Use inclusive language in §1.11 #1101
Conversation
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It doesn't sound very good now, as "their" is plural. |
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I don't see anything "noninclusive" about "his or her". It's certainly a bit awkward, but as Dan points out, so is "their". One standard solution is to make the subject plural:
But this feels a bit awkward to me too, in this case. |
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Putting aside the question of inclusiveness, I think "their" is strictly better in this case --- as this is an indefinite referent and "they" is grammatical in all dialects of english that I'm aware of for such a usage, and has been for at least several hundred years. (The case where singular "they" is ungrammatical for some speakers is only when it has a definite referent.) |
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I've always thought of "their" as plural. Probably the singular usage died out before I was born and has been revived recently. Using "his or her" seems perfectly inclusive, although it is a bit wordy. |
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I'm okay with the indefinite singular "they" in general, but I do find it awkward in this case because it's more commonly a plural form, and the pronoun is sufficiently far away from the singular referent "a mathematician" that it creates a bit of confusion in my head. Another option that some people take is to just say "her". I think readers would understand in that case that our indefinite mathematician could have either sex, but that we want to avoid both awkward phrasings and accusations of patriarchy. |
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Just saying "her" seems fine. |
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I hope I'm not the first to tell you this, but there are people who identify with pronouns that are not "he/him" or "she/her". It's kind of hard to ignore it nowadays. I can count at least 22 people (and that's not an entire summation of the list, I've likely missed some) that I know that identify with pronouns that are not "he/him" or "she/her", that are also interested in the field of homotopy type theory and cartesian cubical type theory. This isn't just about "him or her" being clunky. It is true, but that's not the point of this. The point is, that I don't identify as cisgender personally, and while I don't actively go by "they/them" pronouns, I know people that do. And I use them, when people ask me to or when I don't know someone's pronouns, because that's the respectful thing to do (at least in my opinion, and I'd hope you find that opinion to be agreeable). But that's somewhat beside the point. My point is, gender is not equal to sex, and both are not binary. This is something that I'm really hoping you have heard before, if not I'd be somewhat surprised. Saying "him or her", while not actively exclusive, sets a standard for a sort of "passive exclusivity" that I find in a lot of places. And this quite bothers me! When you set this standard, it implicitly passes on the idea that "oh yeah, if you're non-binary or otherwise gender non-conforming, we don't include you here". And I'd at least hope that this sentiment is not true. But when you set a standard as such, and refuse to change it, it shows me that perhaps that is what you think. As for the question of grammar, consider this fact: the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, and many other organizations (like, I don't know, maybe the sponsor for this work, the Institute for Advanced Study, who state that they are "resolutely committed to the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Diversity refers to the variety of personal experiences, values, and worldviews that arise from differences of culture and circumstance. Such differences include ... gender identity") and individuals all accept and recommend using "they" and "them" as pronouns when the referent is of indeterminate gender. I hope I don't come off as too harsh, it's not my intent to attack anyone. But frankly this makes me angry, and acceptably so! I hope you will understand my point and we can come to an understanding on this issue. |
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Pronouns other than he/him and she/her are very common now. Some of my colleagues use they/them. I had been using they/them for quite a long time in the past. (Now any pronoun goes.) Many people I know---who are reading the book and maybe this issue now---have non-binary gender identity and use they/them (or maybe other pronouns). In my opinion, adjusting this sentence is a small price to pay (if there's a price at all) to welcome more people. |
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I am aware that there is a movement to replace the fact of biological sex with a socially constructed non-binary notion of gender, but I don't support it. Mine is a political opinion that is held by a large number of people; it is not a fringe point of view or a kind of hate or discrimination. It has nothing to do with wanting to exclude people; I have no trouble with welcoming to this community anyone who calls themselves transgender, non-binary, etc. I respect that they have beliefs different from mine, and that they behave according to those beliefs, even in ways that sometimes make me uncomfortable; so I think it seems reasonable for them to likewise respect my beliefs that differ from theirs, and not insist that I behave the way they want me to on pain of being labeled "exclusive". I think some of the biggest political problems in the U.S. nowadays (I can't speak to other countries) are people's unwillingness to engage socially, personally, and professionally with those who hold different opinions, and the rising movement to police language and forbid saying anything that might make someone uncomfortable. I think this leads to radicalization and personal demonization of those who disagree, rather than constructive dialogue through which we can find common ground. Of course, I am only one of the authors of the book. What do others think? |
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I have two good mathematical reasons why you might choose neither phrase:
A more general option would be e.g. to substitute "in one's head" with "mentally", or "construct in one's head" with "imagine constructing", or something similar. |
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There is often a way around:
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I strongly agree with what Mike said above, and he said it better than I could have. When I see "his or her" in a sentence, I take it as a reference to sex, not to gender identity, and that's why I regard it as inclusive of everybody. Probably most people regard it the same way. |
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By the way, I don't see how changing it to "their" makes it more inclusive. If taken as a reference to gender identity, there are lots of people who have gender identities where "he" or "she" or "ze" is the preferred pronoun, not "they". And there are lots of people who don't have a gender identity. All of those people would not be included. |
Perhaps so, but do remember sex is also a spectrum. But that's beside the point.
