Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken
vice.com
vice.com
The people vouching for this at Google are likely product marketing managers, public relations folks, social media managers, etc. All they do is write corporate garbage all day, and much like we have "nit"s in PR's for formatting, variable names, etc; they likely have similar reviews that get flagged for "non-inclusive language" or whatever this is. So they have brilliant idea: the Code people use auto linters/formatters that we enable by default (hey gofmt) and everyone loves it, how about we do the same for the Prose people!
Basically: "All I write is corporate garbage, and all the writing I consume is corporate garbage, and all my coworkers only write corporate garbage, therefore everyone would love a corporate garbage-ifyer!"
For example, if my english-as-a-second-language eastern European subordinates feel self-conscious about their english, they might find an automated tool helpful - where a professional journalist would be better served by their own judgement.
The 'inclusive language' thing is just weird though.
The problem for me is particularly that the combination of monopolies combined with AI that will learn from data largely filtered by those monopolies will generate some questionable gradients. So, yes, this might ultimately change language very quickly without much of human discourse over it. This will lead to language with less variation and arguably to a world that does not encourage variation and will be in effect less inclusive.
I appreciate you adding to the conversation.
However, the net result is that words are driven out of the language even if everyone involved in the document wouldn't care.
No one uses "fuck" in corporate communication either. Is anyone worried about that word being "driven out of the language"? I don't think corporate speech is as influential in overall language use as you are implying.
Swear words are specifically used to be provocative, so naturally they're not going to disappear. Words like "motherboard" or "whitelist" were historically neutral and primarily used in professional settings, so removal from corporate speech is correspondingly a much bigger factor.
To be clear, I'm not particularly worried or concerned about this. I don't consider it any great loss if we start saying "allowlist" and have happily changed my projects to match. It's not a big deal, and the kind thing to do is to go along with those who do care a lot.
Enabling bullies in their social dominance games isn’t being kind.
The classic mistake that Pascal and everyone using his argument to argue for their favorite God lies in the simplifying assumption :
- Compliance is cheap, low-risk and fixed-cost relative to taking a stand
Which gets less and less true as the Wrathful God (or His spokespeople) sees you're completely submitting and realizes they can continue making more and more increasingly humiliating demands. Soon enough, you discover you wish you had drawn the red line earlier.
― George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
https://areomagazine.com/2019/04/02/the-tyranny-of-the-minor...
Not being tolerant here is a pretty clear sign of close mindedness in reality or just a hint of lacking life experience.
It's like, of _course_ early peoples created concepts from "day, when it's light" and "night, when it's dark". It has nothing to do with skin colour or ethnicity at all.
Anyway, that's what scares me about this, I like language naturally evolving like it is in the above example, to address a specific communication need. I'm really not a fan of some remarkably privileged people using an insanely powerful company to coerce my language in whatever direction they see fit.
Adding quotes to "badass" turns up (on the first page) a mechanics job posted in January, four hits for the same CNA job from over a month ago, and one hit for an administrative job, posted this month.
That doesn't seem like a lot of postings, certainly not enough to be considered an outlier.
Of course to verify that I'd have to do fifty Google searches and chart the data, which I don't really want to do...
I think you should, though, so next time you make such a dubious claim, you have the data to back it up. :)
You're at Google. You need to do some kind of project that can be called a success -- within one quarter. What do you do?
One possibility, the disastrous effects of which we've seen, is to build Yet Another Incompatible Chat App.
This is another possibility. A very safe one, in a way.
You constantly have to demonstrate that you are "useful, self-directed, and doing important things", in an environment where usefulness and importance are extremely hard to judge, and so become very socially-constructed. It can get pretty brutal -- even if, when you step back and take the long view, it all seems ridiculous.
So when you look at what comes out of these companies, it's useful to remember that. Imagine the horrible games in which their employees have found themselves trapped.
(Money's a hell of a thing. Shame you seem to need so much of it.)
It's bad writing for the reader. But lots of writing isn't actually for clear communication. Especially when the government is involved.
"The United States had maintained neutrality until 1941. However, it was attacked at Pearl Harbor, and then chose to enter the war."
I'd say active is still better here.
surely not? even a newspaper should be striving for an active voice, at least anytime the actor is known!
As an enterprise feature, enterprises would interested in this because they wouldn't want their employees communications to get them cancelled or put on woke twitter. Despite their writing style guide[1] being a bit too woke for my liking i'm sure some people find it a good reference, especially if they don't have capacity to create their own corporate guide.
I'm putting aside intentionally and just curious about how this actually encourages empathy?
Not hiring union-busting consultants to convince employees to not join a union against their best interests.
I don't understand what you are referring to when you say "this"; what is "this"? Are you referring to a specific statement by the parent poster, or something described in the OP?
I also don't understand whether the double-negative is intentional (and meant to cancel itself out, and become a positive), or if it is a colloquialism.
This = 'the comment being replied to'.
This actually !(not make sense).
V
This actually does make sense.
I do think there is more activism at play than you might. At a minimum it provides the fear mechanism that prevents employees from challenging the work, particularly if they aren't even on the project (why stick your neck out?).
However, the code format for prose analogy illuminates the writing quality angle brilliantly.
I'm sure I'm not alone in having distinct communication modes in work documents, each with their own reasons to be excluded from the ML dataset:
1. Keep it simple -- when achieved it is highly effective for communicating a work memo, but would be terribly dry if used in auto suggestions for an English major struggling through crafting moving prose.
2. Lazily verbose -- going long is more expedient than crafting a compact message. It's mostly unrefined garbage. (exhibit a this comment)
3. Everything is awesome (positivity inflation) -- a deluge of great, love, awesome, wonderful, perfect, etc. all applied to far too many things, far too often.
Imagine if an ML code formatter included psudeo code inputs, or was given a data set of every local file change (pre-commit) instead of what is sitting in a main branch? My Docs are filled with things that I'd never commit much less pass a code review.
If Google Docs was only used in corporate settings, and we wanted to double down on our drab corporate communication styles, I guess the feature would make some sense.
This is white cultural imperialism, full stop. Right or left, I don't care where it comes from - I know it when I smell it.
It doesn't flow anywhere except to other college educated professionals. These people attempt to tell rural, or the working-class, or immigrants what to say and how to behave, who then turn around and do something else like elect Trump.
Here is Kamala Harris, an Indian-Black American, pushing “Latinx”:
https://mobile.twitter.com/kamalaharris/status/1290733001320...
There’s a deep synergy here that exploits the fact that most Americans have limited insight into what minorities think, but generally want to be supportive. White progressives can amplify their apparent mandate by selectively platforming progressive minorities to speak on behalf of those groups. Those progressive minorities, meanwhile, can wield the outsize influence of progressive whites over the media and institutions against other members of their own group.
That’s how “Latinx” happens. Progressive Latinos by themselves have no power to influence what the general public calls Latinos. But if they get Elizabeth Warren to say it, they can turn it from a “progressive Latino” issue into a “Latino” issue and lots of well meaning people will go along to be supportive of Latinos.
Kamala Harris is a great example. She was polling in the single digits among Black people (https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/04/kamala-harris-black...). And I’ll tell you that most desis are closer to Tulsi Gabbard than Harris. Including the Russia stuff—given India’s long-standing affinity with Russia. She’s not Vice President because she’s the one people in those groups would pick. She’s Vice President because of all the white Act Blue donors I know who are thrilled to have a Black-Indian Vice President who just happens to think the way they do.
No surprise there: Modi is a conservative populist who could make Trump blush, and is very popular (and polarizing) in India. I’m not sure how the translates to Indian Americans, Indian politics isn’t very portable.
But at least with respect to pre-Fox News Gabbard, the areas where she departed from white progressives were recognizably desi to me. You don’t celebrate your abortion or make your sexuality part of your identity in Indian American communities. Likewise, there tends to be a strong impulse towards realism in foreign policy that accepts brutal dictators like Assad as necessary in some cases to avoid a breakdown in order. and there is a strong Russian affinity, since India was aligned with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Meanwhile, Harris quite closely tracked white progressive orthodoxy.
I'm not sure I see the problem here? If there is a problem isn't it because minority groups that support regressive politics (say like the 'log cabin Republicans') don't get promoted by their fellow regressives as much? Shouldn't Republicans be amplifying the voice of African-American homophobes, and Gay racists more so that everyone can see that not all minorities are progressive and some want to work together to hold back minority groups they aren't part of?
Progressives promote minorities with progressive opinions and pass those progressive opinions off as representative of those minority groups. White progressives self-consciously wear that label; non-white progressives invoke their ethnic identity without the progressive qualifier.
Progressives in media, academia, and politics often use their institutional power to manipulate the public narrative surrounding minorities. As my dad once lamented, "CNN made Ilhan Omar into the face of American Muslims."
> you don't like that because you're a minority with non-progressive views and feel underrepresented?
I personally don't like it because I have fairly typical views for my minority group and I don't like being misrepresented. I'd like a more honest public discourse that acknowledges something like "brown people love Obamacare, but really don't want their young kids learning about sex."
More importantly, it disenfranchises the very minorities these progressives purport to speak for.
It enables white progressives to hijack the political power of minorities within the broader center and center left (Democrats and Democrat leaners). For a spell in 2020, progressives turned "Defund the Police" into the "Black" position on policing, and weaponized claims of "racism" against anyone who opposed violent protests and riots. They got the Op-Ed guy at the New York Times fired for publishing a piece by Tom Cotton about putting a stop to the riots. Lots of well-meaning white people care what Black people think about policing, and they are terrified of being called racist, so they put up BLM signs on their lawns and reposted quotes like "riots are the voice of the unheard."
Of course Black people didn't want to Defund the Police, and they don't like riots. When Larry Hogan sent in the Maryland National Guard to put a stop to the Freddie Gray riots, his approval rating in majority-Black Baltimore soared over 70%: https://www.baltimoresun.com/politics/bal-maryland-gov-larry.... Luckily this ended with respect to this specific issue because people like Eric Adams were in a position to call out the white progressives: https://www.businessinsider.com/eric-adams-defund-the-police... ("NYC mayoral candidate Eric Adams says 'young white affluent people' lead the 'defund the police' movement").
This happens on issue after issue: progressives claim the moral high ground by purporting to speak on behalf of minorities while advancing policies those minorities actually oppose. For example, you see all these moves toward race-conscious hiring driven by progressives on behalf of Black and Hispanic people. But most Black and Hispanic people oppose such policies: https://www.vox.com/2019/5/9/18538216/diversity-workplace-pe....
In some cases, this interferes with the ability of minority groups to advocate for their own personal safety. During the increase in crimes against Asian Americans in NYC and SF, CNN was full of Asian activists and academics who stressed the importance of non-white solidarity and not letting the violence derail efforts at criminal justice reform. The Asian American activists platformed by progressives care primarily about maintaining solidarity with other progressive groups, not about the unique interests of Asian Americans: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang?s=r.
But Asian American communities face fundamentally different trade-offs with respect to over-policing versus under-policing compared to other minorities. A white American is three times more likely to be shot by a cop as an Asian American. Asian American voters thus strongly supported Andrew Yang in NYC, and large numbers defected for Curtis Sliwa in the general election. Manipulation by white progressives impaired the ability for Asian Americans to advocate for their own interests.
Fundamentally, white progressives who participate in ethnic identity politics have a conflict of interest. They have tremendous incentives to use their larger numbers and institutional power to advance their own interests, not those of minority groups: https://contexts.org/blog/who-gets-to-define-whats-racist/ ("White elites —who play an outsized role in defining racism in academia, the media, and the broader culture — instead seem to define ‘racism’ in ways that are congenial to their own preferences and priorities.").
> so that everyone can see that not all minorities are progressive
Most minorities aren't progressives. Progressives are whiter on average than the population as a whole, and about as white as traditional conservatives: https://hiddentribes.us/profiles (80% white for progressives, 70% white for traditional conservatives). If you disaggregate say Asian Americans into finer groups than just "Democrat" and "Republican," you'd see that most are moderates, the next biggest chunk are moderate conservatives, and progressives make up a relatively small fraction.
The ones that are progressive (mostly Latinos) are much more likely to be Bernie-style economic progressives than to embrace the intersectional progressivism of Elizabeth Warren. In the 2020 Democratic Primary, Bernie won Latinos in California with 45%. Warren placed fourth with just 7%, lower than Mike Bloomberg. Among Black voters in Virginia, Biden won 63%, and Warren again placed fourth behind Mike Bloomberg, with just 7%.
In fact, Warren was actually never a viable candidate in a Democratic Party that relies on southwestern Latino and southern Black voters to win elections: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/elizabeth-warren-boo... (" In February 2020, New York Times reporter Astead Herndon detailed how Warren’s success with Black and Latino political activists had yielded barely any support among actual Black and Latino voters."). But we were subjected to months of white progressives in media treating her like a frontrunner because they thought that the ethnic minority activists she had on stage with her represented real support from ethnic minorities.
> and some want to work together to hold back minority groups they aren't part of?
Minorities have their own ideas of what policies are good for them, and for the most part they're different from what progressives believe. They should be able to advocate for those interests without white progressives using their institutional power and donor dollars to drown out their voices on issues that concern them.
Well you have to appeal to your audience. If you speak as a Bangladeshi how much would the average American member of the audience understand? If the Bangladeshi take is similar to the average Indian take I'm used to, rising crime rates would probably be explained by something like "all these people are corrupt. That's what Indians do instead of doing it the right way they just try to find a shortcut and take from others. Badmaasha do this and ruin the country".
Of course they don't mean that literally the whole country is corrupt and all Indians are awful, but people not from there wouldn't understand that it's an exaggeration. They just don't have the cultural context to understand how to interpret that. The American way of communicating is not so on the nose, in fact it minimizes negatives and tries to avoid generalizing at all. So again, i don't think they would understand it would just sounds vaguely racist to the average American. So I'm not sure what Bangladeshi view you're talking about is but context really matters.
And most of the desis I know support Harris over Gabard. Surprise surprise-- you cannot easily generalize the views of large groups, especially based on anecdotal evidence. Being Desi has little to do with it.
That's why I don't like the whole business of identity politics. It creates this situation where the minorities you see on TV speaking for minority groups are the ones who are saying the things white people want to hear.
> And most of the desis I know support Harris over Gabard.
I'm not talking about overall support, but instead the particular attacks white Democrats aimed at Gabbard in the 2020 primary (pre-Fox News appearances). It was over things where Gabbard was taking a position that was different from white Democrats, but typical of desis.
I think it’s fair to say that Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi Democrats are typically more socially conservative than white Democrats. Likewise, Indians and Bangladeshis often have an affinity for Russia arising from those countries' alignment with the Soviet Union. E.g.: https://www.telegraphindia.com/culture/books/bengalis-and-th....
I found it weird for white people to be talking so much about south asian identity on one hand, while attacking a south Asian woman in a nasty way for having opinions that a lot of south Asian women have.
In fact, the whole body of thought governing them reminds me too much of the Latin Church. I have no words to express how I detest the kind of thinking behind them.
The digital and public life is so important for many people today that, if you eliminate them there, it's like killing a good chunk of their lives.
These people wage crusades against individual reputations and public/digital lives. Just because they think differently.
