Modern US society seems to be layers upon layers of gamified results with little coherent vision. We blame other countries for having "stifling" regulation, "burdensome" oversight and "top-down" planning, but honestly - it seems we simply let problems precipitate for decades on end and in many cases think it's some sort of achievement.
It's the inevitable conclusion of American meritocracy.
In a world where you can achieve anything, someone without achievements must be incapable or, worse, apathetic. Pair that with routine measurement, and it creates a real compounding effect.
So parents correctly try to accumulate achievements as early as possible. To get into HFT, you must go an Ivy, for which you need a recommendation at a top high school, etc, etc....and so you need to impress the pre-K director.
Even (so-called) failure must be managed strategically. Spend 6 months as a freshman at MIT before dropping out, so everyone knows you're better than the best.
Other nations don't do much better. It's a pick your poison situation. But, other nations seem more willing to accept the poison as a necessary evil. The US (systems, not individuals) refuses to see its quirks as anything but a universal good.
>The real problem with American universities is that in one generation they have gone from best in the world to completely lost and directionless, having jettisoned their entire curricula in favor of counterintuitive and vapid intellectual fashion, but enough about that, I'm sure you're thinking you need to know my pronouns
Like? I'm sure you're deeply familiar with these fashions.
And nobody asked for your pronouns, even if I cared we're on an internet forum.
In terms of daily usage it came first from LGBTQ+ communities. It then gained more mainstream attention when colleges and universities, having to work with the emerging generation where acceptance of different sexualities or identities was more common, began to accommodate this. That was helped along of course by the fact that people who systematically study the constantly changing landscape of language use skew towards researchers in linguistics through colleges and universities. So there were two "vectors" of transfer to that community: from both students and linguists.
You have no idea, it probably came from tumblr. I'm familiar with those "fashions" to which you refer and not a single professor I know ever teaches about pronouns or anything else which you're probably alluding to.
any time I get an email from a .edu, it announces pronouns. where it really drives me crazy is dating apps: i spelled out my my preferences, why are you telling me your pronouns? shouldn't I know them by now, unless I clicked "takes all comers" in which case, why would I care? :)
It is frequently policy to do this in an email signature, with the desire to use non-traditional pronouns driven (from what I saw) initially by students themselves. I'm guessing dating apps probably have check boxes or something? If so then it could be necessary or useful if wanting to be exposed or find the broadest group of people that you might click with.
99+% of the people on dating apps are not looking for the broadest group of people that they might click with. They are looking for the site to actually provide them with some filtering and selection to narrow down the possibilities to good candidates. Pronouns are provided to make a fractional percentage feel "included" (and that fraction is not the population you might be thinking of, but the smaller populations of activists in same category), and (using politics as a guide) another 50% to feel good about their virtue, though they have no intention of swiping right on anything but a guy in finance. trust fund. 6'5". blue eyes. citations: the okcupid and tinder studies of who gets swiped when all the votes and chads are counted.
Putting aside pronouns in particular and given hypotheticals were a user doesn't care one way or the other about specific pronouns as long as they know the person they swipe on is identity-compatible as a dating partner:
Wouldn't it be beneficial, prior to fine-grained filtering, to start with the widest group that meets minimally sufficient criteria? That way the end group of people who meet a very aggressive and specific filtering has more options. Sure, beyond a certain size it's too unwieldy, but each user may want to min/max for different values of wieldy(ness?).
Keep in mind I know absolutely nothing about modern dating or dating apps, and it seems things move too fast for even a person coming out of a 5+ year relationship to look at the current crop of temporary/permanent mate-finding tools and really know what they're getting into.
