On Tue, 2022-08-30 at 18:14 +0200, Madrid via agora-discussion wrote: > Its true that I don't care much about upholding ancient tradition. > > It's nomic, a game of change, and I'm very willing to see Spivak > removed.
I would prefer to keep Spivak, not so much due to the tradition, but due to the effects on conversation we'd have if we removed it. Gender is something that generally doesn't, and almost certainly shouldn't, matter at Agora, so the only benefit to using gendered pronouns would be to force constant reminders of people's genders on us for no obvious reason, and that's something that tends to make me uncomfortable (i.e. being forced to think about people as genders, rather than thinking about people as individuals). This is a problem in a wide number of contexts, but Agora's solution is very simple and straightforward. (I also note that the problem is more complicated at Agora than elsewhere, because Agora sometimes has non-sentient persons, typically legal fictions, in addition to the humans. Normally these would be "it" but we need to try to cover them with the same pronouns as the human players.) I probably wouldn't object to a widespread change to singular-they if the general view of the playerlist is that that would be preferable, but it would be likely to add a little extra confusion for no real benefit (the distinction between singular "e" and plural "they" makes it easier to parse what a rule is saying). -- ais523
