intuition relies on those specific clues.
But in any case, I don’t see where exactly you disagree with my above diagnosis, given that it’s discussing what I believe to be a fairly extreme and clear-cut case. Do you think Alicorn’s style doesn’t have the characteristics I described, or that such writing isn’t statistically likely to come from men?
If you want, though, we can see if you can guess the gender of the authors of a few writing samples where the choice of topic doesn’t give it away.
If you have some samples ready, I’d be curious to give it a try.
Two writing samples, one male and one female, from humanities journals:
First:
Machiavelli’s advocacy of force and fraud in the conduct of politics is the key teaching that has secured his reputation as “Machiavellian” and that has led to the conception of “The Prince” as the first document in the Western tradition to lay bare the dark, demonic underside of civic humanism. But this interpretation overlooks the degree to which a politics of intense competition and personal rivalry inhabits the humanist vision from antiquity, producing an ethics of expediency and a rhetoric of imposture that seeks to mask its alertness to advantage behind the guise of integrity and service. This vision is nowhere more apparent than in Cicero’s “De Oratore,” which exerted a powerful influence on the Italian humanists of the quattrocentro in whose direct descent Machiavelli stands. Deception, to put it simply, is an acknowledged and vital element in civic humanism long before “The Prince.” The difference is that Cicero typically couches it in a sacrificial rhetoric that is euphemistically inflected while Machiavelli opts for a hard-edged rhetoric of administrative efficiency to make his case. But the stylistic differences, important as they are, should not mask the essential affinity between the Machiavellian doctrine of princely fraud and the Ciceronian ethics of gentlemanly dissimulation.
Second:
This article analyzes the intellectual content of civic humanism in the specific context of Medici power, asking the question: what ideological role did civic humanism play in Medicean Florence? It argues that there is no contradiction between the ideals of civic humanism and support for the Medici regime. On the contrary, civic humanism could be used to justify and legitimate Medici power. The article analyzes the writings of principal humanists such as Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, and Francesco Filelfo, showing that Hans Baron’s republican “civic humanism” was compatible with different constitutional forms and different distributions of power.
Two excerpts from New York Times articles, one male and one female:
First:
Under newly fortified Republican control, many state governments started the year pledging forceful action to crack down on illegal immigration, saying they would fill a void left by the stalemate in Washington over the issue. Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico backed a repeal to a law granting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Now, with some legislatures winding down their sessions, the lack of consensus that has immobilized Congress has shown up in the legislatures as well, and has slowed — but not stopped — the advance of bills to penalize illegal immigrants. No state has passed a law that replicates the one adopted last April in Arizona, which greatly expanded the powers of police officers to question the immigration status of people they stop. Still, immigrant advocates in many states say the debate has clearly shifted in favor of tougher enforcement. They say they have had to fight just to hold the line on immigration issues that they thought were long settled.
Second:
With the referendum over the constitutional amendments that will shape Egypt’s immediate political future just days away, the country’s nascent political forces were squaring off on Sunday, scrambling to influence a choice that leaves many confused.
The Muslim Brotherhood and rump elements of the disbanded governing National Democratic Party, which both stand to gain the most from a rapid rebirth of electoral politics, support the amendments. Arrayed against them is much, but not all, of the remaining political spectrum, centered on the young organizers behind the Tahrir Square demonstrations who fear a yes vote would ultimately rob them of their revolution. Yet everyone agrees on two things. The referendum, which is scheduled for Saturday, will be a milestone and the first one not rigged outright in about 60 years. “Whether we accept the amendments or we reject them, either situation means a page in our history will turn,” said Amr Shubaki, a political analyst at the state-financed Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.
Two excerpts from short stories, one male and one female.
First:
An old man with radiation scars surrounding the chromed half of his face limped down a salt-grass covered dune. Metal armatures creaked under his clothing as he thumped heavily across dry sand to wet, scuffing through the black and white line of the high-tide boundary, where the sharp glitter of cast-up teeth tangled in film-shiny ribbons of kelp. About his feet, small combers glittered in the light of a gibbous moon. Above, the sky was deepest indigo: the stars were breathtakingly bright.
The old man, whose name was Aethelred, fetched up against a large piece of seawrack, perhaps the wooden keel of some long-ago ship, and made a little ceremony of seating himself. He relied heavily on his staff until his bad leg was settled, and then he sighed in relief and leaned back, stretching and spreading his robes out around him.
Second:
Kalak rounded a rocky stone ridge and stumbled to a stop before the body of a dying thunderclast. The enormous stone beast lay on its side, riblike protrusions from its chest broken and cracked. The monstrosity was vaguely skeletal in shape, with unnaturally long limbs that sprouted from granite shoulders. The eyes were deep red spots on the arrowhead face, as if created by a fire burning deep within the stone. They faded. Even after all these centuries, seeing a thunderclast up close made Kalak shiver. The beast’s hand was as long as a man was tall. He’d been killed by hands like those before, and it hadn’t been pleasant. Of course, dying rarely was.
The humanities articles both use the same formal dry academic style, from which it’s hard to say anything. The first one is much worse in terms of long-winded verbiage, but that doesn’t say much. If I had to guess, I would toss a coin.
The Times articles are similarly written in a routine journalistic style (it reads like a telegram with some cliche phrases cut and pasted between the words), so again it’s hard to say anything. (Also, from what I know, news articles are heavily edited and it’s questionable how much individual style they preserve.) If I really had to guess, I would say the first is more likely to be female by an epsilon. Google confirms this is correct, but I admit I wouldn’t bet any money on it. (On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if an experienced newspaper editor could guess much better.)
As for the short stories excerpts, well, that’s some bad prose. The first one sounds to me a bit more feminine; I’d say it’s something like a 60-40 guess. Googling these paragraphs, I see that I guessed right; admittedly, I wouldn’t have bet very much money on this one either.
Do you think Alicorn’s style doesn’t have the characteristics I described, or that such writing isn’t statistically likely to come from men?
Well, she thinks explicitly and abstractly, like most people here, and I suppose that could be more common in men, but I don’t think I’ve noticed anything especially male or female in her prose. I didn’t notice an unusual lack or predominance of pronouns. (Actually I think Alicorn, more than most LessWrongers, tends to illustrate ideas with anecdotes about individual people, whether real or hypothetical. So that would mean more pronouns—but then again, Eliezer has the same habit, and I don’t know if that means you’d consider his writing feminine.)
I’ve been collecting examples of Eliezer being mistaken for female; so far I’ve got six, plus two people uncertain. (Someone suggested that it’s because of his name, but I don’t remember why.)
Numerous cases in Methods of Rationality, especially during the early days. It’s as if they had priors suggesting that most Harry Potter fanfiction authors were female.
For what it is worth Alicorn’s writing style always resolved to female written for me. And the name seemed even more female—along the lines of “Alison”. My intuition possibly focuses on somewhat different features of communication when making the distinctions.
Also, why not simply use a female name if you’re bothered by this?
Being bothered is not usually about avoiding the negative stimulus.
Whatever the reason for this state of affairs might be, people who write like that are overwhelmingly men.
This may be (although I’d like to see solid data before assuming so). But I also suspect that being on a rationality blog acts a filter for the sorts of people who DON’T write like that.
Have you considered that your writing style might be unusual for a woman? Even based on a small sample of writing that has no obvious clues, it’s usually possible to guess the author’s sex much better than chance. You write in a very technical matter-of-fact style, with long, complex, and yet very precisely constructed sentences, and take unusual care to avoid ambiguities and unstated implications. (You’d probably be a great textbook writer.) Whatever the reason for this state of affairs might be, people who write like that are overwhelmingly men.
That just says ‘well educated and highly intelligent’ to me. Now, such people tend to be more commonly male than female, but given that someone posts on Less Wrong I don’t think that writing style is further evidence for them being male.
I’m not sure which shadows which here. It doesn’t seem like writing in this style will cause someone to post on LessWrong, while conversely it seems much more likely that someone who has been posting on LessWrong for a while will adopt this writing style. Thus, ISTM that the writing style overshadows posting-on-LessWrong more than the other way around.
Given that I have the text itself, learning that it was posted on LessWrong I wouldn’t infer much from it, since regardless of gender they aren’t obviously more likely to write this way on LessWrong if they’re a regular user, whilst if I only know that someone is posting on LessWrong then learning that they write in this manner also gives me all the other non-LessWrong writer data.
Not sure if I’m really being clear. Basically, in my model the causal chain goes the other way around.
My priors before I started paying attention at all (i.e. before the first time it came up in a conversation I was part of, on the internet, that someone was uncomfortable / sad / whatever that they were being referred to as the wrong gender—which, for record, was a post-op man genetically female who still had a few culturally-programmed female-expected behaviors) were around about .4 female to .6 male for any random person I meet and discuss with on the Internet.
Even that .4 seems rather high compared to the base stats I’ve seen since then for some populations, but there’s apparently some factor which makes me more likely to engage and enjoy discussions and interactions over the web with women, for some reason I don’t yet understand.
However, since then, I’ve had to update downwards. Even with my abnormal encounter rates (e.g. meeting 30% women in communities that are 3% women overall), on average I still only expect and observe that I “befriend” (or otherwise engage and interact with more actively with) women only one in five times of such people, i.e. the other four are men. This if I only include so-called “normal” men and women, because I also end up meeting abnormally high numbers of transgenders, asexuals, queers, and other nonstandard genders.
On top of that, out of the women that I do tend to interact with (which are already at less than 0.2 expected rate), only one in two cases I’ll end up having to refer to them before their gender becomes “revealed” in some manner (sometimes because of an obvious nickname). Of the half where I do, nowadays I use gender-neutral format, but before I started doing so, only one in four (well, three out of thirteen to the best of my memory, in total) got slighted/offended/whatever that I used male pronouns.
Which basically ends up with there being an approximately 2% expected probability that for any person I start interacting with I might use a male pronoun for a woman that will be affected by it, unless there is a high amount of women who get hurt from wrong pronoun usage but never reveal this. This is including my current rate of female:male encounter ratio, which I’ve already confirmed is abnormal from other stats (e.g. I’ve eliminated cases like women just befriending more people than men or similar situations).
I would expect that most people have their expectations somewhere around this or even rarer, so I can’t fault them for using male pronouns on the Internet by default without first having to fault them for thousands of other, much worse things.
For bias evaluation purposes: I have been identified and referred to with female pronouns at least twice on the Internet, and wasn’t offended (in one case, I was actually flattered, for various contextual reasons). In the past week, excluding work colleagues and LessWrong, I’ve maintained more meaningful Internet-based interactions with three regular men, two women, and one genetically-male unclear-someone who hasn’t quite yet resolved his own personal gender-identity yet and would probably fall in some gray area between “queer” and “pre-op transgender”.
How is it even reasonable to expect some arbitrarily visitor to notice (or guess correctly) your gender?
Do you evaluate your writing style or your expressed thoughts to be so typically female as to yield to no other conclusion?
Or do you count on the “obvious” connotations of a name like “Alicorn”—for it is surely obvious that anyone naming oneself thus must be thinking about some fluffy, girly sparkling unicorn instead of, for example, making a reference to the Invisible Pink Unicorn—or something (especially on a rationality website!).
There is no personal information on the user pages here on LS, and decidedly no gender marks on top of the posts themselves. Also, you are obviously not willing to provide any info to make you identifiable in RL and yet expect all people to infer that you are female anyway, even given the prior probability distribution (“there are no girls on the internet”, “a contributor on some intellectual/academia website”)?
Even when one does not think of people on the internet strictly as male, it is simply usually a better guess to refer to them as “he”, given that
i) one is unwilling to use “he/she” or a similarly artificial form, and
ii) there is no other information one is willing to look up.
Thus I conclude that as long as you do not change your nickname into something like “Alicorn(female!)” or change your expectations, you will be sad like this time and time again. [ :( ]
I think it’s an unfortunate but inescapable fact that people are unlikely to assume a given poster on a rationality site is female unless said poster has an obviously-female-name (and honestly, I don’t think “Alicorn” counts. I had no idea what it meant until you explained).
But I AM genuinely offended by the Isgoria blogger proclaiming that male pronouns were “neutral”, even when applied to a specific person. I’m not sure it was the optimal use of my time given the year old status of this discussion, but I sent an e-mail saying so. It gave me warm fuzzies, at least.
I think the male bias in the english language is a ridiculously obvious problem, and I am extremely frustrated whenever a someone says “hey, it’d be cool if you made a small effort to use gender neutral language” and the response is “dude, what’s YOUR problem?”
(Originally I used male pronouns to refer to the Isgoria blogger, then realized I didn’t actually know for sure. I’m 90% sure the blogger is male, and I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to guess someone’s gender wrong. But it also didn’t take much effort to avoid the use of pronouns in the first place, and if we had an official actually neutral pronoun it wouldn’t have been an issue.)
I’ve read that essay, it’s largely responsible for my current views (or at least made me much more vocal about them). The only issue I have with it is that it’s almost too subtle. I didn’t really get what was going on until I skipped down to the end. I sent it to a feminist friend of mine and she got annoyed with it and stopped reading before she understood what the point was.
I remember reading that article, and not being impressed. He lumps all the sexist talking points into one essay, and therefore it ends up looking like one big strawperson. He may have good points, but unfortunately his own essay undermines them.
My understanding is that the essay’s effect is via the horror a reader feels at the alternate-world presented in the essay. It opens the reader’s eyes somewhat to the degree that sexism is embedded in everyday grammar and idiom. My understanding is that it is not a persuasive essay in the usual sense.
So we should not stereotype people’s geneder based on the fact that they post on geeky websites (stereotypically male) but we should stereotype people based on their association with unicorns (stereotypically female, supposedly)?
(And why are unicorns supposed to be stereotypically girly? Horses are typically a symbol of strength and masculinity. So an horse with a large horn on its forehead, well...)
So do you maintain that it reasonably possible to infer Alicorn’s gender by her nickname?
To the extent that inferring that female gender is more likely from a feminine name is “stereotyping” then sure I endorse stereotyping.
To answer the question again:
So we should not stereotype people’s geneder based on the fact that they post on geeky websites (stereotypically male) but we should stereotype people based on their association with unicorns (stereotypically female, supposedly)?
You should “stereotype” (which you seem to be using to mean ‘update in response to information’) based on both. Social tact dictates that some care should be taken to avoid making mistakes. Getting pronouns wrong is embarrassing, particularly if someone is around to play offense. If you aren’t sure it is safer to rephrase the sentence such that it doesn’t rely on gendered pronouns.
If the nickname was obviously a femmine one, (e.g. ‘Jane’), or even something more exotic but still recognizably femmine (e.g. ‘Aerith’) I would agree.
But you could infer that ‘Alicorn’ was a femmine name only through the association between interest in unicorns and being female (which is specifict to some subcultures). That doesn’t seem to me any less stereotypical than inferring that somebody is male through the association between nerd interests and being male (which, on the other hand, is supported by statistical evidence and AFAIK occurs in any culture).
Social tact dictates that some care should be taken to avoid making mistakes. Getting pronouns wrong is embarrassing, particularly if someone is around to play offense.
Wei Dai argues that offense is a response to a perceived threat to one own status. He also cautions about oversensitivity.
It doesn’t seem to me that getting a pronoun wrong because you didn’t datamine the Internet for personal information just to get a pronoun right is an attack to someone status.
True, you could use gender-neutral constructions. I’m not a native English speaker, but I suspect that many native speakers find constructions such as ‘he or she’, the epicene ‘they’ or paraphrases like ‘this person’ excessively artificial and unidiomatic for informal speech.
After all, why should you assume that somebody over the Internet will be offended if you incorrectly guess the content of their pants? Isn’t equality feminism all about not caring about what kind of genital organs people have got, except on issues directly related to these organs?
If somebody posted a comment like: “Every woman knows that babies are cuter than rabbits. It’s in our maternal instinct. This guy doen’t know what he’s talking about.” then Alicorn could be reasonably offendend, since this comment would imply that she was defective as a woman and hence it would lower her status. But that’s not what was posted. The poster actually liked the article, she (*) just got one pronoun wrong.
(* the ‘Sharon’ signature and the remark about being a mother are definitely enough evidence to infer that the poster is a she)
Wei Dai argues that offense is a response to a perceived threat to one own status. He also cautions about oversensitivity.
Not being oversensitive yourself is a good practice, dismissing the possibility that another will be offended by something you do is called “insensitive”. Yes, sometimes you should take a stand and decide that a person getting offended about a particular thing is their problem, not yours (otherwise you give them complete control over you). However I don’t think someone being mildly (or occasionally significantly) offended when people get their sex wrong is really the place to draw the battle lines.
It doesn’t seem to me that getting a pronoun wrong because you didn’t datamine the Internet for personal information just to get a pronoun right is an attack to someone status.
Some people get offended if you call them a girl when they are a boy and vice versa. That is all. Either ignore this and be considered an ass by said people (and some observers) or take some degree of care to get it right.
I wasn’t really sure how to word that sentence to strike the right emotional note (I’ve changed it a little, hopefully for the better).
I think it’s legitimate to argue “you should not make assumptions about gender until you have some actual evidence to go on. ” I don’t think it’s legitimate to argue “my name relates to unicorns therefore you should assume I’m a girl.” Either people associate the word alicorn with femininity or they don’t. And since this issue has come up multiple times, apparently enough people don’t make that association that it’s an issue.
I also don’t think the world would be a better place if more people DID think Alicorn was a girly name. My favorite game is Robot Unicorn Attack. I’ve considered buying Invisible Pink Unicorn Merchandise. I don’t feel a need to associate my identity with it, but I think it’d be a better world if preference for unicorns didn’t signal gender or sexuality at all.
I don’t feel a need to associate my identity with it, but I think it’d be a better world if preference for unicorns didn’t signal gender or sexuality at all.
You’d better not move to Germany. Chairs have a masculine sexual identity.
Slavic languages also assign a grammatical gender to every noun, and there’s nothing sexual about it. (I certainly find nothing sexual about stars, books, rivers, or mathematics being feminine.) Even for nouns that denote humans and other living creatures with biological sex, the correlation between grammatical gender and biological sex is high but still not perfect.
The gender defaults are mostly masculine (though with some exceptions), and it would be impossible to change that without rewriting the grammar of the language altogether, which is why the entire business over gender-neutral language in English has always seemed absurd to me. On the upside, it’s almost impossible to speak without revealing whether you’re male or female, since you have to refer to your attributes and actions using adjectives and even verbs inflected for gender, so confusions of this sort are almost impossible (however this can make it impossible to translate literature where a character’s sex is supposed to be hidden).
IIRC, Germans, Italians, &c. will describe the same objects differently based on the grammatical gender of the word describing it; i.e., speakers of a language in which “bridge” is masculine will emphasize a bridge’s strength and stability vs beauty and grace, and visa versa, &c. So gender in the wider sense interacts with it somewhat.
On a lighter note, Mark Twain had a typically great passage which he claimed to be a literal translation of a German story, the main humor being that various inanimate objects are referred to as hes and shes while the hapless fishwife has to get by on its.
The “bridge” study was by Lera Boroditsky, as discussed here. Her papers are available here—it looks like the most relevant is:
Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In Gentner & Goldin-Meadow (Eds.,) Language in Mind: Advances in the study of Language and Cognition.
I mistook your gender as well, initially. In my defence, I had no idea what “Alicorn” meant, except that it sounded like “Unicorn”. Unicorns are male more often than not, and the word “Unicorn” is male-gendered in my native language, which tipped my gender assignment all the way toward “male”.
My point is, the people who are mistaking your gender may not be making any assumptions about you. They may just be making assumptions about unicorns.
Wow, that’s quite a discussion thread that’s hanging below this comment; interesting, but completely unrelated to the top-level post. I want to jump in with a few words about anger but I’m completely at a loss as to where to put them.
Edit: this comment has been rewritten; please see wnoise’s comment below for original context.
I feel that the topic of gender identity is not as important as this discussion and others like it on LW seem to make it. In a text based environment, using pseudonyms, we are genderless until we reveal ourselves. And unless we intend to employ mating signals between posters here, it has little relevance even after it has been revealed.
I have operated for years in communities where the gender of participants is highly relevant, but where there were taboos against attempts to discover true genders (online, text-based roleplaying). In such environments, I’ve developed a severe lack of concern for the topic at large, and instead read what the person has to say and contribute without a gender filter. Many times, I don’t even read the name of a poster except as a pattern that allows me to place the comment in context with those around it.
Alicorn’s focus on gender identity has, several times now, generated very large discussion threads and at least one top level post. I do not understand why this is accepted by the rest of the LW community as important and relevant to the topic of rationality.
It’s because we want more women to post here so we need to listen to Alicorn and keep her happy!!! We respect her opinions. Diversity is good. If we can’t keep Alicorn happy, we’re generally screwed as far as attracting (and subsequently not alienating) more women to this site.
Being non-anglo-saxon, I’m in a minority here. So you need to listen to me and keep me happy!!! You have to respect my opinions. Diversity is good. If you can’t keep me happy, you’re generally screwed as far as attracting (and subsequently not alienating) more non-anglo-saxons to this site.
I don’t perceive Alicorn as “focusing” on “gender identity”. I perceive Alicorn as getting annoyed when people (out of carelessness) get her gender identity wrong.
Annoyance is one thing, and I have no problem with it; expressing that annoyance in such a way as to fuel a 118 post thread (and growing) on the topic in an otherwise unrelated article is what I disagree with.
Surely if the thread’s grown unwieldy, that’s not simply because Alicorn expressed her annoyance? There’s a whole bunch of other people involved here, whose contribution matters even if it all stems off of one of her comments.
Alicorn’s focus on gender identity has, several times now, generated very large discussion threads and at least one top level post. I do not understand why this is accepted by the rest of the LW community as important and relevant to the topic of rationality.
Questions of appropriate standards for our community are on-topic to a limited extent. If you disagree, please refrain from making comments like this one, on pain of contradiction.
As pointed out by Kevin, this discussion has been had several times before on LW, and community norms should have already been established, in which case continued large threads on the topic are likely unproductive.
I also do not see why contradiction should be painful.
I would categorize it as 10 percent humor, 60 percent temporary interest in the vague threat implied by the “don’t do this… or else” definition and why that context was appropriate when applied to the topic of contradiction, and 30 percent etymological interest, as I have “on pain of death” as the most-associated thought when hearing the phrase (Google agrees, with that as the top suggestion to complete “on pain of”), and was curious as to how the permutation may have originated.
ETA: I disagree with the sentiment that contradiction is a negative, undesirable, or potentially painful event; instead, I view it as an opportunity to update maps, assuming that the contradiction is supported by the weight of the evidence.
“Pain” in this expression means “penalty”. Though I haven’t looked it up to confirm, I’m pretty confident the word “pain” itself comes from Latin poena via French peine, meaning just that.
(The first time I heard this idiom, the phrase was “on pain of imprisonment”.)
If you downvoted this comment, please explain why you feel that the topic of gender identity is so important as to merit top level posts and long discussions in many other posts.
I have not downvoted it. But the original phrasing “You are too focused on the topic of gender identity; I suggest that the topic is not nearly so worthy of concern.” differs from the one here in that it suggests concern to oneself, rather than the concern to the community that this post makes clear. The first is telling other people what they should be concerned with, violating a clear norm, and helping no one.
I downvoted it. This was already discussed in depth on the site a while ago. See the fall-out posts and discussion related to the PUA stuff (googling for PUA site:lesswrong.com should give you most of it) Basically, the answer to your statement (and then some!) is contained in that thousands of words worth of discussion, and I thought your comment was little more than being a likely trigger for a discussion that’s already been beaten into the ground here, even though that wasn’t your intention and your intention was in fact exactly opposite.
I will state that summarizing this discussion for postery’s sake (in the wiki) so we can stop having it is a good idea.
Yes, I read those discussions, and those posts, which is why I’m surprised it’s still generating threads this large on unrelated articles.
When reading, I noticed that this particular thread had a button labeled “load more comments (106 replies)”, and that struck me as very wrong for a comment I would have labeled “off-topic” at best.
I didn’t downvote, but considering that many people are confused about gender identity, applying rationality to it seems a reasonable topic for posting here.
Pragmatically: It’s important because the fact that this keeps coming up again and again suggests it’s not going to go away just because it’s annoying to many when it happens, and a mechanism to channel, redirect or settle the matter in the form of community norms hasn’t yet been found. Meanwhile, there’s clearly people who find it relevant, both to their participation in LW and not infrequently to life experiences that have bearing on what they can contribute to refining the art of rationality. Some of those people are major contributors here; some of them may still be lurking. Some of them haven’t even found te site yet. A global norm that rejects the topic altogether seems like a great path to evaporative cooling in an area where LW has real potential for PR issues, and which may be a long-term impediment to its success. Restricting the topic to Discussion only (regardless of the potential quality of the post and ensuing discussion) or attempting to limit the length of threads directly seems like a bad idea.
You can always downvote it if you don’t want to see it.
I didn’t downvote your comment; I think you actually make an interesting point.
For me, it’s not just that people obsess over issues of gender (and race, and sexual preference). It’s that their gender (or race) sometimes becomes like the team they are on and (arguably) warps their views.
For example, let’s suppose you did a poll and asked people if they think women should have the right to vote. I’m pretty confident that the percentage which says “yes” would be higher among women than among men. So it seems likely that peoples’ group membership colors their judgments.
I’ve gotten ‘she’ from ‘Eliezer Yudkowsky’ no less.
Interestingly, over the course of some time monitoring blog trackbacks for Overcoming Bias, I never saw Robin Hanson mistaken for a female Robin.
So… um… I realize that this isn’t really what the whole point is about at all, but I didn’t feel particularly insulted to be called a girl; what does it say about your opinion of men that you’re insulted to be mistaken for male? :)
(And yes, I know, it probably wouldn’t be annoying if it was only happening to you personally and no one else, it’s the background social assumptions that are annoying.)
Am I mistaken for female on here because of my username often, I wonder. It does look like it has the word “gal” embedded in it. Darn orthography not reflecting pronunciation.
(The pronunciation is /ˈwɔrɨɡl̩/ in IPA, uorygl in Lojban. Also, it took me ages to figure out a way to get the word “female” within five words of the beginning of that sentence.)
It says nothing about my opinion of men (I think) - it just signifies to me that the person so profoundly does not even care. I don’t want to be talked about without being considered. This is probably more of a pet peeve for me than for others. It would still be annoying even if it never happened to anyone else.
What did the person who mistook me for a woman not care about with respect to me? What were they not considering about me that constitutes disrespect to me? If it’s not an annoying social background assumption then I genuinely don’t understand what’s so terrible about this.
Do you remember whoever-it-was that was talking about not having the kind of attachment to sexual identity that other people claimed? (She—I believe it was she—mentioned that she would be more likely to report but not as emotionally traumatized by rape.)
I think this is an inverse of this. Some people—me, for example—are unperturbed by being assigned the wrong gender. Not everyone.
In person, I’m fairly obviously girl-shaped. No one has ever made this mistake when interacting with me in person, and I don’t have to do Obvious Girl Things™ to get that accuracy—don’t have to swish around in crinoline, don’t have to conveniently quote third parties who refer to me as “she”, don’t have to carry my purse everywhere I go, or even say my name (which is a girls’ name). People don’t assume based on where I am or what I’m doing or how surprising it would be for me to be a girl before they figure out that I am one anyway and pronoun me accordingly.
And—in person, when people can’t tell what gender someone is, they don’t guess, unless they feel able to rely on visual cues or maybe being married to someone of a known gender (and when they are wrong they are mortified). People will bend over backwards to avoid using the wrong pronoun for someone who’s in the room with them. They’ll ask third parties or construct their sentences to avoid making the assumption or learn the person’s name to get a clue. It’s just not socially acceptable to get it wrong.
Online, people feel free to guess, and on the geeky parts of the Internet I frequent this is most likely to affect women negatively. (I also frequent various anti-prejudice parts of the Internet, but there a) I generally lurk and b) under the circumstances they take the trouble to be careful about that sort of thing!)