That is an interesting argument. I'm not sure how exactly it became the standard that "they" is the "default" for referring to a person of indeterminate gender but it's likely because it's the word that's been in the language the longest, that isn't tied up to gender in general. It doesn't necessarily refer to a non-binary person or a person that goes by "they/them" pronouns in this example, just a person. Perhaps we should just sidestep this whole problem and just avoid using a pronoun at all, like @telephon suggests. This feels like a cop-out, but considering how I don't think I'm going to sway your mind, I think this is the best option. Because I know for sure that this irks me, and I know people that it would irk as well. I'm not saying that you're trying to be exclusive in any way, I just want to make this book better by not reinforcing the dichotomy of "he or she" that can make people feel uncomfortable and excluded. |
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After reading "how a mathematician reading the above English proof might simultaneously construct, in their head", I would conclude that the mathematician's preferred pronoun is "they" and that the mathematician is non-binary. |
I can't remember that sex is a spectrum, since it isn't. Procreation requires a male and a female. |
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Intersex people exist. It's an interesting thing, as many people don't know until much later in their life that they are/were intersex (many intersex people have had surgery at birth consented to by their parents that made them more of "one or the other"). But that's somewhat besides the point. |
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Yes, a small number of intersex people exist. But I think when discussing a hypothethical indeterminate person it's standard to assume that person is normal in all ways that are irrelevant to the issue at hand. E.g. if I write "A mathematician might need to get up and walk around the room before proving this", I'm implicitly assuming the mathematician in question is ambulatory. It's sensible and polite to avoid unnecessarily calling attention to the disability of any particular person, but when discussing a generic indeterminate person, we wouldn't get anywhere if we had to phrase everything in ways that included all possible sorts of abnormalities that an arbitrary person might have. |
That sounds neutral. But I would change "the above English proof" to "the English proof above". |
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Instead of being irked, why not adopt a generous alternative interpretation of the words?: that the author was referring to sex, which is a dichotomy, and didn't exclude anyone. |
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The new suggestion is better, but I still prefer the original, in particular for its suggestion of temporal parallelism between reading the proof and constructing an element mentally. And I'm not convinced that any change is necessary. As Dan said, I think it would be best for people to learn not to be bothered by "he or she" — but failing that, they could at least learn to live with the fact that some people have different political opinions and don't need their language policed. |
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@mikeshulman and @DanGrayson: I recommend watching what the Miriam Webster editor has to say about the singular "they" vs. "he or she". You fell victims to some opinionated 18th century grammarians. |
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I've heard these arguments. What I said was:
Something can be grammatical and still awkward. As an aside, I find it amusing how elite opinion about language has mostly shifted to being descriptive rather than prescriptive, except when it intersects with some progressive cause. If singular "they" is not correct in some person's idiolect, isn't that perfectly valid from a descriptive standpoint, regardless of the history of how that idiolect came to be? |
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@mikeshulman I think it has not so much to do with progressivism... It's true that linguistics is mainly descriptive in nature (this is not "elite opinion" but scientific consensus for as long as linguistics has been a science) --- and we do rely on 'native speaker judgments' to determine whether something is grammatical in someone's idiolect. With that said, it sometimes takes some skill to elicit the rules governing someone's grammar because these are often at odds with what they think they are! You would be surprised how many people insist they never use "singular they", and yet it is everywhere in their speech. I've not made a study of the Mike Shulman Corpus, so I can't say if that applies to you. Zooming out, "singular they with indeterminate referent" is grammatical for the vast majority of English speakers; if you are indeed one of the very few English speakers for whom this is not grammatical, I sympathize but I think you should accept that you are in the minority here. On the other hand, contra certain 'progressive' ideas, I would like to point out that "singular they with determinate referent" is grammatical for a much smaller (but growing) portion of English speakers, and remains ungrammatical or at least very unnatural for a large proportion of English speakers. To be very clear, the case in question in this ticket has an indeterminate referent. Thus we can debate over the merits of actively pushing language-change along, but that is not at all what is happening here. This is a lot of controversy for a change that (1) lies within the bounds of everyday grammatical English for the vast majority of English speakers, and (2) more importantly will signal inclusion to a demographic who makes up a surprisingly large proportion of the young people interested in HoTT today. Is it really so costly? Nobody here is trying to cancel people who don't like the word "they". I don't think your language should be policed either. But this small change costs nothing and is quite reasonable in my opinion. That's the last I have to say on this topic. |
