Also, it's not reading comprehension, it's subconscious level associations that people basically can't avoid.
This is the coddling referred to in a sibling comment. What basis do you have for thinking such misconceptions are unavoidable? This is tantamount to saying "people can never change", which flies in the face of all evidence I've seen. It seems to me entirely more likely that most folks simply don't take the time to practice decent cognitive hygiene.
Surely, the parties responsible for relabeling the default branch will see this as tacit admission of guilt on the part of GH and wield it as vindication of their views going forward.
Rather than pushing back on the issue, challenging these people to perform the self-analysis needed to disabuse themselves of faulty logic, decisions like GitHub's only work to foster and perpetuate a distorted world.
Evidently, this is somehow too much of an ask. How did it ever come to pass that it's _everyone else's_ responsibility to kowtow to the lowest common denominator? Why is it verboten to hold them to a higher standard?
> Surely, the parties responsible for relabeling the default branch will see this as tacit admission of guilt on the part of GH and wield it as vindication of their views going forward.
This is an approach that is not productive, but also not applicable here as those types of actions are usually once the rest of the world has moved, and a small minority has not. This is quite early in such a transition and if anything I would expect Github to be praised for it. I certainly appreciate Github starting the process and conversation here.
I am not a native speaker so my brain might work differently but I don't believe the theory on associations. We're even talking of a noun vs an adjective. Do people make the same associations also when you hear about a Masters degree? Or when you hear about Slavic people, do you feel for the times when they were enslaved?
I have no problem with replacing master/slave, there are usually clearer names since that pair has been overloaded (though changing master/slave to master/replica should be just as acceptable as e.g. primary/replica or active/backup, for the same reason!). Even outside distributed systems other names are clearer (controller/device for example).
"Masters degrees" as far as I linguistically understand means "mastery of subject", which is indeed the same language, though perhaps closer to feudal master/subject, which was more ethnic slavery in Europe than the specific iteration in the US. Maybe we do eventually change that one too. Higher education has the same problematic founding as everything else. Let's not forget that Harvard and many other top schools were literally constructed by slaves. As said elsewhere, this is very much about engrained subconscious defaults and norms and you've just highlighted another.
I think generally these are indeed small effects and you have to pick your battles, but I am always saddened when people spend so much effort fighting and arguing against these really costless changes. No one is saying to change overnight and break everything, but it costs nothing to slowly transition away. Those who argue it "changes history" I also find curious as those people seem to be doing a great job ignoring or denying the histories of the words in those same arguments.
Otherwise, it would be "merge to the master" which I have never heard.
It's not a costless change; all documentation would be split between that for "master" and that for "main". The cynic in me sees Embrace, Extend, Extinguish all over again.
> Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
How did we get from "change one word, find/replace basically" to an entire predatory policy by Microsoft?
If anything, this proves that it is possible over time. The issue with EEE was not the change itself but the power Microsoft gained by enforcing examples itself. Where's the power issue in making a change that is a positive for the world without negatives once past the transitional issue?
Again, my point here is that this just feel like people put more energy into fighting it than the change costs, and I think often that speaks more to people marginalizing the underlying issue than caring about the problems with the change itself.
If you name your git branch "maint", that proper noun comes from the common noun "maintenance".
If you name your git branch "master", that proper noun comes from the adjective "master".
> The issue with EEE was not the change itself but the power Microsoft gained by enforcing examples itself
Exactly, making things different is effectively a potential lock-in issue for GitHub vs. other git hosts.
Even if it was an adjective, you act as if that magically excludes it from being associated with the master/slave distributed systems reference, but it's still a CS term at the end of the day and I fail to see how there would not be a subconscious association there.
> Exactly, making things different is effectively a potential lock-in issue for GitHub vs. other git hosts.
Or all the others can change too for the low cost of near zero, at the same time. If those companies don't want to change for the societal good, maybe that's a legitimate reason not to use them. Do you really believe a single rename in the name of societal good that anyone can do with low cost is going to cause vendor lock-in?
I don't believe there's any gain at all to achieve in terms of societal good, therefore any possible damage is going to be greater than zero. I am ready to be called a racist or fascist for this, which would be quite ironic given that my grandparents and great-grandparents had several unpleasant interactions with the Italian fascist party.
The only thing I can say then is to look to psych research, implicit bias, and biases in decision making studies. The conclusions there clearly point the opposite direction. I'll drop one such example to start[1]
> I am ready to be called a racist or fascist for this
People walk into these assuming this hostility, but if you want such hostility to change, it's a two way street. It's been well established we are all a little racist, ironically here thanks to ingrained biases such as the one we are discussing. What matters is that you're trying to fight against those tendencies, learning, and correcting where you can. No one is asking for perfection. When people bring in hostility into these conversations though is where that then becomes interpreted as a choice, not just subconscious.
> my grandparents and great-grandparents had several unpleasant interactions with the Italian fascist party
I don't see why we are still trying to use this line of argument. There are plenty of sexist women, racist BIPOC to other races, etc. Being of or having been related to X can help statistically at a macro level, but does not magically stop an individual from developing any of those ideas.
That said, both origin and practical use have relevancy here.
1. Where did I say anything about emotional trauma?
2. Even if that was the case (for most it is not as far as I can tell), I am surprised to hear an argument for "ah yes, let's not decrease emotional trauma if we can for low/no cost".
How about decreasing the emotional trauma by actually helping people heal, so they can be calm and not have to fear police brutality or a police state etc, to implement accountability and integrity in our systems? And in another reply I made I suggested that coddling people makes them and us weaker as a society, and allows worse consequences to grow. Arguably doing "low/no cost" things is lazy and procrastinatory, especially when it's relating to something unreasonable or incorrect like associating master-slave in programming to master-slave in human slavery; yes, an unreasonable request not given into by a child being unreasonable will likely lead to a tantrum.
Not responding would be bad and further traumatizing, responding with thought and an actual plan would be deep and powerful, giving into people's unreasonable requests or for-profit company opportunism to look good doing something shallow because people are misinterpreting language is something else.
In another comment I made: "Coddling will only lead to greater problems later, though yes, it certainly is a gesture showing respect — because of the improper associating, trigger it is causing an unreasonable mob. Coddling people makes them and society weaker, it doesn't strengthen them - it turns their anger into something other than critical thinking. Large for-profit corporations who are happy to jump to an easy decision like this seem to be more opportunists than leaders to make a statement like you said in response." - that statement I was referring to is: 'If you read "master branch" and think of slavery, you have reading comprehension issues that won't be fixed by renaming the branch.'
Sounds great, even better for sure! Let's do both! At your day job (if you're in the tech world), which do you have more control over?
> A subconscious association, if using reason, critical thinking,
This is now how subconscious/unconscious biases work, you're again skipping right into "but just logic out of it". People don't react to it with some emotional or anger emotion in the moment, they engrain the association subconsciously in their head, and you have to take massive effort to catch yourself with this. An effort that would be far more than changing the word, and one that tech companies are also trying to work on generally with implicit bias trainings recently.
This is focused on sexism but discusses implicit bias, the training, and its flaws in depth: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-...
Most implicit bias trainings at tech companies today are targeting the same things. While the effects of said trainings are muddy to say the least, the theory behind them is well agreed upon and studied.
I'll leave the generalized psych research to you, but here's an example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148600/