Now, I recognize this disparity is because it’s considered insulting to say that someone looks like the opposite gender, and not so with writing like the opposite gender… except that when people talk about third parties one of them knows in person and the other doesn’t, the one who doesn’t know doesn’t casually hurl pronoun caution to the wind even though someone is right there to correct them should they be wrong without any implications about anyone’s looks having been made. When there is a mechanism to find out a real person’s gender, it gets taken advantage of. With real people, you don’t guess, you find out, and if you’re wrong, that’s not okay.
Getting my gender wrong when it would have been pretty easy to get it right (for crying out loud, ask me! Or someone else! Or do the most cursory of searches for “alicorn gender” on this very site—it’s in the second result!) signifies that I am not a “real person” in the above sense. It’s okay to guess. It doesn’t matter if you get it wrong. He won’t care, and if she does, it’s about eir politics or something dismissible like that, not about whether you took four seconds to fact-check. Not about identity, or consideration, or the fact that this happens about once a week and the blogger, unlike most people who make the mistake, doesn’t even have a way for me to correct em.
It seems somewhat unreasonable to get so upset over the fact that a random person on the Internet doesn’t care about you. I wonder what you think about this quote from my post The Nature of Offense:
On the other side of this interaction, we should consider the possibility that our offensiveness sense may be tuned too sensitively, perhaps for an ancestral environment where mass media didn’t exist and any offense might reasonably be considered both personal and intentional.
But I admit that I’m still quite confused about the proper relationship between rationality, values, and emotions. “Too sensitively” above makes some sense to me intuitively, but if someone asks “too sensitive compared to what?” then I can’t really give an answer. I’d be interested in any insights you (or anyone else) might have.
I wouldn’t mind if the person had chosen not to blog about me at all. But having made the choice to a) blog about my article and b) couch this entry in terms of what puzzles me, etc., not checking up on my gender places the entire thing in a sort of uncanny valley of care. The blogger basically tried to order up my content a la carte, and there is a limit to how modular my contents are.
I tend to agree with Wei Dai, and it seems to me that your analogy between the way people behave on the internet and the way people behave in person is flawed. To illustrate this:
The internet behavior in question: the blogger didn’t care enough about you to find out your gender, but did care enough about what you said to comment on it, also not realizing that you would read the blog post.
Real world behavior that would be actually analogous: two men (more likely to be uncaring) are walking down a street in a large city. Two other persons pass them, walking in the other direction and speaking with one another. The two men overhear something, but it is difficult for them to be sure of the gender of the two persons. Then, one of the two men comments to the other on what they overheard. He uses whatever gender pronoun seems to him slightly more likely, even while knowing that there is a good chance he is wrong, and he doesn’t care.
Note the real analogy here: the two men don’t care about the two persons they pass, but are interested in what they overhear, and so say something about it. They have no reason to expect that the persons will hear what they say, so, in their view, it doesn’t matter whether they are right or not.
Of course, people may well underestimate the probability that other people will read blog posts about them, so maybe they should be more careful.
I tend to agree with Wei Dai, and it seems to me that your analogy between the way people behave on the internet and the way people behave in person is flawed.
The other difference when calling a ‘she’ a he’ in real life is:
If you can actually see her with your eyes and you call her a ‘he’ then it probably means you haven’t noticed her breasts, don’t consider her facial features to be differentiated and don’t even have a polite, respectful appreciation for her feminine form. That makes the situation extremely embarrassing for both parties.
“Too sensitively” above makes some sense to me intuitively, but if someone asks “too sensitive compared to what?” then I can’t really give an answer.
Too sensitive compared to how you would want to feel if you knew more about your preferences (how low worlds rank where the offense was made) and more about what the world is like, e.g. the state of mind of those making the perceived offense?
And—in person, when people can’t tell what gender someone is, they don’t guess, unless they feel able to rely on visual cues or maybe being married to someone of a known gender (and when they are wrong they are mortified). People will bend over backwards to avoid using the wrong pronoun for someone who’s in the room with them. They’ll ask third parties or construct their sentences to avoid making the assumption or learn the person’s name to get a clue. It’s just not socially acceptable to get it wrong.
I’m pretty sure that’s a function of where you hang out.
My impression is that transgendered people have a hard time getting their choices taken seriously in most social circles.
I assume that is without knowing that the word “alicorn” is related to unicorns? Or are you not confident enough in females liking unicorns much more so than males to be able to give a probability estimate?
When I once wasn’t sure about Alicorn’s gender, I googled “alicorn”, saw alicorn was a word related to unicorns and assigned a 95% probability then that Alicorn was female, which was confirmed by seeing someone refer to her as she on here.
That’s a 95% female probability, even accounting for the fact that LW is mostly male? You’re amazingly confident that female persons like unicorns much more, considering that unicorns have a huge sharp pointy phallic weapon sticking out of their foreheads.
That’s 95% confidence that the username would be picked by a female. Not at all the same thing as a 95% confidence that a person who likes unicorns is female. You are ignoring the fact that picking such a username is a powerful signal (to people who know what it means). I think unicorns are kind of cool but that doesn’t mean I would pick a username that references unicorns.
You’re amazingly confident that female persons like unicorns much more, considering that unicorns have a huge sharp pointy phallic weapon sticking out of their foreheads.
I sold my unicorn when I realized why the guys would never believe my locker-room stories of sexual conquest.
Maybe, but I certainly assumed she was female the first time I heard the name, and I had never heard it before… maybe associations with Alice or Allison or whatever. Anyway it sure seems determinately female to me.
This is a cultural norm kind of thing, but in the cultural norms where Alicorn chose her name, I think it really was intended to be a feminine username. I think women do have a tendency to try and choose somewhat feminine usernames, because otherwise a lot of the time on the internet they will be mistaken for men which gets annoying quickly.
I think something that would allow us to definitely solve this problem is profile pictures (which don’t have to be your actual picture) or user profiles.
I think something that would allow us to definitely solve this problem is profile pictures (which don’t have to be your actual picture) or user profiles.
User profiles good, pictures bad.
Frankly, the “problem” here really isn’t very hard to solve: just don’t assume you know a person’s sex unless you actually know it!
I think women do have a tendency to try and choose somewhat feminine usernames, because otherwise a lot of the time on the internet they will be mistaken for men which gets annoying quickly.
This is undoubtedly the case. However, the opposite choice is also quite popular—choosing masculine usernames to avoid being harassed for being female.
I have no idea how the Wedrifid from nearly three years ago selected ‘he’. It doesn’t seem the kind of detail one would encode indefinitely in long term memory.
You mean Ariel Sharon? That is his last name (which he actually chose himself. He was born Ariel Scheinermann, then he changed it to Sharon, probably because Scheinermann sounded too much German).
In fairness, his given name Ariel sound femmine to me, thanks to a certain cartoon character, but according to Hebrew grammar it’s actually a male name and it literally means ‘Lion of God’. Blame ignorant Disney.
BTW, that Sharon was pronounced with a stress on the second syllable, whereas the feminine first name has a stress on the first syllable. (Similarly, if I read that someone’s first name is Andrea I can’t tell whether they are male or female unless I know where they come from, but if I hear it pronounced I can.)
Shakespeare’s “Ariel” (from the Tempest) is also often depicted as a female character (though originally referred to as a male character). This graph does seem to imply however that its popularity as a female name may have been indeed influenced by Disney.
If one fails to invoke System 2 processing and reflect that world leaders are rarely known by their first names (assuming one even realizes that that example is where the ‘Sharon may be male’ thought is coming from), then they certainly do.
It (she) was a girl it is highly unlikely that (she) would have made the mistake. Apart from defaulting to writing ‘she’, she would have blogged since 2003 and would have had her own identity confused more than once.
But mostly I fell back on my prior for people who write blogs on these topics:
Isegoria—From the ancient Greek, equality in freedom of speech; an eclectic mix of thoughts on Policy, War, Economics, Business, Technology, Science, Fitness, Martial Arts, and more
This prior screens off my more general prior for the sex of bloggers in general. Beyond that I have a prior for the types of signalling that I expect to find humans engaging in based on their respective reproductive motivations.
At what odds would you bet against me if I was betting that the blogger in question was male?
Oh, the blogger is probably male. But from eir perspective, so was I: I blogged about “refining the art of human rationality” and ey could have been ever-so-responsibly screening off priors and making eir best guess and ey was wrong and I am pissed off. So, I decline to do the same thing.
Meanwhile I find ‘ey’ just irritating so my approach is to sometimes just avoid pronouns while other times I randomly generate pronouns based on my prediction, biased towards 0.5. I don’t recall being dramatically mistaken thus far and seem to have a reasonably good track record for guessing right based on writing style. At least, that is, in cases where I get later confirmation.
I think the singular they is not appropriate in this case, where the referent is a specific person of unknown (to the writer) gender, namely Alicorn, instead of an indeterminate person. From Wikipedia:
Some grammar and usage guides have accepted singular uses of they, in cases limited to references to an indeterminate person.[48] For example, A person might find themself in a fix is considered standard English, but not Dr. Brown might find themself in a fix.
Like some others here, I also find ‘ey’ annoying and distracting, so the fix I would prefer in this case is ‘he or she’. Does anyone consider that annoying or ungrammatical?
I’m sorry you find “ey” irritating; I promise not to refer to you a la Spivak. And I’m glad you’re good at detecting gender from writing style. And someday you may piss someone off very badly.
It doesn’t appear to have occurred to you that some people find Spivak pronouns very annoying. They annoy me immensely because it feels like someone is deliberately obstructing my reading in an uncomfortable way to make some kind of political point almost entirely unrelated to the context of the post itself. I usually just stop reading and go elsewhere to calm down.
It’s not me being referred to with them that bothers me, it is them being used at all. I find it difficult and uncomfortable to read, like trying to read 1337 5p34k, and it breaks my reading flow in an unpleasant way. It’s like bad grammar or spelling but with the additional knowledge that someone is doing it deliberately for reasons that I consider political.
I think it may have been a few decades ago, when the pronouns were invented, but at this point Spivak is generally used for courtesy purposes, as Alicorn said.
Breaking the flow I’ll agree is a valid objection, however. I have opted to avoid neologistic pronouns for that reason, save in cases where such are requested. If someone wants to be a “xe”, that’s their business, I say.
Thanks for the detailed description of why you find invented pronouns annoying.
I’m pretty flexible about new words, so I react to invented pronouns as a minor novelty.
I don’t know what people who use invented pronouns have in mind—they could be intending to tweak people, or they could be more like me and generalizing from one example.
I trained myself to use Spivak pronouns in less than a month. As far as lingual/grammatical conventions go, they flow very naturally. Singular “they” does not, because a plural verb does not belong with a singular subject. I find that much more annoying.
There is a difference between those situations. “You” is the only modern second person singular pronoun, whereas the third person singular has “he” and “she” in addition to the oft-used “they,” the latter obviously being the one which doesn’t fit.
Personally, I do feel it would be better to have some separation among the singular and plural second person pronouns, to avoid awkward constructions like “you all” and similar things. However, “thou” doesn’t seem to be a very viable option, given its current formal, Biblical connotations.
Also, the English language is missing a possessive form of the pronoun “which” (compare “who” and “whose”), if anyone wants to work on that problem.
One really clumsy thing in English is that there is no interrogative pronoun to which the answer would be an ordinal number (i.e. N-th in some sequential order). There isn’t even a convenient way to ask that question.
That is the suggested remedy, but it’s a bit of a kludge. “Who” is intended to be used as a pronoun for people, so the possessive form “whose” should be used in the same way.
That is the suggested remedy, but it’s a bit of a kludge
I’m a bit confused that you call it just a “suggested remedy”; my point is not that anyone advises this, it’s that this is what English speakers actually do.
“Who” is intended to be used as a pronoun for people, so the possessive form “whose” should be used in the same way.
Intended by who? Should why? It’s not even clear offhand that we should regard “whose” as exclusively a possessive form of “who”, given the above.
Off the top of my head I can’t think of any situation where the antecedent of “whose” would be unclear due to its ability to also refer to inanimate objects.
But doing so reduces the clarity of the language, by conflating two different meanings.
I have to disagree with this. I’m also someone who’s bothered when words with multiple distinct meanings get merged, but I don’t think this can be described as a case of that. (I suppose the most obvious objection is that this does not reduce the quality of the language because there is nothing to compare to. If English ever had these other words you suggest, it can’t have been for hundreds of years at least.)
In any case, these words are just function words, they’re just relative pronouns. Merging different relative pronouns doesn’t add extra meanings—most of them could be pretty well expressed with “what”—it just forces you to include the information even if it’s not relevant (maybe we don’t care if what did this is animate or not), while allowing some things to become slightly shorter by being implicit (we can say “he who did this” rather than “What person did this”. This wouldn’t work as well with “whatever”, but that’s a quirk of how the word is formed in English rather than any general feature of relative pronouns.)
Basically you’re just introducing another unavoidable; it doesn’t “add meaning” any more than does English’s insistence that all finite verbs have tense.
You’re not the only person I know to make this claim, but I will admit to never having understood it.
That is, I can understand objecting to “If my neighbor visits I’ll give them a cookie” because it violates the English grammatical convention that the subject and object must match in quantity—singular “neighbor” doesn’t go with plural “them.” I don’t have a problem with that, myself, but I accept that some people do.
And I can understand endorsing “If my neighbor visits I’ll give em a cookie” despite it violating the English grammatical convention that “em” isn’t a pronoun. I don’t have a problem with that either.
But doing both at once seems unmotivated. If I’m willing to ignore English grammatical conventions enough to make up new pronouns altogether, I don’t see on what grounds I can object to someone else ignoring subject/object matching rules.
Mostly, when people say this sort of thing I understand it to be an aesthetic judgment, on a par with not liking the color blue. Which is fine, as long as they aren’t too obnoxious about trying to impose their aesthetic judgments on me.
That is, I can understand objecting to “If my neighbor visits I’ll give them a cookie” because it violates the English grammatical convention that the subject and object must match in quantity
Presumably you mean pronoun and antecedent. Clearly, subject and object need not agree in number (what you call “quantity”); such a requirement would in fact be logically impossible.
Yup, you’re right. I have absolutely no idea what my brain thought it was doing there.
Entirely incidentally: requiring that the subject and object match in number would admittedly be a strange sort of grammatical requirement to have, as it would preclude expressing all manner of useful thoughts (e.g., “Give me two slices of pizza”), and I’d be incredulous if an actual language claimed to have such a requirement, but I’m not sure it’s logically impossible.
You’re right, of course. In fact, one could conceive of a language where the grammatical number of the object would have to agree with the subject, and it would therefore not give any information about the actual number of things denoted by the object, which would have to be stated explicitly if it’s necessary to avoid ambiguity, like in languages that lack grammatical number altogether. For all I know, there might even be an actual human language somewhere that features something like this.
But doing both at once seems unmotivated. If I’m willing to ignore English grammatical conventions enough to make up new pronouns altogether, I don’t see on what grounds I can object to someone else ignoring subject/object matching rules.
I don’t consider the creation of words to fall under the auspices of grammar. That happens in English and other languages all the time, because new or different concepts frequently need to be expressed in ways that are unavailable in the current state of the language. Using new words promotes clarity, in the long term, but misusing current words does the opposite.
“The pronoun form ‘they’ is anaphorically linked in the discourse to ‘this person’. Such use of forms of they with singular antecedents is attested in English over hundreds of years, in writers as significant as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, and Wilde. The people (like the perennially clueless Strunk and White) who assert that such usage is “wrong” simply haven’t done their literary homework and don’t deserve our attention.” (Language Log)
Language Log apparently thinks there are official rules determined by history.
This could hardly be farther form the truth. Language Log thinks that some completely made up rules that even the authors that propagate them often don’t follow in the very books they are doing the propagating in (I’m not sure if this applies in the specific case of Strunk and White and singular they, but it applies in many cases of what’s labeled prescriptivist poppycock there) are made even more absurd by history and the usage of high status people praised for their style.
This could hardly be farther form the truth. Language Log thinks that some completely made up rules that even the authors that propagate them often don’t follow in the very books they are doing the propagating in
Exactly so. My favorite example is Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” in which he rails against (among other things) the passive voice, but the very opening sentence of the essay contains the phrase “it is generally assumed.” Mistakes were made, I guess...
This is unfair to Orwell. Orwell’s advice is not to never use the passive voice. To begin, Orwell gives examples of bad writing and says:
I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged: … the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active …
His obvious complaint is that the passive voice is overused and inappropriately used, not that it is used at all. Note the phrase “wherever possible”. That suggests that the problem he is identifying is one of excess. In obvious reaction to this, he suggests a rule which exactly flips the above description, specifically:
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
This however does not say “never use the passive, ever”. And it should furthermore be obvious that Orwell does not mean, “never use the passive where you can find some convoluted and unreadable way to use the active.” I should think that you could always find some convoluted way to use the active. Rather, I think it should be obvious that he means, “never use the passive where you can use the active well.” What it amounts to is a reminder to the writer to re-examine his passives to see whether an active would not be better.
Well, yes, he also says, “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” But his opening sentence sounds to me precisely like the sort of passive that he’s warning against. It conjures the image of vague nameless opponents instead of naming concrete people, or at least concrete sorts of people, where we could examine if he really represents their views fairly. For a careful reader, this should be a warning that he might be setting up a strawman.
Can you even think of a concrete phrase that exemplifies a more shamelessly weasely use of passive than “it is generally assumed that...”?
Your position seems to be, then, that Orwell’s advice is sound, and it was his failure to follow his own advice which was unsound. I had taken you to mean approximately the opposite—that Orwell, a good writer, failed to take his own advice, and thereby illustrated the unsoundness of his advice. Or did you have something else entirely in mind?
Actually, both, to some extent. There is good and bad writing in terms of aesthetic style, and also in terms of logical soundness and factual accuracy. Any given piece of writing can be good or bad along these dimensions almost independently. Clearly, texts that combine great style with bad logic and inaccurate facts are especially misleading and difficult to assess correctly, and a lot of Orwell’s writing is in this category.
Now, in this essay, the great stylist Orwell breaks his own advice all over the place and thereby demonstrates that it’s complete rubbish when it comes to achieving good writing style. Good style in fact requires breaking these rules so often that it’s meaningless to espouse them as general guidelines. What’s significant is that Orwell is such a good stylist that his style dazzles you into not realizing this even as the contradictions are dancing in front of your nose. At the same time, the rules do have some limited applicability when it comes to logic and facts: some particular sorts of passives, bad metaphors, etc. are commonly used as weasely rhetorical tricks—and Orwell’s weasely essay does in fact employ them, hidden in plain sight by his great style.
So, to sum it up, Orwell has taken some observations about writing of non-zero but limited usefulness and applicability and written an unsound essay espousing them as supposedly general (if not absolute) rules. In the process he has contradicted himself by demonstrating that to achieve good style one must break these rules liberally, and also by breaking them in those situations where they do have some applicability (such as the awful “it is generally assumed that...”).
Debates on proper language style and grammar are always entertaining due to the impossibility fundamentally inherent in them of ever coming to a rational resolution. It’s a fun distraction to hone the creative mind for when real debate comes along.
It’s a fun distraction to hone the creative mind for when real debate comes along.
Or a temptation to reinforce bad habits of rhetoric so that when there is actually a rational conclusion to be reached everyone can merrily ignore it and follow their ego unfettered.
To expand on this point—Strunk & White and Language Log are both playing the “does this look right nowadays” game; the difference is that LL is basing their conclusions on what people actually do nowadays, whereas S&W are simply stating what they think would work better with no actual testing. That they failed to actually follow it suggests that in actual usage they did not find it to work better.
The reference to historical authors (rather than the current ones that would be more relevant) is just a bit of Dark Arts by LL, because the people espousing such arbitrary rules often claim they are based on history.
If that’s actually what’s being argued, no. And indeed prescriptivists often do argue this. But nobody seems to have actually been claiming that in this case.
They may be wrong on this particular matter, but it hardly follows that they “don’t deserve our attention”. White (of Strunk and White) is the author of Charlotte’s Web, still popular after six decades, so, not quite a literary failure.
Sure. Also, if they are driving a car into an intersection I’m crossing, I definitely endorse attending to them. But I suspect the poster Morendil is quoting meant “don’t deserve our attention [as authorities on grammatical usage].”
The pervasive wrongness of Strunk and White, in particular, is a recurring theme on LanguageLog.
If we’re to be treating people as deserving of our attention on the basis of their literary success, as the author of the quote did (see the appeal to Chaucer et al.), then it becomes relevant that E. B. White wrote Charlotte’s web. If we are going to ignore what E. B. White says on matters of usage because it doesn’t matter what he did as a writer, then in order to be fully consistent we should ignore Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the rest. This, however, undermines the Language Log quote, because it relies entirely on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the others to make its point.
I don’t think it’s straightforwardly literary success. Chaucer and Shakespeare may be the two most influential writers in English. Their work represents the form of English that ‘won’ in the 14th century and turn of 1600 respectively. The only other texts that leap to mind as historical sources of similar importance would be the King James Bible and the first Dictionary.
Shakespeare and Chaucer aren’t being appealed to as authoritative commentators. Their writing is referred to of evidence of English as it did and does exist.
It is not clear to me what you are saying. On the one hand you are saying that their work is representative of English as it existed. On the other hand you are saying that they are highly influential. Well, which is it?
But either way, E. B. White meets the criteria to at least some extent. First, he is indeed a representative of English as it existed in the mid-20th century. And as such, he is arguably more relevant to us now than Shakespeare and Chaucer are, since his English is closer to ours. Chaucer’s work, after all, is sufficiently hard for us to read that there now exist translations into current English of his work, and even Shakespeare cannot be read without a glossary.
As for influential, well, after all, White is one of the authors of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, which is influential. In fact, it is precisely because of the influence of Strunk and White that Language Log is bothering to talk about it.
Both representative and influential. Why would that be a contradiction? Newton and Einstein are both referred to as showing how scientists work AND as influencing scientists after them.
Writers and ‘experts’ are being mixed up here. White’s involvement here is as a commentator and critic, not in his own writing. Shakespeare and Chaucer aren’t commentators offering arguments, they’re the sort of thing that experts have to be expert in. You can argue whether another commentator’s analysis is right or wrong, but it’s more difficult to reject the evidence of cases in the field itself. The example of Einstein is a different sort of evidence about science, and a different sort of appeal, than the arguments of Kuhn or Popper.
Both representative and influential. Why would that be a contradiction?
I didn’t say it was a contradiction. I was asking you to clarify what you were saying. In any case I answered for both possibilities.
Writers and ‘experts’ are being mixed up here. White’s involvement here is as a commentator and critic, not in his own writing.
As I argued elsewhere, I don’t think this distinction is decisive.
You can argue whether another commentator’s analysis is right or wrong, but it’s more difficult to reject the evidence of cases in the field itself.
But now you are simply not answering what I wrote, but are beating up a straw man. My original statement was:
They may be wrong on this particular matter, but it hardly follows that they “don’t deserve our attention”.
In other words, I am admitting that they are wrong (I say “may” but my intent is that I am persuaded by the evidence from the OED), so if we treat them as prosecution lawyers I would say as the jury that they have lost the case and the defense has won, but I am saying that Language Log goes too far in saying that they “don’t deserve our attention”—i.e. that they should not have been permitted into the courtroom in the first place. That takes it one step too far, and I pointed that out.
Sorry, I took ‘which is it’ as meaning it must be one or the other. I think that the distinction is, while not perfect, well worth making. If we’re being philosophers of science, we listen to what Feynman says about physics, but our response can be to disagree. If it’s understood that some hold Feynman’s position, the simple fact he says it doesn’t itself constitute direct evidence. Whereas if we’re being philosophers of science and someone points out that our theory about what science can do clashes with what one of Feynman’s theories actually did, we have to engage with that in a different way.
On refusing them from the courtroom, LangagueLog obviously thinks they are simply bad commentators. It refers to ‘the perennially clueless Strunk and White’. I don’t know the area well enough to know if that’s fair.
But your counter-argument was that we should listen to White because he was a literary success, and that argument was founded on the comparison to appeals to Chaucer and Shakespeare. The fact is that White was being referred to as a bad commentator, which is very consistent with being a good author. And Chaucer and Shakespeare were being referred to as influential and representative authors, not simply succesful ones.
I disagree, because I think that being a bad commentator on writing is not “very consistent” with being a good writer. That is not a comfortable fit. It is technically consistent (i.e. possible), but not very consistent (i.e. probable). Similarly, Feynman being a good physicist would be technically consistent with making outrageously false statements about what science is in his popular essays, but it would not be a comfortable fit. We do not expect someone who has no clue about what science is to actually be a good scientist, and we are right not to expect that. This is why, having seen that Feynman is a good scientist, we expect him to have a very good grasp of what science is and so we expect his popular essays about science to be insightful and largely true.
This is why I find the distinction being made here between writer and commentator on writing to be a bit thin.
I think we’re coming from different ideas about this: in my experience, practicioners in any area often make absolutely horrible theorists about it. And at my university there was a physics professor who actively discouraged students from taking history and philosophy of science. Not because he thought it was worthless but because he felt it would blunt their scientific focus and abilities. This is all relative to those of similar intelligence/ability who haven’t specialised: on average, those doing well at almost any intellectual/educated pursuit will correlate with doing well at others to a degree.
There are honourable exceptions, of course.
In any case, even if there is a close association, there’s still a difference between someone’s work as a practitioner and their work as a commentator.
I think we’re coming from different ideas about this: in my experience, practicioners in any area often make absolutely horrible theorists about it
I sense this veering onto a whole other topic, but it may still be worth pointing out that the Elements of Style is not, and is not intended as, a work of theory. It is intended as a manual of instruction. And as far as I know, by far the majority of instructors in one craft or another are themselves practitioners rather than philosophers or sociologists who study the field from an outside vantage point. You want to learn physics from a physicist, not from a philosopher of physics. You want to learn writing from a writer. You want to learn architecture from an architect. And so forth. And before we had schools of art, we had the system of apprenticeship, in which people who are learning a trade study under those who are already making a living in the trade.
This is a good point; however, it rests on the assumption that Strunk and White managed to accurately describe what they are doing. But actually they failed at this.
This is a good point; however, it rests on the assumption that Strunk and White managed to accurately describe what they are doing. But actually they failed at this.
You are stating this as a binary fact (either they did, or they did not, accurately describe what they are doing). But surely what is more relevant is not a binary fact, but rather a matter of degree. Two questions are important:
1) What portion of their own advice did they not follow?
Suppose you find ten things that Strunk and White didn’t do that they said you should do. That amounts to a page of errata, which many books have (and which maybe all books should have). If we threw out every book that had (or deserved) a page of errata, then we would probably empty the libraries.
2) To what extent did they not follow it?
Question number (2) is interesting because it’s not always a question that can easily be answered by looking at their writing. Here’s what I mean. Suppose that I write an essay that is 100% passive constructions. Then I remember the advice to avoid passive constructions if possible. So I go through my essay, find a lot of passives that would be strengthened by making then active, and bring my essay down to 80% passive constructions.
Now, somebody looking at my essay will see that it is 80% passives and he might be tempted to conclude that I didn’t follow the advice to avoid passives. And he would be wrong.
That you do not find it very consistent is not relevant, because it happened. Even if you do not resolve it in the same direction as the people at Language Log, the contradiction between their writing and their advice on writing remains.
You seem to be failing to draw the distinction between looking at what they said and looking at what they did. And indeed, Strunk and White did not, in fact, actually follow their own advice.
I simply don’t think that this distinction is decisive. After all, on the topic of what physics is, we pay attention to Richard Feynman not only as an example of a physicist. We also pay attention to what he says about what physics is. And we take his statements about physics as having some authority on the strength of his being a physicist.
Fundamentally it seems to come down the expert-at-vs.-expert-on distinction. Being an expert at writing is some evidence for being an expert on it, but if what one says in one’s persona is an expert on writing doesn’t actually match what you do in your persona as an expert at writing, we have to ask which one is actually accurate. These are people who were initially known as experts at writing, so if there’s a contradiction it’s quite possibly because they were able to parlay their reputation as one into reputation as the other, without necessarily actually being the other. And if someone is primarily an expert at writing, then looking at what they actually wrote is more important. We do listen to what Feynman says about what physics is, but we expect philosophers of science to have a somewhat better idea.
