Comment by strken
1 year ago
I agree that this is an odd choice. It hasn't been edited all that well, so the "person" who is "he or she" becomes a "he" in the next sentence. More than that, there's a clumsy instance of find-replace, "person-is-an-object-study", where the intention of the author was almost certainly "humanity-is-an-object-study".
On a personal level, I think editing old language for political correctness smacks of revisionism, but if such language must be edited, then the editing should at least preserve the meaning of the original.
If you do a search for "person-is-an-object-study" it seems to be a phrase from the original author (appearing in other quoted material that hasn't edited "he" to "he or she")
The original journal article (just posted another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42139081) had "person-is-an-object-of-study" which makes more sense. And this is also the only version you find quoted if you search in Google Books; all quotes of the other material are probably propagating errors from some earlier transcription error (that precedes the he-or-she).