antonfire

Therapy isn't supposed to scale.

As I see it "therapy" is already a catch-all terms for many very different things. In my experience, sometimes "it's the relationship that heals", other times it's something else.

E.g. as I understand it, cognitive behavioral therapy up there in terms of evidence base. In my experience it's more of a "learn cognitive skills" modality than an "it's the relationship that heals" modality. (As compared with, say, psychodynamic therapy.)

For better or for worse, to me CBT feels like an approach that doesn't go particularly deep, but is in some cases effective anyway. And it's subject to some valid criticism for that: in some cases it just gives the patient more tools to bury issues more deeply; functionally patching symptoms rather than addressing an underlying issue. There's tension around this even within the world of "human" therapy.

One way or another, a lot of current therapeutic practice is an attempt to "get therapy to scale", with associated compromises. Human therapists are "good enough", not "perfect". We find approaches that tend to work, gather evidence that they work, create educational materials and train people up to produce more competent practitioners of those approaches, then throw them at the world. This process is subject to the same enshittification pressures and compromises that any attempts at scaling are. (The world of "influencer" and "life coach" nonsense even more so.)

I expect something akin to "ChatGPT therapy" to ultimately fit somewhere in this landscape. My hope is that it's somewhere between self-help books and human therapy. I do hope it doesn't completely steamroll the aspects of real therapy that are grounded in "it's the [human] relationship that heals". (And I do worry that it will.) I expect LLMs to remain a pretty poor replacement for this for a long time, even in a scenario where they are "better than human" at other cognitive tasks.

But I do think some therapy modalities (not just influencer and life coach nonsense) are a place where LLMs could fit in and make things better with "scale". Whatever it is, it won't be a drop-in replacement, I think if it goes this way we'll (have to) navigate new compromises and develop new therapy modalities for this niche that are relatively easy to "teach" to an LLM, while being effective and safe.

Personally, the main reason I think replacing human therapists with LLMs would be wildly irresponsible isn't "it's the relationship that heals", its an LLM's ability to remain grounded and e.g. "escalate" when appropriate. (Like recognizing signs of a suicidal client and behaving appropriately, e.g. pulling a human into the loop. I trust self-driving cars to drive more safely than humans, and pull over when they can't [after ~$1e11 of investment]. I have less trust for an LLM-driven therapist to "pull over" at the right time.)

To me that's a bigger sense in which "you shouldn't call it therapy" if you hot-swap an LLM in place of a human. In therapy, the person on the other end is a medical practitioner with an ethical code and responsibilities. If anything, I'm relying on them to wear that hat more than I'm relying on them to wear a "capable of human relationship" hat.

As a fun aside on language, I prefer "they", explicitly, e.g. I pick "they" in pronoun dropdowns, I often wear a "they" pronoun pin, and so on. But insofar as people think in terms of these different versions of "they", I prefer the "'unknown/unspecified' version" over the "'prefers they' version"! Turns out that's hard to communicate.

If being annoying by (not-)answering with "mu" to all gender/pronoun questions communicates it better, maybe it's a point in favor of being annoying!

IMO it points at some cracks in the perspective that there are different versions in the first place.

You said "this makes sense", but the rest of your comment is essentially still in disagreement.

A subtler approach that started with "why shouldn't boys wear pink?" and progressed from there would have already finished the job by now.

That's happening. There's been a lot of progress, and it hasn't finished the job. Not even as far as cis people are concerned.

(I guess it would be coherent to believe that the subtler approach hasn't worked because of less-subtle approaches like a push for transgender health care. I think that's naive.)

It's a bit cliche, and you might be tired of hearing it, but for what it's worth this conversation brings to mind the "disappointed with the white moderate" paragraph in MLK's Letter from Birmingham Jail.

But if sufficiently changing and making flexible our expectations for what it means to be male and female would have been sufficient to make most transgender people comfortable, why did we choose the much harder sell instead?

I think your sense of "sufficiently changing" isn't aligned with the sense of "sufficiently changing" I would need to tentatively grant that, if you think such a change is an easier cultural sell than "some people are born in the wrong body".

We could make a lot of progress in trans acceptance very quickly by just reframing the whole thing in these terms. [...] But arguing that males shouldn't need to live up to an artificial and incredibly outdated standard of masculinity? That would be a much, much easier sell.

It's an "easier sell" of a different thing.