But all this is hardly relevant. The fact remains that these days we have better experts on writing, whose expertise is actually empirically based. Should the debate become so unclear as to come down to authority rather than arguments, who has the better track record is pretty clear.
We do listen to what Feynman says about what physics is, but we expect philosophers of science to have a somewhat better idea.
Not on principle, but because I have read Feynman, and I have read philosophy of science (plenty of it, in my view), I do not expect philosophers of science to have a better idea—but in my case it’s not expectation. It’s memory.
Of course, you don’t have to pay any attention to what I just wrote. But I think that if you read enough philosophy one thing you will find philosophers agreeing on often is that other philosophers are wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, could not be more wrong, disastrously wrong.
We do listen to what Feynman says about what physics is, but we expect philosophers of science to have a somewhat better idea.
I don’t. I’ve read work by prominent philosophers of science and noticed parts that were not even internally coherent. As far as I can see they are off in their own little world divorced from anything useful.
Fair enough—I only mentioned it because I happened to have a period where I avoided singular-they because I thought it was forbidden. I’ll trust your judgement on style.
There are few good reasons to object to the singular they—the usual ones make less sense than objecting to the word “giraffe”. Were I writing a style guide for LessWrong...
Based on what I think are reasonable assumptions: that it is at least as annoying for a male to be referred to as ‘she’ as vice-versa, that there are many more males than females posting at lesswrong, that the proportion of gender-indeterminate usernames is roughly equal between men and women.
Historically, ‘he’ has been more commonly used than ‘she’ when referring to gender indeterminate individuals in English so it doesn’t even necessarily imply any gender assumption.
Historically, ‘he’ has been more commonly used than ‘she’ when referring to gender indeterminate individuals in English so it doesn’t even necessarily imply any gender assumption.
Perhaps interestingly, J.S. Mill tried to argue that “Man” is historically gender-neutral, and so women already have the right to vote in England, since the law refers to “man”. He did not win that battle.
My understanding is that “man” is historically gender neutral. Old English used wer (wereman) for adult males and wif (wifman) for adult females. Wif is etymologically related to wife and eventually changed into woman (from wimman). Wer got dropped and all we have left of it is “werewolf”.
The use of “man” to refer to only adult males is relatively late, like 1000 A.C.E. -ish.
Or wyfwulf… or something. There was no standardized spelling.
Also, I think woman used to mean wife, in the same way it is occasionally used in casual (grrr) American dialect English today. There might be a different word for an unmarried female (and an unmarried female wolf-person!).
Historically, ‘he’ has been more commonly used than ‘she’ when referring to gender indeterminate individuals in English so it doesn’t even necessarily imply any gender assumption.
If nothing else, priming would put the lie to that.
Historically, ‘he’ has been more commonly used than ‘she’ when referring to gender indeterminate individuals in English so it doesn’t even necessarily imply any gender assumption.
If you are talking about a hypothetical or gender-unknown person, using “he” will make it much more likely that people will imagine this person as male. How it’s historically been used, and even how it’s conventionally used now, are irrelevant if we’re talking about its actual cognitive effects.
(For what it’s worth, I think this is the best exposition of sexist language I’ve read. It’s fascinating (yet not all that surprising) how some commonplace linguistic patterns become immediately and intuitively appalling to most people if they are simply applied to a different personal attribute.)
that it is at least as annoying for a male to be referred to as ‘she’ as vice-versa
Probably. But it gets more annoying the more it happens. I have become more annoyed every time it’s happened to me. And it happens more to women than it does to men. So this assumption loses validity over time for any given person. And it is just not that hard to avoid guessing!
Historically, ‘he’ has been more commonly used than ‘she’ when referring to gender indeterminate individuals in English so it doesn’t even necessarily imply any gender assumption.
Assuming history to be unswayed by politics and the meaning of common words to be determined by their usage wouldn’t this be “Yes. But I vehemently object and anyone using pronouns in this way should be punished with unimaginable hoards of dust specks and furthermore be socially disapproved of”?
The probability that anyone would (non-jokingly) refer to me as “he” while knowing (or even strongly suspecting!) that I am in fact female is miniscule; the probability that I am female (even given locally appropriate priors) isn’t; and if I were male and known to be so, the probability that I’d be referred to as “he” would approach 1. Referring to someone as “he” constitutes Bayesian evidence to one’s audience that the referred-to individual is male. Be not thou casual with the Bayesian evidence.
That is evidence in favor of that usage of pronouns being undesirable for efficient communication of evidence. It doesn’t comment particularly on whether or not that particular usage has been traditionally accepted.
I’m not trying to argue with your objection to that kind of usage. I certainly don’t consider using ‘he’ by default any better than using ‘she’ by default. I think “AAAAAAAAAAUGH” is a valid response. It is just ironically more valid than ‘No’.
I am not so sure “No” is an indefensible response.
“so it doesn’t even necessarily imply any gender assumption.” may be a false claim. For example, if you were reading something about a generic, ostensibly nongendered “he”, and then a mention of “his wife”, I imagine that wouldn’t be too jarring. But if instead, say, the text went on to talk about him giving birth, I imagine most people would be a little confused.
So there are some assumptions implicit in the male pronoun.
“so it doesn’t even necessarily imply any gender assumption.” may be a false claim. For example, if you were reading something about a generic, ostensibly nongendered “he”, and then a mention of “his wife”, I imagine that wouldn’t be too jarring. But if instead, say, the text went on to talk about him giving birth, I imagine most people would be a little confused.
“Doesn’t even necessarily” is different from “appropriate in every possible situation including when the gender is not indeterminate”. Matthew’s claim was:
Historically, ‘he’ has been more commonly used than ‘she’ when referring to gender indeterminate individuals in English so it doesn’t even necessarily imply any gender assumption.
If you think that is incorrect, you’re just wrong. If you disapprove and are distressed by that historical fact then that is a legitimate position of the kind that can be expressed by vocalized but non verbal expressions of distress.
I take the “doesn’t even necessarily apply [..]” to be equivalent to the claim that use of the male pronoun is never in itself sufficient to establish some assumption with respect to gender or sex, which claim I disagree with; if the pronoun would be surprising in some circumstances, for reasons of sex or gender, then it carries those connotations everywhere.
Eh… that’s not “necessarily” right. The historical usage of “he” to refer to gender indeterminate individuals doesn’t imply that there isn’t a necessary (to the extent that that term is meaningful in discussions of this sort) gender assumption in modern usage. In fact, that’s the problem—the “indeterminate” individual is by default male (white, middle class, straight, cisgendered, whatevs).
In fact, that’s the problem—the “indeterminate” individual is by default male (white, middle class, straight, cisgendered, whatevs).
Yes, hence the appropriateness of “AAAAAARGH”. It is a flaw in the language in an objective effectiveness of conveying information sense. Plus it would piss of Alicorn legitimately.
If you think about it, could be offensive to males too. Why do they get special wordly attention while we get stuck with word that doesn’t allow the conveyance of distinct sexual identity while the females can be either? It’s a good thing that usage is becoming obsolete (‘she’ can be used indeterminately too and he less often), otherwise I’d have to care too.
Speaking only for myself here, but in regards to race, I’ve been moved somewhat from unmarked to marked state (while remaining white, or possibly “white”), and in my experience, being unmarked is a lot more restful.
that it is at least as annoying for a male to be referred to as ‘she’ as vice-versa
(Probably somewhat more so given that referring to each other as ‘girls’ is a common form of insult among males given that it asserts traits that while rewarded in females are easy targets of abuse in males.)
This is sort of where I’m at on the issue. I understand that you don’t like being referred to as ‘he’, and I agree that you shouldn’t be.
However, my perspective is that ‘he’ is the default, and if someone refers to me as ‘he’, that is the only reason. With the handle ‘byrnema’, I expect people to assume I’m male. Well, it’s more subtle than that. I don’t expect anyone to make a positive prediction that I’m male—they shouldn’t know—but since people assign gender in their minds when they consider a person, I expect that assignment to be male.
Does it bother you, specifically, that the default assignment is male?
Or in your case, with the handle Alicorn, that it seems unusual not to update the probability that you’re female? If the latter then you really must just ask this person to find out what they were thinking (if they were). Possibly the person is either a little linguistically/socially naive or they were thinking of the name ‘Ali’ perhaps with an Arabic origin and the ‘orn’ ending is unclear—if you don’t think of unicorns.
(Why should it be though that a unicorn-associated handle must be a female? Nevertheless, that’s the way it is.)
I’d never heard of the word ‘alicorn’ until I started reading lesswrong and I’m comfortable saying that I am not linguistically naive. It didn’t occur to me that it was an actual word until Alicorn posted in a thread that it should be obvious she is female with that user name. Consider that for the same reasons a unicorn-associated handle is associated with being female it might not be an effective handle to signal to males that one is female.
It is probably wise if one is particularly offended by incorrect gender assumptions to pick a username that clearly signals ones gender to the majority of ones audience.
I was not, when I started using this handle, aware of how non-present in popular vocabulary the word “alicorn” is. I thought it was a pretty girly username—maybe not up there with, I dunno, “PinkFlowerPrincess”, but perhaps on a par with “Cerise” (a shade of pink), or something subtler like “Purl” (a knitting stitch, also hinting at “Pearl”). It doesn’t and was never meant to declare my gender, but I always thought it suggested it. If nothing else, I think “Allison” is a more likely sound-alike than “Ali”-plus-unidentified-suffix, because that actually happened.
Does it bother you, specifically, that the default assignment is male?
It bothers me that there is a default assignment. If one were going to make a brand new default in a situation where none existed, it’s my impression that there would be a better (if still very weak) case for making it female instead, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to make such assumptions.
Thanks for the not-particularly-annoyed-by-”he” datum—but I worry that you imply Alicorn should not be annoyed. Even if this is not your intent, I think it’s a good idea to support the right to have a berserk button.
I think it’s a good idea to support the right to have a berserk button.
I don’t, and here’s why: having a negative emotional response to something kills rationality dead. It causes people to forget their well-thought out goals and engage in compulsive, stereotyped behaviors attached to the specific emotion involved, whether it’s going off to sulk in a corner, flaming, plotting revenge, or loudly lecturing everyone on proper behavior… ALL of which are unlikely to support rational goals, outside the evolutionary environment that drove the development of those emotions.
(And let’s not even get started on motivated reasoning… which, AFAICT, is motivated almost exclusively to avoid negative emotions rather than to obtain positive ones.)
Anyway, if you allow yourself to have a “berserk button” that hijacks your rationality on a regular basis, (and aren’t doing anything about it), you’re only giving lip service to rationality. Okay, modify that slightly: maybe you don’t know HOW to get rid of or work around your button. But you sure as heck shouldn’t be arguing for a right to keep it!
(I expect that objections to this comment will largely focus on individual boo lights that people will put forth in support of the idea that some things should be allowed to set off “berserk buttons”. But I hope that those people won’t bother, unless they can explain why their particular boo light requires them to have a compulsive, fixated response that’s faster than their conscious minds can consider the situation and evaluate their options. And I also hope they’ll consider why they feel the need to use boo lights to elevate their failings as a rationalist to the status of a moral victory! Lacking a compulsive emotional response to a boo light doesn’t alter one’s considered outlook or goals, only one’s immediate or compulsive reactions.)
With all due respect, I (not at all calmly) disagree. The mistakes that you can make by being emotional are not inevitable, and they are not mistakes because of your emotion—a true emotion is true—they are mistakes because you didn’t say, “I can feel my heart racing—did this person just say what I thought they said, or am I misreading?” And so forth.
But if you’re right? And if your response is proportionate? Your anger (or ebullience, or jubilation, or bewilderment, if you really want to be rational about analyzing the effects of emotion on rationality) is your power. Do you think Eliezer Yudkowsky works as hard as he does on FAI because, oh, it’s a way to spend the time? Do you think that his elegy* for Yehuda Yudkowsky was written out of a sedate sense of familial responsibility? Do you somehow imagine that anything of consequence has ever been accomplished without the force of passion behind it?
I pity your cynicism, if you do.
Edit: I will concede instantly that “berserk button” is a deceptive term, however—what I am discussing is not an instant trigger for unstoppable rage, but merely something which infuriates.
* Edit 2: The term “cri de coeur” was suggested over the message system in place of “elegy”—I think it may well hit nearer the mark as a description.
The mistakes that you can make by being emotional are not inevitable, and they are not mistakes because of your emotion—a true emotion is true—they are mistakes because you didn’t say, “I can feel my heart racing—did this person just say what I thought they said, or am I misreading?” And so forth.
If your heart weren’t racing, you wouldn’t have needed to ask the question.
Meanwhile, “true emotion” is rhetoric: the feeling of fear as the hot poker approaches is not rational, unless blind struggling will get it away from your face… and mostly in modern life, it will not… which means you’re simply adding unnecessary insult to your imminent injury.
Do you somehow imagine that anything of consequence has ever been accomplished without the force of passion behind it?
Passion != anger. If it feels bad, you’re doing it wrong.
What I am discussing is not an instant trigger for unstoppable rage, but merely something which infuriates.
Doesn’t matter to my argument: at least a rage trigger is over relatively quickly, while being infuriated over a principle can ruin your life for days or weeks at a time. ;-)
Bad feelings feel bad for a reason: they are actually bad for you.
In regards to the right to have a berzerk button: This depends at least partly on what you mean by a right.
People do have berzerk buttons. I hear “don’t have the right to have a berzerk button” as “should make it go away right now—shouldn’t have had it in the first place”. On the other hand, “do have the right to have a berzerk button” is problematic in the sense that it can imply that berzerk buttons are a sort of personal property which should never be questioned.
It occurs to me that this is a problem with English which is at least as serious as gendered pronouns. A sense of process isn’t built into the language in some places where it would be really useful.
The problem is there in the word “can”. Does “you can do it” mean you can do it right now, perhaps if you just tried a bit harder? If you tried a lot harder (and you really should)? After ten years of dedicated work? Something in between?
You’re right—I tried to reread byrnema’s comment to avoid that kind of error, but I must have missed that sentence twice. I should not have been so pointed. Thank you for catching my mistake.
Truthfully, it doesn’t matter what a person declares in the second sentence if they then negate that sentence with the body of their comment. Perhaps you read for feeling and tone, as I do—that’s why I didn’t point to a specific sentence as a defense in my reply.
However, what I was explaining was that while I don’t question that Alicorn should feel the way she does, I have a tendency to overly reduce problems (which feels like I’m trivializing them) and that’s probably what you were reading. I didn’t intend to do that, but since my friends say I always do that, that’s probably what I did. (Outside view.)
On the other hand, it doesn’t matter what a person declares in the second sentence if they then negate that sentence with the body of their comment. Perhaps you read for feeling and tone, as I do—that’s why I didn’t point to that sentence in my reply.
I would question whether it doesn’t count—I believe your statement was sincere, and that counts for an awful lot—but the feeling and tone was definitely what I responded to. On the gripping hand, I was being quite precise when I said “should not have been so pointed”—I think emphasizing the right to be angry is important in several contexts (example), and I would want to have still said something about the right to a berserk button … but not the slanted “even if this was not your intent”.
(Incidentally, I appreciate the degree of nuance you’ve been employing in your replies—I suspect this is one of the more valuable benefits you gain from your penchant to reduce problems!)
I hope that my comment wouldn’t be interpreted that way—I support how Alicorn feels about the issue even if I don’t feel the same way. (I might anyway if my handle name was Alicorn—or Cerise.)
However, I’ve been told by close friends that the most annoying trait about me is that I’m a “spin doctor”—that I think that problems can be ‘fixed’ just by framing them differently.
Y’know, given the quote wedrifid pulled out, I don’t think it should be except by a careless reader—mea culpa.
That “spin doctor” thing makes me wonder, though: is there some substantial variance* in the ability of people to reframe their way away from berserk buttons? It would explain some comments I have received if I personally am lacking in that attribute.
Recognizing that a berzerk button (I had to google that by the way, not everyone is a tvtropes fanatic contrary to what seems to be a common assumption here) is a fact about you and not a flaw in the external world is probably part of it. From an instrumental rationality point of view it is often easier to control or adjust your own reaction than it is to change the world to avoid your triggers.
Recognizing that a berzerk button (I had to google that by the way, not everyone is a tvtropes fanatic contrary to what seems to be a common assumption here)
It’s on TvTropes? I just assumed “less stigmatised way of saying tantrum” based off context.
From an instrumental rationality point of view it is often easier to control or adjust your own reaction than it is to change the world to avoid your triggers.
The thing is that these triggers exist only for the purpose of changing the world. The most significant emotions are a way to have a credible precomittment to do a mutually destructive thing if the other(s) do(es) not comply. For example, by damaging one’s own body with excess adrenalin and cortisol while causing similar distress to those who defected in your constructed game.
Quite often the triggers are actually well calibrated to serve our interests and it isn’t always wise to mess with them.
Good, but let me fix it further to what I really mean, ancestral environment included. ;)
The triggers are typically well calibrated to serve our genes’ interest in the environment of evolutionary adaptation. Sometimes, but not always, these interests overlap with our own interests here and now and it isn’t always wise to mess with them.
Sometimes, but not always, these interests overlap with our own interests here and now and it isn’t always wise to mess with them.
In the specific case of our socially-driven negative emotions—those associated with status and status threats, especially—they rarely overlap with our considered interests, unless we either
already have high status, or
are literally dependent upon our social circle for physical survival
In most other situations, actually having a negative emotional reaction will not serve our goals.
Interestingly enough, even in the event that a display of anger is tactically useful, a fake display of anger is actually even more effective and can even be status-enhancing. (I’ve heard it said that this is true of horses as well: that a trainer acting angry gets respect from the horse, but a trainer who’s actually angry loses their place in the pecking order.)
This is probably why sociopaths are especially effective in the corporate tribal jungle, but I’ve also known a few very nice, non-sociopathic company presidents who had no problem yelling when something needed yelling about… without actually being angry about it.
are literally dependent upon our social circle for physical survival
That one is complex. A small status threat does not, in itself, threaten survival, but a large number of status threats may well affect one’s chances of making money, getting medical care (or getting decent medical care), or being attacked by police and/or imprisoned—these are a matter of physical survival.
In most situations I encounter people’s emotional reactions tend to be rather useful. It takes a lot of experience in machiavelian thinking before you can replace instincts with raw strategic manipulation.
This I have to concur with:
Interestingly enough, even in the event that a display of anger is tactically useful, a fake display of anger is actually even more effective and can even be status-enhancing. (I’ve heard it said that this is true of horses as well: that a trainer acting angry gets respect from the horse, but a trainer who’s actually angry loses their place in the pecking order.)
I find that a lot of people (over the age of three) who use the ‘berzerk button’, particularly those who do it effectively, are using it strategically rather than merely being at the mercy of their emotions.
I also agree that negative emotional reactions are more useful for those who already have high status than those who do not.
In most situations I encounter people’s emotional reactions tend to be rather useful.
I would agree, if we define “useful” as “fulfills their own short-term emotional needs.” If those happen to correspond with their considered preferences, great. But that’s often a matter more of coincidence than anything else.
It takes a lot of experience in machiavelian thinking before you can replace instincts with raw strategic manipulation.
Actually, I was more talking about using positive instinctual responses, like compassion, encouragement, and enthusiasm, as well as simply behaving rationally. These are far less problematic than our instinctual negative responses.
I would agree, if we define “useful” as “fulfills their own short-term emotional needs.” If those happen to correspond with their considered preferences, great. But that’s often a matter more of coincidence than anything else.
I was using ‘useful’ to mean ‘fulfills their predominately status oriented agenda’. How to relate people’s ‘considered preferences’ with well, the unconscious preferences that they actually act on is a somewhat different question. We probably do agree once we have people take a step back and realise status isn’t necessarily what will maximise their eudomonia in this day and age and for them rather than their genes. But that’s a rather huge step of personal development to overcome and I’m not quite willing to assume it into my usage of ‘useful’.
Actually, I was more talking about using positive instinctual responses, like compassion, encouragement, and enthusiasm, as well as simply behaving rationally. These are far less problematic than our instinctual negative responses.
Those do seem to be useful for most part. Although even then it can be useful to accept the compassion, suppress the instinctive reaction and, as they say, shut up and multiply. Even compassion is misguided at times.
It’s on TvTropes? I just assumed “less stigmatised way of saying tantrum” based off context.
I guessed at the meaning but it sounded like a specific reference to me, TVTropes is the first hit on Google.
The thing is that these triggers exist only for the purpose of changing the world. The most significant emotions are a way to have a credible precomittment to do a mutually destructive thing if the other(s) do(es) not comply. For example, by damaging one’s own body with excess adrenalin and cortisol while causing similar distress to those who defected in your constructed game.
True, the tactic can also backfire however. I respond badly to such tactics, presumably partially an evolved defense to their widespread use.
True, the tactic can also backfire however. I respond badly to such tactics, presumably partially an evolved defense to their widespread use.
Absolutely, and so do I. In fact I am myself emotionally precommitted to not be swayed by the implied threat of ‘berzerk buttons’ even though the immediate payoff structure may make submission have a lesser penalty to me than the mutually destructive punishment. This seems to work for me on net.
I apologize for not defining the term—links to TV Tropes spell trouble for a lot of people.
From an instrumental rationality point of view it is often easier to control or adjust your own reaction than it is to change the world to avoid your triggers.
True—but I prefer to advocate for adaptive behavior, rather than altered emotional response, in many cases. Pronouns is one such.
True—but I prefer to advocate for adaptive behavior, rather than emotional response, in many cases. Pronouns is one such.
The problem with that is that the behaviour that needs adapting is that of other people (in this case, to a first approximation, all English speakers). The emotional response is ones own and therefore easier to change.
You might continue to lobby for others to change their behaviour once the emotional response has been brought under control but unless you think the emotional response is actually the optimal way to change the behaviour of others it is not desirable.
The problem with that is that the behaviour that needs adapting is that of other people (in this case, to a first approximation, all English speakers). The emotional response is ones own and therefore easier to change.
Not what I meant, surprisingly! The example I had in mind was someone changing their macroscopic reaction from “VERBAL HULK SMASH” to “icy courtesy” in order to leave a better impression without compromising the fervor of their principle. If you want to change the behavior of those around you—and you’re right, sometimes you don’t—then the emotional response is a good source of motivation.
If you want to change the behavior of those around you—and you’re right, sometimes you don’t—then the emotional response is a good source of motivation.
That depends on what you define as “good” and “motivation”. Most kinds of negative emotional responses don’t promote taking positive actions, and they’re strressful and harmful to the body as well.
The example I had in mind was someone changing their macroscopic reaction from “VERBAL HULK SMASH” to “icy courtesy” in order to leave a better impression
Note that this ignores the ongoing personally detrimental effect on the person having the reaction, which is unchanged by the change in external behavior. Even if nobody knows you’re angry, you still get to keep the health detriments (and reasoning deficits) of being angry.
without compromising the fervor of their principle.
Most people who are using the fervor of principle to motivate themselves would be better off having goals, instead. The distinction is that a principle’s Platonic purity can never truly be satisfied in an imperfect world, but goals actually have a chance.
Fervently-held principles are also often a convenient excuse to avoid doing the sometimes-difficult job of thinking about what results one would like to have existing in the real world, and what tradeoffs or compromises might have to be made in order to create those results.
In effect, I see “fervent” principles as a form of wireheading… one that, not incidentally, wasted many more years of my life than I care to think about.
(This should not be construed to be against acting on reasoned principles, just to choosing one’s principles based on fervor.)
Reading this comment this instant, I think we are talking past each other to some degree. I argue for two related propositions:
On occasion, anger is an appropriate response to a stimulus.
It is the right and responsibility of each person to determine what stimuli deserve to be responded to with anger.
I will grant that anger has negative effect on quality of life, but I maintain that anger is effective on many occasions, and can be wielded without compromising the powers of rational reason. And I argue that it is the right of the individual to decide when to do so.
Edit: If we agree on these propositions, whatever remains is minor.
I maintain that anger is effective on many occasions, and can be wielded without compromising the powers of rational reason.
This is a true statement for some definitions of its terms, and false for others. I maintain that actual anger is both less-than-effective for one’s considered goals and cannot be “wielded” because actual anger is something that wields you… and this applies as much to ongoing low-level infuriation as to a moment of rage.
(Strategic anger is only a simulation of anger: physiologically, it is not the same thing.)
I argue that it is the right of the individual to decide when to do so.
Sure it’s their right… as an individual. My argument is that they’ve got no business trying to claim that as a social right in a community of rationalists, without displaying major fail by doing so.
Otherwise, for example, I could demand the right to go berserk any time anybody spoke in favor of negative emotions. ;-)
This isn’t a hypothetical example, actually; I used to actually do that here. (Go berserk, I mean, not demanding the right to do so.)
But instead of demanding the right to my berserk button(s) I did the rational thing and got rid of them… which now allows me to be merely passionate in my response to you, rather than actually upset or frustrated or infuriated or any of the other buttons that I used to get pushed in circumstances like these.
And as you can see from my comment volume in the last hour or two, abandoning those feelings hasn’t hurt my motivation in the slightest. ;-)
(It also seems to have somewhat improved the humility and courtesy of my writing in this context, with a corresponding improvement in karma… though of course the latter can still change at any moment.)
If you want to change the behavior of those around you—and you’re right, sometimes you don’t—then the emotional response is a good source of motivation.
It can also cloud judgement and lead to responding in a way likely to alienate your audience. I’m not convinced it is a net win in general, though it might be in the right circumstances / given the right audience.
It can also cloud judgement and lead to responding in a way likely to alienate your audience. I’m not convinced it is a net win in general, though it might be in the right circumstances / given the right audience.
And I am in complete agreement. My only caveat is that I grant each person the right to make that judgement call. ;)
I agree that everyone has the right to get angry if they wish. What I really don’t like is the extra step that is often taken to claim that because someone else’s behaviour angers or offends you, it is therefore your right to enforce different behaviour on them. The example that perhaps most annoys me is when some religious group claims that because they are so deeply angered / offended by the behaviour of some other group (homosexuals, atheists, Belgian cartoonists, etc.) that it is their right to demand that the other group refrain from the offensive behaviour. I think the right to offend is just as (if not more) important as the right to take offense.
Let is return to the specific, then: I would suggest using the gender-neutral singular they not because I or Alicorn or anyone else is offended, but because it reinforces the idea that everyone, not just men, can contribute to the conversation. Saying “he” by default reinforces the idea that everyone is men here, a condition which is usually associated with an uncomfortable environment for women.
It is the latter that leads to the former and the latter that should be discussed.
I don’t object to gender neutral pronouns when they don’t seem forced. That’s obviously a bit of a subjective call but I’m happy to use ‘they’, ‘one’ or ‘you’ when they fit the context. I actively try to use ‘one’ rather than ‘you’ when I’m saying something that could be seen as attacking a particular person rather than being a general comment after being made aware of the distinction in previous discussion.
I believe it is a fact about the English language that ‘he’/‘his’/‘him’ are the most natural pronouns to use in many contexts when gender is indeterminate however and I’m not willing to twist the language to use gender-neutral alternatives or subvert my meaning by using ‘she’/‘hers’/‘her’ when it doesn’t fit the context.
I also think that it is not an accident that certain gender assumptions are made in life. I don’t subscribe to the view that gender is a cultural concept. I believe that the gender discrepancy observed on lesswrong is more due to biology than culture and do not believe that if we all observed politically correct pronoun usage that the discrepancy would evaporate. I think our language reflects our biology. That is inconvenient for individuals who fall outside the norm but life is inconvenient for such individuals and I’m sure everyone who finds their way here has suffered in some way from lying in the tail of a distribution.
I don’t come here to bond over how unfair the world is however and I don’t think that is a productive avenue for discussion. The Internet abounds in venues to bitch about how stupid the rest of the world is. I come here in the hope of being less wrong, not to list the many and various ways in which the rest of the world is more wrong.
