The YouTuber and math popularizer Matt Parker, and his recent activism for social-engineering the use of the word "they" as the English gender-neutral pronoun, has become quite a pet peeve of mine, almost an obsession, but this is my blog, so who cares.
You can read all my posts about him, in chronological order, here, here and here, but here's a really short recap: Matt Parker, of Numberphile fame on YouTube and a quite popular personality especially among the viewers of that channel, has recently started littering his videos with an overabundance of use of the pronoun "they" when referring to a single person, even when there's zero ambiguity about who the person is or was (such as Albert Einstein), or even if the person is someone he personally knows and is his friend. Not only that, but he goes so far as to use that pronoun more than would be necessary (ie. instead of saying eg. "Mark thought about it and then came up with an idea" he will say "Mark thought about it and then they came up with an idea".) Some of his videos are so littered with the use of that pronoun that it's cringeworthy. It appears as if he has become an outright activist in the quest of making this pronoun accepted in this role. He doesn't just use it casually, he seems to deliberately litter his videos with it.
Recently I got curious: When did he get "converted", or indoctrinated, into this kind of social justice activism? I don't think he has always talked like this. When did the change happen? So I did a bit of digging of his two main YouTube channels, and I got some clear cutoff points.
The first video he has made where he's being really obnoxious about the overuse of "they" when referring to an individual well-known person is the video Does The Average Person Exist, uploaded on January 17, 2020. For example, consider this segment:
"And thankfully, one of them was an anthropology student here at Harvard: The young Gilbert Daniels. Daniels had actually done their own mini-anthropometric study when they were a student here at Harvard. They measured the hand size of 250 of their fellow students. I have no idea how they actually got that data. You can imagine them running around this courtyard like some kind of hand-obsessed proto-Zuckerberg, but somehow they got the data. I don't know if they told the participants how the data would be shared, but Daniels analyzed it and discovered that no-one is average."
Given how often he uses the pronoun to refer to one Gilbert Daniels, I think it's pretty safe to say that by this point he has been indoctrinated. It's not just some kind of individual brainfart or slip of the tongue. He uses it so much that it has to be deliberate.
Quite interestingly, this might be one of his first forages into this kind of activism, because in the very next clip after the above one, he suddenly reverts to using the pronoun "he" when referring to Gilbert Daniels:
"Daniels had taken his handy data and worked out the average of the various measurements he had done. He then looked for someone who had average hands, and it turns out none of them did. Of the 250 people he had recorded, none of them had hands that matched all the averages."
I have no idea why the sudden change in style. Maybe he forgot? Maybe the two clips were actually filmed at very different times, and things had happened in between? Or maybe he was still not "self-trained" enough and this was kind of a slip-up, and he just didn't bother to re-record it.
But anyway, I think it's safe to say that by January of 2020 he was fully indoctrinated. But what's the earliest cutoff point for this indoctrination having happened?
I think the clearest case is the video Bayesian Statistics with Hannah Fry, uploaded on March 29, 2019. There he quite clearly refers to Thomas Bayes several times as "he", with no "they" anywhere in sight. (The other protagonist of the video, Hannah Fry, also refers to Bayes as "he" many times during the video, so she clearly hasn't been indoctrinated at this point either.)
The videos in between these are not so clear, because in pretty much all of them whenever he uses a pronoun to refer to someone, he's talking about a friend of his that he knows very well, so who knows.
From those, the clearest ones are "Can we film a stroboscopic helicopter?", uploaded on August 12 of 2019, where he refers to the the wife of a friend as "she", and "The unbelievable solution to the 100 prisoner puzzle", uploaded on November 4 of 2019, where he refers to his friend Alex Bellos as "he".
In the other direction, in the video "Help, our train home is making 9 quintillion stops", uploaded on November 29 of 2019, he refers to someone with the online handle of "Neil Codling" as "they", as well as someone else with the handle of "Daniel". I consider this borderline because these are people he doesn't know personally, nor are well-known celebrities, so even though their names are "Neil" and "Daniel" perhaps he just didn't want to assume anything. Although, perhaps, that in itself tells something.
But I would say that his "conversion" to social justice activist definitely happened some time between March of 2019 and January of 2020, and somewhat probably some time around November of 2019.
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