I'm not seeing a "we" forming here as far as "trans acceptance" is concerned.

Judging from your comment history, your perspective on this seems to basically be grounded in an objection to (more generously: apprehension about) transgender healthcare practices. On purportedly scientific grounds, while ascribing a "politically-driven" motivation in terms of groupthink to people who support these practices. So I think your motivation to ascribe this to a "cultural thing" is grounded in a desire to decouple it from the healthcare thing, because you think it serves an overall political project better.

I'm with you on loosening gender roles. I'm not with you on reducing trans acceptance to that.

why are we doubling down on gender binaries and talking about switching genders instead of creating a campaign that would both get at the root of the issue and be easier to swallow for a larger portion of the country?

In my personal life, I am probably about as far from "doubling down on gender binaries" as anyone you are likely to encounter. In my experience, I find many more people who are genuinely working past "doubling down on gender binaries" in transgender spaces than I do outside them.

My not-doubling-down-on-gender-binaries approach to it is not an easy pill to swallow for a large portion of the country. It may not even be an easy pill to swallow for you. (E.g. "which" bathroom do you want me in? How easily do you think the rest of the country will swallow that?)

Kind of a tangent, but I think the cultural/social side is bigger and messier than your questions suggest, and I think boiling this down to "biological vs cultural" misses that.

If gender is a social construct, is identifying as transgender the result of feeling pressure to conform to a cookie-cutter definition of what someone with male/female parts is meant to be like?

I suspect "identifying as" cisgender is the outcome of this kind of cookie-cutter pressure to much the same degree, if not more. This tends to go unnoticed even in conversations where people are directly engaging with the ideas. (Even though that's part of what "gender is a social construct" is meant to suggest.)

A rhetorical question for cis people: to what degree do you feel your cisgenderness is a result of feeling pressure to conform to a cookie-cutter definition of what someone with male/female parts is meant to be like? I suspect there's more meat to genuinely unpacking this than you might think. Trans people's answers to this might not be that different from cis people's.

"It's a social construct" is an invitation to peek behind (or at least recognize) an abstraction; but it's just a peek into a quite complex story.

"Social construct" doesn't necessarily mean something to rise above, or to dismantle, or to deny. Money is a social construct. Human rights are a social construct. Friendship is a social construct. Sure, one can usefully imagine oneself "above" those things at times, but it's unclear whether aspiring to that is a good idea, and realistically most people won't attain it even if they do. Culturally we must find some relationship to those things anyway, we cannot ignore them.

As I see it, gender is an aspect of a messy evolving cultural system. Yes, the concept of "transgender" is part of that system, though it certainly doesn't fit into that system in quite the same way as "man" and "woman". Trans people tend to challenge or pressure many aspects of this system in some ways that cis people tend not to, but that's not the same thing as denying the system in whole. (Some people do see "gender abolition" as an aspirational ideal; many don't.)

Broadly, I think "is being transgender also just a social construct that can and maybe should be addressed by loosening up our tight expectations for gender roles" vastly underestimates the scope and scale of this cultural system, the degree to which it's tangled up in our lives, and the difficulty of untangling it.

Some women are tetrachromats with an extra colour sense, while men are more likely to have red/green colour blindness.

If I'm not mistaken, red/green color blindness is more common in men because it's caused my a mutation on the X chromosome (which men tend to have fewer of). I would guess a similar thing about tetrachromacy.

So those are probably unrelated to color-perception changes due to exogenous estrogen.

Perhaps this is an insensitive question/comment, but do trans women feel like they have the wrong body or the wrong wholesale gender?

It varies.

In my experience with trans women I know, they still seem to relate primarily to men (they still gravitate towards male dominated interests) whereas many gay men I know seem to relate primarily with women, and gravitate towards women interests.

For whatever it's worth, I think observations like this are as useful a cue to look inward for an explanation as they are to look outwards.

For one thing, part of the whole "gender" thing is the way people's preconceptions lead them to parse information about others (and themselves!), and your sense of trends is probably influenced by that. (E.g. when a (gay) man gravitates towards "women interests" that may just be more salient than when a woman does, so you notice it more.) For another, you might be in a lot of male-dominated spaces (e.g. this one), so the set of trans women you know is probably not that representative. These might not be the whole story, but they certainly have a role to play in whatever reconciliation you're seeking. Gender is difficult to navigate: we're all swimming in it.

