4 ms·
I think the main issue is that it's the only field that's required to be public. That makes it seem out-of-place. You can tell a lot about someone's ancestry
by amalcon 15y ago
I think the main issue is that it's the only field that's required to be public. That makes it seem out-of-place.
You can tell a lot about someone's ancestry from their name as well, but it would be pretty weird if Randall's profile looked like this:
Name: Randall Munroe
Ancestry: Scottish[1]
And that was it. Even though it's kind of obvious, it's encouraging people to think about it, and calling attention to any stereotypes people might have about Scottish people. This is probably not so bad for Scots, but there are a number of ethnicities that carry serious social baggage, and they may prefer not to be called to attention.
Of course, I don't need to know Mr. Munroe's ancestry to refer to him using pronouns in most languages. Getting that information from a name is also much less reliable. It's obviously not quite the same. I think it does highlight the issue pretty well, though.
[1] Which I am inferring from his last name; I have no idea about his actual ancestry.
- rufibarbatus 15y agoA good way of avoiding this problem is to get rid of pronouns altogether. Case in point (drumroll): Facebook's interface! You can count on one hand how many times they use pronouns, and those could be actually be removed as well.
- william42 15y agoIn English, yes, but in other languages this isn't always possible.
- amalcon 15y agoIn romance languages, it doesn't even necessarily require pronouns. The English sentence "Sam is tall." cannot be translated into Spanish without knowing whether Sam is male or female. Interestingly, Google Translate assumes (in this case) that Sam is male, while Microsoft Translate assumes (in this case) that Sam is female.
- wtn 15y agoFacebook abuses "their".
- ignifero 15y agoThey do! In fact, their stream stories used to allow <fb:pronoun /> tags so that when an app published something, you didn't need to refer to him/her as "them". But that changed about a year ago, so now facebook is a major paragon in familiarizing folks with the word "their" being singular.