So not like killing at all. It is, however, a bit like building an orthodoxy. Which the group formerly in position to build orthodoxy is surprised to learn is an uncomfortable process.
You have to observe that deadly violence was normalized in the past.
It was even entertainment in Rome. Hence, the Colloseum.
Externally, it's evolved, but internally the ideolog is quite similar.
Some of the similarities are:
- divides men and women
- interferes and intends to control families
- demonizes people that are useful to society and accumulate wealth
See, you’re digging your own semantic hole with all this political correctness.
The author of the article still sees it as a necessity. They cannot leave people talking like they want to.
And how many devs who are from black communities offended by the use of these terms, at least before it was made to be an issue in mainstream.
Because right now I feel like this is a "woke feminist" issue.
And I'm not a white person. I've never thought otherwise of these words, but maybe that can be because of the mixed society I grew up in.
We don’t punish people for crimes until we’ve had a look at the context and establish their specific intention (Strict liability withstanding) so why are we not doing the same with words and sentences?
Master/slave debacle is a prime example. Yes it can be used offensively. But for gods sake, look at the context! Annoys me that with all the injustice still prevalent in the world, they choose to fight this instead.
/rant
I think what you're trying to say is that people don't mean to be offensive when they reference slavery this way. And you're right about that. Similarly, if I ask someone how their mom is right after she died, I'm probably not trying to be hurtful. But not intending an outcome doesn't actually prevent you from getting that outcome. If somebody tells you their mom is dead, and you didn't mean to be hurtful, you won't keep asking after her, because now you're aware of the effect it has.
The Partition of India was a horrific tragedy and killed 2 million people. Does this mean we should do away with partition_sort ?
In terms of analogies, we're much closer to if we'd decided to call a "delete all" function the "genocide" function. If computer programmers had widely used that terminology for the last three decades it might sound a bit less weird to us and the cohort of people shouting "that's such an inappropriate analogy" might be just a small group of liberals, but I'm not sure their argument about it being a poor word choice would be entirely baseless.
However, since Slav and slave evolved into distinct words and slavery is a larger phenomenon than the Partition, I'd say your point stands.
And "slave" isn't an analogy to transatlantic slavery.
And anyways, who decides which words are associated with bannable tragedies?
Who decides if particular words are potentially inappropriate? People decide, including people working for corporations that make linting tools or industry bodies like the MPAA. Ironically the latter is an actual monopoly that literally does attempt to prevent people from watching films based on its word lists rather than simply suggesting alternative words, but the longstanding practice of people being fussy about certain words is apparently only terrifying or Orwellian when the potentially offended party is minorities.
Would those not be inappropriate because it's just borrowing terminology?
There are only a few of these progressive changes I find really valid, but this is one I can understand. It's not that it's killing people, it's just if we can change it then why not. It is kind of weird to use, given the history of slavery in the majority of the world. Can't we just not have references to slavery in the BIOS of my computer?
Calling a "landlord" a proprietor (example from the article) does nothing to change the actual dynamic between landlord and tenant. You have only changed the symbols you use without affecting any meaningful change in the world. Maybe a devil's advocate would say, "Symbols evoke feelings evoke action and thus we are affecting people's actions". That's the strongest counter-argument I can think of, and it's not very convincing either. Not sure how a landlord would suddenly change how they act because they are now proprietors.
"On metaphor, master is a useful example. The basic concept of the master as a leader or person of authority has extended into a great many metaphorical usages. One of them was its use as a title on plantations worked by slaves...That makes sensible the elimination of certain other uses of the word, which parallel and summon the slavery one...in the 1970s, such schools had just begun a call to stop having male teachers called "master" and female teachers called "teacher," in favor of having all instructors called simply "teacher"...This meant that young subordinates had been calling white men in positions of authority "master," after all—including, by the 1970s, more than a few black students. And today's call to stop referring to technology parts as "master" versus "slave" attachments follows in the same vein, as it directly channels what was so offensive about the slavery usage...However, other extensions of the word master do not meaningfully resemble the plantation one, and only a kind of obsession could explain spraying for them now. Are we to consider it racist to refer simply to mastering a skill? To master tape as opposed to dupes...The plantation meaning of master was one tributary of a delta of extensions of the word; it should go, but we need not fill in the entire delta."
And for emphasis I'm pulling this one out of the main block:
** "To be human is to make distinctions." **
https://reason.com/2020/08/12/is-your-master-bedroom-racist/
That said, if the word "landlord" organically fell out of favor and out of usage to be replaced by something else I wouldn't care. Language is always evolving, and usually we don't make a big deal out of it. It's mundane and can often be helpful. It doesn't have to become a proxy for culture war arguments if we don't make it one.
But to have Google (or any AI) in charge of this... just... no. Admittedly that's a common stance for me but I think it's well justified here anyway.
I didn't think of that. I always thought of it as "lording over" something. As in she's the "lord of the land."
That said, a landlord and a property owner are not the same thing. Many (most?) apartment buildings are owned by one company and managed by another.
But she wouldn't be; she'd be the "lady of the land".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxRkHeQ7-B8
A caveat of bending over backwards to be as inclusive as possible is that sometimes you end up including people who are just plain nuts. You end up enshrining the personal problems of a handful of people into company policy.
Are you suggesting that it's "plain nuts" to be against private ownership of land?
I think these two groups would prefer "landlord" over "proprietor" because "landlord" has a much more negative connotation and probably inspires a visceral reaction in anyone who's had a bad landlord. Only the "male" thing makes any sort of sense from a left wing POV.
I don't like that landlords exist, but that's an inordinately stupid reason to try and get rid of a word. Surely noone believes that by sensoring a word you get rid of that which the word describes.
Please don't assume this. In the southern US in the late 80s and early 90s, "landlady" was a term that was very commonly used for female "landlords". I'm not sure if it's specifically regional, though.
I once was scolded by a United Airlines flight agent at Denver when I expressed disappointment that my full-fair buisness class ticket was downgraded to coach because of an operational change. I said, perhaps a bit flippantly, "I didn't pay for a J ticket (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fare_basis_code#Booking_class) to sit in steerage."
She replied: "Sir! How dare you compare people flying coach to cattle!"
(Of course, the word "steerage" has nothing to do with cattle. We sent a Fed-Ex to United corporate telling them we didn't like being scolded and got an apology and a full refund for that flight. This was in 1998 or so. I doubt that would happen today.)
I would believe the GP's second hypothesis; it's hard to imagine who else would even think to substitute "property owner" for "landlord" (it's not even accurate!)
Google wouldn’t be my first choice, but it’s nice that someone is able to dedicate attention to this.
- It would be nice to improve our antiquated language. I’m thankful that other people have the time and expertise to work on this.
- Changing language by decree from our tech overlords is dystopian. Google in particular I don’t trust to act in good faith.
Both thoughts can be held simultaneously.
Language constantly evolves through use, and historically this has worked very well. Why is it suddenly necessary for people to "work on" it?
A significant number of people, perhaps even a heavy majority, think there's nothing wrong with "landlord" that needs improvement. Change for change's sake isn't a great justification.
It's worth considering the possibility that the "why" is due to insidious bullying, a miasmatic reframing of language in the false name of unity.
If everyone feels a bit awkward about saying anything, then those who generated the awkwardness gain tremendous power.
It's hard not to secretly suspect that some of these things arise that way-- satire that is so spot on that it gets adopted as the truth.
> and out of usage to be replaced by something else I wouldn't care
Fundamentally that's why language bullying works-- it doesn't matter what words are used so long as the communicating parties understand each other. Not only does it mean that it's not worth it to fight back, it makes anyone who does fight back against it look automatically suspect.
The same is true for a lot of other bullying: ignoring that its bullying deprives it of its power. Or, at least, it denies it of it's power until it doesn't.
But do we want to live in a world where our language is constantly being rewritten-- at a non-zero cost-- by bullies (and their automation)? Reasonable people could debate it.
Now I know people are bored of parallels between reality and 1984, or Brave New World, or whatever other dystopia novels. They were written by authors not prophets after all.
Still, it's impossible for me not to think we're on our way when I read something like
"But do we want to live in a world where our language is constantly being rewritten-- at a non-zero cost-- by bullies"
When talking about a real world situation.
Personally I do not want to live in that world.
You mixed up newspeak, the constructed language the state was inventing, with doublethink, the practice of believing 2 contradictory statements that each support the state in opposing ways (having it both ways).
There have been many PR/issues on github that were either very likely, or certainly submitted by trolls, that have been accepted.
[1] Although nowadays it's common to see master/slave being replaced, back in 2015 it was not common, this one one of the first things that dropped that terminology. The fact that the user is called pcbro and has a picture of PC Principal from South Park, makes it somewhat likely that it was a troll.
[2] I think based on the language used is almost 100% certainly a troll
[1] https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/165 [2] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=People%20of%...
Also quite annoying how they simply tell us what to do, without justifying things. A lot of these would be quite hard to truly argue - i.e. "blind people... can't see things. why exactly is that metaphor inappropriate to talk about visibility?" So they just assume an authoritarian tone and just instruct us in how we should behave.
"grayed-out, greyed-out, gray out, grey out Don't use. Instead, use unavailable."
WTF are these people on about.
Oh it's because they hate certain color words such as "black" and "white", words used by humans to indicate certain reflectivity properties of light; since it would be weird to only prohibit words which contain white or black, they just extend the prohibition to nearby related words.
It’s the same with “the box is checked” to mean “selected” or “redlining a contract” to mean “negotiating.”
The point of inclusive language isn’t some weird political points contest. It’s writing in a manner that’s clear to people of lots of different backgrounds and doesn’t rely on just having to know English idioms or have common shared experiences. Why is blacklist the one that excludes and whitelist the one that includes — you just have to know, English right? But you can avoid the need for that entirely by allowlist and denylist.
There are also cases like "white-glove" where the phrase doesn't just represent the stereotypical "white = good & black = bad" - there is real meaning here, since white is a color which makes dust more visible.
The extension of your logic is that all writing should be geared to people with no knowledge, no historical reference, no firm understanding of the language, no visual or auditory cues (how do you talk about music without harming someone? Seriously, I ask this as a former music columnist). That is not language. [Edit: It's at best a graphic, except even that would be prohibited]. That is the conveyance of minimal information, like, 'don't stand here (in the place formerly known as being in front of a door).' It's completely absurd. It's inhuman. It's bent and wicked.
Words are a tool used to convey meaning mate. Cracking the shits because you've gotta make concessions means you're not seeing a hammer as a hammer
(And elsewhere it's being asserted with equal fury that master/slave replication and assumptions that people are exclusively male shouldn't be flagged because the choice of words doesn't have any deeper meaning...)
Honestly, can you not see how staggeringly self-centred it is to insist that if readers have to Google your idioms that's the beauty of language (even for documents where clarity is more important than linguistic flourishes) but removable squiggly line suggestions are far too much of an imposition on native speakers (who are of course both incapable of making a word choice in error and too vulnerable not to unthinkingly accept Google's suggested alternative in their private documents).
Honestly, the word privilege is overused, but I can't think of anything more apt to describe a cohort of people so far removed from any real threat that the most tyrannical thing they can think of is a clunky grammar check feature.
[1]Ironically, my phone actually insisted on overwriting my pryvate werrds with alternative spellings. Tyranny, I tell you.
You know what's self-centered? Telling the whole world that they're writing the right or wrong way. Believing everyone reads the way you do. Believing you know what words they should use and what their aims are in addressing a reader.
>> Honestly, the word privilege is overused, but I can't think of anything more apt to describe a cohort of people so far removed from any real threat that the most tyrannical thing they can think of is a clunky grammar check feature.
The grammar check feature is the thin end of a wedge. Who's more privileged than someone worried one of the world's largest companies is setting policies that restrict or nudge private language in billions of documents? I guess "more privileged" would be the people who have no understanding of the history of political suppression of language and think that using the word "landlord" is a form of "harm" or "violence" which entitles a company to involve itself in the content of people's letters (and here, any comparison to spell checking is totally disingenuous). Anyone who believes language is "violence" and supports policing it is either a totalitarian or so privileged themselves as to have never seen violence.
It's not a question of being able to turn the feature off: It's the sheer monomaniacal hubris of people who think they have a right to be the voice in someone's ear or on someone's text document, trying to dissuade them from using words you arbitrarily don't like in a bid to control their behavior. That is exactly the nature of tyranny and totalitarianism. Only people with such extreme privilege as to have grown up far away from those things can pretend it's simply promoting "inclusivity".
BTW bro, have you looked at that photo of yourself at Machu Pichu on your website? You're the poster child for privileged people misusing "privilege".
>> whingefests
This also betrays your kind. "Quit whining" is a favorite line of most bullies. You're the kind of bully who gets their hands on a leftist idea instead of a fascist/racist idea, but show precisely the same lack of thought. They do try to make these virtue signaling behaviors and speech patterns easier for frat boys these days - makes you guys easier to switch off whenever they feel like turning accusations of "privilege" against you.
And no, it absolutely isn't disingenuous to suggest that a feature which suggests some words might inadvertently assume the reader is male or has negative connotations isn't somehow qualitatively different to one that tells you your Flesch Kincaid score could be higher, advises you to avoid the passive voice or starting sentences with "but", and even spellchecks have a subjective component (as I'm reminded whenever I decline a tool's suggestion to substitute Noah Webster's spellings for the ones I was taught). All style guide stuff involves judgements by humans based on what they think is better for other humans to read and none involves any behaviour control (at least not unless the style guide checker is your boss).
You can't have it both ways, if word choices are incapable of alienating people it makes bugger all difference to have a software feature with some words suggesting using some different words. If the beaty of words matters deeply to you, maybe their etymology or gender implications matter to some people who are not you too. Personally I'd say people thinking that landlord is a pretty worrisome term are a bit over the top, but they're not half as over the top as people insisting there's something akin to the suppression of political speech about suggesting "proprietor" as an alternative and anyone who doesn't agree with them is a bully.
BTW bro, thanks for checking out my website. Not sure why you think that old pic gives you great insight into my background, but let's just say I haven't lead such a sheltered existence I feel bullied by a user configurable linting tool and people not agreeing with my opinion on linting tools.
A decade of social media has shown that small changes to UIs, news feeds, opt-out features and suggestion algorithms have radically changed human behavior. This is a dark pattern attempt to change human behavior. A neutral tool for typing documents has no business making this an opt-out feature. The aim of it is not to improve people's writing but to literally make people think twice about using certain words because someone, somewhere might be offended by them. The trouble is that when this becomes foremost in one's mind while writing, it absolutely warps the ability to speak honestly. It politicizes everything.
And these are not suggestions made by humans. They are being made by an opaque AI. If that AI decides that a word is politically incorrect, a nudge like this can effectively dampen the usage of that word in practice, without any sort of wider debate.
Consider how this will play out when China and Russia require Docs and other word processors to include "nudges" like this, for example about the Ukraine war, or Tibet. Of course, you can still type what you want to, but the chilling effect of seeing a warning pop up about a word you've just written is enough in many places to make you delete it. Just because it's being done first in the name of inclusivity or social justice and 'who could argue with that?' doesn't make it OK. It's a blatant attempt to control human behavior.