As for the rest: I don’t know if you were around during the PUA mess, but there were not a few comments suggesting that this community was obviously offputting to women. I can’t tell you what factors contributed to that with complete confidence, but given how many people have told me that they find improper pronouns irritating, that’s a place I would start.
The singular they may be a bit more subtle than you realize. I agree with linguist Geoff Pullum: it’s ok to use ‘they’ as a singular bound pronoun (someone lost their wallet) but not as a singular referring pronoun (Chris lost their wallet).
In this case, the blogger that Alicorn complained about needed a singular referring pronoun, since a specific person, namely Alicorn, was being referred to. I think all things considered, ‘he or she’ would have been most appropriate.
I’ll grant that “Chris lost their wallet” is a distinctly modern usage—if you prefer “Chris lost his or her wallet”, please use the latter. I think the extension of singular they is the more elegant solution to the problem of unknown genders (particularly in communities where the answer to “he or she?” is sometimes “no”—I have visited such online), but I’ll grant that it is a judgment call.
I think there can be no complete solution to the gendered language problem, since it comes down to respect and status, which is something people will always fight over. For example, if I start using an ungendered pronoun to refer to everyone I know, then some people might be offended because they think I don’t care enough about them to refer to them using the correct gendered pronouns (which takes more effort and therefore signals caring).
I disagree that it’s a more elegant solution. Suppose I say “While on vacation with a bunch of friends, Chris lost their money.” I bet almost everyone would interpret “their” to mean “Chris and friends’” instead of “Chris’s”. Even when the meaning can be correctly deduced from context, using “they” in place of “he or she” as a singular referring pronoun would probably cause a significant delay in reading as the reader tries to figure out what “they” might be referring to, and whether it’s an unintentional error.
In communities of people who prefer not to use either “he” or “she” to refer to themselves, they can set whatever community-specific rules they want. I have no objection to using “they” in that context, but it doesn’t seem like a good general solution for the problem of unknown genders.
Natural languages are full of ambiguity, and yes that use sounds wrong cause your talking about a particular person.
And if you really wanted to say that it was Chris’s money, how about “Chris lost Chris’s money.” It sounds awkward to me cause my English only allows use of they in the singular if it is an abstract person, not a particular real person.
I mean its not like “Chris lost his money” is unambiguous, it is not at all clear to me weather the he refers to Chris, or someone else. That would probably be clear in discourse because of context.
Do you agree that using ‘they’ as a singular referring pronoun is not yet a part of natural English (i.e., a majority of English speakers do not naturally use it that way, nor expect it to be used that way), but that usage is being proposed by some as a useful reform, while others oppose it?
My point is that making this change involves a large cost, including a period of confusion as some people start using ‘they’ as a singular referring pronoun while others are not expecting it to be used that way. And we can foresee that it will increase the amount of ambiguity in English even after this period of confusion is over. Is ‘he or she’ really so bad that this costly reform is worthwhile?
Most of the people I talk to accept ‘they’ as natural English. My highschool English teachers would probably be an exception, as was I until I decided to let it go. Wnoise probably has a point that ‘singular they’ is a matter of dialect, with most, perhaps unfortunately, having lost some of the more elegant subtleties.
And we can foresee that it will increase the amount of ambiguity in English even after this period of confusion is over. Is ‘he or she’ really so bad that this costly reform is worthwhile?
A good question. I’m happy to leave it with ‘singular they’ for most people but ‘he or she’ for people who want to signal sophistication (by speaking correctly). It is probably too late to hope to gain much relief from ambiguity except when you are familiar with your audience’s manner of speech.
EDIT: I missed the great, great grandparent about singular bound vs singular referring. Thanks Wei.
As wedrifid suggests, I think you overestimate the cost. Heck, English allows the verbing of nouns—screwing around with grammatical number is chump change.
I do not agree that there is a singular “natural English”, but rather many overlapping dialects and gradients. In many of them, some usages of “singular they” are completely accepted, in others, next to no usage is.
I mean its not like “Chris lost his money” is unambiguous, it is not at all clear to me weather the he refers to Chris, or someone else. That would probably be clear in discourse because of context.
In proper English, that would not be ambiguous; pronouns always refer to their antecedents, and no other applicable noun can come between the pronoun and the antecedent.
This causes a problem with “they” in this case; “Chris and Pat went to their car” becomes unambiguously “Chris and Pat went to Pat’s car” if “they” can refer to “Pat”, leaving us with no pronoun for “Chris and Pat”.
In proper English, that would not be ambiguous; pronouns always refer to their antecedents, and no other applicable noun can come between the pronoun and the antecedent.
nolrai explicitly specified “natural language,” not your “proper English.”
This causes a problem with “they” in this case; “Chris and Pat went to their car” becomes unambiguously “Chris and Pat went to Pat’s car” if “they” can refer to “Pat”, leaving us with no pronoun for “Chris and Pat”.
It sounds like all these (counterfactual?) people who speak “proper English” need to adapt their language.
I disagree that it’s a more elegant solution. Suppose I say “While on vacation with a bunch of friends, Chris lost their money.” I bet almost everyone would interpret “their” to mean “Chris and friends’” instead of “Chris’s”.
That particular case could be reworded with “Chris lost some money”. On the other hand, that doesn’t convey that Chris had no money left, so I don’t know.
It is always possible to create ambiguity if ambiguity is what you seek—“they” is no richer a source of such than any other. I don’t think either of us is going to convince the other to change their mode of speech (no flaunting of my particular preference intended).
Edit: How did you find out that Chris lost their money without finding out Chris’s gender, anyway? I don’t advocate singular-they in cases where you know the gender.
You’re not flaunting your preference (at least not to me), since the “their” in that sentence is a singular bound pronoun, not a singular referring pronoun.
How did you find out that Chris lost their money without finding out Chris’s gender, anyway?
Perhaps Chris wrote a blog post about it?
I don’t advocate singular-they in cases where you know the gender.
I prefer to advocate for adaptive behavior, rather than altered emotional response, in many cases. Pronouns is one such.
And instrumental rationality suggests that a non-berserk advocate is a more convincing advocate… so often the best way to successfully get people to change their behavior is to first get rid of your button(s).
(Being happily married to a fellow mindhacker, I have much experience with this phenomenon, as both the advocate and advocatee. ;-) )
Which brings me to the other part of this little rant: Why atheist anger is not only valid, but valuable and necessary.
There’s actually a simple, straightforward answer to this question:
Because anger is always necessary.
Because anger has driven every major movement for social change in this country, and probably in the world. The labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the modern feminist movement, the gay rights movement, the anti-war movement in the Sixties, the anti-war movement today, you name it… all of them have had, as a major driving force, a tremendous amount of anger. Anger over injustice, anger over mistreatment and brutality, anger over helplessness.
I mean, why the hell else would people bother to mobilize social movements? Social movements are hard. They take time, they take energy, they sometimes take serious risk of life and limb, community and career. Nobody would fucking bother if they weren’t furious about something.
So when you tell an atheist (or for that matter, a woman or a queer or a person of color or whatever) not to be so angry, you are, in essence, telling us to disempower ourselves. You’re telling us to lay down one of the single most powerful tools we have at our disposal. You’re telling us to lay down a tool that no social change movement has ever been able to do without. You’re telling us to be polite and diplomatic, when history shows that polite diplomacy in a social change movement works far, far better when it’s coupled with passionate anger. In a battle between David and Goliath, you’re telling David to put down his slingshot and just… I don’t know. Gnaw Goliath on the ankles or something.
I’ll acknowledge that anger is a difficult tool in a social movement. A dangerous one even. It can make people act rashly; it can make it harder to think clearly; it can make people treat potential allies as enemies. In the worst-case scenario, it can even lead to violence. Anger is valid, it’s valuable, it’s necessary… but it can also misfire, and badly.
But unless we’re actually endangering or harming somebody, it is not up to believers to tell atheists when we should and should not use this tool. It is not up to believers to tell atheists that we’re going too far with the anger and need to calm down. Any more than it’s up to white people to say it to black people, or men to say it to women, or straights to say it to queers. When it comes from believers, it’s not helpful. It’s patronizing. It comes across as another attempt to defang us and shut us up. And it’s just going to make us angrier.
It is a fact of the matter—and this is me, RobinZ, speaking now—that “anger is false power” is a popular cached thought. (Those exact words are used in a bus advertisement in my area.) What I am telling you is that you should question that one—it is less general than is commonly supposed.
I posted a link to Greta Christina’s “Atheists and Anger” elsewhere in this thread
What you quoted isn’t really relevant to my point, which is that anger over a principle is not very beneficial to you as an individual, vs. passion or even faked anger in the pursuit of your concrete goals.
(I’d also strongly question whether e.g. Gandhi and MLK were motivated by anger over a principle, or the passionate pursuit of concrete goals.)
In general, fervor over principles is perhaps the most anti-rational emotional response that human beings have… and there’s an evolutionary reason for that. Our genes need a way to get us to do things that are stupid for us as individuals, but good for our relatives and descendants or as moves in iterated PD.
In general, fervor over principles is perhaps the most anti-rational emotional response that human beings have… and there’s an evolutionary reason for that. Our genes need a way to get us to do things that are stupid for us as individuals, but good for our relatives and descendants or as moves in iterated PD.
I don’t care about evolutionary reasons. If I want to wreck my health for a cause, you can advise me on how to be more effective in my tactics or you can advise me on how much of an effect is possible, and either of these things may mean choosing equilibrium over anger … but I have the right to calculate the cost-benefit ratio myself, and if you disagree about the terms in my equation, I have the right to tell you to shove it.
And you have the right to shake your head and say I’m a fool. All I claim is that we have the right to draw our own conclusions, and that sometimes the correct conclusion is be angry.
I have the right to calculate the cost-benefit ratio myself … All I claim is that we have the right to draw our own conclusions, and that sometimes the correct conclusion is be angry.
And all I claim is that if you’re actually concluding things, you’re not angry, and if you’re angry, you’re not currently drawing rational conclusions.
If your anger actually serves a useful purpose, you probably got lucky.
Why? Because people rarely self-modify in the direction of anger by actually weighing the costs and benefits.
I can’t speak about Gandhi, but a case could be made for MLK
As far as I can tell, your link supports passion, not anger, as I would define the words. The letter speaks of “passionate yearning for freedom”, “tears of love”, “courage”, “discipline” and many other things which don’t sound like anger to me at all.
So, perhaps you are using “anger” to refer to a broader range of emotions than I am?
I don’t think there is quite a ‘True Scottsman’ in here, but I sure feel his shadow looming over me as I read it.
That’s just an artifact of the lack of precise terminology for emotions, outside of say, Ekman’s facial coding system. In any case, as you’ve by now seen in the rest of the thread, we got this down to specific predictions about observable behavior, and successfully dissolved the illusion of disagreement.
Although, strictly speaking, my “fritzelnits” comment was a glance in the direction of this question—I’m not convinced that the Ekman’s-facial-coding division coincides with this particular discussion’s alberzle-bargulum split. I suspect that was the idea wedrifid was looking at.
I’m not convinced that the Ekman’s-facial-coding division coincides with this particular discussion’s alberzle-bargulum split.
Me either, but it’s a great example of the sort of thing I’m talking about: hardwired physiological reactions leading to biased mental processing. (IIRC, one of Ekman’s studies, btw, actually involved connections between the “anger” facial expression and immediate damaging effects on the heart.)
Anyway, Ekman coding is one of the very few tools we have for being precise about emotions. The original developers of NLP trained people to observe the external physiology of emotional responses, and noted the consistency of physical response to the same thought or stimulus over time within a single individual. But they mostly avoided codifying or labeling these responses across persons, in order to prevent observer projection and definitional arguments like the one we’re having. (And of course, the one thing they did code turned out to be a lot less rigorously specified than they thought it was.)
So, perhaps you are using “anger” to refer to a broader range of emotions than I am?
This is consistent with my observations of your remarks in this thread modulo the imprecision of the English language. There probably is a fact of the matter when it comes to which usage is more accurate, but I doubt we’ll settle it by posting comments on LessWrong. (;
This is consistent with my observations of your remarks in this thread modulo the imprecision of the English language. There probably is a fact of the matter when it comes to which usage is more accurate, but I doubt we’ll settle it by posting comments on LessWrong. (;
I expect, however, that Ekman facial coding would show visible, measurable distinctions between the set of emotions I’m grouping under “anger” and “zeal”, and the emotion(s) being used by the writers of the letters you linked to. (Which might be more aptly described as “determination”, “resolve”, “passion”, etc.)
At that point, it’s less a question of what terms are “correct” than simply what predictions we are making about thought processes, facial expressions, and behaviors.
Btw, if I had to hazard a guess, I would guess I would not label your current emotion as anger, because you’ve been far too reasonable and accommodating. That is, I would predict your facial expression markers to not inlcude those associated with irritation, zeal, rage, or contempt. (All of which I would expect to be associated with cognitive changes in reasoning capacity and active perceptual biases.)
Anyway—one of my few remaining “pet peeves” is the tendency many people have to treat emotions as something unequivocally good, while ignoring the fact that we already have science to show the physical and mental effects of emotion. You don’t really get to decide how or whether your emotions affect you—only limited options for preventing them in the first place, and for mitigating them after the fact.
But I think I’ve gotten my reaction to that down to just a “peeve”, rather than something that provokes actual irritation. ;-)
Anyway—one of my few remaining “pet peeves” is the tendency many people have to treat emotions as something unequivocally good, while ignoring the fact that we already have science to show the physical and mental effects of emotion. You don’t really get to decide how or whether your emotions affect you—only limited options for preventing them in the first place, and for mitigating them after the fact.
Just so long as we don’t end up with a bias towards dividing emotions down the ‘negative/positive’ line and classify all the ‘negative’ ones as ‘just leftovers from the EEA’ and all the positive ones ‘happy good joy right’. There is a certain correlation to be sure, but the dark side turns out to be useful more I would prefer to admit.
There is a certain correlation to be sure, but the dark side turns out to be useful more I would prefer to admit.
As I mentioned before, I’d want to see a specific reason why the pre-conscious reaction(s) brought about by a particular, genuine negative emotion would be more useful than the same behavior executed by conscious choice or strategically trained reaction.
(After all, if we’re really talking “dark side” here, then I would expect a sociopath—i.e., someone who’s lacking most negative emotions—to perform even better than someone who’s under the influence of a negative emotion.)
As I mentioned before, I’d want to see a specific reason why the pre-conscious reaction(s) brought about by a particular, genuine negative emotion would be more useful than the same behavior executed by conscious choice or strategically trained reaction.
The same behavior is the key. Working out the right emotional displays and social strategies applicable to various situations is an extremely difficult task, as many with an Asperger’s diagnosis can attest to. Anger (and related emotions) allow people to take actions that are appropriate to certain situations where analytic, conscious thought would be complex and require strong theoretical understanding of the dynamics in question. More importantly, it means that you actually have to admit to yourself what you really want. This isn’t something most people are willing to do.
The interesting part of you comment to me ‘strategically trained reactions’. Emotional, instinctive reactions are often useful but I would expect them to be seldom optimal. There is huge scope for improvement and fine tuning of both the emotional experience and the external behaviors.
If everyone had the time and inclination and motivation to become perfectly controlled, calm yet fast acting under pressure jedi types then could well come a time where emotional reactions are not useful. But until that time emotional reactions tend to be a good baseline to start from. Then, in those instances in which they don’t work satisfactorily, debug them with conscious intervention.
(After all, if we’re really talking “dark side” here, then I would expect a sociopath—i.e., someone who’s lacking most negative emotions—to perform even better than someone who’s under the influence of a negative emotion.)
We may have a different idea of which emotions sociopaths experience. My understanding (and observation) of sociopaths suggests that they don’t feel shame, guilt or remorse are are terrible at picking up fear, sadness and contempt in others. But they do seem to feel anger or something like it whenever their grandiose ego is threatened.
If everyone had the time and inclination and motivation to become perfectly controlled, calm yet fast acting under pressure jedi types then could well come a time where emotional reactions are not useful. But until that time emotional reactions tend to be a good baseline to start from. Then, in those instances in which they don’t work satisfactorily, debug them with conscious intervention.
There seems to be an implicit assumption here that you would have to be “controlled”, but what I’ve been talking about is eliminating the need for control, by simply altering whatever mental association is making you have something to control. Emotions aren’t something that just happen due to environmental conditions; mostly, they require a learned pairing to be triggered, and those pairings can be altered.
For example, if you thought that Santa Claus existed, and then later realized he didn’t, a whole bunch of emotional triggers got switched off automatically as soon as you realized this. You did not need to become a “trained jedi” to stop the emotion of wanting to wait up and see Santa—you simply didn’t have the reaction any more.
I’m going to stop the discussion here, though, because you still haven’t identified with any specificity whatsoever what sort of situations you’re talking about. I have only the vaguest idea, and assume you are talking about some sort of corporate-politic machinations, so I’m using my own experiences as a guide.
In my own experiences, however, I cannot recall any situation where someone was positively served by an immediate negative emotional reaction to anything—the game always went to people who could calmly spin any situation to their strategic advantage.
However, I’m also thinking of situations primarily where objective standards of performance were also involved, and were ultimately the most important thing. I could imagine that in situations of total politics and no objective standards, perhaps some other case could exist. I just cannot (yet) imagine what that would look like.
So, that means we’re going to keep talking past one another in this area unless you give me a specific example of a situation where you think an instinctual negative reaction would help a person’s real goals. Otherwise, we’re just handwaving different priors.
More importantly, it means that you actually have to admit to yourself what you really want. This isn’t something most people are willing to do.
Perhaps this is the point of confusion: I’m not talking about most people. I’m talking about people who claim to be rationalists. If you’re a rationalist, admitting to yourself what you really want should be at the top of your frickin’ to-do list. ;-)
And really, that’s been my point in this thread from the get-go. Know what you want, then self-modify according to what will get you what you want.
Perhaps this is the point of confusion: I’m not talking about most people. I’m talking about people who claim to be rationalists. If you’re a rationalist, admitting to yourself what you really want should be at the top of your frickin’ to-do list. ;-)
And really, that’s been my point in this thread from the get-go. Know what you want, then self-modify according to what will get you what you want.
On this we are in total agreement!
On the other parts we would be rehashing the same old ‘built in instincts’ vs ‘learned emotional associations’ debate. We tend to agree that regardless of how they got there, the emotional triggers can certainly be modified by training (hacking).
We may have some difference in our predictions on how useful instinctive negative emotional responses to complex status risks can be for naive subjects. We seem to agree that there is always benefit to be had (neglecting opportunity cost) in replacing those emotional reactions with more finely tuned proactive habits. I’m not sure how we calibrate our respective ‘opportunity cost’ vs benefit functions over various cases of potential hacking. One would expect from our respective roles that you would on average predict a higher benefit/‘opportunity cost’ value than I!
(Naturally, this is my reading of our respective positions and subject to correction if I read you wrong.)
I’m not sure how we calibrate our respective ‘opportunity cost’ vs benefit functions over various cases of potential hacking. One would expect from our respective roles that you would on average predict a higher benefit/‘opportunity cost’ value than I!
And that’s mainly because I predict a much lower cost to changing than you do, as you seem to replace any mention of self-modification with references to “training”. Training, however, is an exceptionally costly form of self-modification by comparison.
Getting rid of a hot button does not require training; it simply requires awareness and reinterpretation of a situation, akin to my earlier example of realizing there’s no Santa Claus. When the right part of your brain “gets” that there’s no Santa Claus, the emotion simply stops. Training is not required, except for the one-time investment to develop the skill to intentionally perform such modifications.
Thus, I anticipate a much lower cost to changing responses than you. In fact, I consider it so much cheaper, that my routine attitude towards anything I feel bad about is to first remove that reaction.
And usually, the immediate result of removing the reaction is that I spontaneously think of a much better solution to whatever outside-world problem I’m encountering, than anything I could think of while still “under the influence” of the negative emotion.
And, this extends to people-problems as well as logistical problems: I find my brain models other people better when it’s not busy being obsessed with a perceived threat to me!
Anyway, given my extremely low cost to self-modifying, you can see why I’d view it as borderline insane not to do it at the drop of a hat (or the push of a berserk button).
(Of course, you could argue that I’ve already invested so much into becoming a person who can self-modify so easily, but then, it’s not as if there isn’t plenty of other payoff to even up that score.)
Btw, if I had to hazard a guess, I would guess I would not label your current emotion as anger, because you’ve been far too reasonable and accommodating. That is, I would predict your facial expression markers to not inlcude those associated with irritation, zeal, rage, or contempt. (All of which I would expect to be associated with cognitive changes in reasoning capacity and active perceptual biases.)
If only I had known! I could have videorecorded myself to post to Youtube, and we would have a testable hypothesis! :P
That said: this remark constitutes definite proof of “different definitions” theory, because I would have said I was angry. And I am sure I would have had a difficult time being as carefully phrased were I responding in realtime—introspecting on my feelings, I think I can detect places where I steered away from the transition into what you have called anger in order to maintain the tone of the conversation.
Anyway—one of my few remaining “pet peeves” is the tendency many people have to treat emotions as something unequivocally good, while ignoring the fact that we already have science to show the physical and mental effects of emotion. You don’t really get to decide how or whether your emotions affect you—only limited options for preventing them in the first place, and for mitigating them after the fact.
This is true—and a lesson I need to put into practice, to be honest.
But I think I’ve gotten my reaction to that down to just a “peeve”, rather than something that provokes actual irritation. ;-)
I wonder if I would have provoked less of a reaction with “pet peeve” than “berserk button”? (:
(I think I would still use the latter were I writing it now—an intermediate term would be better, though.)
That said: this remark constitutes definite proof of “different definitions” theory, because I would have said I was angry. And I am sure I would have had a difficult time being as carefully phrased were I responding in realtime—introspecting on my feelings, I think I can detect places where I steered away from the transition into what you have called anger in order to maintain the tone of the conversation.
Is this a case of anger-on-the-Internet vs. anger in real life? There is an emotion on the Internet which I am sometimes inclined to identify as anger which is not at all the same as the real life emotion of anger which I have experienced in myself and others.
Real life anger is scary stuff, something that can result in you or others actually getting physically hurt. It is inseparable from a fear of physical harm. I don’t know where you draw the line between anger and rage but my physical-world experiences with either have been disturbing.
I sometimes read posts on the Internet which ‘make my blood boil’ but I don’t label it ‘anger’ because real-world anger is something far more frightening. A discussion mediated by the Internet can’t really invoke the implications of real-world anger.
I must admit to some bewilderment, because the way you and pjeby are talking, there seems to be some superpowered incensed fury that you reserve the term “anger” for that I am personally unfamiliar with. I can’t say my anger during this discussion was qualitatively different from my anger on other occasions, on and offline.
Edit: That is to say, I am quite familiar with alberzles, but not with bargulums, to extend that conceit.
If it helps clarify, I see anger as ‘the emotion that makes you want to hurt people’, either through physical or emotional violence. While I can appreciate the strategic value of such an emotion from an evolutionary point of view I find it hard to approve of it. Grudging respect is about the closest to a positive view of anger I can muster.
And I am sure I would have had a difficult time being as carefully phrased were I responding in realtime—introspecting on my feelings, I think I can detect places where I steered away from the transition into what you have called anger in order to maintain the tone of the conversation.
And this also supports what I’ve been saying, on two additional points:
FIrst, you appear to agree that actually entering into that emotional state is a mind-killer. And second, having buttons that pushed you in the direction of that state was not actually helpful to your considered goals.
I think this is sufficient to conclude the discussion; I feel like Albert and Barry, just having agreed on “alberzles” and “bargulums”. Yay, rationality! ;-)
[Edit: misspelled “bargulums”, not that anyone could tell.]
I think this is sufficient to conclude the discussion; I feel like Albert and Barry, just having agreed on “alberzles” and “bargulums”. Yay, rationality! ;-)
With the caveat that we haven’t decided which ones are fritzelnits yet. :P
[Edit: misspelled “bargulums”, not that anyone could tell.]
Wait, if no-one could tell, how did you? Paradox!
Okay, I need to go to bed. Catch you on the flipside!
Yes, reframing is a learnable skill. Family therapist Virginia Satir had a reputation as an exemplar of that skill. One book I’ve read, “The patterns of her magic”, goes a little into the details of how it’s done.
That “spin doctor” thing makes me wonder, though: is there some substantial variance in the ability of people to reframe their way away from berserk buttons?
I think so. It seems to depend on personality (innate emphasis on practical vs political thinking for example), education (cognitive behavioral therapy emphazises reframing things away from awfulising and suchlike) and status (‘berzerk button’ is a high status only option).
(I should note that I am not trying to label the berzerk button as defective by observing that it is trained away from in CBT. CBT is intended for people who’s existing thought process is not working for them. If going berzerk or otherwise allowing things to make you angry gets you what you want then CBTing it away is not advocated.)
I think that problems can be ‘fixed’ just by framing them differently.
Really, that’s the best way to fix problems. Funny enough, when our brains aren’t reacting to something as though it’s some kind of threat to our life or status, our higher reasoning actually functions and lets us change the outside world in a more sensible way.
I don’t think this makes you a “spin doctor”, unless you’re attempting to reframe others’ problems for your benefit at their expense.
No, I would estimate that to be roughly equal. I don’t think females use ‘man’ or ‘boy’ to insult other females in the same way as males use ‘woman’ or ‘girl’ to insult each other.
The explanation I give suggests only that the use of ‘girl’ as an insult is not intended to be of the form “You are a girl. Girls are bad, therefore you are bad.” It is inteded to be of the form “You have female traits. Female traits on a male are extremely low status. You have status below both other males and females”.
It looked like you were using the fact that males insult each other by insinuating that they have female traits to back up the hypothesis that it is more insulting for a male to be referred to with the wrong pronoun. If you think that the reverse scenario is about equal, why would this make it more insulting, rather than just as insulting?
For the same reason that I would take offence at being called a ‘bastard’ even though I actually couldn’t care less that my parents happened to be married at the time of my conception.
If something is commonly used as an insult then that can be expected to cause offence independently of any factual content. So my claim is:
It looked like you were using the fact that males insult each other [by calling each other girls] to back up the hypothesis that it is more insulting for a male to be referred to with the wrong pronoun.
I think I might be talking past you. Let me try to re-frame my confusion:
Art calls Ben “girly” because Ben has exhibited stereotypically feminine trait F.
Meanwhile, Amy calls Bev “mannish” because Bev has exhibited stereotypically masculine trait M.
It looks like both Ben and Bev should be insulted, by about the same amount, and you seemed to assent to this, above.
Given this background, if Random Internet Person goes on to refer to Amy as “he” and Art as “she”, whence your above indication that Art should be more insulted than Amy?
Well put. I’m not myself exposed to what girls do to each other behind the scenes while I know males far better. Would you consider ‘mannish’ to be a ubiquitous insult? If so then Art should not be insulted more than Amy by ‘he’/‘she’ mistakes.
My impression is that ‘mannish’ is used less than ‘girly’ to such a degree that the implied insult (by this specific mechanism) of ‘he’ is much less ‘she’.
And I can’t think of ‘mannish’ being used ever. My impression was that female competition tended to be a little more sophisticated than banal locker room banter.
Austin Powers: You must admit she is rather mannish. Really, if that is a woman she must have been beaten with an ugly stick.
Good point. Now I can think of one.
Vanessa: That’s you in a nutshell.
Austin Powers: No, this is me in a nutshell: ‘Help! I’m in a nutshell. How did I get into this bloody great big nutshell? What kind of shell has a nut like this?’
I think I knew YOU were female… However, I apparently mis-remembered this article as being by Eliezer, and had that in mind when I made my earlier comment about gender links. Maybe because the perspective it takes feels more like the perspectives of my male friends than of my female friends.
According to the GenderAnalyzer, that blog post was written by a man. I tested your original post as well and it was correctly guessed as being written by a woman.
I tried it on some other pages and if anything the thing is underconfident—it’s right more often than it supposes.
lesswrong.com is probably written by a male somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is academic and happy most of the time.
The age result is interesting.