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Andrej, the sentence "everyone should do their best" sounds fine if we think of "everyone" as plural, and some people probably do. That was the example in the video. But "a mathematician should do their best" sounds horrible. |
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Jon, re: "But this small change costs nothing and is quite reasonable in my opinion." The cost is that accepting the change validates the accusation that there is something non-inclusive about "his or her". |
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Well then, if we all agree that the singular "they" is grammatically correct, it's just a matter of taste. The matter can then easily be settled with a simple show of hands. The issue may be moot however, since the current proposal avoids using the pronoun altogether. Let me also just say one more thing. A little kindness goes a long way. Fighting about minor grammatical points not so much. |
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If folks are to discuss codes of conduct, I want to point out that they vary widely in quality, with some of the more popular ones unfortunately being some of the worse examples. Good examples worth copying from include Django's and Debian's. If you are happy with neither of those and want options of different lengths: Fedora's previous CoC is a good example of a short CoC. I haven't read the longer, more recent one, so I can't comment on it, but my priors are that most CoCs are poorly designed, especially those of that middle-length. Good examples of longer ones include the old FreeBSD (the new one is also good, but not an example of a longer one) and the Tor Project Forum one (though that one seems like it was adapted from something for in-person events), Obviously, one should be tailored to a community's needs and venues. What is to be avoided in a code of conduct? Unfortunately, Andrej, I think the GitHub Community Forum Code of Conduct is in fact a poor starting point: it Rust's code of conduct is mostly okay, but also features this anti-feature on a smaller scale. It is perhaps more appropriate for their community, since they have a much larger community and a formal system of moderators. There's another example of a class of poor CoCs that I won't list here. This class of CoCs are often written by those who oppose libre software and would gladly have us use only software we have negotiated licenses for in advanced. It is no surprise that such licenses are full of other anti-features, but the primary way one can identify them is their authors' opposition to FLOSS-licensed works (though ironically the CoCs themselves tend to be MIT-licensed). I am not sure why these are popular lately, even with GPL-licensed projects, but suffice to say they should be avoided. |
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(As one of the original contributors.) I vote for (2), or anything else using “their” but otherwise staying close to the original. It’s both more inclusive, and also (to my ear) just better style. I’d also like to second @andrejbauer’s urgings to please keep this thread civil and on-topic. |
@andrejbauer Please consider that those who are harmed by bigotry are generally not interested at all in a "discussion" on their fundamental right to exist, and just want to be left alone, without being pelted by hateful commentary under the guise of a "debate" that doesn't really exist. While I can understand the desire to retain the original comment for purposes of historical record, this seems like a good place to use the "Mark as disruptive comment" feature and at least hide it by default. This at least somewhat prevents the spread of hateful rhetoric, and means that readers of this thread do not need to run across hateful and abusive statements unprepared. I'm particularly thinking of the comments by @mikeshulman here. Especially considering this rule:
... that seems like the least that could be done here. |
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As yet another non-contributing community member, I'd like to take the opportunity to add my voice in support of
It takes no effort at all to avoid othering valued and important members of our community by simply using inclusive language. Conversely, fighting against change towards inclusivity citing non-existent rules of grammar and irrelevant personal tastes is an active attack against real people who are reading this right now, and is not something that can be tolerated. There are a huge number of trans and gender non-conforming people interested or involved in HoTT or adjacent fields who are watching this comment section very closely right now, and the way it plays out is going to have an enormous and long lasting impact on them and the community. Emily Riehl said,
My view is that actually, making people with bigoted views unhappy is a perfectly acceptable price to pay for making the very people they are bigoted against happy - and that this is actually the best possible outcome in such situations. |
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@joepie91 I have no problem at all with hiding the offending statements by default, so long as they are accessible to those who need to see the context. However, at the moment I am failing to find the Hide button on any one of the comments, even though I thought earlier I clearly had access. Allow me to debug myself. Addendum: Apparently I cannot hide comments made by other administrators. I wil try to get it done otherwise, please hold. |