Consider how this already played out when the words in question were profanity. People cracked jokes about the clunkiness of a feature that censored the town of Scunthorpe but nobody old enough to get into cinemas came up with absurd comparisons to the Great Firewall of China or talked about it as mind control or bullying. No slippery slope was fallen down, and despite swear filters being pervasive in style guides and on user generated content tools, self-proclaimed free speech advocates ignored them to the extent they're actually insisting the social justice people did content filters first. I guess it's easier to be indifferent when you don't despise the cause behind it...
The "honesty" is inherent in calling a thing what it is. Red and green still exist, whether or not there are blind people who can't see them. Asking people to avoid the word "red", as in "redlining", is asking people to agree that 2+2=5. Some will do so out of fear. Some will do so because they're browbeaten with retarded arguments like the ones you're giving.
2+2=4. The people who thought the Great Firewall was a good idea for Chinese nationalism are just like you. They believed in doing the best thing for the most people, at the expense of anyone who disagreed with them. And like you, their real reason was not in fact to help anyone; it was showing that they had power to push their agenda.
>> I guess it's easier to be indifferent when you don't despise the cause behind it...
This is the real nut of it. If you find yourself indifferent to something because you're in favor if the cause behind it, but you would be outraged if you were against the cause behind it, then you had better speak out against it - because it will come for you eventually.
It always comes back and bites you. I'm a grandchild of holocaust survivors. No one spoke up for us. You are creating the conditions by which everyone is afraid to speak their mind.
I hope your own people do come for you first, and I'm confident they will find something in your Facebook or Twitter history to kick you out of society as language changes in the next few years and you find yourself left behind. My advice to you then is: Remember that you didn't speak up for anyone else you disagreed with.
This'll be the end of this; I'm done wasting my time on someone who can't understand the basic principles at work here. I hope the best for you and people like you when the fascists take over and tell you which words aren't inclusive of their idea of equity.
I don't think efficiency and universal comprehension is the point at all. Deaf people understand the phrase "loud and clear" just as well as hearing people. Blind people understand "redlining" as well as sighted people do.
Policing every bit of language to cater to every potential group robs the language of its color, which is something I suppose you couldn't say anymore. Robs it of its beauty. Robs it of its poetry. Destroys its capacity for nuance. In the name of what?
Can you possibly be serious? Is your idea of perfect communication something that omits every daily experience of every person who can see, hear, read, and walk? Should these concepts never be mentioned?
How is it "violence" to someone in a wheelchair to talk about walking to the store? They know they're in a wheelchair. They know other people can walk. You think preaching "avoiding the need" for idioms that refer to walking is somehow fixing inequality? It's daft and ludicrous virtue signaling, and worse, it's insulting to everyone you think you're protecting.
[Edit] The worst is, it's a power play. Google should not nudge or dictate the language you use in any document, let alone a private text document! Words are our tools, human tools, to use as we wish to express what we want, the way we want, and you and Google have no right to police them.
> Is your idea of perfect communication something that omits every daily experience…
No, what? It’s about avoiding terms where the context for understanding them are experiences not everyone has — “temba his arms wide” only makes sense to the Darmok.
> How is it "violence" to someone in a wheelchair to talk about walking to the store.
It’s not what are you even taking about? You should not presume that your reader can walk by saying things like “when you are out walking to the store” but there’s literally nothing wrong with mentioning walking.
> Policing every bit of language to cater to every potential group robs the language of its color
So this isn’t true, nobody is trying to force this on all language. But you have to take a step back and reflect on this. Given a hypothetical world where the choice was language color and including groups different from your own experience you really picked the former?
The real choice being presented is between a world where language has many colors as used by many groups when talking within and between groups, and one where everything is supposed to be "inclusive"... an idea based on the feelings or hypothetical feelings of some person, somewhere. You think we should all adjust our language and it's worth removing any color to accommodate that hypothetical person's feelings, and I think that's not only insane, it's an attempt to use phoney virtue to dictate to and feel power over others.
You may as well ask whether I'd choose a world where everyone spoke English rather than one which excluded people by some groups speaking their own language. There are, in fact, linguistic supremacists who think like this, and can frame it as an argument for "inclusivity"... e.g. the Chinese government. What it really amounts to is cultural imperialism.
In other words, by trying to be inclusive about allowlist aren't you taking away opportunity to include ESL folks in that rich history?
Anyone will have to ask/learn about able/denylist behavior anyways on their first encounter, and learning "whitelist" would have a multiplier effect that increases comprehension of the numerous similar usages they will inevitably encounter. That seems like active inclusivity to me, but I wouldn't be surprised if I'm missing something (I hadn't ever thought down this line until I read your comment).
Note: I'm specifically asking about otherwise neutral terms and have come around on avoiding any terms that are still used in the same way as their offensive history (e.g. no master/slave but yes master debater).
Did it even have a suggestion or is every word containing a color just blindly labeled dirty?
Here’s an idea. American Big Tech should form a Uniban Consortium to streamline the process of adding and banning new harmful words of the month. Then your OS update could come with support for, say, Unicode 20.0 and Uniban 6.0: five new emojis and fifty new words banned!
Btw, the word main should probably be put on a future batch; too similar to “man” to be comfortable.
If they could they'd ban the letter X to prevent people typing "sex"
Giving these dummies what they want won't defuse anything. Thus far, doing so has not retarded the progress of this sort of language policing, but has led to increasingly insane demands. It's like handing your lunch money over to a bully in the hopes she will stop bullying you.
I think the way to stop outrage culture is to stop incentivising 'outrage' by refusing to indulge these lunatics.
We don't have to all be helpful, logical or anodyne all the time, either. Repressing what you want to say is unhealthy and also leads to dishonest debate. We don't need to be coddled and protected from some speech by algorithms. What we need to do is learn to see the rhetorical flaws and rebut them - as you just have (although, as I said, those flaws were there on purpose, as a layer of meta-meaning in sarcastic word choice that would fly over the head of an algorithm).
> every parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied
I could tell you were being sarcastic, but the fact remains your said what you said. Sarcasm is great for tearing bad things down, but useless for building anything to replace it.
I am not a fan of this Clippy shit either, but I can see value in things I don't like. The world needs more nuance, not less. And the world needs people to be willing to explain the nuance, not serve it as an inside joke for those who already get it.
I also don't want an anodyne and bland world, but I believe some communication should be that way. In fact, I believe the world would be a better place if the populist messaging were more lower common denominator, and our personal communications more dynamic. Not because it legally has to be, but because it helps preserve the status quo (which I selfishly like).
I think there are other reasons to care about the "lowest common denominator" (which really means, people who don't think like me) besides to manipulate or gain something from them. I believe everyone has value as human beings, and we'll build a better society if everyone understands the conversation.
I present you the beautiful translation of hungarian gender-less sentences to english:
ő csinos. ő okos. ő csúnya. ő jó.
becomes
she is pretty. he is clever. she is ugly. he is good.
I can't wait for inclusive warnings to come to non-english languages.
This on the other hand looks like a hand-crafted blacklist of words that they want to remove from the language, I have no idea how would I train an AI which would classify "motherboard" as inappropriate.
I believe you just need to give it emotions.
Well, this doesn't necessarily show you facts about society because there's no particular reason to think the training set distribution is the same as anything in the real world.
The alternative is they are carefully curating a training set (google historically unwilling to do anything manually) or writing one themselves???
It's frankly impossible that they have a training set without any biases, though I'm sure they worked to eliminate the ones they could think of (which itself would have bias).
Ő jóképű
Becomes, wait for it
She is handsome
Just like in English, handsome is used to compliment a man, and pretty to compliment a woman.
Google Docs will “warn you away from inappropriate words” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31086310 - April 2022 (964 comments)
While we’re at it, let’s just gut the English language of anything remotely related to gender, race, or color. Then we can go after Latin-based languages that use gender at the core of their grammar.
"Good job, you won, you made me stop using a perfectly fine word that was uniformly well understood, and replace it with another perfectly fine word that is also uniformly well understood. Nothing changed, but now at least you get to take credit for it. Good for you."
I especially find the term “birthing person” particularly cringey and offensive and I imagine women do as well. Humanity was perfectly fine with the word “woman” (in whatever language you choose) for as long as we invented language, but then some elitist academic comes along and thinks they can simply erase that because…reasons?
Inclusion does not imply exclusion!
As a Google employee expressing my own opinion and observations of company culture, I can say that these are 100% not mistakes. Many Google employees are just so out of touch with the real world that they believe it is the duty of Google Docs to change the English language to exclude the words "landlord", "motherboard", and even "mother" in most contexts (sub with birthing person).
This may seem unbelievable, but the word "motherboard" is literally banned within Google and you are required to use "mainboard" instead. You are not allowed to use this word in documentation or code, and you're also not allowed to say it privately in chats or emails.
George Carlin's skit couldn't be more timely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isMm2vF4uFs
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/450328-don-t-you-see-that-t...
Two examples:
Allowlist and denylist are much clearer to a kid learning about computers than whitelist or blacklist. If you've never heard of whitelist before, it's sounds like a list of things that are white. If you've never of allowlist, it's pretty obvious what it means - a list of things that are allowed.
Similarly, mainboard is clearer than motherboard. Mainboard implies there's one main board. Motherboard could be more ambiguous to someone who's never seen the inside of a computer. Are there two boards, mother and father? Do boards somehow inherit from one another? Is there a grandmother board that's even bigger? Obvious to us, but not obvious to a kid learning computers for the first time.
Not saying these terms are better (there's a huge switching cost and the terms are less colorful), but do want to point out there are dimensions to consider beyond inclusivity. One benefit is better language precision.
Am I crazy or does mainboard strongly imply there's more than one -- eg main, supporting / secondary, etc? Stories have a main character which is almost by definition not the only character in the narrative.
Edit: isn't the videocard technically a "non-main-board"? I mean nobody called it a "daughterboard" but it kind of technically is one isn't it? And so if "mainboard" implies the existence of "non-main-boards"... that accurately describes its relationship with the video card, which is a baord.
However, terms like motherboard and whitelisting are just a few in the universe of complicated (yet gender neutral) terms like GPU, CPU, DDR, parity, firewall, IP6, etc.
Of course, that is not a reason to not improve the language where one can, but I don't know if it will help that much in CS.
A short-film/parody on how an extreme obsession with inclusive speech makes it impossible to communicate clearly without consequences.
Source: I also work at Google.
This is the public one: https://developers.google.com/style/word-list
I don't want to share the name of the internal one publicly, but anyone at Google can ping me if they want help finding it, or they can search "respectful words"
I’ve mostly cleansed myself of these words while I’m at work but I generally let the shit fly once Im out of the setting
I just look at it like any other corporate politics, you have to play along to get anywhere
Outside of work I’m my own person and use any word I want. Retard, cripple, bum, idiot, motherboard, man, master, slave, fuck, shit, piss!
See! Fire me Amazon I fucking dare you! :)
The mote in the employee's eye vs. the log in the company's eye
I did get an angry code review response from a fellow engineer once, after writing in a commit description (not the actual code) something like "this is a stupid fix but it stops the linter from bitching about so and so" - for using both the words "stupid" and "bitch". I guess the second one was on point but referring to my own work as "stupid" is pretty okay in my book. I would never ever describe anyone else's work as such.
But someone reading your commit message doesn't know that. Someone new to the company might see your change and think "That looks reasonable to me", but see that you called it "stupid", and start to doubt themselves.
Although it makes technology more boring, I think there is some value in using precise words over emotive words. Perhaps using the word "pedantic" instead, or "no-op", would have conveyed more information, without disparaging the amount of intelligence that went into making it (or into the design/configuration of the linter).
Odd thing to do. "Black" is synonymous with darkness, hidden, off, empty space, and things of that nature. For this reason "blacklist" works. There is no clash with people, or any disrespect.
Politically correct OCD invents problems. Then dictate to others how they should solve those problems. Add penalties for those who don't follow the prescribed solutions to invented problems, and we find ourselves in 2022 looking at Google's efforts to solve the invented problems.
The author of the Vice article states that by removing master/slave and black/whitelist, it "addresses years of habitual bias in tech terminology".
Accusations of bias are just accusations. We can't "find" bias on the grounds of matching words in technical contexts to the same words in other contexts.
In the S&M world, the context is not actual master and slave, it's a new context that encompasses consent and good times. Likewise, the technical context is not one that involves people, but machines communicating under specific rules which "master/slave" adequately describes.
This is meaningless. I work at a large organization that has banned terms like "master/slave" and "whitelist/blacklist", and I can also readily find these terms through internal search, simply because it's taking a while for the requirements to be implemented and enforced.
> I could not find anything referencing a banned non-inclusive words policy in the employee policy guide.
This also doesn't mean a lot, unless you've comprehensively searched through every possible location for the relevant policy, as almost every organization in existence has terrible knowledge management.
Go talk directly to someone in HR and tell me if they tell you that those words aren't restricted.
The same can't be said for people who are blind or deaf.
Do you have any data on that? It does not coincide with my anecdotal experience. I'm in a Math/CompSci department and there's zero trans people here (that I know of), while there are some in other departments. Anyhow, trans people are a tiny percentage of the total population, so it would be hard to have somewhat solid statistics on them.
There was a smattering in other afaik. I was on the board of the LGBT club so I knew at least the ones who were out / came frequently.
Several impressive videos on social media have shown that programming without using vision or even hands is perfectly possible, there are very few good reasons why such underrepresentation shouldn't be corrected for. In fact, I believe for many disabilities a job in fields like data science or programming would be much easier to adjust for disabilities than many other sectors where interactivity is key.
I'd bet the theater kids gave CS a run for its money. Or the art kids. Just fewer gay men and lesbians in CS.
https://www.eurogamer.net/twitch-removes-blind-playthrough-t...
It boils down to a few things:
1.) A lot of this identity politics is coming from upper-middle class people of color OR white queer people, who are using it to make money and boost their careers. The disabled are, in America at least, far less likely to have careers to boost. This is why the type of disability activism you see in identity politics is usually limited to mental illnesses.
2.) The disabled, to some degree, disprove some of the ideological underpinnings of modern identity politics. Modern identity politics is based on the idea that if we change society/fix discrimination, then everybody (all groups) will have the same rates of success. But even if social discrimination didn't exist, those of us who are disabled literally can't do things able-bodied people can do. There's an undercurrent of 'discrimination is bad BECAUSE all these groups can be normal/productive/participate in capitalism' and the disabled make people confront that they don't actually believe all people are equal. They believe all PRODUCTIVE people are equal, but they can't say that, because then they sound like those 'horrible' right wingers.
3.) Fighting on behalf of the disabled doesn't make people feel like they're 'on the right side of history'. I've experienced a shit ton of sexism and homophobia from right-wingers, but most conservatives would be horrified at insulting me for having MS and agree that I should get help if I need it. They just disagree on how it should be done. That's harder to fight about, which means it's harder for the media to turn into a frenzy, and that's where people on both sides get their 'marching orders'.
You are using the term "mental illness" in a way that seems to exclude people for whom it is obviously a disability. These people are characterized by:
1. One or more hospitalizations that are not voluntary.
2. Diagnosis by medical professionals, not psychologists or oneself.
3. Having to take medications forever, at least in order to be employable or generally take care of themselves, that cause substantial long term effects including diabetes, brain damage, disfiguring tics and involuntary movements, recurring tumors, sudden death, and other problems.