(This is a different web site that uses the same underlying service. It is based on the most recent posts, so the result will likely change over time.)
These percentages are supposedly Bayesian estimates, so it basically just means that it isn’t easy to tell one way or another but the thing was more inclined to take it as female. If the thing is well calibrated it would be right 63% of the time and wrong 37% of the time with this estimate. But at least for my tests it was right even more often—it seems other people had different experiences.
This is based on all the estimates that people have voted on. So it’s not strange if it’s only getting 63 − 70% correct; it’s giving many estimates which are less certain than this.
I wasn’t referring to the total percentage but to ranges: for example when it estimated from 65-75%, it seemed to be wrong 1 in 4 to 1 in 6 times instead of 1 in 3 to 1 in 4. But maybe my sample was still too small.
My livejournal gets 58% female; my synopsis of my webcomic gets 81% female; and my serial fiction, which I coauthor with another woman, gets 75% female.
Does anyone know how to contact this blogger so I can correct em on my gender?!
Hey, Alicorn, look what I found!
http://scienceblogs.com/casaubonsbook/2010/02/why_bunnies_are_cuter_than_bab.php
On it!
Go go feminism police!
Thank you!
Why did Eliezer tell everyone here about another blogger who doesn’t care enough about Alicorn to find out and use her preferred pronoun, instead of, say, just contacting that blogger directly? And why did people vote it up? Do they want to see more instances of such lack of caring to be reported here? I think I’m missing something here...
The blog post is of independent interest aside from the gender mixup.
Ah, thanks. I guess my brain was so primed to think about the gender mixup that I missed the obvious.
I found the mere fact that a lesswrong post got that much external reference was interesting.
I don’t think my personal vote should be taken as support of any ‘lack of caring’ about Alicorn, as that is not an inference I have made about the state of the mind of the blogger based on the evidence available. That is, I reject the framing of the question.
Er… a sense of humor? I regret only that I didn’t get to see the look on her face in person, but I was kind of hoping for an AAAAAAAHHH in reply.
Oh, I didn’t realize my frustration was so entertaining. Should I stop exhibiting it, to create better incentives?
While I generally get pissed off when people find my frustration entertaining, I’m not sure that’s the correct inference here. I can be amused by my friends frustration in a way that, far from diminishing my sympathy for them, is actually borne of it. This is part of what amuses us about the Bill Hicks of this world.
Perhaps you should at least stop exhibiting it so amusingly. Lately it’s sounded like something out of Peanuts.
I think we should steer a lot further from high-school tropes. Right now you seem a whisker away from grabbing her stuff, offering it back to her, then throwing it to a mate when she reaches for it. I don’t think that’s exactly the atmosphere we’re aiming for, do you?
Agreed, and voted up.
With that said, note that the scienceblogs author and most of the commenters were female, and didn’t make the inference, “alicorn = unicorn-related = probably female”.
What would be a clear, non-amusing, ideally empathy-inspiring expression of frustration?
A :( probably wouldn’t hurt
People keep mistaking my gender and it makes me sad :(
I’m a little curious why you care so much about people getting your gender correct online.
Speaking personally, I generally use my actual name in my screen name which to native English speakers shows my gender clearly. But even then, some non-native speakers see a name ending in “a” and apparently conclude that that’s female.
Also, I have a very high-pitch voice for a male, so I regularly get mistaken for a female over the phone. But this isn’t really that annoying except when it becomes an actual inconvenience (as in “I’m sorry ma’am, but I need to speak to your husband about this.” and then refusing to believe that they really are speaking to Joshua Zelinsky).
So I’m curious why this preference issue is one that you place so much emphasis on.
I have never been mistaken for male in person or on the phone, ever. Additionally, people who identify me as male (or choose to express their uncertainty with male pronouns) on the Internet aren’t typically doing so because there’s positive evidence to that effect; they’re guessing based on my location (“the Internet” or the specific site), which amounts to careless, casual stereotyping and rankles horribly. If people tended to only identify me as male after I dropped a casual reference to an ex-girlfriend without mentioning in the same context that I’m bi, that would bother me less, albeit still some, because it would be a reasonable update to make on the basis of information I’d provided beyond simply having wandered into an area that they suppose to be the province of males.
I know what I said about unicorns above, and I think that’s still relevant, but I disagree with your characterization of the gender misidentification as “stereotyping”.
Given that there are more men than women on Internet discussion sites, and especially on Less Wrong, wouldn’t it be reasonable to guess that any given poster is male, unless there’s evidence to the contrary ? By analogy, if I knew that a bag contained 75 black marbles and 25 white marbles, why shouldn’t I guess that a random marble, that I pulled out of the bag without looking, is black ?
Only if you are unable to actually look and check the color. Which was Alicorn’s whole point.
I’m not sure how the looking would work in practice. I would feel incredibly creepy if, every time I wanted to quote someone’s blog post, I had to first contact the poster and inquire about his/her/etc. gender. Conversely, assuming I ever posted anything of consequence (unlikely, I know), I’d feel uncomfortable if someone asked me, “hey, I liked your blog post and I want to respond to it; BTW, what is your gender ?”.
But perhaps my reaction is atypical ?
I am not upset if people write in or around their uncertainty about my gender. “He/his” does not do either, but “(s)he” or “ey” or “they” or “Alicorn” or “the OP” or whatever would be all fine and no contact would be necessary.
She mentioned that a simple google search would have done the job. Granted, the gender-inquiry step often bypasses one’s consciousness completely, and it happened to me here and elsewhere on more than one occasion.
Actually a simple google search yields this: http://www.google.it/search?q=alicorn
The first result is Wikipedia, the second and the third are My Little Pony stuff, and they even mention a male alicorn.
This link is not stable. Google uses filter bubbles. I don’t have the same first results as you do.
In fact, the first two results for me point to LessWrong directly, the third to an MLP fan wiki, and the fourth to a random news article that apparently misspelled “unicorn”.
Interesting.
“alicorn gender site:lesswrong.com″ with the date restriction of before Feb 24 2010 (when she posted a question about correcting her gender in someone’s blog) gives me a pretty unambiguous second hit.
But you have to know that the person who uses the nickname ‘alicorn’ has posted something about her gender.
The word ‘alicorn’ itself doesn’t seem associated with anything femmine, other than the ‘unicorns are girly’ stereotype which is itself far from obvious.
You mean the monstrous, superpowered godlike entity of human-level intelligence that purely selfishly rewards with mystical life-enhancing divine gifts those that save it, and those who would threaten it find themselves and all their relatives and descendents forever cursed, including any innocent offspring five generations removed from a single unicorn-threatening ancestor?
The first time I knew I’d probably encounter a unicorn in a game of D&D, I started rolling my next character.
All in all, I think the “unicorns are girly” stereotype isn’t all that widespread outside of certain typical US populations. For most populations, I’d figure the question of unicorn genderness never even occurs in the first place—unicorns are just one of those many “mythical creature” thinghies. Then again, I’m from a rather young generation and I have an extended family that is rather high standards in terms of gender cultural programming and social expectations (or prevention thereof).
In whatever population I am part of (not a US one), it isn’t the beast itself that is considered female, but rather that females are more likely to be associated with it. Probably a selection effect because they are slightly less likely to be impaled on sight.
Perhaps the unicorn suffers from a similar problem as the angel. When I hear the word “Angel” I think “Enormously powerful, ruthless, highly masculine yet somewhat pretty enforcer that is quite likely to slaughter you on sight”. I don’t think “scantily clad girl with harp”. Unicorns are somewhat analogous albeit being territorial beasts rather than henchman.
I associate the word “Angel” with an eldritch inhuman monstrosity, the very sight of which will drive you mad, if you’re lucky. It is a messenger of an inscrutable divine omni-power, and it only ever carries one message: annihilation.
Angels carry at least two types of message: Annihilation and threats of annihilation if compliance with arbitrary demands is not immediate! Sometimes they are also scouts come to investigate whether said annihilation is necessary. Tip: if large flawlessly beautiful men walk up to your city don’t try to gang rape them. Offering your daughters up to the would-be rapists as a compromise is frowned upon but not penalized.
In one case, the message was “You’re pregnant”. Then, later, a whole chorus of angels gave a concert in celebration of that child’s birth.
Which is not to detract from your point! The very first thing those angels said, to Mary and the shepherds both, was “Fear not!”
This set of posts made my day.
It seems to be encouraged, not frowned upon. And offering your daughter and the wife of the intended (non-angelic) victim is super-righteous.
Um, no.
[source]
“The sex of angels” is an Italian idiom for an irrelevant question, much like “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” is in English.
One of my most salient associations with unicorns is dangerous men. One of my friends was a social worker, and he found that nearly every time he saw the lodgings of a male serial rapist or other such severely disturbed male, they were decorated with unicorn posters.
...huh.
Be right back. If anybody needs me, I’ll be reevaluating everything I thought I knew about My Little Pony.
Hah, yeah, that’s exactly the kind of usage I would come up with if I had to pick something unicorns would be a symbol for.
My image of unicorns as incredibly monstrous, scary supernatural creatures first came from the question: “Okay, it’s a white horse with a long, pointy, sometimes serrated or with screw-like sharp spiral edges, horn, but… what the hell do they use that horn for?”
Stabbing lions. And ill-informed hunters.
More like 89 black marbles, 8 white marbles, and 3 striped/grey/transparent/other-colour marbles. But still, I don’t usually use gendered pronouns unless I’m >95% sure of someone’s gender (from the venue, their username, and what I’ve read by them so far).
Given that the prior for male is 89%, iit doesn’t seem it would take lots of evidence to reach 95% posterior probability that somebody is male.
My prior probability that someone is male is about 50%, knowing that they read Less Wrong amounts to about +10 dB of evidence that they are male (as of the last survey), so the posterior probability that someone is male given that they read Less Wrong is about 90%. How does Bayesian updating amount to careless, casual stereotyping?
I completely agree. Well, it doesn’t rankle for me in the same way because I probably post a lot less on the Internet than you do, and thus get a lot fewer assumptions. (Also, I kind of like the thought of people not knowing my gender.) But I completely agree that the Internet, and especially sites like LessWrong, is assumed to be populated by males.
Alicorn:
Have you considered that your writing style might be unusual for a woman? Even based on a small sample of writing that has no obvious clues, it’s usually possible to guess the author’s sex much better than chance. You write in a very technical matter-of-fact style, with long, complex, and yet very precisely constructed sentences, and take unusual care to avoid ambiguities and unstated implications. (You’d probably be a great textbook writer.) Whatever the reason for this state of affairs might be, people who write like that are overwhelmingly men.
Also, why not simply use a female name if you’re bothered by this?
Out of curiosity, what markers do you associate with feminine writing?
Perhaps I should stress that it’s not that you write in a typical masculine style. Rather, you write in a style that’s altogether unusual, and the minority of people who write like that are predominantly men. So it does constitute some evidence, unless I’m completely mistaken about the facts of the matter (and I pretty confident I’m not).
Regarding the typical male/female style, it’s hard to give a simple description. It’s an intuitive impression that’s not amenable to detailed introspection. Somehow a given text usually sounds more natural in male voice than female or vice versa, unless perhaps it’s a completely dry technical discussion, and while far from being 100% reliable, these guesses are also far better than chance. As for those clues that can be analyzed explicitly, I’m not sure if it would be a good idea to get into that topic, since it’s mostly about (statistically accurate) sex-stereotypes, which is clearly a hot-button issue.
It’s been my experience that writing style isn’t especially gendered. I used to think I could tell, but I can’t actually guess accurately based on writing style alone. (Topic choice, sure.) And, of course, women have successfully written under male pseudonyms many times. Lots of behaviors are gendered, but there’s psychological evidence that people are biased towards seeing gender differences in everything, and I think the “female writing style” is one of those supposed gender differences that doesn’t actually exist. If you want, though, we can see if you can guess the gender of the authors of a few writing samples where the choice of topic doesn’t give it away.
I initially thought Alicorn was male too, but that’s because she has a genderless username and writes on a majority-male site. I’ve been mistaken for a guy on the internet, when I thought my username was plenty girly, but, you know, I was on the internet so the priors are skewed.
Well, there’s this.
I did not know about that!
(Quick summary: n-gram analysis shows that women use more pronouns than men, among other distinctions.)
Ok, there does seem to be such a thing as a gender difference in writing style. Even within genres.
Writing style can’t be strictly separated from the choice of topic (or rather sub-topics addressed when writing on a given topic), and some of the most powerful clues come exactly from where these things blend into each other. Moreover, in interactive back-and-forth writing on forums and blogs, typical male and female behaviors and attitudes often quickly become apparent, just like in a live conversation, and are clearly detectable in writing.
Someone has already posted a link to a paper whose authors claim to have found measurable statistical differences between male and female styles, but I’m not sure how much (if at all) the usual human intuition relies on those specific clues.
But in any case, I don’t see where exactly you disagree with my above diagnosis, given that it’s discussing what I believe to be a fairly extreme and clear-cut case. Do you think Alicorn’s style doesn’t have the characteristics I described, or that such writing isn’t statistically likely to come from men?
If you have some samples ready, I’d be curious to give it a try.
Two writing samples, one male and one female, from humanities journals: First:
Second:
Two excerpts from New York Times articles, one male and one female:
First:
Second:
Two excerpts from short stories, one male and one female.
First:
Second:
The humanities articles both use the same formal dry academic style, from which it’s hard to say anything. The first one is much worse in terms of long-winded verbiage, but that doesn’t say much. If I had to guess, I would toss a coin.
The Times articles are similarly written in a routine journalistic style (it reads like a telegram with some cliche phrases cut and pasted between the words), so again it’s hard to say anything. (Also, from what I know, news articles are heavily edited and it’s questionable how much individual style they preserve.) If I really had to guess, I would say the first is more likely to be female by an epsilon. Google confirms this is correct, but I admit I wouldn’t bet any money on it. (On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if an experienced newspaper editor could guess much better.)
As for the short stories excerpts, well, that’s some bad prose. The first one sounds to me a bit more feminine; I’d say it’s something like a 60-40 guess. Googling these paragraphs, I see that I guessed right; admittedly, I wouldn’t have bet very much money on this one either.
Well, she thinks explicitly and abstractly, like most people here, and I suppose that could be more common in men, but I don’t think I’ve noticed anything especially male or female in her prose. I didn’t notice an unusual lack or predominance of pronouns. (Actually I think Alicorn, more than most LessWrongers, tends to illustrate ideas with anecdotes about individual people, whether real or hypothetical. So that would mean more pronouns—but then again, Eliezer has the same habit, and I don’t know if that means you’d consider his writing feminine.)
I’ve been collecting examples of Eliezer being mistaken for female; so far I’ve got six, plus two people uncertain. (Someone suggested that it’s because of his name, but I don’t remember why.)
Numerous cases in Methods of Rationality, especially during the early days. It’s as if they had priors suggesting that most Harry Potter fanfiction authors were female.
Aren’t they? That’s always been my impression. Although I can think of a lot of exceptions, like you, nonjon, and the guy who wrote Wastelands.
Someone mentioned that his first name could be misread as Eliza.
I didn’t base my conclusion on pronouns at all. Maybe you missed my commend a few turns further up in the thread where I describe it in more detail.
For what it is worth Alicorn’s writing style always resolved to female written for me. And the name seemed even more female—along the lines of “Alison”. My intuition possibly focuses on somewhat different features of communication when making the distinctions.
Being bothered is not usually about avoiding the negative stimulus.
This may be (although I’d like to see solid data before assuming so). But I also suspect that being on a rationality blog acts a filter for the sorts of people who DON’T write like that.
That just says ‘well educated and highly intelligent’ to me. Now, such people tend to be more commonly male than female, but given that someone posts on Less Wrong I don’t think that writing style is further evidence for them being male.
I’m not sure which shadows which here. It doesn’t seem like writing in this style will cause someone to post on LessWrong, while conversely it seems much more likely that someone who has been posting on LessWrong for a while will adopt this writing style. Thus, ISTM that the writing style overshadows posting-on-LessWrong more than the other way around.
Given that I have the text itself, learning that it was posted on LessWrong I wouldn’t infer much from it, since regardless of gender they aren’t obviously more likely to write this way on LessWrong if they’re a regular user, whilst if I only know that someone is posting on LessWrong then learning that they write in this manner also gives me all the other non-LessWrong writer data.
Not sure if I’m really being clear. Basically, in my model the causal chain goes the other way around.
My priors before I started paying attention at all (i.e. before the first time it came up in a conversation I was part of, on the internet, that someone was uncomfortable / sad / whatever that they were being referred to as the wrong gender—which, for record, was a post-op man genetically female who still had a few culturally-programmed female-expected behaviors) were around about .4 female to .6 male for any random person I meet and discuss with on the Internet.
Even that .4 seems rather high compared to the base stats I’ve seen since then for some populations, but there’s apparently some factor which makes me more likely to engage and enjoy discussions and interactions over the web with women, for some reason I don’t yet understand.
However, since then, I’ve had to update downwards. Even with my abnormal encounter rates (e.g. meeting 30% women in communities that are 3% women overall), on average I still only expect and observe that I “befriend” (or otherwise engage and interact with more actively with) women only one in five times of such people, i.e. the other four are men. This if I only include so-called “normal” men and women, because I also end up meeting abnormally high numbers of transgenders, asexuals, queers, and other nonstandard genders.
On top of that, out of the women that I do tend to interact with (which are already at less than 0.2 expected rate), only one in two cases I’ll end up having to refer to them before their gender becomes “revealed” in some manner (sometimes because of an obvious nickname). Of the half where I do, nowadays I use gender-neutral format, but before I started doing so, only one in four (well, three out of thirteen to the best of my memory, in total) got slighted/offended/whatever that I used male pronouns.
Which basically ends up with there being an approximately 2% expected probability that for any person I start interacting with I might use a male pronoun for a woman that will be affected by it, unless there is a high amount of women who get hurt from wrong pronoun usage but never reveal this. This is including my current rate of female:male encounter ratio, which I’ve already confirmed is abnormal from other stats (e.g. I’ve eliminated cases like women just befriending more people than men or similar situations).
I would expect that most people have their expectations somewhere around this or even rarer, so I can’t fault them for using male pronouns on the Internet by default without first having to fault them for thousands of other, much worse things.
For bias evaluation purposes: I have been identified and referred to with female pronouns at least twice on the Internet, and wasn’t offended (in one case, I was actually flattered, for various contextual reasons). In the past week, excluding work colleagues and LessWrong, I’ve maintained more meaningful Internet-based interactions with three regular men, two women, and one genetically-male unclear-someone who hasn’t quite yet resolved his own personal gender-identity yet and would probably fall in some gray area between “queer” and “pre-op transgender”.
There may be a clue about reasons to be concerned in your post.
You sometimes (how often?) get ignored because you’ve been mistaken for being female.
Women’s input being ignored isn’t all that rare, and that can lead to women wanting to be taken seriously while being known as female.
He gets ignored for being mistaken for not being Joshua Zelinsky.
How is it even reasonable to expect some arbitrarily visitor to notice (or guess correctly) your gender?
Do you evaluate your writing style or your expressed thoughts to be so typically female as to yield to no other conclusion? Or do you count on the “obvious” connotations of a name like “Alicorn”—for it is surely obvious that anyone naming oneself thus must be thinking about some fluffy, girly sparkling unicorn instead of, for example, making a reference to the Invisible Pink Unicorn—or something (especially on a rationality website!).
There is no personal information on the user pages here on LS, and decidedly no gender marks on top of the posts themselves. Also, you are obviously not willing to provide any info to make you identifiable in RL and yet expect all people to infer that you are female anyway, even given the prior probability distribution (“there are no girls on the internet”, “a contributor on some intellectual/academia website”)?
Even when one does not think of people on the internet strictly as male, it is simply usually a better guess to refer to them as “he”, given that i) one is unwilling to use “he/she” or a similarly artificial form, and ii) there is no other information one is willing to look up.
Thus I conclude that as long as you do not change your nickname into something like “Alicorn(female!)” or change your expectations, you will be sad like this time and time again. [ :( ]
I think it’s an unfortunate but inescapable fact that people are unlikely to assume a given poster on a rationality site is female unless said poster has an obviously-female-name (and honestly, I don’t think “Alicorn” counts. I had no idea what it meant until you explained).
But I AM genuinely offended by the Isgoria blogger proclaiming that male pronouns were “neutral”, even when applied to a specific person. I’m not sure it was the optimal use of my time given the year old status of this discussion, but I sent an e-mail saying so. It gave me warm fuzzies, at least.
I think the male bias in the english language is a ridiculously obvious problem, and I am extremely frustrated whenever a someone says “hey, it’d be cool if you made a small effort to use gender neutral language” and the response is “dude, what’s YOUR problem?”
(Originally I used male pronouns to refer to the Isgoria blogger, then realized I didn’t actually know for sure. I’m 90% sure the blogger is male, and I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to guess someone’s gender wrong. But it also didn’t take much effort to avoid the use of pronouns in the first place, and if we had an official actually neutral pronoun it wouldn’t have been an issue.)
There’s a knockdown essay on this subject by Hofstadter:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
I’ve read that essay, it’s largely responsible for my current views (or at least made me much more vocal about them). The only issue I have with it is that it’s almost too subtle. I didn’t really get what was going on until I skipped down to the end. I sent it to a feminist friend of mine and she got annoyed with it and stopped reading before she understood what the point was.
I remember reading that article, and not being impressed. He lumps all the sexist talking points into one essay, and therefore it ends up looking like one big strawperson. He may have good points, but unfortunately his own essay undermines them.
My understanding is that the essay’s effect is via the horror a reader feels at the alternate-world presented in the essay. It opens the reader’s eyes somewhat to the degree that sexism is embedded in everyday grammar and idiom. My understanding is that it is not a persuasive essay in the usual sense.
Please elaborate.
You may not count it but I dispute the ‘simple’ word.
So we should not stereotype people’s geneder based on the fact that they post on geeky websites (stereotypically male) but we should stereotype people based on their association with unicorns (stereotypically female, supposedly)?
(And why are unicorns supposed to be stereotypically girly? Horses are typically a symbol of strength and masculinity. So an horse with a large horn on its forehead, well...)
No, all people who stereotype are evil and probably also kill puppies.
(Alternately, “I said nothing in the grandparent that advocates stereotyping of anything by anything, you are being logically rude”.)
So do you maintain that it reasonably possible to infer Alicorn’s gender by her nickname?
If you do, please explain how this is not stereotyping. If you don’t, I apologize for misunderstanding your remark.
To the extent that inferring that female gender is more likely from a feminine name is “stereotyping” then sure I endorse stereotyping.
To answer the question again:
You should “stereotype” (which you seem to be using to mean ‘update in response to information’) based on both. Social tact dictates that some care should be taken to avoid making mistakes. Getting pronouns wrong is embarrassing, particularly if someone is around to play offense. If you aren’t sure it is safer to rephrase the sentence such that it doesn’t rely on gendered pronouns.
If the nickname was obviously a femmine one, (e.g. ‘Jane’), or even something more exotic but still recognizably femmine (e.g. ‘Aerith’) I would agree.
But you could infer that ‘Alicorn’ was a femmine name only through the association between interest in unicorns and being female (which is specifict to some subcultures). That doesn’t seem to me any less stereotypical than inferring that somebody is male through the association between nerd interests and being male (which, on the other hand, is supported by statistical evidence and AFAIK occurs in any culture).
Wei Dai argues that offense is a response to a perceived threat to one own status. He also cautions about oversensitivity.
It doesn’t seem to me that getting a pronoun wrong because you didn’t datamine the Internet for personal information just to get a pronoun right is an attack to someone status.
True, you could use gender-neutral constructions. I’m not a native English speaker, but I suspect that many native speakers find constructions such as ‘he or she’, the epicene ‘they’ or paraphrases like ‘this person’ excessively artificial and unidiomatic for informal speech.
After all, why should you assume that somebody over the Internet will be offended if you incorrectly guess the content of their pants? Isn’t equality feminism all about not caring about what kind of genital organs people have got, except on issues directly related to these organs?
If somebody posted a comment like: “Every woman knows that babies are cuter than rabbits. It’s in our maternal instinct. This guy doen’t know what he’s talking about.” then Alicorn could be reasonably offendend, since this comment would imply that she was defective as a woman and hence it would lower her status. But that’s not what was posted. The poster actually liked the article, she (*) just got one pronoun wrong.
(* the ‘Sharon’ signature and the remark about being a mother are definitely enough evidence to infer that the poster is a she)
Not being oversensitive yourself is a good practice, dismissing the possibility that another will be offended by something you do is called “insensitive”. Yes, sometimes you should take a stand and decide that a person getting offended about a particular thing is their problem, not yours (otherwise you give them complete control over you). However I don’t think someone being mildly (or occasionally significantly) offended when people get their sex wrong is really the place to draw the battle lines.
Some people get offended if you call them a girl when they are a boy and vice versa. That is all. Either ignore this and be considered an ass by said people (and some observers) or take some degree of care to get it right.
I wasn’t really sure how to word that sentence to strike the right emotional note (I’ve changed it a little, hopefully for the better).
I think it’s legitimate to argue “you should not make assumptions about gender until you have some actual evidence to go on. ” I don’t think it’s legitimate to argue “my name relates to unicorns therefore you should assume I’m a girl.” Either people associate the word alicorn with femininity or they don’t. And since this issue has come up multiple times, apparently enough people don’t make that association that it’s an issue.
I also don’t think the world would be a better place if more people DID think Alicorn was a girly name. My favorite game is Robot Unicorn Attack. I’ve considered buying Invisible Pink Unicorn Merchandise. I don’t feel a need to associate my identity with it, but I think it’d be a better world if preference for unicorns didn’t signal gender or sexuality at all.
You’d better not move to Germany. Chairs have a masculine sexual identity.
Slavic languages also assign a grammatical gender to every noun, and there’s nothing sexual about it. (I certainly find nothing sexual about stars, books, rivers, or mathematics being feminine.) Even for nouns that denote humans and other living creatures with biological sex, the correlation between grammatical gender and biological sex is high but still not perfect.
The gender defaults are mostly masculine (though with some exceptions), and it would be impossible to change that without rewriting the grammar of the language altogether, which is why the entire business over gender-neutral language in English has always seemed absurd to me. On the upside, it’s almost impossible to speak without revealing whether you’re male or female, since you have to refer to your attributes and actions using adjectives and even verbs inflected for gender, so confusions of this sort are almost impossible (however this can make it impossible to translate literature where a character’s sex is supposed to be hidden).
And maidens are neutral. Which suggests to me that grammatical gender in German has much less to do with personal gender than it does in English.
IIRC, Germans, Italians, &c. will describe the same objects differently based on the grammatical gender of the word describing it; i.e., speakers of a language in which “bridge” is masculine will emphasize a bridge’s strength and stability vs beauty and grace, and visa versa, &c. So gender in the wider sense interacts with it somewhat.
On a lighter note, Mark Twain had a typically great passage which he claimed to be a literal translation of a German story, the main humor being that various inanimate objects are referred to as hes and shes while the hapless fishwife has to get by on its.
The “bridge” study was by Lera Boroditsky, as discussed here. Her papers are available here—it looks like the most relevant is:
Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In Gentner & Goldin-Meadow (Eds.,) Language in Mind: Advances in the study of Language and Cognition.
I mistook your gender as well, initially. In my defence, I had no idea what “Alicorn” meant, except that it sounded like “Unicorn”. Unicorns are male more often than not, and the word “Unicorn” is male-gendered in my native language, which tipped my gender assignment all the way toward “male”.
My point is, the people who are mistaking your gender may not be making any assumptions about you. They may just be making assumptions about unicorns.
Wow, that’s quite a discussion thread that’s hanging below this comment; interesting, but completely unrelated to the top-level post. I want to jump in with a few words about anger but I’m completely at a loss as to where to put them.
Anyway, said blogger has now changed his post.
Edit: this comment has been rewritten; please see wnoise’s comment below for original context.
I feel that the topic of gender identity is not as important as this discussion and others like it on LW seem to make it. In a text based environment, using pseudonyms, we are genderless until we reveal ourselves. And unless we intend to employ mating signals between posters here, it has little relevance even after it has been revealed.