For me personally: I'm "nonbinary", whatever that means. As I see it today, for me being trans feels like more of a "wrong wholesale gender" thing than a "wrong body" thing. (But I'm open to the idea that I'm just not in touch with my body.) Part of the "wholesale gender" thing is the realization at some point in my life that "gender" was playing a much bigger role in my life than I had realized, including how I relate to people, what interests I gravitate towards, and so on. Something I find deeply aversive.

But I'm also averse to, like, rearranging my whole life to retroactively "fix the gender story" around it, just to make myself more legible. You might parse me as gravitating towards interests that line up with my assigned gender at birth (AGAB), and maybe even as relating to people primarily of my AGAB, and so on. I'm sure some people go further and functionally take this as an excuse to continue to relate to me through the lens of my "birth gender" or what have have you. I'm sure it's easier. From my perspective, I suspect those people are underestimating how much of a clusterfuck the whole "gender" thing is.

But if, instead of extending it, you try to contract it, then without crossing into metaphysics, you'll stop at the brain.

Dunno about the other poster, but I can promise you I will not.

I think it's kind of a pointless exercise to try to draw a physical boundary of what's "me" and what isn't, but carrying that exercise a bit further: How much of the spinal cord can I exclude in my "sense of me" before I "cross into metaphysics"? If I drop my eyes from my sense of "me", seems like I could also drop the neurons in the brain that are responsible solely for visual processing of input from them. Or is that a step too far and "into metaphysics"?

Heck, I think the classic nerd brain-in-a-meatsuit position doesn't really stop at the brain here either. E.g. I think it places an accurate simulation of one's brain running on different hardware on about the same level as the meat brain, and "you" wouldn't know the difference. That's just not a thing we can do (yet?). Does that position cross into metaphysics?

In practice, I "contract my sense of self" when it comes to my thoughts too, which (presumably) all happen in the brain. I often find it useful to ask "where did that thought come from?" and give an external account ("ah, I picked it up from X") and let that have some bearing on the next thought. I also have "intrusive thoughts"; the act of labeling a thought an "intrusive thought" is (arguably, partially) an act of contracting one's sense of self to exclude that thought.

I'm pretty sure this conversation had "crossed into metaphysics" by the time discussion about expansion/contraction of one's "sense of you" was happening; not when the contraction reached the brain.

But the fact remains that a hand or a heart or a lung can be removed or replaced without loss of self. A brain can't.

Here's a related observation that tipped me a bit away from thinking about my body as the meatsack carrying my brain: cutting off a hand doesn't cut off the experience or sensation of having a hand. (E.g. people with missing limbs have phantom pain.)

Lots of emotions are at least partly "embodied". People feel love in the chest. Fear in the stomach.

Not sure about anybody else, but I feel frustration in my elbows. I strongly suspect that if my arms were removed, I would still feel frustration in my elbows. I don't think removing my physical arms would remove all the ways "having arms" is baked into my experience. Even if an external physicalist account accurately places those phenomena "in the brain" and not "in the arms", that's not really all that relevant to an internal account of someone actually having the experience.

As I see it, a human's brain-from-the-inside (mind? soul?) is "body-shaped" in a lot of ways. When I hear warnings against "reducing ourselves to a bunch of 'computers", I read them as prompts to recognize this. As warnings against recognizing and engaging with *only* the parts of one's experience that can fit into an "abstract reasoner" model.

Throwing blame on "the prevalence of psychotherapy" into this conversation, writing it all off to "pseudo-science" and emphasizing "lifestyle" (as in "if you exercised more you'd be better off", I guess) reads like a just-so story from a brain in a meat sack that's missing the substance of the conversation.

Just like "meditation" is many different things, and "exercise" is many different things, and "healthcare" is many things, and "thinking" is many different things, "psychotherapy" is many different things.

One of the first things by current therapist asked me was more or less how embodied I was. I suspect of all the relationships with other people in my life, the one with my psychotherapist is the one that's most likely to be help me build out a fuller relationship to my body in the way the grandparent comment is advocating.

The therapist before that focused on behavioral "lifestyle" changes when feelings came up, in a way that I guess superficially follows the "I am a body" model, but really felt like it only added distance and abstraction to my relationship to myself. I guess that approach was grounded in a scientific evidence base that those kinds of interventions are what moves metrics.