The people you are thinking of, who act like it is possible to normalize and be open about mental illness, are, let's say "type A", while I have defined above what I'll call "type B".
I just want to call your attention to the fact that "type B" people are erased as much or more by "type A" as the visibly disabled that you acknowledge. You are inadvertently promoting that erasure.
"Type B" people bridge both worlds but can't talk about it normally. I do recognize the emotions regarding "type A". I recognize why they do what they do, and I see you embracing their compulsive erasure from existence of "type B".
The issue of productivity is difficult, if you think there is a right answer. If someone can work, at incredible cost, should they not take pride? Yeah, it's luck that I, or anyone, can work, but you wouldn't sneer at someone with an intellectual disability that was bagging groceries, would you?
Mental disabilities are frequently easier to hide (much like being bi is easier to hide than being homosexual), which means that people with mental illnesses/disabilities are more likely to know how people treat them before and after finding out they're disabled (as opposed to someone whose disability is physical or intellectual who are more likely to always be seen as disabled and not see that on-off switch to ableism). People with mental illnesses are also more likely to have difficulties stemming from stigma and erasure vs. physical limits (I'm not saying any difficulties are worse than the others; they're just different) and intersectionality/identity politics has a lot of focus on correcting or changing behavior and thoughts to improve society.
Intersectionality/identity politics, in 2022, don't really do a great job at changing physical reality, which tends to be more necessary for physical and intellectual disability activism.
There are also historical reasons for the intertwining of mental illness advocacy and intersectionality (the rise of intersectionality/id politics in the upper-middle class coinciding with the rise of psychiatry/therapy/ the move to destigmatize mental illness, for example, whereas the sensory and physically disabled communities had their own activist movements/organizations for decades/centuries beforehand which made them more likely to have disagreements).
> Yeah, it's luck that I, or anyone, can work, but you wouldn't sneer at someone with an intellectual disability that was bagging groceries, would you?
Of course not, but I'm not a capitalist (or a communist, for that matter). The point is more that a lot of people into intersectional activism claim to also be anti-capitalist, but their embrace of diversity often depends on diverse people being able to work and if they advocated for the disabled, they'd have to confront that they can't use 'disabled people can do anything able bodied people can do' as a reason, which means they'd have to articulate some reason diversity matters other than to let marginalized people/ their pet companies make $$$.
I just think if said grocery bagger had to stop bagging groceries that they don't lose value as a human. Of course everyone should be proud of what they can contribute to society and their communities.
I understand where you're coming from, but the implication that someone with a mental disability has control over how they're perceived, or even accurate knowledge is wrong.
If they share information, there's no going back, and it can have devastating consequences.
If they don't intentionally share information, it may leak out anyway. Everybody knows what "crazy eyes" are, and gets uncomfortable if someone rambles on too much or shows excessive emotion.
If I look normal, but I have difficulty walking, and sometimes limp a bit, nobody is going to kick my leg when they notice, to prove that I'm not dangerous and they're not ill but I am. And if I share that I have a club foot, or that my lungs are damaged so I don't get enough oxygen, it's not likely to destroy relationships or seem relevant to share with everyone.
On the other hand, the slightest hint that someone might be mentally unstable leads to immediate concern - is this person a threat? Everybody knows this, and every crazy person feels exactly the same way around someone else that might be crazy. They feel it from both sides, but you have felt it from at least one.
So the way you prove someone isn't a threat is by testing whether they are vulnerable, and if they react incorrectly to that test. You prod them, you try some BS to see if they get upset or respond "normally". It's like being out on a tree limb and hearing a crack. You hold on to something and wiggle it a little to see if it's about to break. Everybody knows this from life experience.
I guess what I'm saying is that the uncertainty and ambiguity around mental illness is its own horror show of catch-22s, not a kind of privilege.
Someone with serious mental illness has to be tranquilized more than just enough to function normally, but enough to suppress normal reactions to provocation.
And once that is accomplished, they cannot share information about their condition indiscriminately because they are totally vulnerable. They can't casually ramble on about their thought process, because it will sound paranoid, no matter how controlled their actions are. Even to other mentally ill people because everybody thinks the same way, because it's logical but awful.
The choices that someone with an invisible condition other than mental illness, have, do not exist for someone with it. Every case where it is suspected, entails the threat of being outside the basic social contract.
>I just think if said grocery bagger had to stop bagging groceries that they don't lose value as a human
Sure, what I meant is that if their job is an immense source of pride and purpose in life, then aren't they in effect promoting the work-based ethic that bothers you? How can you have values without devaluing people who have different values?
Maybe the pendulum will stop or swing back, but "that's not going to catch on" has been wrong for nearly two decades.
Or repeating the cult dogma in a cult.
This isn’t about rationality or what is ridiculous. It is about proving that you are part of a group. And to prove that people have done insane things for thousands of years. Much worse than calling a mother a birthing parent tbh, but it shows you what direction we are headed.
And interestingly this seems to apply to corporations too. They too (probably because of management), want to demonstrate they are part of a group/cult.
In this context, what does it mean? For the other stuff, it is easily envisioned that it means official documents need to be scanned for prohibited terms. Ultimately, the term "motherboard" has to at least appear in an official document of banned words. In private chats, do they rely on the other party to turn you in? Is it automatically detected? Are you prevented from actually typing it? Can you post this link [1]?
I'm waiting until they start marking "Latino" as non-inclusive, and start forcing "Latinx".
The "-inx" suffix (when pronounced "inks") somehow makes the word sound more objectifying, sexist and even lewd than the original words.
To be fair, I've literally never heard anyone try to pronounce "latinx" outloud. And I live in one of the most stereotypical liberal/left-wing cities in the US (Seattle). The usage of that term seems to be mostly confined to a vocal twitter/internet minority and written form (whether online or in promotional materials for certain things).
Even here, this term is extremely fringe irl. And I don't think I've ever felt pressured to use it either, given I've never heard it in use (despite my friend group having a couple of people who are very left-leaning and are vocal about it).
I guess tl;dr, don't mistake a fringe vocal minority on the internet for an accurate representation of what it is like to actually live in the US (even when it comes to certain most heavily stereotyped big cities).
I guess you quit listening to NPR before they started using that one. It's ubiquitous now.
What was it that made you quit?
> Don't mistake fringe vocal minorities on the internet for an accurate representation of what it is like to actually live in the US.
They I agree, though this particular example is not just internet fringe.
With that in mind, i guess i mostly meant "people you actually talk to or hear talking not in public news media" when i said that i dont ever hear it said outloud.
I am not disagreeing with you, and sure, your future prediction is not out of the realm of possibilities. I am just saying that I am yet to see it happen as of today. And I don't really care to be outraged about something that isn't a thing yet.
It isn't global warming or some other thing that is difficult to reverse or has some life/death stakes. Language has been perpetually changing, and still is. Really fast, and really wildly. So making a trouble out of "this one word might become used in future in real life at some point, so you should worry about it now" is not something I am really into wasting energy on.
Don't you mean "Thanx"?
Same as "master branch"/"main branch". If there is an equivalent, less fancy and less controversial technical term, by all means let's use that instead. As long as you don't start with "childbearing person board" or "privileged branch" or whatever.
I've never even heard of any controversy over the word "motherboard". I just did some internal searches. It seems to be a well-used word, both in code and in documentation. (I did a code search for both "motherboard" and "mainboard" and they seem to be used by similar amounts, fwiw.)
In fairness, I will say that I do watch my language more closely than I think is really needed:
The terms "whitelist" and "blacklist" are built into my thought-vocabulary. I do find myself switching to "allowlist" and "denylist" as I translate my thoughts in discussions. Not that anyone has ever "called me out" if I slipped up with "whitelist".
The fact that it’s in a list at all should make you reconsider your employment with them.
The inmates run the asylum at Google, just because they haven’t come for your corner/fiefdom yet doesn’t mean they won’t.
More importantly: when I was there, I actively fought against this kind of shit, but it was clear at some point that the content moderation team had enough sway with execs that they were going to continue this sort of idiocy untrammelled.
Once you stop thinking of companies as single entities and instead as large kingdoms containing many fiefdoms it starts making more sense.
You can see it even in this thread, there exist Lists and tools that can be used as weapons against other groups, even if sometimes they're not currently being used because they're not currently at war.
That said, consider that leaving just means one less opponent for the other side.
Meanwhile, Google is rotten at the executive layer. No amount of good people working for them will fix things.
I'm going to be charitable and suggest this person is just accidentally leaving out context, rather than deliberately trying to rile people up because they disagree with something :)
The figurative part of "motherboard" is pretty vague: it's just larger than the "daughterboards" and in charge of them--it doesn't birth or nurture them or do anything that's stereotypically maternal.
As for whether it's the main board or not, surely that's a matter of opinion. An AI researcher would be much more interested in what the GPU board is doing than on what the motherboard is doing.
I've heard claims that it's a motherboard because it has female connectors (i.e., sockets), but that's sort hard to square with the contemporary coinage of "daughterboards."
The idea that a large, influential organization plays along with the idea that "motherboard" should in any way be filtered is as absurd as filtering the words "table" or "stereo".
But in typical HN fashion, i'm sure you know better. Just like the people who say that X or Y should take 2 people over a weekend. Remind me again what your experience is here to say they are wrong? Are you a culture expert of some sort? It's really not obvious from your HN profile or comment exactly why you think your expertise should overrule theirs.
Otherwise, i'd say it sure is fun to get upset and pretend it's the reactionary woke police, rather than a group of people carefully thinking something through.
I think your militant stance on the subject is more problematic than someone else's view that the word motherboard is not offensive.
Also, advocating for some narrow unknown group of people to have exclusive right to define language gives off a little cultish vibes.
See, this is the whole issue right here. It's not about a single culture. It's hundreds. This wordlist is for global products with literally billions of users in literally hundreds of countries.
Yes, it requires experts to know what will be inoffensive to all of them at once (or at least, the vast majority).
Your "narrow unknown group of people" is really "people who are experts at language and culture and understand this".
Paying and asking them to help figure out how to create common standards that will cover the majority of the hundreds of cultures at once does not seem cultish or militant at all to me?
It is something literally every single company with literally billions of global users in hundreds of cultures does.
Otherwise they end up naming their product something offensive to a culture, etc.
News stories about those gaffes occur literally all the time, so i'm sort of shocked you are really trying to argue that trying to avoid them is somehow cultish.
I am probably one of the least "politically correct" people you will find, and i'm not even all that progressive in the scheme of things, yet this clearly makes sense to me. So I look at this, and see HN having a huge overreaction because they are upset the world is becoming a lot more politically correct for no obvious benefit.
That bothers me too - a lot in fact. I just don't see the particular thing complained about in this part of the thread (a wordlist used to ensure google doesn't say offensive things in product documentation) all that objectionable.
The original article, about offensive/inclusive/etc AI writing nudges, bothers me about 1000x more than the wordlist.
I would urge you to actually seek facts first, rather than make them up yourself just because you are sure you are right. It's not a particularly helpful approach.
It's quite obviously not a carefully thought through decision, it's more or less random machine-gunning of random words that happen to have the word mother in them because ... well ... because they think motherhood is offensive? Presumably? It's impossible to discern any logic here. This supposedly expert decision is already leading to near universal derision towards Google, a once universally respected name. That derision is now also coming from left-wing media outlets that you'd expect to be fully supportive, like VICE. That's because it's quite obviously insane. Nobody is looking at this and thinking "about time", they're thinking "wtf is that?!".
For the former, it's none of the things you say, and AFAICT, you have precisely zero knowledge of either the decision making process, or how it is used, etc.
So saying "it's quite obviously x" seems trivially wrong.
No one in this chain said that, however. Some person gave an opinion and you then replied with "you don't have any knowledge on this". Even though in this case, it is indeed a cultural question which everyone has some knowledge and likely opinion on.
If you want to encourage others to seek more information out (if it's out there), then sure. But at some point it just sounds like you're appealing to an authority that doesn't exist here. And honestly, who IS the authority of a thing like language and its usage is a conversation in and of itself.
I would be interested to see the rationale for the change, if it is so clearly benign and not part of any secret-sauce or competitive advantage - similar to the AP Stylebook.
This isn't a debate about cloud security, or strongly-typed languages, or the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and its impact on the Earth. It's a cultural discussion, and I believe citizens should be encouraged to form an opinion, rather than insulted and berated for having one.
You actually didn't defend your position in any way on the topic, you only berated me for not having faith in closed-door internal Google processes to alter the use of the English language.
From another comment: >you have precisely zero knowledge of either the decision making process, or how it is used, etc.
Isn't that the issue being brought up? Let's be charitable: Could it be that "mainboard" is the English term used by ESL speakers across the world, and "motherboard" is only used in the US/UK? Perhaps. I know you work at Google, but I am surprised at your surprise that people would be skeptical of that company's motivation.
I'd be interested in your opinion on the first-order topic, and also why you're so angry in the second place.
Even google translate mainboard to "carte mère" !!!
These departments have an expertise, sure. But part of being an intelligent, critically thinking person is knowing when people are speaking within the scope of their expertise and when they aren’t. You and I both know that this wouldn’t hold up under Daubert. This isn’t like telling you not to name your car the “Nova” in Spanish-speaking countries. It’s like trying to make “LatinX” happen.
So this list is real, you own it, and you acknowledge that as a continued employee you are supporting this nonsense?
At any rate, while I wouldn't go out of my way to squelch the word, I wouldn't go out of my way to insist on it, either. "Logic board" and "mainboard" both work and get the point across.
i mean there are some bad words you shouldn’t use, but i just can’t grasp why is there something like “motherboard” on that list?
could you please explain to me, a non-native english speaker, why using "mainboard" is better than "motherboard"?
Basically I don't believe that "precaution" you mention is an apathetic but cautious person. These changes are more often motivated by someone who thinks "this might offend someone so I will take offense to it too".
Motherboard. It took me a few moments to guess as to why this is a "problem". Obviously due to the word mother. Let me roll my eyes.
Frankly it is completely absurd to be offended about a word that is part of a process that keeps our very species existing. Sadly I would not be surprised at all if there are google employees who are offended on behalf of "people being offended".
People are wild. You can find small groups of people who do and think insane things. We as a society should not try to cater to every possible sensibility. That's a recipe for disaster.
I'm tired of this sort of shallow, performative, language policing. I'm (I believe) a socially progressive, inclusive person, but this shit makes me tired. Just fucking leave it alone and spend our collective fucks to give on something that actually matters.
This doesn't seem too unlikely. I've been hoping tech would go this way -- We're doing IVF in June, and it's still hit-or-miss whether it'll work.
In that future, if someone identifies as nonbinary but still wishes to have a child, neither "mother" nor "father" would accurately describe them. And since a womb isn't required for a baby, there's not necessarily any "mother" (nor "father") in that scenario.
That said, I think the argument is "mainboard is better than motherboard for the same reason that denylist is better than blacklist -- the whole point is so that people don't have to be reminded of social issues whenever the word comes up in discussion."
Is there not still an egg supplier and a sperm supplier?
If nothing else, maybe we should revisit the language as a whole and its obsession with overloaded homonyms.