I have operated for years in communities where the gender of participants is highly relevant, but where there were taboos against attempts to discover true genders (online, text-based roleplaying). In such environments, I’ve developed a severe lack of concern for the topic at large, and instead read what the person has to say and contribute without a gender filter. Many times, I don’t even read the name of a poster except as a pattern that allows me to place the comment in context with those around it.
Alicorn’s focus on gender identity has, several times now, generated very large discussion threads and at least one top level post. I do not understand why this is accepted by the rest of the LW community as important and relevant to the topic of rationality.
It’s because we want more women to post here so we need to listen to Alicorn and keep her happy!!! We respect her opinions. Diversity is good. If we can’t keep Alicorn happy, we’re generally screwed as far as attracting (and subsequently not alienating) more women to this site.
See Eliezer’s post on this topic. http://lesswrong.com/lw/13j/of_exclusionary_speech_and_gender_politics/
Being non-anglo-saxon, I’m in a minority here. So you need to listen to me and keep me happy!!! You have to respect my opinions. Diversity is good. If you can’t keep me happy, you’re generally screwed as far as attracting (and subsequently not alienating) more non-anglo-saxons to this site.
Are you happy?
I don’t perceive Alicorn as “focusing” on “gender identity”. I perceive Alicorn as getting annoyed when people (out of carelessness) get her gender identity wrong.
Annoyance is one thing, and I have no problem with it; expressing that annoyance in such a way as to fuel a 118 post thread (and growing) on the topic in an otherwise unrelated article is what I disagree with.
Surely if the thread’s grown unwieldy, that’s not simply because Alicorn expressed her annoyance? There’s a whole bunch of other people involved here, whose contribution matters even if it all stems off of one of her comments.
Questions of appropriate standards for our community are on-topic to a limited extent. If you disagree, please refrain from making comments like this one, on pain of contradiction.
As pointed out by Kevin, this discussion has been had several times before on LW, and community norms should have already been established, in which case continued large threads on the topic are likely unproductive.
I also do not see why contradiction should be painful.
I can’t tell if you meant this humorously, so I’ll take it as a serious statement of confusion...
“On pain of X” is an idiom in English which roughly means, “or else you will experience X”, where X is something bad.
example
I would categorize it as 10 percent humor, 60 percent temporary interest in the vague threat implied by the “don’t do this… or else” definition and why that context was appropriate when applied to the topic of contradiction, and 30 percent etymological interest, as I have “on pain of death” as the most-associated thought when hearing the phrase (Google agrees, with that as the top suggestion to complete “on pain of”), and was curious as to how the permutation may have originated.
ETA: I disagree with the sentiment that contradiction is a negative, undesirable, or potentially painful event; instead, I view it as an opportunity to update maps, assuming that the contradiction is supported by the weight of the evidence.
“Pain” in this expression means “penalty”. Though I haven’t looked it up to confirm, I’m pretty confident the word “pain” itself comes from Latin poena via French peine, meaning just that.
(The first time I heard this idiom, the phrase was “on pain of imprisonment”.)
If you downvoted this comment, please explain why you feel that the topic of gender identity is so important as to merit top level posts and long discussions in many other posts.
I have not downvoted it. But the original phrasing “You are too focused on the topic of gender identity; I suggest that the topic is not nearly so worthy of concern.” differs from the one here in that it suggests concern to oneself, rather than the concern to the community that this post makes clear. The first is telling other people what they should be concerned with, violating a clear norm, and helping no one.
I downvoted it. This was already discussed in depth on the site a while ago. See the fall-out posts and discussion related to the PUA stuff (googling for PUA site:lesswrong.com should give you most of it) Basically, the answer to your statement (and then some!) is contained in that thousands of words worth of discussion, and I thought your comment was little more than being a likely trigger for a discussion that’s already been beaten into the ground here, even though that wasn’t your intention and your intention was in fact exactly opposite.
I will state that summarizing this discussion for postery’s sake (in the wiki) so we can stop having it is a good idea.
Yes, I read those discussions, and those posts, which is why I’m surprised it’s still generating threads this large on unrelated articles.
When reading, I noticed that this particular thread had a button labeled “load more comments (106 replies)”, and that struck me as very wrong for a comment I would have labeled “off-topic” at best.
I didn’t downvote, but considering that many people are confused about gender identity, applying rationality to it seems a reasonable topic for posting here.
Pragmatically: It’s important because the fact that this keeps coming up again and again suggests it’s not going to go away just because it’s annoying to many when it happens, and a mechanism to channel, redirect or settle the matter in the form of community norms hasn’t yet been found. Meanwhile, there’s clearly people who find it relevant, both to their participation in LW and not infrequently to life experiences that have bearing on what they can contribute to refining the art of rationality. Some of those people are major contributors here; some of them may still be lurking. Some of them haven’t even found te site yet. A global norm that rejects the topic altogether seems like a great path to evaporative cooling in an area where LW has real potential for PR issues, and which may be a long-term impediment to its success. Restricting the topic to Discussion only (regardless of the potential quality of the post and ensuing discussion) or attempting to limit the length of threads directly seems like a bad idea.
You can always downvote it if you don’t want to see it.
I didn’t downvote your comment; I think you actually make an interesting point.
For me, it’s not just that people obsess over issues of gender (and race, and sexual preference). It’s that their gender (or race) sometimes becomes like the team they are on and (arguably) warps their views.
For example, let’s suppose you did a poll and asked people if they think women should have the right to vote. I’m pretty confident that the percentage which says “yes” would be higher among women than among men. So it seems likely that peoples’ group membership colors their judgments.
How on earth did he get ‘he’ from ‘Alicorn’?
I’ve gotten ‘she’ from ‘Eliezer Yudkowsky’ no less.
Interestingly, over the course of some time monitoring blog trackbacks for Overcoming Bias, I never saw Robin Hanson mistaken for a female Robin.
So… um… I realize that this isn’t really what the whole point is about at all, but I didn’t feel particularly insulted to be called a girl; what does it say about your opinion of men that you’re insulted to be mistaken for male? :)
(And yes, I know, it probably wouldn’t be annoying if it was only happening to you personally and no one else, it’s the background social assumptions that are annoying.)
I automatically assumed Yvain was female for a while, because the name looks like “Yvonne”.
Sir Yvain, Knight of the Lion.
that was interesting, and there was I thinking of alicorn as male and yvain as female, shuks..
Am I mistaken for female on here because of my username often, I wonder. It does look like it has the word “gal” embedded in it. Darn orthography not reflecting pronunciation.
(The pronunciation is /ˈwɔrɨɡl̩/ in IPA, uorygl in Lojban. Also, it took me ages to figure out a way to get the word “female” within five words of the beginning of that sentence.)
It’s easy for me to see your name as Warriorgal.
I believe I was agnostic on the question, for one.
It says nothing about my opinion of men (I think) - it just signifies to me that the person so profoundly does not even care. I don’t want to be talked about without being considered. This is probably more of a pet peeve for me than for others. It would still be annoying even if it never happened to anyone else.
What did the person who mistook me for a woman not care about with respect to me? What were they not considering about me that constitutes disrespect to me? If it’s not an annoying social background assumption then I genuinely don’t understand what’s so terrible about this.
Do you remember whoever-it-was that was talking about not having the kind of attachment to sexual identity that other people claimed? (She—I believe it was she—mentioned that she would be more likely to report but not as emotionally traumatized by rape.)
I think this is an inverse of this. Some people—me, for example—are unperturbed by being assigned the wrong gender. Not everyone.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1f4/less_wrong_qa_with_eliezer_yudkowsky_ask_your/19iw
It also signifies that you care a lot, more than is normally expected, and so more than people normally adjust their behavior to accommodate.
About gender pronouns, your gender, gender politics in general or something more esoteric?
About me.
In person, I’m fairly obviously girl-shaped. No one has ever made this mistake when interacting with me in person, and I don’t have to do Obvious Girl Things™ to get that accuracy—don’t have to swish around in crinoline, don’t have to conveniently quote third parties who refer to me as “she”, don’t have to carry my purse everywhere I go, or even say my name (which is a girls’ name). People don’t assume based on where I am or what I’m doing or how surprising it would be for me to be a girl before they figure out that I am one anyway and pronoun me accordingly.
And—in person, when people can’t tell what gender someone is, they don’t guess, unless they feel able to rely on visual cues or maybe being married to someone of a known gender (and when they are wrong they are mortified). People will bend over backwards to avoid using the wrong pronoun for someone who’s in the room with them. They’ll ask third parties or construct their sentences to avoid making the assumption or learn the person’s name to get a clue. It’s just not socially acceptable to get it wrong.
Online, people feel free to guess, and on the geeky parts of the Internet I frequent this is most likely to affect women negatively. (I also frequent various anti-prejudice parts of the Internet, but there a) I generally lurk and b) under the circumstances they take the trouble to be careful about that sort of thing!)
Now, I recognize this disparity is because it’s considered insulting to say that someone looks like the opposite gender, and not so with writing like the opposite gender… except that when people talk about third parties one of them knows in person and the other doesn’t, the one who doesn’t know doesn’t casually hurl pronoun caution to the wind even though someone is right there to correct them should they be wrong without any implications about anyone’s looks having been made. When there is a mechanism to find out a real person’s gender, it gets taken advantage of. With real people, you don’t guess, you find out, and if you’re wrong, that’s not okay.
Getting my gender wrong when it would have been pretty easy to get it right (for crying out loud, ask me! Or someone else! Or do the most cursory of searches for “alicorn gender” on this very site—it’s in the second result!) signifies that I am not a “real person” in the above sense. It’s okay to guess. It doesn’t matter if you get it wrong. He won’t care, and if she does, it’s about eir politics or something dismissible like that, not about whether you took four seconds to fact-check. Not about identity, or consideration, or the fact that this happens about once a week and the blogger, unlike most people who make the mistake, doesn’t even have a way for me to correct em.
It seems somewhat unreasonable to get so upset over the fact that a random person on the Internet doesn’t care about you. I wonder what you think about this quote from my post The Nature of Offense:
But I admit that I’m still quite confused about the proper relationship between rationality, values, and emotions. “Too sensitively” above makes some sense to me intuitively, but if someone asks “too sensitive compared to what?” then I can’t really give an answer. I’d be interested in any insights you (or anyone else) might have.
I wouldn’t mind if the person had chosen not to blog about me at all. But having made the choice to a) blog about my article and b) couch this entry in terms of what puzzles me, etc., not checking up on my gender places the entire thing in a sort of uncanny valley of care. The blogger basically tried to order up my content a la carte, and there is a limit to how modular my contents are.
I tend to agree with Wei Dai, and it seems to me that your analogy between the way people behave on the internet and the way people behave in person is flawed. To illustrate this:
The internet behavior in question: the blogger didn’t care enough about you to find out your gender, but did care enough about what you said to comment on it, also not realizing that you would read the blog post.
Real world behavior that would be actually analogous: two men (more likely to be uncaring) are walking down a street in a large city. Two other persons pass them, walking in the other direction and speaking with one another. The two men overhear something, but it is difficult for them to be sure of the gender of the two persons. Then, one of the two men comments to the other on what they overheard. He uses whatever gender pronoun seems to him slightly more likely, even while knowing that there is a good chance he is wrong, and he doesn’t care.
Note the real analogy here: the two men don’t care about the two persons they pass, but are interested in what they overhear, and so say something about it. They have no reason to expect that the persons will hear what they say, so, in their view, it doesn’t matter whether they are right or not.
Of course, people may well underestimate the probability that other people will read blog posts about them, so maybe they should be more careful.
The other difference when calling a ‘she’ a he’ in real life is: If you can actually see her with your eyes and you call her a ‘he’ then it probably means you haven’t noticed her breasts, don’t consider her facial features to be differentiated and don’t even have a polite, respectful appreciation for her feminine form. That makes the situation extremely embarrassing for both parties.
Too sensitive compared to how you would want to feel if you knew more about your preferences (how low worlds rank where the offense was made) and more about what the world is like, e.g. the state of mind of those making the perceived offense?
I’m pretty sure that’s a function of where you hang out.
My impression is that transgendered people have a hard time getting their choices taken seriously in most social circles.
Your impression is accurate. It’s frequently an issue in gatherings of trans people, let alone in mixed groups or majority-cis spaces.
Is that from someone reading it as ‘Eliza’?
No clue hath I, though your suggestion seems plausible enough.
Alicorn ends with a consonant. This doesn’t guarantee that it will be seen as male, but I think it increases the odds.
The user name “Alicorn” seems gender-indeterminate to me.
I assume that is without knowing that the word “alicorn” is related to unicorns? Or are you not confident enough in females liking unicorns much more so than males to be able to give a probability estimate?
When I once wasn’t sure about Alicorn’s gender, I googled “alicorn”, saw alicorn was a word related to unicorns and assigned a 95% probability then that Alicorn was female, which was confirmed by seeing someone refer to her as she on here.
That’s a 95% female probability, even accounting for the fact that LW is mostly male? You’re amazingly confident that female persons like unicorns much more, considering that unicorns have a huge sharp pointy phallic weapon sticking out of their foreheads.
That’s 95% confidence that the username would be picked by a female. Not at all the same thing as a 95% confidence that a person who likes unicorns is female. You are ignoring the fact that picking such a username is a powerful signal (to people who know what it means). I think unicorns are kind of cool but that doesn’t mean I would pick a username that references unicorns.
“Alicorn” sounds much more feminine than either “Unicorn” or “Aliborn”.
I sold my unicorn when I realized why the guys would never believe my locker-room stories of sexual conquest.
Yup—didn’t know “alicorn” was a word.
Maybe, but I certainly assumed she was female the first time I heard the name, and I had never heard it before… maybe associations with Alice or Allison or whatever. Anyway it sure seems determinately female to me.
Ali can be short for several female names, but it can also be a male name.
This is a cultural norm kind of thing, but in the cultural norms where Alicorn chose her name, I think it really was intended to be a feminine username. I think women do have a tendency to try and choose somewhat feminine usernames, because otherwise a lot of the time on the internet they will be mistaken for men which gets annoying quickly.
I think something that would allow us to definitely solve this problem is profile pictures (which don’t have to be your actual picture) or user profiles.
User profiles good, pictures bad.
Frankly, the “problem” here really isn’t very hard to solve: just don’t assume you know a person’s sex unless you actually know it!
This is undoubtedly the case. However, the opposite choice is also quite popular—choosing masculine usernames to avoid being harassed for being female.
How in the earth did you get ‘he’ from ‘Sharon’?
I have no idea how the Wedrifid from nearly three years ago selected ‘he’. It doesn’t seem the kind of detail one would encode indefinitely in long term memory.
Probably he (or she?) didn’t care about being offensive
The last prominent world leader of that name was male, I believe.
You mean Ariel Sharon? That is his last name (which he actually chose himself. He was born Ariel Scheinermann, then he changed it to Sharon, probably because Scheinermann sounded too much German).
In fairness, his given name Ariel sound femmine to me, thanks to a certain cartoon character, but according to Hebrew grammar it’s actually a male name and it literally means ‘Lion of God’. Blame ignorant Disney.
BTW, that Sharon was pronounced with a stress on the second syllable, whereas the feminine first name has a stress on the first syllable. (Similarly, if I read that someone’s first name is Andrea I can’t tell whether they are male or female unless I know where they come from, but if I hear it pronounced I can.)
Shakespeare’s “Ariel” (from the Tempest) is also often depicted as a female character (though originally referred to as a male character). This graph does seem to imply however that its popularity as a female name may have been indeed influenced by Disney.
I forgot that Ariel sounds female, too. I don’t know if that undermines or reinforces my point!
“Last names don’t encode gender”—Claude Shannon
If one fails to invoke System 2 processing and reflect that world leaders are rarely known by their first names (assuming one even realizes that that example is where the ‘Sharon may be male’ thought is coming from), then they certainly do.
I don’t know how it keeps happening. How did you get “he” from the blog post? (Or is it indicated somewhere else?)
It (she) was a girl it is highly unlikely that (she) would have made the mistake. Apart from defaulting to writing ‘she’, she would have blogged since 2003 and would have had her own identity confused more than once.
But mostly I fell back on my prior for people who write blogs on these topics:
This prior screens off my more general prior for the sex of bloggers in general. Beyond that I have a prior for the types of signalling that I expect to find humans engaging in based on their respective reproductive motivations.
At what odds would you bet against me if I was betting that the blogger in question was male?
Oh, the blogger is probably male. But from eir perspective, so was I: I blogged about “refining the art of human rationality” and ey could have been ever-so-responsibly screening off priors and making eir best guess and ey was wrong and I am pissed off. So, I decline to do the same thing.
Meanwhile I find ‘ey’ just irritating so my approach is to sometimes just avoid pronouns while other times I randomly generate pronouns based on my prediction, biased towards 0.5. I don’t recall being dramatically mistaken thus far and seem to have a reasonably good track record for guessing right based on writing style. At least, that is, in cases where I get later confirmation.
The singular they has a long and illustrious history. I know I’ve said it four or five times in the recent comments, but that’s what I’d recommend.
Really? I use ‘they’ quire frequenly but feel bad every time. I’ll stop feeling bad now. Thanks. ;)
Glad to be of service!
I think the singular they is not appropriate in this case, where the referent is a specific person of unknown (to the writer) gender, namely Alicorn, instead of an indeterminate person. From Wikipedia:
Like some others here, I also find ‘ey’ annoying and distracting, so the fix I would prefer in this case is ‘he or she’. Does anyone consider that annoying or ungrammatical?
I’m sorry you find “ey” irritating; I promise not to refer to you a la Spivak. And I’m glad you’re good at detecting gender from writing style. And someday you may piss someone off very badly.
It doesn’t appear to have occurred to you that some people find Spivak pronouns very annoying. They annoy me immensely because it feels like someone is deliberately obstructing my reading in an uncomfortable way to make some kind of political point almost entirely unrelated to the context of the post itself. I usually just stop reading and go elsewhere to calm down.
I promise not to refer to you with Spivak pronouns either.
“I don’t know what gender the person I’m talking about is and wouldn’t care to get it wrong” is not a political point, though.
It’s not me being referred to with them that bothers me, it is them being used at all. I find it difficult and uncomfortable to read, like trying to read 1337 5p34k, and it breaks my reading flow in an unpleasant way. It’s like bad grammar or spelling but with the additional knowledge that someone is doing it deliberately for reasons that I consider political.
“Political”?
I think it may have been a few decades ago, when the pronouns were invented, but at this point Spivak is generally used for courtesy purposes, as Alicorn said.
Breaking the flow I’ll agree is a valid objection, however. I have opted to avoid neologistic pronouns for that reason, save in cases where such are requested. If someone wants to be a “xe”, that’s their business, I say.
Thanks for the detailed description of why you find invented pronouns annoying.
I’m pretty flexible about new words, so I react to invented pronouns as a minor novelty.
I don’t know what people who use invented pronouns have in mind—they could be intending to tweak people, or they could be more like me and generalizing from one example.
I trained myself to use Spivak pronouns in less than a month. As far as lingual/grammatical conventions go, they flow very naturally. Singular “they” does not, because a plural verb does not belong with a singular subject. I find that much more annoying.
Dost thou also find the use of “singular you” annoying?
There is a difference between those situations. “You” is the only modern second person singular pronoun, whereas the third person singular has “he” and “she” in addition to the oft-used “they,” the latter obviously being the one which doesn’t fit.
Personally, I do feel it would be better to have some separation among the singular and plural second person pronouns, to avoid awkward constructions like “you all” and similar things. However, “thou” doesn’t seem to be a very viable option, given its current formal, Biblical connotations.
Also, the English language is missing a possessive form of the pronoun “which” (compare “who” and “whose”), if anyone wants to work on that problem.
One really clumsy thing in English is that there is no interrogative pronoun to which the answer would be an ordinal number (i.e. N-th in some sequential order). There isn’t even a convenient way to ask that question.
Don’t we use “whose” for that purpose?
That is the suggested remedy, but it’s a bit of a kludge. “Who” is intended to be used as a pronoun for people, so the possessive form “whose” should be used in the same way.
I’m a bit confused that you call it just a “suggested remedy”; my point is not that anyone advises this, it’s that this is what English speakers actually do.
Intended by who? Should why? It’s not even clear offhand that we should regard “whose” as exclusively a possessive form of “who”, given the above.
There’s a difference between what people actually do and what they should do.
Exactly my point. “Who” is for people, i.e. those beings that can have intentions.
But doing so reduces the clarity of the language, by conflating two different meanings.
Off the top of my head I can’t think of any situation where the antecedent of “whose” would be unclear due to its ability to also refer to inanimate objects.
I have to disagree with this. I’m also someone who’s bothered when words with multiple distinct meanings get merged, but I don’t think this can be described as a case of that. (I suppose the most obvious objection is that this does not reduce the quality of the language because there is nothing to compare to. If English ever had these other words you suggest, it can’t have been for hundreds of years at least.)
In any case, these words are just function words, they’re just relative pronouns. Merging different relative pronouns doesn’t add extra meanings—most of them could be pretty well expressed with “what”—it just forces you to include the information even if it’s not relevant (maybe we don’t care if what did this is animate or not), while allowing some things to become slightly shorter by being implicit (we can say “he who did this” rather than “What person did this”. This wouldn’t work as well with “whatever”, but that’s a quirk of how the word is formed in English rather than any general feature of relative pronouns.)
Basically you’re just introducing another unavoidable; it doesn’t “add meaning” any more than does English’s insistence that all finite verbs have tense.
You’re not the only person I know to make this claim, but I will admit to never having understood it.
That is, I can understand objecting to “If my neighbor visits I’ll give them a cookie” because it violates the English grammatical convention that the subject and object must match in quantity—singular “neighbor” doesn’t go with plural “them.” I don’t have a problem with that, myself, but I accept that some people do.
And I can understand endorsing “If my neighbor visits I’ll give em a cookie” despite it violating the English grammatical convention that “em” isn’t a pronoun. I don’t have a problem with that either.
But doing both at once seems unmotivated. If I’m willing to ignore English grammatical conventions enough to make up new pronouns altogether, I don’t see on what grounds I can object to someone else ignoring subject/object matching rules.
Mostly, when people say this sort of thing I understand it to be an aesthetic judgment, on a par with not liking the color blue. Which is fine, as long as they aren’t too obnoxious about trying to impose their aesthetic judgments on me.
Presumably you mean pronoun and antecedent. Clearly, subject and object need not agree in number (what you call “quantity”); such a requirement would in fact be logically impossible.
Yup, you’re right. I have absolutely no idea what my brain thought it was doing there.
Entirely incidentally: requiring that the subject and object match in number would admittedly be a strange sort of grammatical requirement to have, as it would preclude expressing all manner of useful thoughts (e.g., “Give me two slices of pizza”), and I’d be incredulous if an actual language claimed to have such a requirement, but I’m not sure it’s logically impossible.
You’re right, of course. In fact, one could conceive of a language where the grammatical number of the object would have to agree with the subject, and it would therefore not give any information about the actual number of things denoted by the object, which would have to be stated explicitly if it’s necessary to avoid ambiguity, like in languages that lack grammatical number altogether. For all I know, there might even be an actual human language somewhere that features something like this.
I don’t consider the creation of words to fall under the auspices of grammar. That happens in English and other languages all the time, because new or different concepts frequently need to be expressed in ways that are unavailable in the current state of the language. Using new words promotes clarity, in the long term, but misusing current words does the opposite.
“The pronoun form ‘they’ is anaphorically linked in the discourse to ‘this person’. Such use of forms of they with singular antecedents is attested in English over hundreds of years, in writers as significant as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, and Wilde. The people (like the perennially clueless Strunk and White) who assert that such usage is “wrong” simply haven’t done their literary homework and don’t deserve our attention.” (Language Log)
(Examples)
Language Log and Strunk and White are not playing the same game.
Strunk and White are playing “Does this look right nowadays?”
Language Log apparently thinks there are official rules determined by history.
I, of course, think the singular “they” looks just fine, nowadays.
This could hardly be farther form the truth. Language Log thinks that some completely made up rules that even the authors that propagate them often don’t follow in the very books they are doing the propagating in (I’m not sure if this applies in the specific case of Strunk and White and singular they, but it applies in many cases of what’s labeled prescriptivist poppycock there) are made even more absurd by history and the usage of high status people praised for their style.
Exactly so. My favorite example is Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” in which he rails against (among other things) the passive voice, but the very opening sentence of the essay contains the phrase “it is generally assumed.” Mistakes were made, I guess...
This is unfair to Orwell. Orwell’s advice is not to never use the passive voice. To begin, Orwell gives examples of bad writing and says:
His obvious complaint is that the passive voice is overused and inappropriately used, not that it is used at all. Note the phrase “wherever possible”. That suggests that the problem he is identifying is one of excess. In obvious reaction to this, he suggests a rule which exactly flips the above description, specifically:
This however does not say “never use the passive, ever”. And it should furthermore be obvious that Orwell does not mean, “never use the passive where you can find some convoluted and unreadable way to use the active.” I should think that you could always find some convoluted way to use the active. Rather, I think it should be obvious that he means, “never use the passive where you can use the active well.” What it amounts to is a reminder to the writer to re-examine his passives to see whether an active would not be better.
Well, yes, he also says, “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” But his opening sentence sounds to me precisely like the sort of passive that he’s warning against. It conjures the image of vague nameless opponents instead of naming concrete people, or at least concrete sorts of people, where we could examine if he really represents their views fairly. For a careful reader, this should be a warning that he might be setting up a strawman.
Can you even think of a concrete phrase that exemplifies a more shamelessly weasely use of passive than “it is generally assumed that...”?
Your position seems to be, then, that Orwell’s advice is sound, and it was his failure to follow his own advice which was unsound. I had taken you to mean approximately the opposite—that Orwell, a good writer, failed to take his own advice, and thereby illustrated the unsoundness of his advice. Or did you have something else entirely in mind?
Actually, both, to some extent. There is good and bad writing in terms of aesthetic style, and also in terms of logical soundness and factual accuracy. Any given piece of writing can be good or bad along these dimensions almost independently. Clearly, texts that combine great style with bad logic and inaccurate facts are especially misleading and difficult to assess correctly, and a lot of Orwell’s writing is in this category.
Now, in this essay, the great stylist Orwell breaks his own advice all over the place and thereby demonstrates that it’s complete rubbish when it comes to achieving good writing style. Good style in fact requires breaking these rules so often that it’s meaningless to espouse them as general guidelines. What’s significant is that Orwell is such a good stylist that his style dazzles you into not realizing this even as the contradictions are dancing in front of your nose. At the same time, the rules do have some limited applicability when it comes to logic and facts: some particular sorts of passives, bad metaphors, etc. are commonly used as weasely rhetorical tricks—and Orwell’s weasely essay does in fact employ them, hidden in plain sight by his great style.
So, to sum it up, Orwell has taken some observations about writing of non-zero but limited usefulness and applicability and written an unsound essay espousing them as supposedly general (if not absolute) rules. In the process he has contradicted himself by demonstrating that to achieve good style one must break these rules liberally, and also by breaking them in those situations where they do have some applicability (such as the awful “it is generally assumed that...”).
Debates on proper language style and grammar are always entertaining due to the impossibility fundamentally inherent in them of ever coming to a rational resolution. It’s a fun distraction to hone the creative mind for when real debate comes along.
Or a temptation to reinforce bad habits of rhetoric so that when there is actually a rational conclusion to be reached everyone can merrily ignore it and follow their ego unfettered.
To expand on this point—Strunk & White and Language Log are both playing the “does this look right nowadays” game; the difference is that LL is basing their conclusions on what people actually do nowadays, whereas S&W are simply stating what they think would work better with no actual testing. That they failed to actually follow it suggests that in actual usage they did not find it to work better.
The reference to historical authors (rather than the current ones that would be more relevant) is just a bit of Dark Arts by LL, because the people espousing such arbitrary rules often claim they are based on history.
