Changing the world with better documentation

Posted Feb 1, 2019 4:10 UTC (Fri) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
In reply to: Changing the world with better documentation by mathstuf
Parent article: Changing the world with better documentation

Another argumentum ad absurdum: We personally identify as the reincarnation of Napoléon Bonaparte I, by god's grace, legitimate emperor of all of Europe and Tsar of all Russias. You are to refer to me as "Your Majesty", and use the pluralis maiestatis in all communication. I will take great offence if you fail to do so.

To what extent are you required to participate in my delusion?

Changing the world with better documentation

Posted Feb 1, 2019 5:28 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (11 responses)

Do you honestly and earnestly identify that way?

Changing the world with better documentation

Posted Feb 1, 2019 6:36 UTC (Fri) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link] (4 responses)

How dare you question that?

Changing the world with better documentation

Posted Feb 1, 2019 7:55 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (3 responses)

Ok cool so you're actually just joking about people who don't fall into the male/female binary spectrum and minimising the distress caused by inappropriate pronoun usage rather than trying to engage in any sort of reasonable conversation.

Changing the world with better documentation

Posted Feb 1, 2019 12:34 UTC (Fri) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link] (2 responses)

Of course its a joke but it's a setup for a larger point. I am minimizing the distress that wrong pronouns (malice aside) cause. If this is causing someone severe distress that's a sign of a deeper issue (trauma for example).

The binary spectrum is somewhat of a crutch but it works for the majority of people. Of course there are more sexes than male / female but as an approximation this can work. Just pick one, or none.

I don't have a problem when someone wants to be addressed with different male / female pronouns, and I can tolerate they / them, but don't call me an asshole when I don't get it right the first time. It's a matter of politeness I believe. I draw the line at Ze/Hir or some other recently made up pronouns. Trying to stay abreast of all the identities and pronouns that people came up with is almost a full time job, and basically it's asking me to agree fully with a political opinion or a philosophy (gender as a social construct). That's quite an imposition. There are even cases where someone tried to remove / discipline a developer on CoC grounds for voicing their opinion in other channels.

You can't be welcoming to everyone, very often to me it seems that CoC are designed to exclude the conservative and perhaps people on the autism spectrum. I think of course you are allowed to do that if you want to. If that's the goal, I would like it to be stated in the open instead of clouded in language of inclusiveness. Many times though it seems these things are backdoored into projects.

Apparently there are even people who identify as a different species, a fictional species or an object. It's impossible to tell if I'm being trolled. Very often this seems more like a lifestyle choice, to make yourself look more interesting, which I believe belittles the struggle of people with actual gender identity problems. Of course whether someone identifies as an Apache Helicopter doesn't really factor in to communication.

I had a classmate who later had gender reassignment surgery. What impressed me very much about her was the fortitude she displayed when dealing with abuse from others, which was sadly extremely frequent in that part of town (many conservative Muslims).

As a matter of practicality, does this extreme inclusiveness actually cause an influx of talent?

Changing the world with better documentation

Posted Feb 1, 2019 13:21 UTC (Fri) by james (subscriber, #1325) [Link] (1 responses)

If this is causing someone severe distress that's a sign of a deeper issue (trauma for example).

Possibly. I'd hope most people would want to respect that distress, and not expect sufferers to shun human contact until the underlying issues were addressed.

There is a certain amount of help that tooling can bring: I used to configure mutt to display emails from certain senders in a different colour, with one key to add someone to the list.

I used it to identify people who had their own viewpoints which were best respected from a distance, shall we say, but it would be easy to set up another list of people who needed extra care.

Changing the world with better documentation

Posted Feb 2, 2019 20:15 UTC (Sat) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link]

I don’t really think a free software project with communication channels open to everyone is necessary a healthy place if you suffer these kinds of issues, the larger internet certainly isn’t.

Your technological solutions is an interesting idea.

Changing the world with better documentation

Posted Feb 1, 2019 11:19 UTC (Fri) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link] (5 responses)

If they indeed do, then I suppose Their Majesty has some explaining to do in front of the international criminal court on the matters of war crimes.

More seriously though, can the question of anyone's internal honesty on these matters be reliably answered? Does it even matter at all?

I man, if there's no cost associated with following whichever rules the other party finds respectful, why not just follow them? I guess we'll all be better off that way, including people that are distressed by being addressed with a different pronoun than they prefer, those who don't care, as well as Their Majesty.

Changing the world with better documentation

Posted Feb 2, 2019 13:35 UTC (Sat) by emorrp1 (guest, #99512) [Link] (3 responses)

The problem is that there *is* a cost to this imposition of a particular communication style.

It used to be "professional" in documentation, journalism style guides etc. to refer to a person of unknown (but binary) gender as "he". I consider it right that this is hopefully now replaced with a more neutral "they", especially with an anonymous internet - but even making that habitual change is difficult for many.

So I'd say expecting others to use even more specific, unfamiliar pronouns, on a per-individual basis is going too far. Probably best experienced by interacting with kids just learning to talk "look, man with beard" is not easily replaced with "look, person with beard" - assuming the interesting thing about them from kids' point of view was an unfamiliar beard.

Changing the world with better documentation

Posted Feb 2, 2019 16:58 UTC (Sat) by jani (subscriber, #74547) [Link]

Here's another angle to this. There are gender neutral languages. My native tongue, Finnish, has only gender neutral pronouns and completely lacks grammatical gender.

Getting the gender pronouns and grammatical gender right in foreign languages can be incredibly hard. It's a fairly common mistake for Finns to get them wrong. I can relate to the difficulty of learning new pronouns. From experience, I think gender neutral pronouns are superior.

Changing the world with better documentation

Posted Feb 4, 2019 3:30 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

I agree with this. The cost is real (and there's probably something on sci-hub that quantifies exactly what it is); the average human brain has about as many free registers as an i686 and its task switches are slow and prone to data loss. In the context of trying to communicate technical ideas without being interrupted by off-topic nitpicking, I think *gradually* refactoring language toward terms like “they” is fine.

Changing the world with better documentation

Posted Feb 4, 2019 15:59 UTC (Mon) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link]

Or we could all start learning Finnish. It's probably possible in documentation to use more neutral language, or switch up gendered pronouns (or even develop a way to automatically convert it into the form preferred by the reader), this is a lot harder to do with they since they usually means a group of people, so you lose precision immediately. Does this make documentation better? I think it's harder to understand, and even harder to write that way, especially if you don't have that much experience in the English language. There is a cost to everything.

Alice and Bob (and so forth) are often used as examples in documentation.

Changing the world with better documentation

Posted Feb 2, 2019 20:10 UTC (Sat) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link]

It’s „Your imperial Majesty“. I got the styles a bit wrong ;)

There is a cost associated I believe. First of all you now have to remember how to refer to a certain person, there’s a need to educate new people so as not to upset anyone and inevitably not everyone will accept it, causing further conflict. It’s a question of whether you want to include people who make communication extremely difficult and what their potential contributions are.