/rant
It seems like people who object to motherboard don't understand analogy?
The problem is that you had a motherboard and daughter boards, those were the accepted terms, and never fatherboard or son boards, never parentboard or child boards. Why were they gendered female in the first place?
Because they had “female connections,” which is to say their use is in plugging pins into their sockets.
Obviously that is a sexual analogy that did not age particularly well, this idea that a motherboard is the motherboard because you shove stuff into it. So people started replacing with mainboard because it makes more sense...
well, for this context, it's called a "motherboard" because "mainboard" was already a thing. Motherboard was to distinguish at the time how this new board can be expanded upon by plugging in ports. There was no real malice here, it was just fancy marketing term that stuck.
Ultimately, we're humans and we try to anthropize all kinds of things in life to make them "feel relatable", be it animals, boats, hurricanes, or yes, computer. so that extends to our language as well. Especially in marketing where the goal is to make customers feel good and close the sale. There may be a conversation on WHY we do this, but starting that conversation on the foot of "well people just want to be sexist" won't get us anywhere.
> "Avoid referring to people in divisive ways. For example, instead of referring to people as native speakers or non-native speakers of English, consider whether your document needs to discuss this at all"
https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation#...
Your claim is somehow going a little viral. You have a responsibility to try to correct it.
And to those who say this is not inclusive to the colorblind, I say traffic lights
But I think we can agree that the goal when choosing these names isn’t really being concise and easy to use
Retarded differential equations (RDEs) are differential equations having retarded arguments.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037704270...
And for those who would like to change this, any change to a pilot's routine has a chance of being the thing that pushes an incident over the edge into a crash. Would it be worth it?
I'm not saying this is a large set of people. But it looks like some of them have power at github.
I guess if you're doing software for the airline industry you cannot use github.
Well, honestly I wouldn't use github for anything if money depended on it, because of their record of "firing" customers who don't toe the line on their exact politics.
[1] I'm quoting training material that even passed HR review in corporate education DEI here. It's not hyperbole.
`main` is better. It's shorter, it's more descriptive, and costs nothing to remove something someone might find offensive.
It's pretty much an all around win.
"Why does my git say main and not master? Did I break it?"
"Why cant I push to master like the 100x tutorials show? I get errors!"
Also if your tutorials are using a base repository to work from, then you can still have the branch "master" it's just not default. So your existing repos should still work. And if you changed your repo then you should be responsible for updating your documentation to reflect that. It's just good practice.
I struggle to come up with any two terms that make this more clear than "master" and "slave". Just because we've abolished chattel slavery, doesn't mean we should avoid the very words themselves when they are appropriate. Destruction of meaning is far worse than some abstract offense that doesn't seem reasonable to take on behalf of a computer process.
Don't tell me you're still using bare pointers, `new` and `delete` in your C++ classes instead of using smart_ptr fields, or explicitly declaring local variable types instead of using `auto`...
In reality each change that requires updates to documentation (or code) is of course not actually zero cost.
Adapt or die is the motto out here.
This is pretty much the view of the left now :p
See how this works? It is also definitely not without cost. It is not free to change all of your documentation and you will inevitably have to be exposed to it anyway because not everyone will have changed it, so it's ultimately not doing anything anyway.
The communication cost of the change is not free. Do you think the internal wiki and new-hire git training materials all updated themselves?
It wasn't a large process change. Most of our git users are competent git users. But I billed hours dealing with it.
I still have people here who haven't touched a repository that uses "main" instead of "master". They have better things to do with their lives than lurk social media focused on programming. They don't know yet. Eventually they'll pull something with "main" instead of "master". Can I get your phone number so you can be the one to explain to them?
But a master copy or version of something like a master recording or gold master for pressing records is different from merely "main".
Applied to software they are similar but not identical concepts, and neither is in any way wrong or harmful to anyone.
It's a small enough issue that it's not worth fighting very hard over, but, the rationale for the change, and especially for anyone trying to tell anyone else they have to do that change, is still invalid and the word master actually applies better if that's how you're using that branch. It has nothing to do with slave bosses.
Here you go…
> costs nothing to remove something someone might offensive
It might break scripts, aliases, and any general automation (CI, etc) with a baked in main branch assumption
All of these are true! I agree, "main" is a better name.
However, as to the larger point, the individuals and groups advocating for these changes also don't advocate for similar changes (that is, things that have good benefits but come with a very high cost to implement due to breaking backwards compatibility) around technologies/terms that they don't consider to be "problematic".
That strongly suggests that the driver isn't to improve technology, it's to shape language, with occasional incidental technological benefits - and the ignored technological regressions (it's harder to say "allowlist" than "whitelist", for instance, or to write applications that have a field to place in the user's preferred pronouns than just not address the user using pronouns at all).
I actually know a social-justice oriented trans woman online who strongly advocates for the use of Tau instead of Pi because it is simpler and easier to learn. So sample of 1 there.
Tau vs Pi is a perfect microcosm of this debate with the social justice arguments removed. See also metric vs imperial.
The benefits are small but non-zero and localized to a handful of people, the new terminology is substantially simpler and cleaner, and the costs are primarily related to inertia and the comfort of people experienced with The Old Way.
But there is a cost. You're losing a battle in the war of free speech vs Orwellian thought control.
The woke (an offshoot of last-wave feminism, currently promoted mainly by the control-left strain of the Democratic party) are lying; they're not actually offended, they're just using that as an excuse (propaganda) and as an emotional appeal, to get you to agree to their arguments, and cede power to them. This is most obvious with "Latinx" which is pushed by white journalists & activists but which isn't even supported by the overwhelming majority of Latinos and Latinas in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx
Don't believe me? Listen to what they (the woke) say themselves!
> I wanted to start by focusing on the obvious one, Its harder for them to object to just one to start with, then once they admit the logic, we can expand the list
That phrase is going to die soon and it never picked up in Latin America. Most likely the queer community in Latin America will come up with more effective slang. It took the US queer community decades, a century? To reclaim and come up with effective phrases -- I think the main issue here is lack of patience and a somewhat condescending attitude from American liberals that we, the actual hispanic diaspora, need our hands held.
There is also what I've argued is a hierarchy of needs issue at play with LatinX. The problems facing the queer community in Latin America are more severe than those facing the US community, because it is a younger community in a more conservative atmosphere. Therefore, the effort is better spent advocating for table stakes, like marriage equality in some countries and reduced violence towards queer people -- there is no time to be wasted, right now, on the exact, precise terminology to use. And LatinX is not a way to win hearts and minds in this process.
Edit: this is NOT support for Google's product, which clearly broken and not useful. This is an explanation of why LatinX specifically is not a good counter-example to `main` versus `master`. I hope this pre-empts someone coming in and calling me all 'woke' or whatever is the cool phrase for dismissing people these days.
The fact the term is dying further reinforces my point: it failed. No power gained. Does optionally calling master 'main' give people power? Do you really believe that? As far as I can tell, the 'wokes' you are so afraid of seem to be failing pretty often recently. If I believed in the existence of the 'woke' monster under my bed, and they had this track record, I would simply ignore them.
Did 'wokeism' stop Disney from losing its special tax status in Florida? No.
Did 'wokeism' stop Texas from passing laws restricting transgender students and their families? No.
Did 'wokeism' stop the abortion bounty laws from passing in Texas? No.
Has 'wokeism' prevented the recent book bannings across the US; for example, the recent banning of math books in Florida? No.
Was 'wokeism', the root of this Orwellian system you propose will engulf us, the reason why state government in Florida censored the phrase 'climate change' in state congress? I would be very surprised.
Who exactly is gaining or losing power here? And why are you so adamant that the culture war will somehow involve GitHub?
I simply cannot wrap my head around it all.
Since you suggest it “costs nothing to remove something someone might find offensive”, I propose it be changed to something else instead of main.
\s
As far as "uncomfortable connotations", would you agree that that's a subjective claim?
I don't like that forced slavery is a thing, but I'm capable of handling context-specific word meanings, and of not getting emotional due to alternative meanings.
Why? I think that slavery is bad only if the slaves are people. I want machines to be my slaves! (non-sentient machines only, dear future AI overlords!)
Are we going to remove "duplicate" because we can somehow imagine that genetically identical twins are offended by this?
Are we going to remove "admittance" (inverse of impedance) because people will be uncomfortable when reminded that they weren't admitted to their first choice institution?
These are all equally ridiculous to the master/slave debacle.
Your use of the word is violence.
/s?
If it's really the case that the vast majority of employees are feeling stifled by the company policy, isn't that a situation where forming a trade union could help?
The irony of workers rising up against oppressive supposedly left-wing rule is not lost on me, especially if it were to occur in Google's office in Poland.
> A transcribed interview of neo-Nazi and former Klan leader David Duke—in which he uses the N-word and talks about hunting Black people—gets no notes.
Edit: Also interesting that this comment is dropping like a stone in HN's comment ranking, even though currently the comment score is at 1. If I accidentally triggered some anti-flame or anti-profanity filter, I'm sorry.
The feature only seems to trigger when it has a suggestion. I can't imagine what suggestion would be suitable to replace the n word.
Comment order is a function of both score and age. As far as anybody (except those who actually have access to the source), there's no other "hidden" mechanic.
For that role, there's no need to include the n-word, because nobody is going to accidentally put that in a press release.
(Of course, the lists were apparently compiled by total dorks who put in things like "terminate", "dummy variable", and "native". But the list being dumb is a separate issue from it from what you raise).
Or is the idea to just erase the very concept of gender from the world? Welcome to OkCupid, I am a [PERSON] seeking [PERSON]
I want out of this timeline
We'll promise them they can be a boy. They do all the things boys can: can play on the boys sports teams, use the boys lockers and bathrooms... And all the meanwhile we're banishing gendered extracurricular programs and making the bathrooms unisex.
We promise them we'll help them find their identity in gender, and destroy gender in the process.
About the cultural aspect of gender: this video opened my eyes about what most people think it means to do things 'like a girl', and what it actually is supposed to mean.
Wouldn't it be equally problematic if they banned are male words and allowed all female words? If you're going for it, removing gender (from computer terminology) seems consistent. No one is saying to remove it from the world, but mainboard is just as if not more descriptive (to someone who isn't familiar with the word to start with), and things like allowlist/blocklist are much more self-descriptive than whitelist/blacklist.
It would be interesting to call landlord as landperson.
To discourage the term as an analogy for things that are a universal source is to demote women and their role as mothers.
I'd like to know who at Google puts these lists together and what judge decreed their viewpoint on this more valid than mine or anyone else's, since apparently Google feels that from this judgement they have the right to shape speech for millions of people and therefore, by extension, our culture.
But also, on MLK and postmodernism: postmodernism dates back to the 1940s, To Kill a Mockingbird is postmodern. MLK's Letter From a Birmingham Jail is very clearly postmodern (e.g. when he says "But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being.", he's alluding to a failure to consider the viewpoint of the oppressed in the situation).
That letter is also very modern-leftist. Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" in 1989 and elaborated on it in 1991, saying "When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when anti-racism does not incorporate oppposition to patriarchy race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other, and both interests lose". The letter from a Birmingham jail includes another famous line from MLK: " Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly". To me, those express similar sentiments: that oppression exists in many forms in many places, and it is unwise to pretend that oppression that fails to inconvenience me is therefore unworthy of my attention.
And of course he says later on "there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. " which to me describes the people often criticized as "modern far leftists", those people who create the tension and discomfort in society are, in MLK's view, doing us, collectively, a great service.
I'd recommend you read the whole letter[0]. If you're so willing to lionize MLK, but disagree with so much of what he preached, I implore you to consider why exactly that is.
[0]: https://www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets/documents/susi-letter-...
It seems you're engaging in a straw man fallacy saying that we don't need to do anything because we're all eventually accountable in front of God. Islam never said that. Several texts and accounts explicitly call out racism as a sin.
CRT is a fringe offshoot that swings the pendulum so far out, it goes back to being racist, ironically enough. It is not the beacon of equality that its supporters claim it is.
I agree, I never claimed Islam said that. I claim you said that, which misrepresents Islam!
> CRT is a fringe offshoot that swings the pendulum so far out, it goes back to being racist, ironically enough.
What about CRT does this? The core idea of CRT (as you use it) is, I think the recognition that inequality exists, that some people mistreat others and that we should recognize that when it happens. What about that is racist?
Where did I say that?
> What about that is racist?
CRT, and many other far leftist ideologies conform to what we say in Arabic: "A word (claim) of truth by which falsehood is intended"[1]. We see the same with movements like BLM (with self proclaimed Marxist founders), etc. They're crafted in such a way that if you argue against their actual behavior or criticize their actual behavior, they are able to retort with their canned response: ah so you're against justice/equality/are racist/etc.
These approaches are trite and people are waking up to them. We've known for millenia that inequality exists or the people are prone to mistreating others. CRT/latest fad of the day is not telling us anything new with that regard, but behind the scenes they're power grab movements.
[1] كلمة حق يراد بها باطل
> CRT/latest fad of the day is not telling us anything new
I disagree. The CRT (again, insofar as it is a cultural thing that people argue against) functionally says that people who have power should account for the mistreatment and inequality when making decisions. This is problematic to some people.
Apparently, this is what's being taught now: https://i.redd.it/vwuw7529iws81.jpg. Just an oversimplification, and dumbing down of any conversation. It's no wonder those people have built a reputation for being impulsive and not being able to take any criticism, retorting to crying and making fusses when they can't defend their positions.
This is incorrect.
> Everything is painted in terms of "white supremacy", and it's honestly getting tiring and trite
Ah, so it's getting tiring to see people discuss race and its impact? That's exactly the kind of reaction MLK was criticizing ;)
> Just an oversimplification, and dumbing down of any conversation.
Well yes, it's a children's book. Do you think it's a problem that discussions of the solar system or geology are oversimplified when explained to children? You're not even claiming it's wrong (perhaps because, fundamentally, it isn't).
It is more of a natural outcome of silly corporatists not really understanding why leftists and progressives object to things, and so just reflexively avoiding anything that could be, however tenuously, linked to gender. They are concern trolling themselves.
That's how I understand their thinking, at least.
I agree with you and think anyone who is offended by motherboard is silly. I'm sure it was never even anyone that was actually offended, but a group of people sitting down and looking at any and every word that has any type of gender connotation and saying that's a bad thing.
Think of that what you will.
I wish there was more pushback against this insanity. I've also seen people want to erase the word "blindspot" from the dictionary... Even though I'm sure no blind person was ever offended by it, because that word typically is used to refer to the limits of people who aren't blind.
For what it's worth, in support of the original comment's claim, I just dug around the Pixelbook documentation all over the place and I can't find any mention of the motherboard. But it doesn't seem they renamed it to "mainboard" or "birthing person board." They just dropped it from the specification completely and don't tell you anything about what kind of motherboard you're getting.
[1965 Wireless World July 49/2 (advt.) Contact tail variations..include..tails for direct mounting to a ‘mother’ printed circuit board.] 1965 Electronics 6 Sept. 36/1 Nine daughterboards, each carrying 30 circuit packages, go on each side of a motherboard.
However, that's just an analogy: it doesn't actually tell you anything about what the motherboard does or why. In that sense, I think mainboard is actually a bit more descriptive: it's the principal interconnect between all of the device's parts.