Is it Dark Arts to head off at the pass the feeling that a grammatical rule is upholding ‘proper, traditional’ English against ‘slipping standards’?
If that’s actually what’s being argued, no. And indeed prescriptivists often do argue this. But nobody seems to have actually been claiming that in this case.
If it had been explicitly claimed it wouldn’t be ‘heading it off at the pass’!
:-)
They may be wrong on this particular matter, but it hardly follows that they “don’t deserve our attention”. White (of Strunk and White) is the author of Charlotte’s Web, still popular after six decades, so, not quite a literary failure.
Sure. Also, if they are driving a car into an intersection I’m crossing, I definitely endorse attending to them. But I suspect the poster Morendil is quoting meant “don’t deserve our attention [as authorities on grammatical usage].”
The pervasive wrongness of Strunk and White, in particular, is a recurring theme on LanguageLog.
If we’re to be treating people as deserving of our attention on the basis of their literary success, as the author of the quote did (see the appeal to Chaucer et al.), then it becomes relevant that E. B. White wrote Charlotte’s web. If we are going to ignore what E. B. White says on matters of usage because it doesn’t matter what he did as a writer, then in order to be fully consistent we should ignore Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the rest. This, however, undermines the Language Log quote, because it relies entirely on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the others to make its point.
I don’t think it’s straightforwardly literary success. Chaucer and Shakespeare may be the two most influential writers in English. Their work represents the form of English that ‘won’ in the 14th century and turn of 1600 respectively. The only other texts that leap to mind as historical sources of similar importance would be the King James Bible and the first Dictionary.
Shakespeare and Chaucer aren’t being appealed to as authoritative commentators. Their writing is referred to of evidence of English as it did and does exist.
It is not clear to me what you are saying. On the one hand you are saying that their work is representative of English as it existed. On the other hand you are saying that they are highly influential. Well, which is it?
But either way, E. B. White meets the criteria to at least some extent. First, he is indeed a representative of English as it existed in the mid-20th century. And as such, he is arguably more relevant to us now than Shakespeare and Chaucer are, since his English is closer to ours. Chaucer’s work, after all, is sufficiently hard for us to read that there now exist translations into current English of his work, and even Shakespeare cannot be read without a glossary.
As for influential, well, after all, White is one of the authors of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, which is influential. In fact, it is precisely because of the influence of Strunk and White that Language Log is bothering to talk about it.
Both representative and influential. Why would that be a contradiction? Newton and Einstein are both referred to as showing how scientists work AND as influencing scientists after them.
Writers and ‘experts’ are being mixed up here. White’s involvement here is as a commentator and critic, not in his own writing. Shakespeare and Chaucer aren’t commentators offering arguments, they’re the sort of thing that experts have to be expert in. You can argue whether another commentator’s analysis is right or wrong, but it’s more difficult to reject the evidence of cases in the field itself. The example of Einstein is a different sort of evidence about science, and a different sort of appeal, than the arguments of Kuhn or Popper.
I didn’t say it was a contradiction. I was asking you to clarify what you were saying. In any case I answered for both possibilities.
As I argued elsewhere, I don’t think this distinction is decisive.
But now you are simply not answering what I wrote, but are beating up a straw man. My original statement was:
In other words, I am admitting that they are wrong (I say “may” but my intent is that I am persuaded by the evidence from the OED), so if we treat them as prosecution lawyers I would say as the jury that they have lost the case and the defense has won, but I am saying that Language Log goes too far in saying that they “don’t deserve our attention”—i.e. that they should not have been permitted into the courtroom in the first place. That takes it one step too far, and I pointed that out.
Sorry, I took ‘which is it’ as meaning it must be one or the other. I think that the distinction is, while not perfect, well worth making. If we’re being philosophers of science, we listen to what Feynman says about physics, but our response can be to disagree. If it’s understood that some hold Feynman’s position, the simple fact he says it doesn’t itself constitute direct evidence. Whereas if we’re being philosophers of science and someone points out that our theory about what science can do clashes with what one of Feynman’s theories actually did, we have to engage with that in a different way.
On refusing them from the courtroom, LangagueLog obviously thinks they are simply bad commentators. It refers to ‘the perennially clueless Strunk and White’. I don’t know the area well enough to know if that’s fair.
But your counter-argument was that we should listen to White because he was a literary success, and that argument was founded on the comparison to appeals to Chaucer and Shakespeare. The fact is that White was being referred to as a bad commentator, which is very consistent with being a good author. And Chaucer and Shakespeare were being referred to as influential and representative authors, not simply succesful ones.
I disagree, because I think that being a bad commentator on writing is not “very consistent” with being a good writer. That is not a comfortable fit. It is technically consistent (i.e. possible), but not very consistent (i.e. probable). Similarly, Feynman being a good physicist would be technically consistent with making outrageously false statements about what science is in his popular essays, but it would not be a comfortable fit. We do not expect someone who has no clue about what science is to actually be a good scientist, and we are right not to expect that. This is why, having seen that Feynman is a good scientist, we expect him to have a very good grasp of what science is and so we expect his popular essays about science to be insightful and largely true.
This is why I find the distinction being made here between writer and commentator on writing to be a bit thin.
I think we’re coming from different ideas about this: in my experience, practicioners in any area often make absolutely horrible theorists about it. And at my university there was a physics professor who actively discouraged students from taking history and philosophy of science. Not because he thought it was worthless but because he felt it would blunt their scientific focus and abilities. This is all relative to those of similar intelligence/ability who haven’t specialised: on average, those doing well at almost any intellectual/educated pursuit will correlate with doing well at others to a degree.
There are honourable exceptions, of course.
In any case, even if there is a close association, there’s still a difference between someone’s work as a practitioner and their work as a commentator.
I sense this veering onto a whole other topic, but it may still be worth pointing out that the Elements of Style is not, and is not intended as, a work of theory. It is intended as a manual of instruction. And as far as I know, by far the majority of instructors in one craft or another are themselves practitioners rather than philosophers or sociologists who study the field from an outside vantage point. You want to learn physics from a physicist, not from a philosopher of physics. You want to learn writing from a writer. You want to learn architecture from an architect. And so forth. And before we had schools of art, we had the system of apprenticeship, in which people who are learning a trade study under those who are already making a living in the trade.
This is a good point; however, it rests on the assumption that Strunk and White managed to accurately describe what they are doing. But actually they failed at this.
Examples (because these are what actually determines it but have been lacking from the discussion so far—yes, these are drawn from Language Log, it’s an easy source):
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001905.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001906.html
The note about “which” here
The note about “needless words” here
Point 10 here
You are stating this as a binary fact (either they did, or they did not, accurately describe what they are doing). But surely what is more relevant is not a binary fact, but rather a matter of degree. Two questions are important:
1) What portion of their own advice did they not follow?
Suppose you find ten things that Strunk and White didn’t do that they said you should do. That amounts to a page of errata, which many books have (and which maybe all books should have). If we threw out every book that had (or deserved) a page of errata, then we would probably empty the libraries.
2) To what extent did they not follow it?
Question number (2) is interesting because it’s not always a question that can easily be answered by looking at their writing. Here’s what I mean. Suppose that I write an essay that is 100% passive constructions. Then I remember the advice to avoid passive constructions if possible. So I go through my essay, find a lot of passives that would be strengthened by making then active, and bring my essay down to 80% passive constructions.
Now, somebody looking at my essay will see that it is 80% passives and he might be tempted to conclude that I didn’t follow the advice to avoid passives. And he would be wrong.
That you do not find it very consistent is not relevant, because it happened. Even if you do not resolve it in the same direction as the people at Language Log, the contradiction between their writing and their advice on writing remains.
You seem to be failing to draw the distinction between looking at what they said and looking at what they did. And indeed, Strunk and White did not, in fact, actually follow their own advice.
I simply don’t think that this distinction is decisive. After all, on the topic of what physics is, we pay attention to Richard Feynman not only as an example of a physicist. We also pay attention to what he says about what physics is. And we take his statements about physics as having some authority on the strength of his being a physicist.
Fundamentally it seems to come down the expert-at-vs.-expert-on distinction. Being an expert at writing is some evidence for being an expert on it, but if what one says in one’s persona is an expert on writing doesn’t actually match what you do in your persona as an expert at writing, we have to ask which one is actually accurate. These are people who were initially known as experts at writing, so if there’s a contradiction it’s quite possibly because they were able to parlay their reputation as one into reputation as the other, without necessarily actually being the other. And if someone is primarily an expert at writing, then looking at what they actually wrote is more important. We do listen to what Feynman says about what physics is, but we expect philosophers of science to have a somewhat better idea.
But all this is hardly relevant. The fact remains that these days we have better experts on writing, whose expertise is actually empirically based. Should the debate become so unclear as to come down to authority rather than arguments, who has the better track record is pretty clear.
Not on principle, but because I have read Feynman, and I have read philosophy of science (plenty of it, in my view), I do not expect philosophers of science to have a better idea—but in my case it’s not expectation. It’s memory.
Of course, you don’t have to pay any attention to what I just wrote. But I think that if you read enough philosophy one thing you will find philosophers agreeing on often is that other philosophers are wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, could not be more wrong, disastrously wrong.
I don’t. I’ve read work by prominent philosophers of science and noticed parts that were not even internally coherent. As far as I can see they are off in their own little world divorced from anything useful.
OK, I guess that part was just wrong.
Singular they may be less distracting than Spivak, much as I like the latter.
I use singular “they” sometimes, although I find it makes many sentences awkward, especially if I’m also talking about some plural items or persons.
Fair enough—I only mentioned it because I happened to have a period where I avoided singular-they because I thought it was forbidden. I’ll trust your judgement on style.
It is a reasonable default assumption, not adjusted with negative effect of a mistake in mind.
But you don’t need to invoke a default assumption here—the singular “they” is a perfectly well-established alternative.
As a rule of thumb, it’s annoying to be talked about without being considered.
People at this end of the internet tend to have ‘male’ as the default gender for everyone.
Yes. It’s very annoying.
On average, less annoying than the alternatives.
There are few good reasons to object to the singular they—the usual ones make less sense than objecting to the word “giraffe”. Were I writing a style guide for LessWrong...
I find the opposition to singular they baffling—I don’t know who started it, but whoever they are, they have a funny sense of what sounds awkward.
How do you even gauge this? Do you know how annoyed I am on some absolute scale so you can make such a comparison?
Based on what I think are reasonable assumptions: that it is at least as annoying for a male to be referred to as ‘she’ as vice-versa, that there are many more males than females posting at lesswrong, that the proportion of gender-indeterminate usernames is roughly equal between men and women.
Historically, ‘he’ has been more commonly used than ‘she’ when referring to gender indeterminate individuals in English so it doesn’t even necessarily imply any gender assumption.
Perhaps interestingly, J.S. Mill tried to argue that “Man” is historically gender-neutral, and so women already have the right to vote in England, since the law refers to “man”. He did not win that battle.
My understanding is that “man” is historically gender neutral. Old English used wer (wereman) for adult males and wif (wifman) for adult females. Wif is etymologically related to wife and eventually changed into woman (from wimman). Wer got dropped and all we have left of it is “werewolf”.
The use of “man” to refer to only adult males is relatively late, like 1000 A.C.E. -ish.
So a female werewolf should actually be a wifwolf? Excellent!
Or wyfwulf… or something. There was no standardized spelling.
Also, I think woman used to mean wife, in the same way it is occasionally used in casual (grrr) American dialect English today. There might be a different word for an unmarried female (and an unmarried female wolf-person!).
Casual?
With the amount of attention causality gets around here, I have to ask.
Well a language could hardly function if it was acausal, could it?!
Fixed.
If nothing else, priming would put the lie to that.
If you are talking about a hypothetical or gender-unknown person, using “he” will make it much more likely that people will imagine this person as male. How it’s historically been used, and even how it’s conventionally used now, are irrelevant if we’re talking about its actual cognitive effects.
(For what it’s worth, I think this is the best exposition of sexist language I’ve read. It’s fascinating (yet not all that surprising) how some commonplace linguistic patterns become immediately and intuitively appalling to most people if they are simply applied to a different personal attribute.)
Probably. But it gets more annoying the more it happens. I have become more annoyed every time it’s happened to me. And it happens more to women than it does to men. So this assumption loses validity over time for any given person. And it is just not that hard to avoid guessing!
AAAAAAAAAAAUGH
Ahem. I mean:
No.
Assuming history to be unswayed by politics and the meaning of common words to be determined by their usage wouldn’t this be “Yes. But I vehemently object and anyone using pronouns in this way should be punished with unimaginable hoards of dust specks and furthermore be socially disapproved of”?
I actually think ‘AAAAAAAAAAAUGH’ fits better! :)
The probability that anyone would (non-jokingly) refer to me as “he” while knowing (or even strongly suspecting!) that I am in fact female is miniscule; the probability that I am female (even given locally appropriate priors) isn’t; and if I were male and known to be so, the probability that I’d be referred to as “he” would approach 1. Referring to someone as “he” constitutes Bayesian evidence to one’s audience that the referred-to individual is male. Be not thou casual with the Bayesian evidence.
That is evidence in favor of that usage of pronouns being undesirable for efficient communication of evidence. It doesn’t comment particularly on whether or not that particular usage has been traditionally accepted.
I’m not trying to argue with your objection to that kind of usage. I certainly don’t consider using ‘he’ by default any better than using ‘she’ by default. I think “AAAAAAAAAAUGH” is a valid response. It is just ironically more valid than ‘No’.
I am not so sure “No” is an indefensible response.
“so it doesn’t even necessarily imply any gender assumption.” may be a false claim. For example, if you were reading something about a generic, ostensibly nongendered “he”, and then a mention of “his wife”, I imagine that wouldn’t be too jarring. But if instead, say, the text went on to talk about him giving birth, I imagine most people would be a little confused.
So there are some assumptions implicit in the male pronoun.
“Doesn’t even necessarily” is different from “appropriate in every possible situation including when the gender is not indeterminate”. Matthew’s claim was:
If you think that is incorrect, you’re just wrong. If you disapprove and are distressed by that historical fact then that is a legitimate position of the kind that can be expressed by vocalized but non verbal expressions of distress.
I take the “doesn’t even necessarily apply [..]” to be equivalent to the claim that use of the male pronoun is never in itself sufficient to establish some assumption with respect to gender or sex, which claim I disagree with; if the pronoun would be surprising in some circumstances, for reasons of sex or gender, then it carries those connotations everywhere.
Eh… that’s not “necessarily” right. The historical usage of “he” to refer to gender indeterminate individuals doesn’t imply that there isn’t a necessary (to the extent that that term is meaningful in discussions of this sort) gender assumption in modern usage. In fact, that’s the problem—the “indeterminate” individual is by default male (white, middle class, straight, cisgendered, whatevs).
Yes, hence the appropriateness of “AAAAAARGH”. It is a flaw in the language in an objective effectiveness of conveying information sense. Plus it would piss of Alicorn legitimately.
If you think about it, could be offensive to males too. Why do they get special wordly attention while we get stuck with word that doesn’t allow the conveyance of distinct sexual identity while the females can be either? It’s a good thing that usage is becoming obsolete (‘she’ can be used indeterminately too and he less often), otherwise I’d have to care too.
Speaking only for myself here, but in regards to race, I’ve been moved somewhat from unmarked to marked state (while remaining white, or possibly “white”), and in my experience, being unmarked is a lot more restful.
I don’t understand:
(Probably somewhat more so given that referring to each other as ‘girls’ is a common form of insult among males given that it asserts traits that while rewarded in females are easy targets of abuse in males.)
You don’t think females are socially punished for exhibiting “male” traits, or you think it’s comparatively insignificant?
This is sort of where I’m at on the issue. I understand that you don’t like being referred to as ‘he’, and I agree that you shouldn’t be.
However, my perspective is that ‘he’ is the default, and if someone refers to me as ‘he’, that is the only reason. With the handle ‘byrnema’, I expect people to assume I’m male. Well, it’s more subtle than that. I don’t expect anyone to make a positive prediction that I’m male—they shouldn’t know—but since people assign gender in their minds when they consider a person, I expect that assignment to be male.
Does it bother you, specifically, that the default assignment is male?
Or in your case, with the handle Alicorn, that it seems unusual not to update the probability that you’re female? If the latter then you really must just ask this person to find out what they were thinking (if they were). Possibly the person is either a little linguistically/socially naive or they were thinking of the name ‘Ali’ perhaps with an Arabic origin and the ‘orn’ ending is unclear—if you don’t think of unicorns.
(Why should it be though that a unicorn-associated handle must be a female? Nevertheless, that’s the way it is.)
I’d never heard of the word ‘alicorn’ until I started reading lesswrong and I’m comfortable saying that I am not linguistically naive. It didn’t occur to me that it was an actual word until Alicorn posted in a thread that it should be obvious she is female with that user name. Consider that for the same reasons a unicorn-associated handle is associated with being female it might not be an effective handle to signal to males that one is female.
It is probably wise if one is particularly offended by incorrect gender assumptions to pick a username that clearly signals ones gender to the majority of ones audience.
I was not, when I started using this handle, aware of how non-present in popular vocabulary the word “alicorn” is. I thought it was a pretty girly username—maybe not up there with, I dunno, “PinkFlowerPrincess”, but perhaps on a par with “Cerise” (a shade of pink), or something subtler like “Purl” (a knitting stitch, also hinting at “Pearl”). It doesn’t and was never meant to declare my gender, but I always thought it suggested it. If nothing else, I think “Allison” is a more likely sound-alike than “Ali”-plus-unidentified-suffix, because that actually happened.
It bothers me that there is a default assignment. If one were going to make a brand new default in a situation where none existed, it’s my impression that there would be a better (if still very weak) case for making it female instead, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to make such assumptions.
Thanks for the not-particularly-annoyed-by-”he” datum—but I worry that you imply Alicorn should not be annoyed. Even if this is not your intent, I think it’s a good idea to support the right to have a berserk button.
I don’t, and here’s why: having a negative emotional response to something kills rationality dead. It causes people to forget their well-thought out goals and engage in compulsive, stereotyped behaviors attached to the specific emotion involved, whether it’s going off to sulk in a corner, flaming, plotting revenge, or loudly lecturing everyone on proper behavior… ALL of which are unlikely to support rational goals, outside the evolutionary environment that drove the development of those emotions.
(And let’s not even get started on motivated reasoning… which, AFAICT, is motivated almost exclusively to avoid negative emotions rather than to obtain positive ones.)
Anyway, if you allow yourself to have a “berserk button” that hijacks your rationality on a regular basis, (and aren’t doing anything about it), you’re only giving lip service to rationality. Okay, modify that slightly: maybe you don’t know HOW to get rid of or work around your button. But you sure as heck shouldn’t be arguing for a right to keep it!
(I expect that objections to this comment will largely focus on individual boo lights that people will put forth in support of the idea that some things should be allowed to set off “berserk buttons”. But I hope that those people won’t bother, unless they can explain why their particular boo light requires them to have a compulsive, fixated response that’s faster than their conscious minds can consider the situation and evaluate their options. And I also hope they’ll consider why they feel the need to use boo lights to elevate their failings as a rationalist to the status of a moral victory! Lacking a compulsive emotional response to a boo light doesn’t alter one’s considered outlook or goals, only one’s immediate or compulsive reactions.)
With all due respect, I (not at all calmly) disagree. The mistakes that you can make by being emotional are not inevitable, and they are not mistakes because of your emotion—a true emotion is true—they are mistakes because you didn’t say, “I can feel my heart racing—did this person just say what I thought they said, or am I misreading?” And so forth.
But if you’re right? And if your response is proportionate? Your anger (or ebullience, or jubilation, or bewilderment, if you really want to be rational about analyzing the effects of emotion on rationality) is your power. Do you think Eliezer Yudkowsky works as hard as he does on FAI because, oh, it’s a way to spend the time? Do you think that his elegy* for Yehuda Yudkowsky was written out of a sedate sense of familial responsibility? Do you somehow imagine that anything of consequence has ever been accomplished without the force of passion behind it?
I pity your cynicism, if you do.
Edit: I will concede instantly that “berserk button” is a deceptive term, however—what I am discussing is not an instant trigger for unstoppable rage, but merely something which infuriates.
* Edit 2: The term “cri de coeur” was suggested over the message system in place of “elegy”—I think it may well hit nearer the mark as a description.
If your heart weren’t racing, you wouldn’t have needed to ask the question.
Meanwhile, “true emotion” is rhetoric: the feeling of fear as the hot poker approaches is not rational, unless blind struggling will get it away from your face… and mostly in modern life, it will not… which means you’re simply adding unnecessary insult to your imminent injury.
Passion != anger. If it feels bad, you’re doing it wrong.
Doesn’t matter to my argument: at least a rage trigger is over relatively quickly, while being infuriated over a principle can ruin your life for days or weeks at a time. ;-)
Bad feelings feel bad for a reason: they are actually bad for you.
In regards to the right to have a berzerk button: This depends at least partly on what you mean by a right.
People do have berzerk buttons. I hear “don’t have the right to have a berzerk button” as “should make it go away right now—shouldn’t have had it in the first place”. On the other hand, “do have the right to have a berzerk button” is problematic in the sense that it can imply that berzerk buttons are a sort of personal property which should never be questioned.
It occurs to me that this is a problem with English which is at least as serious as gendered pronouns. A sense of process isn’t built into the language in some places where it would be really useful.
The problem is there in the word “can”. Does “you can do it” mean you can do it right now, perhaps if you just tried a bit harder? If you tried a lot harder (and you really should)? After ten years of dedicated work? Something in between?
It is hard to extract that implication given:
You’re right—I tried to reread byrnema’s comment to avoid that kind of error, but I must have missed that sentence twice. I should not have been so pointed. Thank you for catching my mistake.
Truthfully, it doesn’t matter what a person declares in the second sentence if they then negate that sentence with the body of their comment. Perhaps you read for feeling and tone, as I do—that’s why I didn’t point to a specific sentence as a defense in my reply.
However, what I was explaining was that while I don’t question that Alicorn should feel the way she does, I have a tendency to overly reduce problems (which feels like I’m trivializing them) and that’s probably what you were reading. I didn’t intend to do that, but since my friends say I always do that, that’s probably what I did. (Outside view.)
I would question whether it doesn’t count—I believe your statement was sincere, and that counts for an awful lot—but the feeling and tone was definitely what I responded to. On the gripping hand, I was being quite precise when I said “should not have been so pointed”—I think emphasizing the right to be angry is important in several contexts (example), and I would want to have still said something about the right to a berserk button … but not the slanted “even if this was not your intent”.
(Incidentally, I appreciate the degree of nuance you’ve been employing in your replies—I suspect this is one of the more valuable benefits you gain from your penchant to reduce problems!)
I hope that my comment wouldn’t be interpreted that way—I support how Alicorn feels about the issue even if I don’t feel the same way. (I might anyway if my handle name was Alicorn—or Cerise.)
However, I’ve been told by close friends that the most annoying trait about me is that I’m a “spin doctor”—that I think that problems can be ‘fixed’ just by framing them differently.
Y’know, given the quote wedrifid pulled out, I don’t think it should be except by a careless reader—mea culpa.
That “spin doctor” thing makes me wonder, though: is there some substantial variance* in the ability of people to reframe their way away from berserk buttons? It would explain some comments I have received if I personally am lacking in that attribute.
* Edited to add link.
Recognizing that a berzerk button (I had to google that by the way, not everyone is a tvtropes fanatic contrary to what seems to be a common assumption here) is a fact about you and not a flaw in the external world is probably part of it. From an instrumental rationality point of view it is often easier to control or adjust your own reaction than it is to change the world to avoid your triggers.
It’s on TvTropes? I just assumed “less stigmatised way of saying tantrum” based off context.
The thing is that these triggers exist only for the purpose of changing the world. The most significant emotions are a way to have a credible precomittment to do a mutually destructive thing if the other(s) do(es) not comply. For example, by damaging one’s own body with excess adrenalin and cortisol while causing similar distress to those who defected in your constructed game.
Quite often the triggers are actually well calibrated to serve our interests and it isn’t always wise to mess with them.
Fixed that for you. ;-)
Good, but let me fix it further to what I really mean, ancestral environment included. ;)
In the specific case of our socially-driven negative emotions—those associated with status and status threats, especially—they rarely overlap with our considered interests, unless we either
already have high status, or
are literally dependent upon our social circle for physical survival
In most other situations, actually having a negative emotional reaction will not serve our goals.
Interestingly enough, even in the event that a display of anger is tactically useful, a fake display of anger is actually even more effective and can even be status-enhancing. (I’ve heard it said that this is true of horses as well: that a trainer acting angry gets respect from the horse, but a trainer who’s actually angry loses their place in the pecking order.)
This is probably why sociopaths are especially effective in the corporate tribal jungle, but I’ve also known a few very nice, non-sociopathic company presidents who had no problem yelling when something needed yelling about… without actually being angry about it.
are literally dependent upon our social circle for physical survival
That one is complex. A small status threat does not, in itself, threaten survival, but a large number of status threats may well affect one’s chances of making money, getting medical care (or getting decent medical care), or being attacked by police and/or imprisoned—these are a matter of physical survival.
In most situations I encounter people’s emotional reactions tend to be rather useful. It takes a lot of experience in machiavelian thinking before you can replace instincts with raw strategic manipulation.
This I have to concur with:
I find that a lot of people (over the age of three) who use the ‘berzerk button’, particularly those who do it effectively, are using it strategically rather than merely being at the mercy of their emotions.
I also agree that negative emotional reactions are more useful for those who already have high status than those who do not.
I would agree, if we define “useful” as “fulfills their own short-term emotional needs.” If those happen to correspond with their considered preferences, great. But that’s often a matter more of coincidence than anything else.
Actually, I was more talking about using positive instinctual responses, like compassion, encouragement, and enthusiasm, as well as simply behaving rationally. These are far less problematic than our instinctual negative responses.
I was using ‘useful’ to mean ‘fulfills their predominately status oriented agenda’. How to relate people’s ‘considered preferences’ with well, the unconscious preferences that they actually act on is a somewhat different question. We probably do agree once we have people take a step back and realise status isn’t necessarily what will maximise their eudomonia in this day and age and for them rather than their genes. But that’s a rather huge step of personal development to overcome and I’m not quite willing to assume it into my usage of ‘useful’.
Those do seem to be useful for most part. Although even then it can be useful to accept the compassion, suppress the instinctive reaction and, as they say, shut up and multiply. Even compassion is misguided at times.
I guessed at the meaning but it sounded like a specific reference to me, TVTropes is the first hit on Google.
True, the tactic can also backfire however. I respond badly to such tactics, presumably partially an evolved defense to their widespread use.
Absolutely, and so do I. In fact I am myself emotionally precommitted to not be swayed by the implied threat of ‘berzerk buttons’ even though the immediate payoff structure may make submission have a lesser penalty to me than the mutually destructive punishment. This seems to work for me on net.
I apologize for not defining the term—links to TV Tropes spell trouble for a lot of people.
True—but I prefer to advocate for adaptive behavior, rather than altered emotional response, in many cases. Pronouns is one such.
The problem with that is that the behaviour that needs adapting is that of other people (in this case, to a first approximation, all English speakers). The emotional response is ones own and therefore easier to change.
You might continue to lobby for others to change their behaviour once the emotional response has been brought under control but unless you think the emotional response is actually the optimal way to change the behaviour of others it is not desirable.
Not what I meant, surprisingly! The example I had in mind was someone changing their macroscopic reaction from “VERBAL HULK SMASH” to “icy courtesy” in order to leave a better impression without compromising the fervor of their principle. If you want to change the behavior of those around you—and you’re right, sometimes you don’t—then the emotional response is a good source of motivation.
That depends on what you define as “good” and “motivation”. Most kinds of negative emotional responses don’t promote taking positive actions, and they’re strressful and harmful to the body as well.
Note that this ignores the ongoing personally detrimental effect on the person having the reaction, which is unchanged by the change in external behavior. Even if nobody knows you’re angry, you still get to keep the health detriments (and reasoning deficits) of being angry.