It appears this world has become manically trigger-happy to label something as -ist or -istic

Also to label something as maniacal, perhaps.

"Women divorce men more often than the other way around; this seems to bear out that men are more dissatisfied in marriage" seems like a stretch to me.

At any rate, it reminds me of the classic physics joke:

An experimental physicist comes running excitedly to a theorist's office, waving a graph taken off his latest experiment. "Hmmm", says the theorist, "that's exactly where you'd expect to see that peak. Here is the reason." A long logical explanation follows. In the middle of it, the experimentalist says "Wait a minute", studies the chart for a second and says "Oops, this is upside down." He fixes it. "Hmmm," says the theorist, "you'd expect to see a dip in exactly that position. Here is the reason..."

Leaning into society's stereotypes is one way to bend to people's implicit demands to change your writing (and quite possibly thinking).

But sure, if the metric you're optimizing is raw views and smiles and laughs, then probably the way to go is leaning into stereotypes. There's a reason those views and smiles and laughs are called "cheap".

It's a trope to say that our "best minds are working on ads".

"The last generation was better because they read _books_ and had _discipline_ and didn't waste their time on frivolous garbage" is also a trope.

This study found that the "marshmallow test"—as a single measure—is no more or less predictive than a basket of other measures of self-control the study tested, or any of those other measures of self-control taken alone.

Are we looking at the same study? I don't see where "no more or less predictive than a basket" comes from, specifically where "no less predictive" comes from.

My reading of the abstract is that, the study found that a measure based on the "marshmallow test" ("preschool delay of gratification", RND in the article body), is not predictive of the outcomes they measured (11 capital formation outcomes).

It also found that a basket of measures of self-control (collected at various ages, RNSRI/RNCCQ in the article body) is predictive of the outcomes, whether you include the preschool measurement or not.

So from skimming the study without even reading the article, it sounds to me like they found that the preschool measure doesn't predict the outcomes they're measuring by itself, and it doesn't contribute predictive power when it's used as part of an index of self-control measured at a variety of ages.

Buyers clicking on the ad, rather than just stashing the product name, and later buying it offline, or through another channel.

I'm not talking about measuring clicks on the ad. I'm talking about either surveying people or about measuring their post-ad behavior, e.g. whether they buy a product. Yes, this generally misses offline behavior, but it captures a lot more online behavior than whether or not you click the ad. People measure clicks on the ad too, but that's not what I'm describing.

What this requires is accurately tracking a user across the internet, i.e. being able to identify a user who is part of your experiment as the same user later buying a product (or visiting a website, or answering a survey). Which is an imperfect mechanism. But it works well enough to run this kind of experiment.

Ad blockers don't really mess this up. The experiment takes the existence of ad-blockers into account. E.g. if everyone used ad blockers, this kind of experiment wouldn't show positive results (except by random variation).

And you're right, you do need a lot of data to get statistically significant results when people don't buy the product that often (when "conversion rates are low", in the lingo), which is a challenge with measuring "conversions". It's a lot easier to measure those for, say, mobile games than it is for cars. If you're a car manufacturer, then measuring car buying this way isn't going to work.

When you do this in practice, it turns out sometimes the results are significant and sometimes they aren't. Probably because some ads work and some ads don't.

It tells you which style of ad works best, without telling you how much better it works than simply not bothering.

The style of experiment I described is a "holdback" experiment. It compares showing people the ad vs simply not bothering showing (some subset of) people that ad. People in control group B are treated as though the ad under the experiment never existed in the first place. (Which typically means showing them some other ad in its place, because that's what would be done to users if the ad campaign under the experiment wasn't being run.)

But what about everyone else (group B)? That's the rest of the population of the planet.

This isn't how A-B tests work. Groups A and B aren't "people who see your website with change A" and "everyone else, including people who never interact with anything you showed them at all". A good experiment design means a good control group that you can measure something about. These experiments aren't stupid. (Well, sometimes they are. You have to set it up well.)

And it doesn't tell you how many people were sufficiently annoyed by the ad to vow never to buy that brand.

Well sure, but it can tell you if your ad results in people answering survey questions about your brand more negatively, which might help you notice that your ad is annoying and counterproductive.

Anyway, long story short, internet advertising is a whole lot more measurable than you were originally suggesting with "But how could one prove such a thing? It would involve peering into people's minds."

