Comment by oneeyedpigeon
2 days ago
Love this article, OP, especially those interactive demos. One small suggestion:
> A truth booth is where a male & female ...
The use of "male" and "female" as nouns sounds very unnatural. "A man and a woman" would be a little less jarring, imo.
[flagged]
> it gives off incel vibes imo
One really should be careful making statements like these on the Internet. It's a stronger signal than people saying "male" and "female".
I've always found this to be such a pedantic hill to die on.
I don't think the author is an incel and it's pretty rude to throw out that kind of language for what's pretty clearly just a style choice.
Agreed. "A female doctor/accountant/X" is incel-ish, but "male and female" is treating both genders equivalently. That. Is. The. Goal.
I hear this commonly about using the words "male" and "female." I think it's unfair. For one thing, the military uses them frequently, and so would veterans. Another reason is that their meanings are age-agnostic which helps to emphasize the intent of the speaker--to differentiate on sex alone, not sex plus age.
"It's used in the military" supports the point the GP is making, that it sounds unnatural in a common context.
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Yes because these descriptions are meant to foster dehumanization and detachment, which is very useful in military and scientific study contexts. That's why they also sound unnatural in casual conversation
Keep in mind that not everyone on the internet uses English as their first language and they might use words weirdly cause it resembles what they're used to
One small boon of AI is that making small interactive web components for demonstrations is now a few-minutes diversion instead of an hour or more. I have no idea if that's what OP did, but I've been happy with generating low-stakes code for blog posts.