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I opened #1111 to discuss a Code of conduct separately. |
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Now, now. Why quarrel like this? It ruins everyone's day. The discussion has devolved to the point where people are being loud, and unnecessarily getting aggravated, in what has now become, a primal popularity contest. I didn't think conducting a vote was a good move, especially when there is, but one, socially acceptable choice, in today's internet landscape. I don't have particular fondness for what Mike has said on this thread either, but attacking him like this is most uncivil. HoTT is an academic project, and we're all academics to some degree. Has our education, sophistication, and moderation vaporized? The goal of this discussion is to improve the book, while the intent of all the extremism is to gain social credit, with little regard for what happens to the project. In my opinion, the thread should have been locked, to avoid attracting a mob. Mike's personal beliefs and choice of wording are unpalatable; he's however entitled to them, and would be wise to not express them publicly. |
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That's quite an unfair framing of the situation, @artagnon. Mike has started off this conversation with a blanket statement equating a minor grammatical tweak with a "movement to replace the fact of biological sex with a socially constructed non-binary notion of gender". As someone supporting this grammatical tweak, this means that I am already being smeared by Mike without me saying a single word. Mike then went on to say that transgender people make him "uncomfortable". Again, I take this personally, since the one time me and Mike have had an email exchange I thought it was quite pleasant, and I did not suspect that he felt this way about me, especially since I've done nothing to deserve such feelings from him aside from existing. You say that Mike is entitled to his unpalatable beliefs about us, well then we should be entitled to our beliefs about Mike. And if I call him a bigot, it is not to attack him, but to accurately describe what his unpalatable beliefs make him. I believe I have provided sufficient evidence in this post to justify such a description. Finally, since this is a forum of logicians after all, let me just say that there's something very contradictory about a person who claims that he should be allowed to call anyone whatever he wants and that preventing him from doing so is "policing" his language, but yet he draws the line at people calling him "exclusive", which is a word that he describes as bringing him 'pain'. |
And while we're on the topic of what counts as being uncivil, I want to bring your attention to the fact that many people here know each other and are doing their best to be polite, so your attacks on us as a 'mob', a 'primal popularity contest', 'loud', 'unnecessarily aggravated', and conforming to "but one, socially acceptable choice" are exactly the kind of uncivil and disruptive comments that we're trying to avoid. |
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I fully sympathize, and my comments weren't directed at anyone in particular. I simply posted my observation of the thread, and the decisions taken by the maintainers. I have no idea what the gender of each commenter is, or if they know each other. Moreover, I have the misfortune of not having any trans friends, so my assessment and sympathy can only go so far. There is no need to repeat what Mike has said. It's bad enough that it's been said once. Don't stoop to personal attacks: let us maintain our character and integrity. Yes, he did say something unpalatable, and there are over fifty messages in this thread calling him out for it; one message would have sufficed. We're not gaining anything with justifications either. What has happened has happened; history is immutable. We can learn from it, and do better the next time around, but that's about all we can do. I apologize if my comments were inflammatory. I have no intent of attacking anyone; all I have to offer is are observations. |
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Thank you for your apology, I am likewise sorry for being blunt to you in my reply.
I appreciate your desire to calm down the situation, but it's not up to you to decide how many messages will suffice. Mike chose to attack people that he interacts with professionally, and he chose to do it in a project that he is a contributor on. The people Mike attacked have a right to respond to his attacks, even if we'd rather do this elsewhere. This is one of the reasons why a Code of Conduct is important - it protects other contributors of a project from someone going rogue and causing exactly this kind of situation. |
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To quote a letter by Wittgenstein:
Since Andrej has clarified that community opinions will be taken into account, I thought that now would be a good time for me to enter the scene. So, hi, I'm Astra Kolomatskaia – Mike Shulman's graduate student who also happens to be trans; this has very distinctly been a thing. I think that it's fair to say that the discourse in this PR is part of a larger conversation that has been talking place in private for the past several months. I would like to share part of a document that I had been planning to send to Mike as a response to some other correspondence from several weeks ago. (I can't share the whole document because it addresses several points that are currently privileged information.)