Most people who are using the fervor of principle to motivate themselves would be better off having goals, instead. The distinction is that a principle’s Platonic purity can never truly be satisfied in an imperfect world, but goals actually have a chance.
Fervently-held principles are also often a convenient excuse to avoid doing the sometimes-difficult job of thinking about what results one would like to have existing in the real world, and what tradeoffs or compromises might have to be made in order to create those results.
In effect, I see “fervent” principles as a form of wireheading… one that, not incidentally, wasted many more years of my life than I care to think about.
(This should not be construed to be against acting on reasoned principles, just to choosing one’s principles based on fervor.)
Reading this comment this instant, I think we are talking past each other to some degree. I argue for two related propositions:
On occasion, anger is an appropriate response to a stimulus.
It is the right and responsibility of each person to determine what stimuli deserve to be responded to with anger.
I will grant that anger has negative effect on quality of life, but I maintain that anger is effective on many occasions, and can be wielded without compromising the powers of rational reason. And I argue that it is the right of the individual to decide when to do so.
Edit: If we agree on these propositions, whatever remains is minor.
This is a true statement for some definitions of its terms, and false for others. I maintain that actual anger is both less-than-effective for one’s considered goals and cannot be “wielded” because actual anger is something that wields you… and this applies as much to ongoing low-level infuriation as to a moment of rage.
(Strategic anger is only a simulation of anger: physiologically, it is not the same thing.)
Sure it’s their right… as an individual. My argument is that they’ve got no business trying to claim that as a social right in a community of rationalists, without displaying major fail by doing so.
Otherwise, for example, I could demand the right to go berserk any time anybody spoke in favor of negative emotions. ;-)
This isn’t a hypothetical example, actually; I used to actually do that here. (Go berserk, I mean, not demanding the right to do so.)
But instead of demanding the right to my berserk button(s) I did the rational thing and got rid of them… which now allows me to be merely passionate in my response to you, rather than actually upset or frustrated or infuriated or any of the other buttons that I used to get pushed in circumstances like these.
And as you can see from my comment volume in the last hour or two, abandoning those feelings hasn’t hurt my motivation in the slightest. ;-)
(It also seems to have somewhat improved the humility and courtesy of my writing in this context, with a corresponding improvement in karma… though of course the latter can still change at any moment.)
If the state of our conversation after this reply is not sufficient to justify dropping this thread, please let me know.
It can also cloud judgement and lead to responding in a way likely to alienate your audience. I’m not convinced it is a net win in general, though it might be in the right circumstances / given the right audience.
And I am in complete agreement. My only caveat is that I grant each person the right to make that judgement call. ;)
I agree that everyone has the right to get angry if they wish. What I really don’t like is the extra step that is often taken to claim that because someone else’s behaviour angers or offends you, it is therefore your right to enforce different behaviour on them. The example that perhaps most annoys me is when some religious group claims that because they are so deeply angered / offended by the behaviour of some other group (homosexuals, atheists, Belgian cartoonists, etc.) that it is their right to demand that the other group refrain from the offensive behaviour. I think the right to offend is just as (if not more) important as the right to take offense.
Let is return to the specific, then: I would suggest using the gender-neutral singular they not because I or Alicorn or anyone else is offended, but because it reinforces the idea that everyone, not just men, can contribute to the conversation. Saying “he” by default reinforces the idea that everyone is men here, a condition which is usually associated with an uncomfortable environment for women.
It is the latter that leads to the former and the latter that should be discussed.
I don’t object to gender neutral pronouns when they don’t seem forced. That’s obviously a bit of a subjective call but I’m happy to use ‘they’, ‘one’ or ‘you’ when they fit the context. I actively try to use ‘one’ rather than ‘you’ when I’m saying something that could be seen as attacking a particular person rather than being a general comment after being made aware of the distinction in previous discussion.
I believe it is a fact about the English language that ‘he’/‘his’/‘him’ are the most natural pronouns to use in many contexts when gender is indeterminate however and I’m not willing to twist the language to use gender-neutral alternatives or subvert my meaning by using ‘she’/‘hers’/‘her’ when it doesn’t fit the context.
I also think that it is not an accident that certain gender assumptions are made in life. I don’t subscribe to the view that gender is a cultural concept. I believe that the gender discrepancy observed on lesswrong is more due to biology than culture and do not believe that if we all observed politically correct pronoun usage that the discrepancy would evaporate. I think our language reflects our biology. That is inconvenient for individuals who fall outside the norm but life is inconvenient for such individuals and I’m sure everyone who finds their way here has suffered in some way from lying in the tail of a distribution.
I don’t come here to bond over how unfair the world is however and I don’t think that is a productive avenue for discussion. The Internet abounds in venues to bitch about how stupid the rest of the world is. I come here in the hope of being less wrong, not to list the many and various ways in which the rest of the world is more wrong.
The singular they doesn’t actually constitute “twist[ing] the language”—it is as valid as “everyone knows each other”.
As for the rest: I don’t know if you were around during the PUA mess, but there were not a few comments suggesting that this community was obviously offputting to women. I can’t tell you what factors contributed to that with complete confidence, but given how many people have told me that they find improper pronouns irritating, that’s a place I would start.
The singular they may be a bit more subtle than you realize. I agree with linguist Geoff Pullum: it’s ok to use ‘they’ as a singular bound pronoun (someone lost their wallet) but not as a singular referring pronoun (Chris lost their wallet).
In this case, the blogger that Alicorn complained about needed a singular referring pronoun, since a specific person, namely Alicorn, was being referred to. I think all things considered, ‘he or she’ would have been most appropriate.
I’ll grant that “Chris lost their wallet” is a distinctly modern usage—if you prefer “Chris lost his or her wallet”, please use the latter. I think the extension of singular they is the more elegant solution to the problem of unknown genders (particularly in communities where the answer to “he or she?” is sometimes “no”—I have visited such online), but I’ll grant that it is a judgment call.
Indeed—I dislike “he or she” because it makes assumptions about gender and just puts off the “gendered language” problem.
I think there can be no complete solution to the gendered language problem, since it comes down to respect and status, which is something people will always fight over. For example, if I start using an ungendered pronoun to refer to everyone I know, then some people might be offended because they think I don’t care enough about them to refer to them using the correct gendered pronouns (which takes more effort and therefore signals caring).
I disagree that it’s a more elegant solution. Suppose I say “While on vacation with a bunch of friends, Chris lost their money.” I bet almost everyone would interpret “their” to mean “Chris and friends’” instead of “Chris’s”. Even when the meaning can be correctly deduced from context, using “they” in place of “he or she” as a singular referring pronoun would probably cause a significant delay in reading as the reader tries to figure out what “they” might be referring to, and whether it’s an unintentional error.
In communities of people who prefer not to use either “he” or “she” to refer to themselves, they can set whatever community-specific rules they want. I have no objection to using “they” in that context, but it doesn’t seem like a good general solution for the problem of unknown genders.
Natural languages are full of ambiguity, and yes that use sounds wrong cause your talking about a particular person.
And if you really wanted to say that it was Chris’s money, how about “Chris lost Chris’s money.” It sounds awkward to me cause my English only allows use of they in the singular if it is an abstract person, not a particular real person.
I mean its not like “Chris lost his money” is unambiguous, it is not at all clear to me weather the he refers to Chris, or someone else. That would probably be clear in discourse because of context.
Do you agree that using ‘they’ as a singular referring pronoun is not yet a part of natural English (i.e., a majority of English speakers do not naturally use it that way, nor expect it to be used that way), but that usage is being proposed by some as a useful reform, while others oppose it?
My point is that making this change involves a large cost, including a period of confusion as some people start using ‘they’ as a singular referring pronoun while others are not expecting it to be used that way. And we can foresee that it will increase the amount of ambiguity in English even after this period of confusion is over. Is ‘he or she’ really so bad that this costly reform is worthwhile?
Most of the people I talk to accept ‘they’ as natural English. My highschool English teachers would probably be an exception, as was I until I decided to let it go. Wnoise probably has a point that ‘singular they’ is a matter of dialect, with most, perhaps unfortunately, having lost some of the more elegant subtleties.
A good question. I’m happy to leave it with ‘singular they’ for most people but ‘he or she’ for people who want to signal sophistication (by speaking correctly). It is probably too late to hope to gain much relief from ambiguity except when you are familiar with your audience’s manner of speech.
EDIT: I missed the great, great grandparent about singular bound vs singular referring. Thanks Wei.
As wedrifid suggests, I think you overestimate the cost. Heck, English allows the verbing of nouns—screwing around with grammatical number is chump change.
I do not agree that there is a singular “natural English”, but rather many overlapping dialects and gradients. In many of them, some usages of “singular they” are completely accepted, in others, next to no usage is.
In proper English, that would not be ambiguous; pronouns always refer to their antecedents, and no other applicable noun can come between the pronoun and the antecedent.
This causes a problem with “they” in this case; “Chris and Pat went to their car” becomes unambiguously “Chris and Pat went to Pat’s car” if “they” can refer to “Pat”, leaving us with no pronoun for “Chris and Pat”.
nolrai explicitly specified “natural language,” not your “proper English.”
It sounds like all these (counterfactual?) people who speak “proper English” need to adapt their language.
That particular case could be reworded with “Chris lost some money”. On the other hand, that doesn’t convey that Chris had no money left, so I don’t know.
It is always possible to create ambiguity if ambiguity is what you seek—“they” is no richer a source of such than any other. I don’t think either of us is going to convince the other to change their mode of speech (no flaunting of my particular preference intended).
Edit: How did you find out that Chris lost their money without finding out Chris’s gender, anyway? I don’t advocate singular-they in cases where you know the gender.
You’re not flaunting your preference (at least not to me), since the “their” in that sentence is a singular bound pronoun, not a singular referring pronoun.
Perhaps Chris wrote a blog post about it?
Ok, I didn’t think that you did.
“Chris said on their blog that they lost their money while vacationing with friends.”
And instrumental rationality suggests that a non-berserk advocate is a more convincing advocate… so often the best way to successfully get people to change their behavior is to first get rid of your button(s).
(Being happily married to a fellow mindhacker, I have much experience with this phenomenon, as both the advocate and advocatee. ;-) )
Not always. I posted a link to Greta Christina’s “Atheists and Anger” elsewhere in this thread:
It is a fact of the matter—and this is me, RobinZ, speaking now—that “anger is false power” is a popular cached thought. (Those exact words are used in a bus advertisement in my area.) What I am telling you is that you should question that one—it is less general than is commonly supposed.
What you quoted isn’t really relevant to my point, which is that anger over a principle is not very beneficial to you as an individual, vs. passion or even faked anger in the pursuit of your concrete goals.
(I’d also strongly question whether e.g. Gandhi and MLK were motivated by anger over a principle, or the passionate pursuit of concrete goals.)
In general, fervor over principles is perhaps the most anti-rational emotional response that human beings have… and there’s an evolutionary reason for that. Our genes need a way to get us to do things that are stupid for us as individuals, but good for our relatives and descendants or as moves in iterated PD.
I can’t speak about Gandhi, but a case could be made for MLK. More to the point, these social movements have included more than two people—and some were quite explicitly angry.
I don’t care about evolutionary reasons. If I want to wreck my health for a cause, you can advise me on how to be more effective in my tactics or you can advise me on how much of an effect is possible, and either of these things may mean choosing equilibrium over anger … but I have the right to calculate the cost-benefit ratio myself, and if you disagree about the terms in my equation, I have the right to tell you to shove it.
And you have the right to shake your head and say I’m a fool. All I claim is that we have the right to draw our own conclusions, and that sometimes the correct conclusion is be angry.
And all I claim is that if you’re actually concluding things, you’re not angry, and if you’re angry, you’re not currently drawing rational conclusions.
If your anger actually serves a useful purpose, you probably got lucky.
Why? Because people rarely self-modify in the direction of anger by actually weighing the costs and benefits.
As far as I can tell, your link supports passion, not anger, as I would define the words. The letter speaks of “passionate yearning for freedom”, “tears of love”, “courage”, “discipline” and many other things which don’t sound like anger to me at all.
So, perhaps you are using “anger” to refer to a broader range of emotions than I am?
I don’t think there is quite a ‘True Scottsman’ in here, but I sure feel his shadow looming over me as I read it.
That’s just an artifact of the lack of precise terminology for emotions, outside of say, Ekman’s facial coding system. In any case, as you’ve by now seen in the rest of the thread, we got this down to specific predictions about observable behavior, and successfully dissolved the illusion of disagreement.
Although, strictly speaking, my “fritzelnits” comment was a glance in the direction of this question—I’m not convinced that the Ekman’s-facial-coding division coincides with this particular discussion’s alberzle-bargulum split. I suspect that was the idea wedrifid was looking at.
Me either, but it’s a great example of the sort of thing I’m talking about: hardwired physiological reactions leading to biased mental processing. (IIRC, one of Ekman’s studies, btw, actually involved connections between the “anger” facial expression and immediate damaging effects on the heart.)
Anyway, Ekman coding is one of the very few tools we have for being precise about emotions. The original developers of NLP trained people to observe the external physiology of emotional responses, and noted the consistency of physical response to the same thought or stimulus over time within a single individual. But they mostly avoided codifying or labeling these responses across persons, in order to prevent observer projection and definitional arguments like the one we’re having. (And of course, the one thing they did code turned out to be a lot less rigorously specified than they thought it was.)
This is consistent with my observations of your remarks in this thread modulo the imprecision of the English language. There probably is a fact of the matter when it comes to which usage is more accurate, but I doubt we’ll settle it by posting comments on LessWrong. (;
I expect, however, that Ekman facial coding would show visible, measurable distinctions between the set of emotions I’m grouping under “anger” and “zeal”, and the emotion(s) being used by the writers of the letters you linked to. (Which might be more aptly described as “determination”, “resolve”, “passion”, etc.)
At that point, it’s less a question of what terms are “correct” than simply what predictions we are making about thought processes, facial expressions, and behaviors.
Btw, if I had to hazard a guess, I would guess I would not label your current emotion as anger, because you’ve been far too reasonable and accommodating. That is, I would predict your facial expression markers to not inlcude those associated with irritation, zeal, rage, or contempt. (All of which I would expect to be associated with cognitive changes in reasoning capacity and active perceptual biases.)
Anyway—one of my few remaining “pet peeves” is the tendency many people have to treat emotions as something unequivocally good, while ignoring the fact that we already have science to show the physical and mental effects of emotion. You don’t really get to decide how or whether your emotions affect you—only limited options for preventing them in the first place, and for mitigating them after the fact.
But I think I’ve gotten my reaction to that down to just a “peeve”, rather than something that provokes actual irritation. ;-)
Just so long as we don’t end up with a bias towards dividing emotions down the ‘negative/positive’ line and classify all the ‘negative’ ones as ‘just leftovers from the EEA’ and all the positive ones ‘happy good joy right’. There is a certain correlation to be sure, but the dark side turns out to be useful more I would prefer to admit.
As I mentioned before, I’d want to see a specific reason why the pre-conscious reaction(s) brought about by a particular, genuine negative emotion would be more useful than the same behavior executed by conscious choice or strategically trained reaction.
(After all, if we’re really talking “dark side” here, then I would expect a sociopath—i.e., someone who’s lacking most negative emotions—to perform even better than someone who’s under the influence of a negative emotion.)
The same behavior is the key. Working out the right emotional displays and social strategies applicable to various situations is an extremely difficult task, as many with an Asperger’s diagnosis can attest to. Anger (and related emotions) allow people to take actions that are appropriate to certain situations where analytic, conscious thought would be complex and require strong theoretical understanding of the dynamics in question. More importantly, it means that you actually have to admit to yourself what you really want. This isn’t something most people are willing to do.
The interesting part of you comment to me ‘strategically trained reactions’. Emotional, instinctive reactions are often useful but I would expect them to be seldom optimal. There is huge scope for improvement and fine tuning of both the emotional experience and the external behaviors.
If everyone had the time and inclination and motivation to become perfectly controlled, calm yet fast acting under pressure jedi types then could well come a time where emotional reactions are not useful. But until that time emotional reactions tend to be a good baseline to start from. Then, in those instances in which they don’t work satisfactorily, debug them with conscious intervention.
We may have a different idea of which emotions sociopaths experience. My understanding (and observation) of sociopaths suggests that they don’t feel shame, guilt or remorse are are terrible at picking up fear, sadness and contempt in others. But they do seem to feel anger or something like it whenever their grandiose ego is threatened.
There seems to be an implicit assumption here that you would have to be “controlled”, but what I’ve been talking about is eliminating the need for control, by simply altering whatever mental association is making you have something to control. Emotions aren’t something that just happen due to environmental conditions; mostly, they require a learned pairing to be triggered, and those pairings can be altered.
For example, if you thought that Santa Claus existed, and then later realized he didn’t, a whole bunch of emotional triggers got switched off automatically as soon as you realized this. You did not need to become a “trained jedi” to stop the emotion of wanting to wait up and see Santa—you simply didn’t have the reaction any more.
I’m going to stop the discussion here, though, because you still haven’t identified with any specificity whatsoever what sort of situations you’re talking about. I have only the vaguest idea, and assume you are talking about some sort of corporate-politic machinations, so I’m using my own experiences as a guide.
In my own experiences, however, I cannot recall any situation where someone was positively served by an immediate negative emotional reaction to anything—the game always went to people who could calmly spin any situation to their strategic advantage.
However, I’m also thinking of situations primarily where objective standards of performance were also involved, and were ultimately the most important thing. I could imagine that in situations of total politics and no objective standards, perhaps some other case could exist. I just cannot (yet) imagine what that would look like.
So, that means we’re going to keep talking past one another in this area unless you give me a specific example of a situation where you think an instinctual negative reaction would help a person’s real goals. Otherwise, we’re just handwaving different priors.
Perhaps this is the point of confusion: I’m not talking about most people. I’m talking about people who claim to be rationalists. If you’re a rationalist, admitting to yourself what you really want should be at the top of your frickin’ to-do list. ;-)
And really, that’s been my point in this thread from the get-go. Know what you want, then self-modify according to what will get you what you want.
On this we are in total agreement!
On the other parts we would be rehashing the same old ‘built in instincts’ vs ‘learned emotional associations’ debate. We tend to agree that regardless of how they got there, the emotional triggers can certainly be modified by training (hacking).
We may have some difference in our predictions on how useful instinctive negative emotional responses to complex status risks can be for naive subjects. We seem to agree that there is always benefit to be had (neglecting opportunity cost) in replacing those emotional reactions with more finely tuned proactive habits. I’m not sure how we calibrate our respective ‘opportunity cost’ vs benefit functions over various cases of potential hacking. One would expect from our respective roles that you would on average predict a higher benefit/‘opportunity cost’ value than I!
(Naturally, this is my reading of our respective positions and subject to correction if I read you wrong.)
And that’s mainly because I predict a much lower cost to changing than you do, as you seem to replace any mention of self-modification with references to “training”. Training, however, is an exceptionally costly form of self-modification by comparison.
Getting rid of a hot button does not require training; it simply requires awareness and reinterpretation of a situation, akin to my earlier example of realizing there’s no Santa Claus. When the right part of your brain “gets” that there’s no Santa Claus, the emotion simply stops. Training is not required, except for the one-time investment to develop the skill to intentionally perform such modifications.
Thus, I anticipate a much lower cost to changing responses than you. In fact, I consider it so much cheaper, that my routine attitude towards anything I feel bad about is to first remove that reaction.
And usually, the immediate result of removing the reaction is that I spontaneously think of a much better solution to whatever outside-world problem I’m encountering, than anything I could think of while still “under the influence” of the negative emotion.
And, this extends to people-problems as well as logistical problems: I find my brain models other people better when it’s not busy being obsessed with a perceived threat to me!
Anyway, given my extremely low cost to self-modifying, you can see why I’d view it as borderline insane not to do it at the drop of a hat (or the push of a berserk button).
(Of course, you could argue that I’ve already invested so much into becoming a person who can self-modify so easily, but then, it’s not as if there isn’t plenty of other payoff to even up that score.)
If only I had known! I could have videorecorded myself to post to Youtube, and we would have a testable hypothesis! :P
That said: this remark constitutes definite proof of “different definitions” theory, because I would have said I was angry. And I am sure I would have had a difficult time being as carefully phrased were I responding in realtime—introspecting on my feelings, I think I can detect places where I steered away from the transition into what you have called anger in order to maintain the tone of the conversation.
This is true—and a lesson I need to put into practice, to be honest.
I wonder if I would have provoked less of a reaction with “pet peeve” than “berserk button”? (:
(I think I would still use the latter were I writing it now—an intermediate term would be better, though.)
Is this a case of anger-on-the-Internet vs. anger in real life? There is an emotion on the Internet which I am sometimes inclined to identify as anger which is not at all the same as the real life emotion of anger which I have experienced in myself and others.
Real life anger is scary stuff, something that can result in you or others actually getting physically hurt. It is inseparable from a fear of physical harm. I don’t know where you draw the line between anger and rage but my physical-world experiences with either have been disturbing.
I sometimes read posts on the Internet which ‘make my blood boil’ but I don’t label it ‘anger’ because real-world anger is something far more frightening. A discussion mediated by the Internet can’t really invoke the implications of real-world anger.
I must admit to some bewilderment, because the way you and pjeby are talking, there seems to be some superpowered incensed fury that you reserve the term “anger” for that I am personally unfamiliar with. I can’t say my anger during this discussion was qualitatively different from my anger on other occasions, on and offline.
Edit: That is to say, I am quite familiar with alberzles, but not with bargulums, to extend that conceit.
If it helps clarify, I see anger as ‘the emotion that makes you want to hurt people’, either through physical or emotional violence. While I can appreciate the strategic value of such an emotion from an evolutionary point of view I find it hard to approve of it. Grudging respect is about the closest to a positive view of anger I can muster.
And this also supports what I’ve been saying, on two additional points:
FIrst, you appear to agree that actually entering into that emotional state is a mind-killer. And second, having buttons that pushed you in the direction of that state was not actually helpful to your considered goals.
I think this is sufficient to conclude the discussion; I feel like Albert and Barry, just having agreed on “alberzles” and “bargulums”. Yay, rationality! ;-)
[Edit: misspelled “bargulums”, not that anyone could tell.]
With the caveat that we haven’t decided which ones are fritzelnits yet. :P
Wait, if no-one could tell, how did you? Paradox!
Okay, I need to go to bed. Catch you on the flipside!
Berserk button was the right phrase in the context.
Yes, reframing is a learnable skill. Family therapist Virginia Satir had a reputation as an exemplar of that skill. One book I’ve read, “The patterns of her magic”, goes a little into the details of how it’s done.
I think so. It seems to depend on personality (innate emphasis on practical vs political thinking for example), education (cognitive behavioral therapy emphazises reframing things away from awfulising and suchlike) and status (‘berzerk button’ is a high status only option).
(I should note that I am not trying to label the berzerk button as defective by observing that it is trained away from in CBT. CBT is intended for people who’s existing thought process is not working for them. If going berzerk or otherwise allowing things to make you angry gets you what you want then CBTing it away is not advocated.)
It would surprise me if there were some psychological trait which didn’t show a lot of variance.
We probably wouldn’t even call it a trait.
Really, that’s the best way to fix problems. Funny enough, when our brains aren’t reacting to something as though it’s some kind of threat to our life or status, our higher reasoning actually functions and lets us change the outside world in a more sensible way.
I don’t think this makes you a “spin doctor”, unless you’re attempting to reframe others’ problems for your benefit at their expense.
No, I would estimate that to be roughly equal. I don’t think females use ‘man’ or ‘boy’ to insult other females in the same way as males use ‘woman’ or ‘girl’ to insult each other.
The explanation I give suggests only that the use of ‘girl’ as an insult is not intended to be of the form “You are a girl. Girls are bad, therefore you are bad.” It is inteded to be of the form “You have female traits. Female traits on a male are extremely low status. You have status below both other males and females”.
It looked like you were using the fact that males insult each other by insinuating that they have female traits to back up the hypothesis that it is more insulting for a male to be referred to with the wrong pronoun. If you think that the reverse scenario is about equal, why would this make it more insulting, rather than just as insulting?
For the same reason that I would take offence at being called a ‘bastard’ even though I actually couldn’t care less that my parents happened to be married at the time of my conception.
If something is commonly used as an insult then that can be expected to cause offence independently of any factual content. So my claim is:
It’s a typical insult. Insults bad. That’s all.
I think I might be talking past you. Let me try to re-frame my confusion:
Art calls Ben “girly” because Ben has exhibited stereotypically feminine trait F.
Meanwhile, Amy calls Bev “mannish” because Bev has exhibited stereotypically masculine trait M.
It looks like both Ben and Bev should be insulted, by about the same amount, and you seemed to assent to this, above.
Given this background, if Random Internet Person goes on to refer to Amy as “he” and Art as “she”, whence your above indication that Art should be more insulted than Amy?
Well put. I’m not myself exposed to what girls do to each other behind the scenes while I know males far better. Would you consider ‘mannish’ to be a ubiquitous insult? If so then Art should not be insulted more than Amy by ‘he’/‘she’ mistakes.
My impression is that ‘mannish’ is used less than ‘girly’ to such a degree that the implied insult (by this specific mechanism) of ‘he’ is much less ‘she’.
I can’t think of a way to non-insultingly apply “mannish” to a woman.
And I can’t think of ‘mannish’ being used ever. My impression was that female competition tended to be a little more sophisticated than banal locker room banter.
Well, I don’t think it would customarily be said to one’s face...
I’d say that “mannish” is an obsolete insult—in use in the 1940s and 1950s (I’m going by feel on this).
“Looks like a man” is current, and specifically about appearance.
I’m not sure if there are standard insults used by women to other women about other masculine traits.
Have you never seen Austin Powers?
Good point. Now I can think of one.
And that is just damn funny.
Speaking as an actual bastard, I’m more familiar with the term being applied at time of birth, not conception.
Good point.
(I wonder about people who divorce during the gestation period.)
I think I knew YOU were female… However, I apparently mis-remembered this article as being by Eliezer, and had that in mind when I made my earlier comment about gender links. Maybe because the perspective it takes feels more like the perspectives of my male friends than of my female friends.
According to the GenderAnalyzer, that blog post was written by a man. I tested your original post as well and it was correctly guessed as being written by a woman.
I tried it on some other pages and if anything the thing is underconfident—it’s right more often than it supposes.
[/me googles “GenderAnalyzer” and checks own blog.]
Woo-hoo! (I’m male, but it seems to me a bad thing for that to be obvious from my writing.)
It’s probably not fair to the tool to use it on a community blog, but:
The age result is interesting.
(This is a different web site that uses the same underlying service. It is based on the most recent posts, so the result will likely change over time.)
Darn—claims my blog is 63% woman. Not sure how to take that!
These percentages are supposedly Bayesian estimates, so it basically just means that it isn’t easy to tell one way or another but the thing was more inclined to take it as female. If the thing is well calibrated it would be right 63% of the time and wrong 37% of the time with this estimate. But at least for my tests it was right even more often—it seems other people had different experiences.
Just clicked through to the following screen after selecting “no—it didn’t get it right” to see the resulting poll:
Yes − 63% No − 32% Don’t know − 5%
This is based on all the estimates that people have voted on. So it’s not strange if it’s only getting 63 − 70% correct; it’s giving many estimates which are less certain than this.
What was the percentage? The tests I’ve done have range from 31% to 73% for the correct answer.
I wasn’t referring to the total percentage but to ranges: for example when it estimated from 65-75%, it seemed to be wrong 1 in 4 to 1 in 6 times instead of 1 in 3 to 1 in 4. But maybe my sample was still too small.
I’m sorry—I meant the percentage for the blog post and for Alicorn’s post.
66% for the blog post, 56% for Alicorn’s original post. For this comment : http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ss/babies_and_bunnies_a_caution_about_evopsych/1ofp , it gave 70% female, which is reasonable: it’s much more obvious than in the original post (apart from the fact that she says so explicitly which I assume the thing doesn’t know.)
My livejournal gets 58% female; my synopsis of my webcomic gets 81% female; and my serial fiction, which I coauthor with another woman, gets 75% female.