-Or consider how previous generations of public intellectuals considered this exact problem. In 1983, Douglas R. Hofstadter also expressed disapproval of _she_ and _he_ as a matter of language design, and to illustrate the point about how alien and unnecessary gendered language would seem if you weren't already used to them, wrote a satirical piece, ["A Person Paper on Purity in Language"](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html), in the persona of a conservative author in a society with race-based (!) language conventions, including the pronouns whe/wis for whites and ble/bler for blacks. In neither the piece itself (during which Hofstadter's alter-ego brings up and rejects a couple of reform suggestions from the liberals of whis Society, including singular _they_), nor the Post-Scriptum in its subsequent [anthologization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamagical_Themas), does Hofstadter entertain the idea of redefining _he_ and _she_ (or _whe_ and _ble_) to refer to the subject's pronoun preference. It's worth asking: why not? If it's so clear to Yudkowsky in 2021 that self-identification is the "simplest and best protocol" to repair the objective flaw in English's design, why didn't that simplest and best solution occur to Hofstadter in 1983?
+Or consider how previous generations of public intellectuals considered this exact problem. In 1983, Douglas R. Hofstadter also expressed disapproval of _she_ and _he_ as a matter of language design, and to illustrate the point about how alien and unnecessary gendered language would seem if you weren't already used to it, wrote a satirical piece, ["A Person Paper on Purity in Language"](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html), in the persona of a conservative author in a society with race-based (!) language conventions, including the pronouns whe/wis for whites and ble/bler for blacks. In neither the piece itself (during which Hofstadter's alter-ego brings up and rejects a couple of reform suggestions from the liberals of whis Society, including singular _they_), nor the Post-Scriptum in its subsequent [anthologization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamagical_Themas), does Hofstadter entertain the idea of redefining _he_ and _she_ (or _whe_ and _ble_) to refer to the subject's pronoun preference.
+
+It's worth asking: why not? The statement of the objective language-design flaw (pronouns shouldn't denote sex, that's dumb; why would you define a language that way) was _the same_ in 1983 as it is in 2021. If it's so clear to Yudkowsky in 2021 that self-identification is just the "simplest and best protocol" to repair the objective flaw in English's design, why didn't that simplest and best solution occur to Hofstadter in 1983?
+
+Could it, perhaps, be the case that public intellectuals in the current year might have some _other_ motivation to conclude that "_he_ refers to the set of people who have asked us to use _he_", that was not present for their analogues in 1983? But if so, they'd be transparent and _tell_ us that ... right?