I go on to write is an analysis of several pressing trans rights issues from this perspective of of belonging and exclusion. Society, as a whole, and particularly in the US and UK, has been increasingly hostile to trans people, starting from five or six years ago, when trans rights became an increasingly politicised issue. My conclusions are that, on every point of contention, the real issue is not the safety and comfort of cis people, but rather whether or not society is to permit me to exist as a trans person. As far as this PR is concerned, then, I really do think that, at this point we are voting on whether or not so signal inclusion to the trans and non-binary members of our community. I urge you all, then, to take into account the lived experiences of trans people and the extent to which many individuals, organisations, and political forces work very hard to signal to us that we do not have a place in society. As I wrote, what we are working for is something that is taken for granted by members of non-marginalised groups. (My vote, of course, is 2 >> 3 >>>> 1) |
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Thank you for introducing yourself Astra! Nice to meet you. I would like to second your point, that the issue at hand is whether we signal hospitality to the trans and genderqueer people of our community, and it is also a very important point to me. I already voted for option 2 earlier, but I would like to stress once more the importance that we use gender neutral and inclusive language. Not only in our book, but also in other online spaces and in person. The community I want to live and work in is respectful towards trans and genderqueer people, or to anyone regardless of their status within the community, and helps people who are excited about HoTT to find the best of themselves -- not put into question their existence. That's the way to a flourishing community of researchers. So I want to thank anyone who spoke up in this discussion to call out that transphobia is not ok, and I also want to say that I'm glad to see this discussion becoming now a constructive conversation about what we want our community to be. |
I promised myself that I'd bow out of this conversation as I've said everything that I wanted to say, but Oh My God, I feel this so much. Full disclosure, a few years ago I've applied to be in Mike Shulman's research group in the Adjoint School. Had I been accepted, Mike would have been someone whom I'd be relying on as an academic reference during my early career, and potentially (at the time - very hopefully) even someone I'd apply to do graduate study with. I cannot overstate how glad I am that this never happened. I do not want to speak for Astra, and I can't imagine what her personal experience is like. But I want to ask the senior academics here if you can imagine a situation where you had to write a letter like this to your advisor, one where you had to argue for your basic right to exist and be happy? And if so, maybe you can advise me - as an early career researcher - on the best time to write such a letter? Should I get it out of the way in my first year, or wait a year or two until I know my advisor better? ... I'm sorry, I jest, because the alternative is to despair. I don't know Astra's situation, but I have known a couple of queer people - neither of whom is in academia right now - who ended up with PhD advisors that didn't think of them as equals because of their sexuality. And I hope you'll let me convey the magnitude of what that's like. All of us, regardless of which side of this debate we take, can agree that it's been an intense few days of a very toxic, damaging conversation, and we're all just waiting for it to end. But imagine... if it didn't end. Imagine if this conversation kept going for another week, a month, a year... Imagine if this level of toxic, intense animosity was now the baseline of your life for the entirety of your graduate study, and this is what you had to look forward to during your weekly meetings with your advisor. How many of you would still be here, working on one of the most important topics of modern mathematics? I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm a pretty thick skinned person, and yet... that would break me. I say all this because multiple times in this conversation, Mike has made references to being silenced in one way or another, or to not being able to speak his opinion in fear of backlash. And I want to emphasise that despite my harsh words in his direction, I 100% emphatically do not want to silence him. I am utterly grateful to Mike for showing who he is, because it means that I can take precautions to never be in a situation that Astra is in right now, a situation where Mike Shulman has any sort of authority over me or my career. So I want to ask everyone involved in this conversation - here, zulip, etc - to look back and ask yourself who is really being silenced here? Steve Awodley, in another channel, has said this
And that comment - said, I'm sure with the best of intentions - is what my post is all about. Because if you build a community where things don't "stick", a community where it's okay to call someone an 'abnormality' but not okay to criticise that, a community where calling someone a bigot gets hidden as 'uncivil', then you will have a community where people break. A community where people get paired with advisors that despise them. A community where people from marginalised groups quietly leave without saying why, and when years later you talk to their advisor over conference drinks and ask "what happened to so and so?" all you get is a non-committal shrug and "well, maybe they weren't that committed to the field to begin with? So on this note, I will actually bow out of this conversation. Thank you to everyone here for letting me intrude and speak my mind. |
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@mikeshulman Was one of your degrees in biology? If not you should read some of the literature before claiming facts https://www.nature.com/articles/518288a |
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Re: clunkiness, "they" is 1 syllable and 4 letters. "his or her" is 3 syllables and 8 letters |