The thing is, all nouns in French are gendered, and carte (board) happens to be female. So it can only be a mother, and not a father board. And the reason is that it carries smaller boards, like a mom would carry her babies (in most mammal species, as far as I know, the mom is carrying babies even after birth).
A disque (disk) is male. But a floppy disk translate to "disquette" (small disk) which is female : le disque, la disquette. Don't ask me why, but that's who the language works.
This would drive Silicon Valley wokes completely nuts. The table is female, the cloud is male (note that, in Italian, clouds are female). The TV is female, the glass is male, the door is female, the handle is female, the window is female, the roof is male, the wall is male.
Their role as breeders and birthing people, you mean. Time for a trip to HR for you.
> they have the right to shape speech for millions of people and therefore,
Google', "Do the right thing" could be understood as "if you have the power to do something, you have the obligation to do so". I'd say someone forgot that most evil in the world is done by people convinced that they're doing the right thing, but if that were forgotten the old motto wouldn't have been an impediment.
You could ask what idiot gave google this power, but the answer-- to the extent that they have it-- is each and every one of us. Fortunately, it lasts only as long as we keep giving it to them.
Anyhow, you might find it awkward, but the general assumption that "parent" is synonymous with "mother" to the exclusion of all other kinds of parents does real damage to inclusiveness, and the term "motherboard" flows from that.
I know your tongue is in cheek, but the mainboard may be considered a parent of the components, but it is not giving birth to them. "Parent" fits better than "mother". So your absurdist counter-argument doesn't really fit here.
We're programmers. We refactor mercilessly. Why shouldn't language be refactored mercilessly too? The term "mainboard" is available, widely understood, and well-adopted, so why not use that?
Because we don't want to keep handing out stupid prizes to the weenies that constantly force us to play these stupid games. Every time they win they're further emboldened, and that's not a good thing, since there are actual problems to solve.
https://developers.google.com/style/word-list
You're supposed to use "plug" and "socket" instead.
One old convention, mostly originating with radio-frequency connectors, is that the gender of the connector is the gender of its innermost contact. Thus, the plug of the common 2.5" and 2.1" connector of power supplies is technically female because the inner contact is a hole. The socket on the appliance has a pin in the middle and is technically male. When you try to buy one, half the time the part is labelled as male and the other half it is labelled as female.
But there is no problem bad enough that cannot be made worse by government. Years ago some US regulator didn't like the fact that people were plugging big radio antennas into wifi equipment, so they invented the "reverse-polarity" connector. What used to be a "SMA male" connector with a pin in the middle now is a "RP SMA male" connector with a hole in the middle. Here is a random link with a picture: http://cablesondemandblog.com/wordpress1/2014/05/05/reverse_... If you order this kind of connectors, now you have a 25% chance of getting what you need. One RP SMA male and a SMA female will mate together but not propagate any signals.
> hang, hung
> Don't use to refer to a computer or system that is not responding [..] see Avoid unnecessarily violent language.
plug socket
male exists exists
female exists exists
hermaphroditic exists exists
changeable exists existsHere's a female plug https://www.homedepot.com/p/Leviton-15-Amp-125-Volt-3-Wire-C...
Here's a male socket https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/10A-250V-AC-Male-Powe...
Should it have been renamed to birthing-person-board? What a joke
Not something I feel super strongly about, but the fact that it's so scary to go against these stupid ideas is annoying. It's pure politics, there's nobody benefiting from this except the people claiming impact for antiracist work in their perf.
This isn't remotely limited to Google. My company does this too. I've heard of others making similar changes.
Are these kinds of arbitrary changes to language usage silly and pointless? Maybe. But tough love here: languages change in arbitrary and pointless ways constantly. They always have. They always will. Your own common usages and idioms would seem outrageously weird to your grandparents. People had these same fights in the 60's, also 80's, and 50's... The 40's too now that I think of it...
To wit: we aren't getting oppressed here, we're just getting old. And the attempt to turn it into a political fight (on both sides) is largely just a reaction to the friction. It's not the cause.
I mean, really. Is "mainboard" such a hardship? It's not even a new word, it's two bytes and one syllable shorter. Must this be a fight?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31086310&p=3#31087238
It's frantic activity to avoid looking in the mirror. Making themselves busy fixing something massive and intractable to avoid having to think about the actionable items closer to home.
/s
Even if there was some natural physical law that guaranteed that oppressive nations would eventually be overthrown/atrophy, there's definitely nothing that puts a bound on how long that will take.
And, as we've seen with Ukraine, war can break out more quickly than any of us think.
(also, if the social justice warriors in the West have their way, the US government itself would be overthrown and replaced with its own, authoritarian, but ineffective regime, long before a conflict with China would occur)
The summer of 2020 was a great preview of what this dictatorship will look like once the USD collapses in value another 30-40%. Burning buildings and more statues of "heroes" like George Floyd, who stood up to White Supremacy. Remember, removing "master" from git repos was done because of the legacy of slavery in the United States.
Chinese have far bigger and far more strict word list bans.
In US, you need to say “people who menstruate” and “land owning person”; in China you will just just disappear if you say a wrong thing against the regime.
but the argument “I wish I was in China and I didn’t have to be careful what I say in public!” is so laughable if you have actually been in China or interacted with mainland Chinese
People hours
It's like, yes, we know some over paid highly educated technologists are biased against but that doesn't equal the end of liberalism and democracy itself. His words are not at all going to sway any of the HN readers who may agree with him on cultural issues about the west, that Russia are the good guys!
Perhaps his words are meant to developing nations who are uniformly culturally conservative?
Is this really true? I always thought I might eventually apply to work at Google someday, but I hadn't heard there was such aggressive internal thought policing.
I try to be somewhat reasonable. I can stretch my mind enough to see the complaint with blacklist at least. But mother being offensive...my mind isn't able to stretch that far unless I'm missing something.
If I'm writing about a ship and refer to it as a "she", does that set off the autoinquisitor?
https://mashable.com/article/google-youtube-women-in-tech-di...
To push the Clippy thing further, Bill Gates once gave us "content is king". Google's Woke Clippy needs to learn that "context is king" - but it can't ever do that with language; well, not without a general AI.
eww. This has the same vibes as someone saying "I want to breed with them". Like sure, it's grammatically correct, but you're gonna come off as a creep at best and some weird fetishist at worst.
No more "motherboard" and "daughterboard?" Sounds like Google has found yet another way to marginalize women.
Pay 'em less. Then pretend they don't exist.
Way to go, Diversity Champions!
We put some of our job postings through one of these, and it flagged too many 'masculine' words, like 'analyze', 'leadership', and 'data'. Sorry women, time get back in the kitchen and nurture.
Or maybe they want to help people write specifically masculine job postings?
https://blog.ongig.com/writing-job-descriptions/top-10-mascu...
Part of the reason these things have taken off is that their proponents are very vocal, while the opponents prefer to just mind their own business.
Though, I agree.. inquisitions and dogma are honeytraps for free-thinkers, by signalling dissent you are exposing that you arent under their ideological control.
Disagreeable sorts should, whereever possible, not raise their hand when asked, "do you have any hetrodox opinions?".
It's just my anecdotal experience with this kind of mentality that the people looking to enlighten us simple minded folk are also using any questioning or opposition of their enlightenment as an opportunity to shame those people that question or oppose. Some kind of twisted competition I guess.
(not to say I don't support enlightenment of certain issues, I do, but with limits)
You go to shake someone's hand using your right hand. That reinforces the patriarchy, so you are told off.
You ask, no one told me I should shake hands with my left hand.
It's not the job of the oppressed to educate the oppressor.
On the flip side, I know many that have been discriminated based on their looks or vocal patterns(trans / lgbt). Alot of companies and people assume these people are a problem because of what goes on at google and decline them due to culture fit.
In many of the more frugal businesses I've seen, folks just don't have the time to strike / protest etc for some of the stuff the FANG folks are into.
They are paid very well, many especially non-engineering roles have VERY flexible work setups.
Netflix had a big strike over Dave Chappelle
"Transgender Netflix employees and co-workers will stage a walkout next week protesting the streaming giant’s decision to release Dave Chappelle’s latest comedy special"
On Spotify we had the demand for employees direct editorial control of the Joe Rogan podcast:
"Spotify staffers are now considering a walkout or full-blown strike if their demands for direct editorial oversight of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast aren’t met."
I don't listen to Joe Rogan, but I don't think my work environment is necessarily helped by the staff at spotify taking over his show.
So these are the content strikes (the public side of internal pressures).
The question currently is, do you want the loudest voices to control all conversation?
Then for sure, support these strikes and have things taken over by these staff.
Even if declined citing a reason everyone could reasonably agree is reprehensible, do you imagine that the activists at Google would - what - put GP on a Silicon Valley blacklist that everyone subscribes to?
If you know anyone within Google, I suggest privately asking their experiences, rather than sampling only those people who are mad about Google on HN.
> A transcribed interview of neo-Nazi and former Klan leader David Duke—in which he uses the N-word and talks about hunting Black people—gets no notes. Radical feminist Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto gets more edits than Duke’s tirade; she should use “police officers” instead of “policemen,”
Mother definitely does not mean birthing person. The easiest example is adoption. Would would you call the mother in that case? Adoptive Female Parent goes again against the 'rule' because it has female in there. Parent 1/Parent 2? no it has Hierarchy.
I fail to understand what’s going on these days. Words change their meaning over decades. A small minority seem hellbent on kicking up a storm to change popular usage, where no offense or other meaning is implied in general modern usage.
It doesn't even make sense that an AI model trained on normal writing samples would flag that as problematic, since it is not considered so by the vast majority of people. Unless the model was trained exclusively on the most extreme Tumblr posts, it suggests that fringe Google employees are injecting their personal ideology into the products.
The vast, vast majority of people do not want their mothers erased from the language.
Shouldn't you say that we got spelling assistance correct instead of right? Left-handed people might not like to see the word "right" being used to mean "correct"
As a left handed non birthing person, I was very offended by their comment. Also I was a little offended by your comment, please in the future include “L” or “R” at the beginning of all messages.
Thank you for attempting to be a left handed ally.
They would be well served to update their motto to, "Don't be fatuous." It's the best they can do now.
One of the best films on this subject is Dogville by Lars von Trier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogville , with Grace as its main character.
You also assume they are female.
Why?
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis put to use as a tool to ensure that future generations of humans will avoid the problems that have plagued us for all time, because the ideas that perpetuate those issues will have been eradicated.
I'm left in awe at the audacity of it, the idea that human nature itself can be changed just by striking out words from the language. Seems implausibly naive and paternalistic.
This is effectively one of the tenets of postmodernist thought. That language shapes reality. There is truth in the idea that language can influence perception but that doesn't mean that negative ideas can be eliminated by merely controlling language...
People making themselves the victims over language isn’t even new. You say happy holidays and someone goes on a rant about Christianity being under attack.
I tried to explain to someone online that the word black has many meanings, not every use of black is about people. Oh man, in the end I was "taught" that just by not accepting his ideas I was a racist person.
My experience with this type of person is very bad. They are ignorant people, defending points without understanding the points. They are very aggressive and work in packs.
Today I try not to work or talk to this type of person/company.
I don't think these types should discredit the movement. I do wish they wouldn't rile up folk so much though. Change is hard as it is, it's very unhelpful for the cause that they behave in such a bad way.
All the hallmarks of a cult. Commit heresy and get excommunicated.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-budget-proposa...
On similar trends, we are seeing institutions such as the ACLU post tweets like this: https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1439259891064004610?s=20 . It's a tweet of a quote by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But the ACLU has decided to replace the word "women" with "people".
So yes, we are moving into a brave new world.
Ah, but it's not innocuous, and everyone knows it. I assume you know it -- when you watched that clip of the senator, did you really think he had forgotten what the definition of "woman" was?
The question he was really asking was along the lines of "is it the health department's official stance that trans woman are woman and should be treated as such under the law?"
Although actually he wasn't really asking that either, he was signaling to his supporters that he does not think that trans woman are women, and he was attempting to embarrass his political opposition so he and his allies could talk about the lunacy of the woke left or whatever and how they can't even define what a woman is.
I can forgive people for not wanting to play along.
Although, I can't forgive people for not having an answer ready; that question is being used as a "gotcha" more and more frequently.
"Motherboard" was included in Apple's style guide in 2020 as "don't use" (https://help.apple.com/applestyleguide/#/apsg72b28652). Like it or hate it, this is the direction the industry, of which Google is a part, is moving. I'm sure a publication called Motherboard might have an opinion on this, but neither they nor Google are the final arbiters on the language. The I Have a Dream speech example is pretty anecdotal; King was an excellent writer, and I don't think Google is claiming this tool would make a person write like King. And the substitution suggestion in Kennedy's speech is just the way the language use has trended since his time... One can note that the Star Trek franchise changed the saying from "Where no man has gone before" to "Where no-one has gone before" in the time between then and now, as well. The Bible is probably the worst example to pull up for this topic; paging through the over 20 translations on biblegateway.com shows the passage in question is also sometimes translated as "great works", "mighty works", or just "miracles." Which should you use? It depends completely on what you're doing.
Of everything noted, the only possibly concerning one is really the lack of suggestions on a David Duke interview. If I had to guess, I'd chalk that up to lack of training data, and it may be something Google wants to consider addressing.
But at the end of the day, the overall thesis of the report is flawed. "But words do mean things," says the author. Yes, they do. Which is why it could be nice to have an auto-editor lifting up examples of words that might mean something other than the author intended (and then the author can choose to change their phrasing or stick with the original). Nothing about this feature claims to make users magically better at writing; it's an assistive tool to open the possibility, not unlike a spell-checker.
We've had Microsoft Word grammar checker for literal decades. This technology is neither particularly new nor, IMHO, particularly interesting (certainly not interesting enough to kick up this news cycle). It's no more 1984 than some random stranger online offering an opinion on your verbage is 1984.
Can you disable this feature globally for your account, or do you need to disable this in every document explicitly?
Shape the language people are allowed to use and you start to shape their thoughts as well.
The bad news is that Google and seemingly the rest of Big Tech are all sitting solidly on one side, and amongst all this "diversity and inclusion" talk, there is basically no thought given about diversity and inclusion of the political kind. Given the power that Google has over "speech", perhaps some sort of equality of political representation "affirmative action" needs to happen to it too?
Big tech is not how you're painting it. I think it sits solidly where it can keep its income growing. They'd like to operate in China, so they apply filters to search results, or use their servers instead of the default. Pride month sees avatars changing to a colorful, but only in the more permissive locations. Business is, in part, about getting along, and inclusivity is currently how you get along in the West - nothing more, nothing less.
After banning world-famous paintings from Facebook because they dared show a breast, a few well-off engineers and product managers will now pick which English words should remain, and which should be let go.
How nice of them. Don’t know what we’d do without them.
https://www.economist.com/international/2021/06/12/social-me...
I'd like to give some examples, but I fear I'd end up swiftly banned for even using some of the best examples.
One interesting case is "idiots, imbeciles and morons" - once technical terms to describe a mental health scale. The 'most insulting' end of the scale is now probably the most acceptable word to use in public!