Yes, there are limitations. Yes, a lot of statistics about marketing "working" is bullshit. But some of it isn't.

A-B testing will tell you whether internet advertising works.

Pick an ad. Assign users at random into groups A and B. Show users in group A the ad. Don't show users in group B the ad. Watch and see at what rate users in group A and in group B buy the product. (Or survey the users in the group to ask how they feel about the brand.) If there's a statistically significant difference between the behaviors of people in group A and in group B, then you have statistically significant evidence that the ad works.

Yes, this kind of thing is harder to do with billboards and with TV advertising than with internet ads. This is one of the selling points of internet ads over TV and billboards. If you buy ads from Google or Facebook or whatever, they can run this kind of experiment to measure how effective your advertising actually is. It doesn't involve peering into people's minds, just watching their internet behavior and/or surveying them.

Relevant links:

Google help page: https://support.google.com/displayvideo/answer/9570506

Facebook help page: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1693381447650068

Naturally, they don't explain all the ways they didn't solve the problem when they finally do solve a problem.

I do think something related to this is less obvious than you're suggesting. A proof generally presents a train of thought gets you from point A to point B. It's almost never a representation of the train of thought that the author actually followed to get from point A to point B. This is obvious to people with experience in mathematics, but it's much less obvious before you have that experience. Even if you know it's true in principle, appreciating it viscerally and adapting the way you interact with mathematics to account for it is basically a lifelong task.

A big component of good mathematical communication is explaining what motivates a solution to a problem (or even what motivates the problems in the first place). Sure, you don't have to do that every time, but it's fair criticize a broad lack of this. A lot of mathematical communication is... not good in this sense. Notably, the problem/solution in the OP isn't really motivated by the author. A skilled reader will think about it themselves, but they need to learn that skill somewhere.

More or less on topic, here's an example where an experienced mathematician tries to reproduce one of Sylow's theorems without looking it up, and writes down a more-honest account of the thought process involved: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/group-actions-iv-int...

Advertisers will produce statistics to prove that their kind of marketing "works". But how could one prove such a thing? It would involve peering into people's minds.

Or, say, running an A-B test and measuring whether people in the control group buy more of the product or feel more positively about the brand than the exposed group.

I think a bit of disillusionment with mathematics is healthy, but it's misguided to call this kind of thing "a fundamental flaw in mathematics".

For one thing, in my experience, working on real life problems involves a whole lot more "memorizing problems" than working on mathematics.

And thank goodness for that! When I drive over a bridge or install an app, I really don't want to hear that whoever made it has an aversion to memorizing problems and solutions. Solving a real world problem is usually boring. Making a real life thing well is usually about correctly putting together many pieces that some other people have put together, in a way that's roughly similar to how somebody else has already put a lot of those pieces together before. Most of the work is well-trodden and uncreative.

I think part of the reason mathematics feels like it's about "memorizing problems" is that getting something deeper than that out of it is a habit/skill. A very important aspect of the vague notion of "mathematical maturity" is a habit of looking at a solution to a problem with the mindset of "how could I have come up with this?". That is, unpacking a problem and solution into some deeper understanding or way of thinking that led to it. As opposed to filing the problem and solution away "as is" into some toolbox to be referenced later. A lot of "gotcha!" solutions to mathematical problems are unsatisfying precisely for this reason.

In a lot of cases once you've read a problem and read a solution to that problem, and understood the solution, you've done about 10% of the work. The remaining 90% is this difficult work of unpacking and repacking lessons from that solution into something that actually deepens your understanding of what the problem is about. Sometimes reading the solution is actually doing negative work.

In other words, if you look at this problem and look at this solution and think "neat, but I don't get anything out of it beyond 'neat'", that's normal and fine, and probably correct. But that doesn't mean there isn't anything in it beyond 'neat', and a big part of learning mathematics well is to dig deeper than that even when the problem and solution don't force you to. Whether that digging is worth it is up to you. (It's often kind of a crapshoot in terms of payoff.)

But that's a more complicated situation than "this shows a fundamental flaw in mathematics".

Alright, I'm pretty burned out on this conversation so this is gonna be my last post. It's been distracting me and I want my real life back. I'll just try to wrap up the bits I find interesting.

But if you mean, would I spot Blair if I didn't know them?

That's more or less what I mean, but also, would you, on top of that, expect me to spot the same thing?

Do you think this means I'm reading their gender expression?