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Since community member opinions count, definitely (2) "they." I'm never going to be able to read "he or she" by one of these authors again, and not feel like they're talking about biology, which makes me feel a bit repulsed because they have no right to know my biology. FWIW I go by any pronouns, but the idea of pronouns corresponding to sex specifically makes me really uncomfortable, and is not how I have ever used pronouns for anyone at any point in my life. |
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Hello all, I've been following this issue since it was brought to my attention a few days ago. As an outsider, I would like to at least cast an informal vote that echoes Astra's vote: 2 > 3 > 1. Before any extraneous political reasoning, I prefer the grammatical aesthetic in the case of "they", because it is less wordy, and conveys a uniformly more general thought than the alternatives. Not only this, but both Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English dictionaries support the notion that singular 'they' is both grammatically correct, and has a rich history as a pronoun that extends back to Medieval times. As far as personal politics goes, my investment in this issue is as follows:
I care deeply about both HoTT and CT in general, and the community has been wonderful to engage with on both an intellectual and social basis. It was a lonely pursuit at the U of Utah when I first picked up Awodey's book and subsequently bounced off of it, but with more community came renewed enthusiasm for the subject, and it has been a joy for years now. With that in mind, I'm completely disappointed by this thread. Disappointed as someone who at one point wanted to apply for a Shulman grad position, and also saddened for how inflexibly hostile the rhetoric surrounding trans people has been from the opposition, some of whom are inarguably influential in their field. It's a single word change after all, not a political battle for the soul of HoTT! Regardless of how you feel about the state of the current authoritarian agitprop in the US and UK, people and their various modes of being are at the heart of the conversation. This point seemed to have been lost from the first counterpost. I don't feel the need to justify trans identities here: they exist regardless of the pushback. If this causes you turmoil, then look inward. If you can't help yourself, you should be up front about it instead of hiding behind bigoted rhetoric.
Not that I have much of a say, but these comments being public are exactly the kind of material that are needed for prospective students to accurately choose an advisor, and should be kept up. I would not, for example, as a trans person, want to engage with an advisor who did not want to engage with me, but you would never catch either Mike or Dan saying something so straightforward. This thread has been helpful in my and others' pursuits, as I am told on a daily basis since this thread came into the public sphere. Anyway, cheers. I hope Astra and others find a way forward now that they know who more about their peers and mentors. Good luck all! |
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Astra, I want you to feel welcome in the HoTT/UF community. And I want everybody to feel welcome. And more generally, I want everybody to feel welcome in any community I am part of. Even more generally, I want any person who interacts with me because they so wish or because they have to, to feel comfortable and welcome. And I want this for my own benefit as much as their own. |
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As a non-author, I would like to express a very strong opinion for changing from "his or her" to any of the more inclusive alternatives presented here. |
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Non-author, long-time listener, first-time caller. Opt for more inclusive language when possible. 2 > 3; 1 isn't acceptable. As adherents of the n-point of view, everyone here already understands that since "they" is variadic, its use should be preferred over the singular pronouns. This entire field of study grew around the idea that classical modes of expression are inadequate to the task of describing the things we care about. Why should we privilege new understandings of mathematical categories over those of social categories? Both are equally-real mental constructs. I do not accept that we should affirm the former by writing this whole book, and in the same stroke deny the latter the dignity of inclusion, especially when it could be avoided simply by using in more places a word we already use all the time. For some of the field's otherwise-champions to draw a line at modern conceptions of gender in a project developing a new philosophy of identity is both laughable and disheartening. Several years ago, I read an important essay on the n-Category Cafe about attempting to resolve problems in entrenched theories by transcending orthodox ways of thinking. Among many other insightful passages he should now revisit, Shulman wrote this about having a positive attitude when engaging with new ontologies:
I encourage the authors to take this same approach here, and adopt the more inclusive language. |
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On the last day of 2009, @mikeshulman was of a mind to pursue inclusivity as far as changing the name of nlab.
Perhaps they might think back to that point, and compare and contrast with this exchange. |
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I am not going to respond here to any of the more recent comments. This is not an appropriate place for political discussions, and I'm sorry for my role in derailing the conversation in that direction. I regret that my attempts to explain my views hurt people's feelings; I meant no harm to anyone. |
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Even though @andrejbauer stated that the vote would be open until Sunday, April 17th, we have decided unanimously that we need not wait until then, as there is a clear preference for the 'they' option, which we shall implement promptly. Adoption of a suitable Code of Conduct and related topics may still be discussed in Issue #1111. The HoTT book administrators, Steve Awodey |
Change "his or her" -> "their"