Cmon man, there's a big difference between the natural evolution of language and some radical-run company forcibly jamming their desired changes down our throats through an instantaneous and global software update.
However, personally I'm pretty sure that the US is overdoing it.
Issues with breasts aren't exactly a new thing in the US, just ask Janet Jackson.
And this quote, from the wikipedia article, sums it all quite well:
> "I know many people in other countries are scratching their heads and thinking 'What in the world is the big fuss over there?'"
The intentions of these features aside which will no doubt be the topic of conversation, to me the biggest takeaway about this is just how entirely stupid AI still is. Failing to recognize context, wordplay, even names (suggesting alternatives to Motherboard), and so forth. Trying to adjust something as complex as 'inclusivity' by flipping words is like trying to change the tone of a poem by flipping individual letters. Entirely wrong level of abstraction.
The suggestions look a lot like code linters in FAANG companies. People from the outside will be shocked at some of these "inclusive" linters if they take a look.
> calling landlords “property owners” is almost worse than calling them “landchads,” and half as accurate. It’s catering to people like Howard Schultz who would prefer you not call him a billionaire, but a “person of means.”
"I like the tool because it removes others' words that I don't like but I don't like the tool because it removes my words that others don't like"
The author does position themselves against algorithmic sanitization generally.
This is a whole paragraph in the article where the author agrees this is good thing, just that google implemented it poorly.
Example: Is the proprietor of a bar the person running it or the landlord who owns the building?
A more clearcut case of semantic confusion I can see a crappy AI creating out of the blue would be:
"My proprietor said if I didn't pay the rent soon she was gonna ..."
Which clearly has a very different (and basically nonsensical) meaning than a the more natural formulation using the now thankfully forbidden L-word.
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
> A landlord is the owner of a house, apartment, condominium, land, or real estate which is rented or leased to an individual or business
How is that different from "property owner"? The difference is that to you, a native English speaker, landlord is a word you're familiar with. To others, it's a whole new word they need to learn, whereas property-owner is self-descriptive. It's like using good variable names in your code, you don't need to look up the definition of every word when you use re-use words that are common.
They mean different things: one is a subset of the other. A person who owns their own home that they live in is a property owner, but not a landlord.
Well that's new to me, because I absolutely do not get that from the term "property owner". For example, if I have a place I own that my brother lives in, and someone asks my brother "who is the property owner", he would definitely answer me. I own that property. How does the term property owner say anything about where the person lives in?
Our local immigration office recently picked a newer, better name, but since no one uses it, I'm sticking to the old one.
Another one is expat vs immigrant. I favor immigrant, but I can't rename expat insurance to immigrant insurance. The latter does not exist.
I use the gender-neutral "they" across the website, but sometimes "he" would be a lot clearer when replacing a singular noun like "the landlord".
Sometimes the common word is the right word to use. When in doubt, I refer to Google Trends.
Examples: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/systems/the-past-presen... https://sustainability.google/progress/projects/circular-eco...
Basically I think the core idea is fine. But applying the same model globally was a clear mistake.
Humans act so weird in large groups.
On that note - HN hive mind: Can the current Grammar/Spell checking be turned off?
I am a victim of Google Docs. Must be used at work. I hate the slow opinionated clunky thing, but turning off the "features" would be helpful.
Nope, it suggested to change from this to that so the writer could be Google's avatar on writing what Google wants to get written
It's almost like it's just some basic pattern matching software they're using to help catch and highlight common mistakes when reviewing text at the risk of false positives rather than waiting until they have a fully sentient god-level AI that knows everything.
If blacklist is considered non-inclusive language, why isn’t motherboard? Motherboard is a needlessly gendered term that perpetuates stereotypes.
The stereotype that mothers... are... computer parts...? I don't get it, what's the stereotype?
Why would their algorithm do this?
Like, whether that's a bug or intended, how could their algorithm have ended up suggesting that "annoyed" was non-inclusive?
And much of this logic ignores context.
The rest of us around the world never asked for any of this weirdness
Will it suggest "peace be upon him" in Islamic countries next? If not, why not? At least that's an actual religion unlike whatever this weirdness is.
How is it inclusive to export this thinking to places that don't want it? Words are really just words. I never enslaved anyone and neither did my ancestors. Keep the word master and slave.
Considering the number of ancestors in your past, this is highly unlikely for any human being alive today.
But they're not though. Words are products of, and inputs into, people's culture and modes of thought.
Which is exactly why giving this much global power to one unelected politically extreme group of people is so dangerous.
Another is the freedom fighter vs terrorist word choice.
Does it shape anything for you? You're just doing your 9-5 building T'Challa's HUD for his panther helmet as an immigrant worker who barely speaks the language. If anything it just makes your life more annoying when the Wakandan scientists rattle off instructions to you and you're barely keeping up. They are just words.
Perhaps in Wakandan culture the change is significant and shapes their models of thinking but we are talking about terminology changes for all of planet Earth and beyond. Why not do some soul searching and come to terms with your ugly history on your own instead of dragging everyone into it.
(I am using "you" in the general sense, not directing it at anyone in particular)
https://help.sap.com/doc/b0322267728e48a28b0c8ee7dd1ab4c7/1....
> A transcribed interview of neo-Nazi and former Klan leader David Duke—in which he uses the N-word and talks about hunting Black people—gets no notes.
I think unfortunately a lot of folks think this is a feature, not a bug.
Google might be too far gone, and working with those people would be so exhausting that it's actually stopped me from applying (James Damore)
There are companies that don't stand for that sort of stuff. And top paying ones too (pay better than Goog). Coinbase is one of them, and I don't want to mention mine to avoid dox. And go check blind, you'll find the vast majority of people don't stand for this BS either, and that they're just silenced.
My advice? Hit them where it hurts & vote with your feet. Google's not the top payer anymore, so just leave.
In principle I agree but I feel like level headed folks choosing to leave only makes the echo chamber even worse. And sadly, I don't think Google as a company will suffer much of a downside because they're so big.
I like the security of not working with unchecked witch hunts . I don't want to be Damore'd because of words I use outside of work.
Instead, it's the white picket fence, steady income and BBQs for me
As the share of ideologically-driven people rises, capacity to solve problems and create valuable stuff decreases. The organization will die inevitably.
I suppose that's easier than trying to debate every occurrence.
The things that worry me are the witch hunts started by the same group of people. See my other comment on "fren"
Teach someone with no previous cultural knowledge what "allow" and "deny" means, then ask them what white list and black list means, then ask them what allow list and deny list means.
Black and white list requires previous knowledge of what those terms mean, allow and deny do not. Someone can intuit from just basic language knowledge what the feature does.
Although I don't think anyone ever seriously thought that "master" branch meant the "lord" branch.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/474419/does-the-...
I personally like "main" as the replacement. Clear, concise and as you say, feels natural too.
Hmm there's also something about he who picked the name (which wasn't Linus apparently) meant "master" as in e.g. "master recording", see the Twitter tweets in the comments to that answer. And that he doesn't remember if maybe he was influenced by BitKeeper, was 15 years ago
Regarding your concern about people for whom English isn't the first language, I dont know how valid it is. Because those terms exist under the same names and fall under the same usage in many other languages. I can confirm that it is the case with Russian, as "черный список" is a commonly used phrase, and it literally translates to "black list", and has the exact same meaning as in English.
Better hope you're not dealing with a block device or other data structure that involves units of data called blocks.
"Which one, the deny list or the list of blocks?".
Whitelist and blacklist are the words we've been using for decades to describe a concept. Everybody knows what they mean.
Yeah, and so was calling black men "boy" or using the n-word like 50 years ago.
Language changes because people realize there are better words that more people are okay with.
—- The langage police
Pushing such terms is (while presumably this is not the conscious intent) a means of cementing power by showing who (as in, “what vague coalition”, not “which specific people”) is in control.
Ultimately if you're trying to edge proof language then you're just changing which bunch of people you're pissing off but I feel like people who do this act like its impossible they could piss anyone off over this.
Most people don't see 'blacklist' with racist connotations or think 'motherboard' is in any way at odds with transgenderism.
I'm generally on board with using culturally neutral terms, particularly since they're often more descriptive of the actual thing being described. I think there would be far less resistance if people didn't feel coerced.
[0]: like painting over a fence, geez.
Independent of all other political goings on, in a vacuum, I could agree that we should get rid of white and blacklist and replace them with something else.
because you give them an inch and they'll take a mile.
look up "menstruators" and "birthing people" to see what else that kind of people fight for.
>objectively clearer
then it wouldn't be necessary to force the change. nobody had a problem with these words until very recently, and only in very narrow circles of very loud people with disproportionate amount of power
>especially for folks who's first language is not English?
that's a very slippery slope
Political correctness linters require you to explicitly acknowledge or disable warnings when you're doing things like pasting existing URLs.
And it never stops with one term. It started with master/slave (which are now replaced with dozens of synonyms that are often hard to figure out), then whitelist/blacklist, and the activists are already queueing up the next words for sure.
Few people want to ban others from using alternative terms that they consider better, but where they draw the line is when others prevent them from using the terms they deem appropriate, or demand/force additional work.
There are real problems in this world, yet it seems that the progressives are going after the minute details. From a SWE perspective, it would be like your app getting crushed by bugs and technical debt while you argue over how big the logo on the login page should be.
The worst part of all of this, is the companies that are actively pushing this crap are the same companies that have the resources to make a difference in this world.
If you're a company with a 1T+ market cap, actually do something bold with your cash. Imagine if all the top tech companies approached a bunch of non-profits trying to help people in 3rd world countries and said: "here's a blank check, do what you need to". We could solve a shitload of problems on this planet.
But no, we all are just quibbling about our pronouns and how to write "inclusively".
Also, as many point it out, this change is often spearheaded by entities of questionable reputation. Google, for one, is grilled a lot for their behavior lately, and now they roll this out.
Lastly, I think that this innate and natural feeling, that "they" will come and change our ways, is preyed upon by populist politicians. When people feel like this, it can be, and is being played up by creating the very Boogeypersons you jokingly made up: they point to immigrants, like LGBT people, successful Jewish businessmen, whatever sticks.
"mom test
Don't use mom test, grandmother test, grandma test, or girlfriend test. Instead, use terms like beginner user test or novice user test."
https://developers.google.com/style/word-list#letter-m
Some of them make sense, some of them are ridiculous. The whole thing is entertaining, really.
Closes window
It's not about "social justice," it's about instilling totalitarian patterns in the population. There is no debate about these "woke" issues. There's an incredible intolerance on one side, and they claim to have indisputable moral superiority. Anyone who goes against the "woke" agenda is deemed to be evil. There's no debate. Just an automatic classification, "You're wrong AND evil."
That's just how it was in Nazi Germany. No debate, no nuance. You're a jew? To the chambers with you.
Uhhh isn't this thread a debate?
Vice, you are not helping.
Unless your ancestors had lands confiscated or graves desecrated in a manner you find unjust during the Stuart Restoration, you have no standing to complain about "blacklist".
Kek. The absolute state of the FAANG World playing with AI and identity politics
I said motherboard all the time in meetings and chats, never had any pushback. TBH if I did get pushback on that one, I'd bring it to HR and say the pushback was affecting my ability to get work down.
And yes, those teams really did come up with their determinations of what was OK and what wasn't, based on their own beliefs. That made that quite clear in their repeated, stupid posts on memegen.
It ain't exactly the hottest, edgiest shitposting club out there.
I think those types of people are even more likely to end up as paid content moderators, since the work tends to be too tedious for most average people to deal with.
I love that you were courageous enough to say this because this is completely true and also why we say #ACAB. Most people who want to be police officers are absolutely unfit to be police officers!
There probably isn't any job which is an exception to this, politicians are similarly mainly people who want the associated influence and even engineers become engineers so they have control over engineering. It's just that the incentives are more perverse with politicians, police and moderators than with engineers.
From what I understand from rumors in the area, is those who couldn't become police (for whatever reason) would then go apply at the prison, and those who couldn't get a job there (and it appears they take anyone with a pulse) would go work for TSA.
Perhaps the "public servant" idea should be taken to a larger extreme, and some positions picked by lottery instead.
Sounds preposterous, but is not. I had a boss around 2000 who believed wholeheartedly that people brought from Africa to the United States were the only slaves that ever existed in history anywhere on Earth.
This came up because someone noted in passing conversation that an anniversary was coming up related to the Atlantic slave trade in the 1600's, and my boss insisted that there couldn't have been slavery before 1776, because slavery was started by the United States.
I walked out of the break room early in the conversation and decided to let the others handle it. She was my boss, and I would have gotten fired for contradicting her.
https://www.britannica.com/summary/Transatlantic-Slave-Trade...
Peak transatlantic: 78,000 new slaves per year.
https://thecurrentmsu.com/2021/01/24/prison-labor-americas-s...
Current US forced prison labor population: 1-2.1 million.
Similarly, if there was political consensus that US companies shouldn't own or hire slaves overseas, then the bit starting with "within" would be easy to remove as well.
None of this has had any chance of happening since the thirteenth amendment was passed (not even during BLM). It's pretty clear that a big chunk of the US's leaders are pro-slavery.
When one has a essentially complete control over another person's life, there are ways to make this life hell, even while staying within the legal bounds.
A few things to consider:
- A disproportionate number of prisoners are African American, and that subset are mostly in prison for crimes that whites simply don't go to prison for (e.g., pot, or coke vs. crack).
- US prisoners aren't given nutritionally adequate food for free. They have to buy that at inflated prices from the prison. Once they blow through any savings, their only option (other than malnutrition) is to work for wages that would be illegally low outside of prison.
- As during the transatlantic trade, it is straightforward to buy your way out of forced prison labor.
- A growing fraction of prisoners consider the current system to be eugenics as well as slavery. The prisons take the majority of men while they are at prime child rearing age. It's well known that any that do manage to have kids will probably be forced into a situation where they can't adequately care for those children (dad goes to prison for driving while black or whatever), making the next generation easy targets for the same scheme. (This is coming from current prisoners, not me.)
The other pushback against my comment boils down to "it's legal, so we don't use that word". Similar arguments were made in defense of the transatlantic trade. For instance, black Africans were generally the ones selling slaves, and often used real or imagined criminal records as an excuse. Any objective comparison of the two systems would find that the transatlantic slave trade was roughly as immoral California's three strike law is in practice. You could argue the slave trade was worse because the kids were automatically slaves. In the current system, they're only probably going to prison, but the prisons also aren't paying to raise them.
I suggest reading Things Fall Apart if you're unfamiliar with the African side of the slave trade.
I appreciate what you're saying, but my point is actually that the US view is that "slavery has been abolished for 150 years" makes for a very US-centric view of history. Which for a 250 year old country is laughably closed minded both backwards and forwards in time.
The context of what I said is the parent comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31124042), specifically related to the US-centricism of the retold statement of "slavery was started by the United States".
The story of the world is not that slavery was created for the process of building the US as a powerful nation, and then abolished and now only dealing with the fallout and reparations. But I've heard this understanding many times in the US, to the point where it seems like the mainstream understanding there.
And get Damore'd?
It turns out American companies are not the Athenian Lyceum, and some topics are not up for debate.