I don't think that logically follows, and I certainly don't think I'm going to convince you of that.

I think I have a chance of convincing you that the argument you gave in the paragraph starting with "What people who harp on pronouns miss is" in the comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25379317 is a bad argument for the claim that pronouns (should?) refer to biological sex rather than gender. So I'm shooting for that. (But not for convincing you that the conclusion is wrong.)

I think the Blaire White across a room scenario suggests that pronouns are more useful in a referential sense if they're used in a way that aligns with gender presentation (assuming a person's gender presentation falls neatly into male or female) than if they're used in a way that aligns with biological sex, in the case where those things differ. So if you're really just optimizing for referential usefulness when you're using "he" and "she", I don't think "biological sex" is where you're going to land. I think you're going to land closer to "gender", and even closer to "gender presentation". These things align for most people, so usually it doesn't matter, but in the cases where it matters I expect "biological sex" to be less referentially useful pretty often.

I also don't think the Blaire White scenario is unusual. I know a handful of trans people in person, and the same applies to them, i.e. if you were to point someone who looks like one of them out of a room and use a pronoun to help me know which person you're talking about, the pronoun that matches their gender identity would do a better job than the pronoun that matches their biological sex.

I also don't think it's just me, i.e. I don't think most people are much more prone to 'seeing' someone's true biological sex in this kind of scenario than I am.

Doesn't that implicitly assume that there are only two gender expressions then?

Sort of. I think "that thing that you see and also expect me to see that makes you choose which of 'he' or 'she' you would use if you want to be referentially useful when pointing out a person across the room" doesn't quite capture what "gender presentation" is either. (Hence the hedge with "if anything" in my earlier comment.) I just think that thing lines up with "gender presentation" a lot better than it lines up with "biological sex" in the cases where those differ.

It brings up the question of how one would be expected to recognize 'Moon Gender' at all.

Taking it seriously, in real life, for people with Moon Gender (or whatever outside-the-binary gender identity you want to substitute)? I don't think one is expected to just recognize it based on presentation. Hence, the practice of being explicit about preferred pronouns in circles that care about about this.

Contrapoints is a homophobic monster who supports shaming people with "genital preferences"

Jesus, what was the phrase you used? "Straight to ideological slander"?

I'm super behind being sensitive, but if you're six inches taller than the others, have a beard, or breasts, etc, those are sex linked traits.

So if you were talking to me and saw someone who looks like Blair White across the room, and wanted to single that person out, do you think you'd spot that person's biological sex and say "him over there" to me rather than "her over there"?

What set of rules are you actually picturing that you think echelon has that they're not applying to themselves?

As far as I can tell, the rules they're suggesting for singular "they" is that "they/them" can always refer to anybody in the singular, irrespective of their gender. (Maybe unless the person you're referring to indicates a preference otherwise.)

Like, maybe this is inconsistent with some set of standard SJW rules that you have in mind. But even if so, I don't see any reason in this conversation to assume that the person you're criticizing is attached to that standard set. (I also don't think there is a standard set at this point.)

FWIW, I agree with you that "it seems like you dislike trans folk" isn't a good place to go, for a number of reasons. For one, it's a tactical mistake to pull out that kind of accusation if you want someone to listen to you. For another, it's probably too reductive to be accurate. I'm not going to defend the hill of "SJWs aren't bullies" or even "the person you're calling an SJW here wasn't being a bully".

But I also think if you look past that and strip the junk away, there's a kernel of truth to it which is worth keeping.

Namely, the pushback against singular "they" here is grounded as pushback against some perceived nominally-pro-trans movement. (That's what "1% of the population" refers to, yeah?) A good chunk of the criticism presented is criticism of the kind of people who call for singular "they" and not actually criticism of singular "they". It's not just about the grammar, and probably wasn't in the first place, as evidenced by the fact that we're talking about trans people now somehow.

If you're willing to toss "SJW" and "bully" around, I think it's not out of line for me to scrunch up my nose and throw out a "reactionary" when I see that.

or a desire to dictate that others have to use certain language.

As far as I can tell, the content of your first comment in this thread was

The site is the work of a guy, "him", and "his" work. We don't have to guess and say "them" and "their" work.

This, to me, indicates that you want the previous person to say "him" and "his" where they said "them" and "their". Even in this post you're displaying a negative opinion about the use of singular "they", and expressing that you want others to stop using singular "they" this way. Am I wrong?

Like, if you referred to Dominique McLean with "he", and someone said to you "We know that person prefers they/them pronouns, we don't have to guess based on appearances and say 'he'," would you not characterize them as dictating that you have to use certain language?

I don't speak in vagaries when something is specific and known.

I hope you do. (And I'm pretty sure you do.) Omitting information that is specific, known, and irrelevant is a basic part of communicating well. Not every failure to bring up something that is specific and known constitutes "dumbing down of discourse".

Oh, also, regarding

What people who harp on pronouns miss is that pronouns are not used to refer to someone's gender but their sex. I can see your sexual characteristics from across the room, and referring to them is a good way to narrow down who I'm talking about.

The thing you see about someone when you look at them from across the room isn't their biological sex, if anything it's their gender presentation. This chunk of youtube video (https://youtu.be/9bbINLWtMKI?t=548) talks more or less about that.

What people who harp on pronouns... Mental breakdowns over pronouns... pronoun police

To my eyes, in this thread, the person who is harping on pronouns the most, seems to be closest to having a mental breakdown over them, who can most accurately be described as "pronoun police", and who shows the greatest explicit tendency to control others' use of pronouns, is also the person who in the first place corrected an in-the-wild usage of singular "them" to "him".

Like, can we step back and look at the thread and say that yeah, sometimes maybe it's the people who are pushing back against singular "they" that are blowing the thing out of proportion?

I've never seen the pronoun police display actual concern for anything other than their ability to control people.

If you're open to a real example, the "pronoun police" at my workplace suggest that when writing about hiring candidates, we use singular "they" instead of "he" or "she", in order not to call too much attention to the gender of that person when those evaluations are read by decision makers. The intent is to reduce any possible gender bias in hiring.

This to me reads like an actual concern for something other than one's ability to control people, namely a concern for being more objective and unbiased in hiring decisions. (Or at least, if you want to be cynical about it, for seeming more objective and unbiased in hiring decisions.)

The grammar of a language isn't about what "makes sense". A particular usage making sense or being reasonable isn't the same thing as that usage being part of a language.

If non-homophobic circles of Russian-speakers actually use "они" as a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun, that's news to me. I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find out that's true. If it is, I would expect that to be a recent development, as in the last decade or so.

But it sounds like you're basing what you're saying on just mapping the English usage to Russian, or basing it on ground principles about what makes sense or doesn't, which is pretty unconvincing. Are you aware of examples of "они" being used this way in the wild by native speakers?

Anyway, whether it expresses politeness is a whole other can of worms, and I would be quite surprised to find out that on top of that in these circles "они" is used to express politeness in place of "он" or "она" (or I guess "оно") the way that "вы" is used to express politeness in place of "ты".

You're literally complaining about having more dropdown menus in your life like it's a big deal. Not a good place to "you're out of touch with the needs of the world" from.

While it's true that pronoun usage in English is a relatively unimportant problem compared to lots of other existing problems in the world, it's worth noting that the person who seems to be the most emotionally invested in that problem here is you. You might accurately feel that using "they/them" this way is forced on you in other situations, but that's not what happened here. In this conversation, you observed "them" being used that way; you didn't get told that you have a moral or ethical obligation to use it that way. That a pretty important distinction.

You're the one that's being high and mighty and trying to impose a standard on somebody else's use of language here, not vice versa.

Also, until just now, the "1% of the population" that you are talking about (which I presume is trans people) wasn't even directly relevant. You're right that part of the cultural shift towards greater use of gender-neutral pronouns is socially driven by trying to make trans people's lives easier, but you could easily have the more or less the same conversation and not have trans people in mind at all. That shift is also socially driven by just trying to leave gender out of the picture when it's irrelevant. That's an aspiration that one might reasonably have even if one doesn't give a shit about trans people.

The thing you're upset about in the first place wasn't a case of someone using "them" because it was a preferred pronoun or whatever. It was case of using "them" as a gender neutral singular second-person pronoun because they didn't bother to do the legwork to work out the gender of the person they were referring to.

That's for the second person pronoun, which are all gender neutral in Russian, whether they are singular or plural. (Like English.)

We're talking here about third person pronouns, and the "the plural is the polite version and the singular is the casual version" doesn't extend to those. You wouldn't refer refer to someone in the third person as "они" rather than "он" to be polite.