What? Absolutely not. That is terrible advice when it comes to something that couldn't have been a literal accident. If he'd used the word "mother", then sure-- that could be apologized for. But a protracted essay on population level statistical differences between genders and its impact on the employment pool? Not a chance.
There is so much noise and outright disinformation about any issue that often the only reliable source for wrong doing is when the target of an accusation admits it themselves.
And even when that fails to protect you, at least you can be a hero to someone. Do you think a damore that apologized and said he was mistaken would be more employable? That people would eventually see it as a youthful transgression? I doubt it greatly-- it's not like the screens that show up when you google his name will yellow with age. Instead he'd just be the enemy to both factions of the war he wandered into, rather than enemy of one and hero to the other.
Sometimes, but doesn't apply here; the entire kerfluffle happened on an internal-public message-board. There was a paper-trail a mile long.
> Do you think a damore that apologized and said he was mistaken would be more employable?
Absolutely. Google management was very willing to give him a second chance. His mistake was basically tactless following of the existing corporate culture of internal openness, and they recognized that. Unfortunately, he did basically everything in his power to make retaining him as unpalatable as possible, claiming repeatedly the science was on his side and people shouldn't be afraid to debate science. Like I said: walking Title VII violation. You can debate the science all you want, but not as an employee in an American corporation that also has project authority.
In essence, he dared Google to either go up against the Civil Rights Act or admit they were hypocritical about their internal culture. They resolved the issue by removing the irritant (and the corporate culture took a hit too, as people realized in general that a liberal interpretation of it was incompatible with the Civil Rights Act. You can't just say whatever internally).
Compare with Facebook still employing the guy who did an A/B test on whether emotional tone of stories make people sad. Once he realized why that was a problem, he owned up to it and is still doing research at Facebook.
> rather than enemy of one and hero to the other.
Meh. Check his Twitter these days and he's not really their hero; the Right lost interest in him when the labor relations board ruled his firing was legal (they don't want to make a headlong run into the Civil Rights Act either... it protects most voters, so it's very popular).
... and besides, sometimes being hero to none is the most dignified course of action. I can name several historical figures who made the choice to join a faction as a hero at the mere cost of spending their finite lives serving actual evil.
"1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
2 really was just me being unimpressed generally. For some reason I didn't think much of the ipad...
Now I'm old and everything is amazing.
I am applying that dismissiveness to all objections equally based off their motivation. I don't agree with the argument on either side of the "motherboard/mainboard" debate. But I can emphasize with the motivation of the side pushing for "mainboard" because it is the same as your argument about misusing "gay" being unnaceptable. I disagree with their specific objection but I understand the motivation. I don't understand the side pushing for "motherboard" because the heart of the objection seems to be "things were better when I was young". Presented with those two options, why not side with the people who you would side with if we were arguing over a different word such as "gay"?
The reason I push against "mainboard" is, I think, the analogous concern. While it's possible in principle to type out the letters "mainboard" without meaning anything by it, in practice the people who say it are motivated by a package of ideas about gender which I think are bad and would be harmful for society if they were more broadly adopted. To say "mainboard" would make me appear to be endorsing those ideas.
I would argue this is a symptom of the same phenomenon and therefore the heart of the objection is still the same.
I also live in the rural Midwest, so I figured that was about how far in the past you on the coast think we are with this sort of thing - and you'd be right, to an extent.
I wouldn't have believed you that there are people like this, but a few minutes after i read your comment, i saw replies (requires showdead) to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123102 that said men cannot be discrimated against...
As a Russian, this is amusing to read. For me and most people I know, when you meet a black person, it's totally normal to ask them "where are you from" because they can't possibly be local. Our society just doesn't have the concept of racism it seems because of the exceeding rarity of people who aren't European or Asian.
People in Russia are often discriminated against based on their sexual orientation, political views, and nationality though.
"Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave," said Vorbis.
"So I understand," said the Tyrant. "I imagine that fish have no word for water."
-- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
We do have a word for racism by the way. It's, unsurprisingly, "расизм".
I've never been to Russia, but I'm finding it hard to believe racism doesn't exist there.
I suspect you are overlooking some pretty pervasive discrimination against minority groups because you have become accustomed to it, and/or because you aren't personally affected by it. While racism in Russia appears to have been improving over the last decade or so, it is hardly absent.
Anyone who thinks otherwise: go out and talk to ethnically Asian people more. (For an outsider, keep in mind that anywhere in Russian Siberia there are very large indigenous Asian populations in proportion to total.)
My Asian friends are routinely discriminated against purely based on their appearance: subject to searches at subway entrances, subject to disdainful attitude by government officials, salespeople and other citizens. They will have trouble renting flats, etc.
This is significantly worse in western parts of Russia (where you can be targeted by gangs and skinheads), but is still present in their part of the country.
And it is those who were lucky to have gone to good schools and speak perfect Russian. Things are dimmer for someone who has a stronger accent.
Most of my Asian friends never talk about it, but one did, after which I started making observations and reevaluating past ones and recognized that it is very much true.
Those of middle eastern ethnicities (often immigrants and their descendants) have likely even harder time.
Yeah, I had my doubts too. The Wikipedia article claims that racist attacks have been on the decline, and supports that claim with some statistics from the SOVA Center. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if that were simply because those attacks have become so commonplace that they aren't reported at all, or that reports are being actively suppressed.
> Either way, people here aren't discriminated based on their race. Never were.
That is untrue.
You could argue the “pale of settlement” (instituted shortly after the annexation of parts of Poland made Jews more than a rounding error) was discrimination based on religion, not ancestry (and indeed it seems to have had some resemblance to the suppression of Old Rite communities, which did not have any particular ethnic composition as far as I know). But the distance between the two is easily bridged (one only needs to look at Ireland to see that), and by the 20th century it was, thoroughly, as evidenced by things ranging from Stalin’s Jewish resettlement attempts in the 30s and 40s (whence the “Jewish autonomous region”) to the ethnic quotas and heavily biased exams at the Mekhmat and elsewhere in the 70s and 80s (supported not only by a mass of mostly-forgotten university functionaries, but also by some of the genuine greats such as Pontrjagin, cf You Failed Your Math Test, Comrade Einstein).
(That last part is why any intentional bias or quota in admissions gives me the chills. Nothing will go wrong, surely.)
It’s not only the Jews, of course. The common euphemistic appellation for the situation on the Caucasus, “tensions”, hides a morass of mutual hatreds that is centuries deep, though again the results of Stalin’s disastrous resettlement efforts are best characterized as “fallout”, and the two Chechen wars intended as election publicity for Putin did not help. But a close look at the 19th-century colonization of the region as described indirectly by authors like Lermontov gives the impression that the whole thing was pretty fucked up even then.
(If you want to dismiss these places as “not really Russia”, you are proving my point, even if there are senses in which that statement is true.)
Shall we talk about the undocumented and (thus) vastly underpaid Middle Eastern migrant workers who have sustained most of Moscow’s municipal infrastructure for the last two decades? (Though perhaps not for much longer, given the recent monetary restrictions.) Who have reversed much of its despair- and alcohol-fueled collapse of the late Soviet times? That the low-wage jobs should go to them may not be not explicitly xenophobic (except inasmuch as any system of employment controls for foreigners is), just the result of the how the USSR was organized and how it fell apart; but I have an acquaintance who has adopted a child from there, and their experiences both with officials and with strangers off-handedly insulting the child or the family sound pretty straightforwardly racist to me.
And, well, let us be honest and acknowledge the mutual feeling of otherness between people from Central or Northern Russia and those from West Ukraine, Belarus, or even the south of the country as it currently is. It can range from having a stereotypical funny-talking character in jokes to toppling monuments, rewriting history, and going to war, but it’s been there for a long time, and the distance between these two extremes isn’t nearly as large as I’d like.
(Navalnyj has distant relatives in Ukraine? Everybody has distant relatives in Ukraine. If you want commentary on the Golodomor and whether it fits here, though, you’ll need to find someone qualified enough to talk specifics about it.)
This is not at all an exhaustive list. (What about the Tatars? The Russian Germans? The postwar expulsions, tacitly accepted by the West, that turned Königsberg into Kaliningrad and Danzig into Gdańsk? I’m sure there are things I’ve never heard of as well.) It might be that there is no “racism” in the precise North American mold in Russia or around it, but that is only because that mold is uninteresting (and to the extent that the opposition to it is built around its incidental features, that opposition is missing the point, although I would not claim to be the one to make it the Right Way). Xenophobia towards people inside or just outside the country, now that we have plenty of, and so does everybody else living on the ruins of an empire.
That is if the economic structures originating from serfdom in the Empire or from internal migration restrictions in the USSR are not enough for you. They might not always have an ethnic bent, but is that really that much of a consolation?..
A good example would be some of the pieces out there about what it's like to live in Japan as a black person, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMpxLmMnS6M - their society is definitely not going to racially discriminate like the US does, but that doesn't mean you won't experience any discrimination or unusual treatment due to your skin color being different.
Also, if people get discriminated against based on their nationality and you just said a black person can't possibly be From Here... it seems like if you combine those two statements that would mean black people would naturally get discriminated against since they're foreigners?
The nationality thing is more about those who work customer-facing jobs here. Like, you call a taxi, it arrives but you can't find where. You call the driver to ask where they stopped, but the driver is from Tajikistan or Uzbekistan and barely speaks any Russian. It is frustrating when you can't use your native language in your home country for something as mundane as asking the taxi driver where they are. Besides, they usually do their jobs much more shoddily, get paid less, and have lower standards. So, yes, these people have this kind of reputation, but every rule has its exceptions.
But then if someone is a foreign student for example, they are never treated like that. So I guess this discrimination is not against the nationality per se, but against people bringing their customs into someone else's society and refusing to blend in?
I'd say "racism" those days is a fairly weird word that I've seen infrequently applied as an umbrella term covering many different things.
It's almost certainly true that there is virtually no "classical" (black vs white) racism there. Russia never had any significant fraction of black population, and the flavors of slavery were quite different from the US. When Russian sees a black person, while their inner voice would surely say "this person is an alien", there's most likely would be no immediate derogatory prejudice involved - because to best of my awareness it was never instilled, at least not in the Soviet and post-Soviet mindspace.
But in Russia there surely is something similar, just of a different flavor - again, because of different history and societal composition. Say, doubtlessly there are tons of prejudices based on ethnicity - just remember how many derogatory names and jokes are there (and always were) for neighboring nations such as Ukrainians (this is so fucked up!), Georgians, Tajiks or Uzbeks; or Russian ethniticies - especially Chechens (this nationality is pretty touchy conversation subject).
It seems there's a group of people who are too far in the other direction too. When I heard that it's preferred to say "allowlist" instead of "whitelist", do you know what my reaction was?
"Sure, whatever."
And I moved on with my life. It has zero impact on my day to day. The pushback reminds me of people who deadname others on purpose. Like, who cares? Bob wants to be called Sally now? Sure, whatever.
However it tends to become a password game. There's a new password every few months. If you know the new password, you get to feel above those who don't. It's as we invent new crimes to charge people with.
If no one calls it out (because sure, whatever), it keeps ratcheting up. Then banal conversations turn into minefields. What you say gets invalidated because you used the wrong password.
Is this a common occurrence for you? It has never happened to me.
I'm skeptical about whether it's actually and issue or mostly a hypothetical issue.
This entire discourse is so full of straw men it's hard to believe you have actually had real conversations with these people.
There is so much effort during these conversations toward "calling in" vs "calling out" that I am very confused how a conversation could ever get to the point you describe. You'd have to be really callous, and completely unwilling to meet your conversation partner on an even field, to elicit such reactions.
And no, Twitter pile-ons don't count as evidence for your argument -- Twitter is very, very far from an accurate cross-section of "real life".
So - I used a word that someone didn’t like, they corrected me, I adjusted without deep apology and moved on, and everything was fine. Who cares? Why is this such a huge issue, language evolves all the time.
My suspicion is - of people who run into problems with language at tech companies, half of the problem is due to their reaction to being corrected.
So I guess the password is “don’t use a colloquialism based on an ethnic stereotype “, and that seems pretty straightforward and reasonable.
My response would be more like: And just who are you?
So in a way, you’re right.
Is every disagreement you experience combative? Every correction? I tell you, I had a catch-up yesterday with a former team member that turned to the subject of web3, and that friendly debate was approximately 50x more combative as the moment I described.
And how does the other person think they’re better than me? You’re inventing all of this context about a simple conversation that just doesn’t exist.
Because, look, I’m a successful, senior, valued individual who is respected and liked by my team. In the grand scheme of my life, if someone wants me to use one word vs another, why do I care? I have thousands of things that are more important to worry about than that.
It’s the same way that I work with someone who likes to be addressed in emails by their full name - okay, no problem, remind me once and I’ll just move on. Or a coworker I had who was from Africa and did not want to be referred to as “African American” - sure, fine.
Doing so diminishes me not at all, because I don’t define my worth based on whether I use the correct (or incorrect) word or not.
It seems like a lot of the objections that I see in this thread have to do with people having issues being “corrected” or “policed” or “silenced”, all of which have to do with how they interpret how those moments have wronged THEM. Another option would be to let it go. Yet another would be to see themselves as making the faintest possible effort to make sure people feel welcome.
That's the gap between you and others in this thread. What we've experienced is not that one individual is genuinely offended and everyone just moves on, it's that they immediately run the HR/management with crocodile tears in their eyes, and then demand you be fired. They conclude that the only reason to refuse their request is because you're an ideological enemy and don't care about anything else.
And that's why it's bad. It's not about genuinely taking offence, and never was. It is about establishing dominance over powerful institutions so they can turn them all into Twitter - weapons in a never-ending dystopian culture war that can never be won because the victory conditions change every day.
On the other hand, all that nonsense about 'master' was ridiculous. Master's degrees, the master boot record, come on let that one go.
blinks in disabled lesbian
They seem increasingly disconnected with what their users actually want.
... and the willingness to take risks has historically served them pretty well.
The idea that there are millions of people who want to be told that motherboard is a dirty word every time they write it, but won't realize that desire until Google foists it on them, just strikes me as absurd.
Apple is a different story of course.
I feel like I can just gesture to the stock price and say "scoreboard," but that seems an unfair dismissal of the question.
To expound on the topic a bit: I think when they were a smaller company it served them well consistently. Photos and Drive have become an enterprise cornerstone that supports their "light cloud" business space (quite a few people pay for that extra storage). Ads doesn't get talked about much, but the internal culture is very quick-innovate. Chrome went from being a wild idea to dominating the browser-share (and therefore giving Google a foot in the door on everyone's desktop computer), and then they parlayed that into a whole operating system play. Maps basically displaced most of the other players in that space and now competes with only a couple other contenders.
I don't know if it will continue to do so now that they're an 800-lb gorilla in the room. They've certainly become more structurally conservative in the decade-plus since their founding. And I think their push into Cloud is putting pressure on them to act a lot more starched-collar; Enterprise is a different customer than they're used to (or comfortable with) dealing with.
Being passive-aggressively told "blacklist" is a no-no word is not.
If you were really clever, you'd let the user set a "sensitivity" level for the writing from "normal human speak" to "corporate PR approved".
But what if the company found out (and some employee leaked) the fact that most people deliberately set the default level to "normal human speak", and its campaign to replace and redefine words doesn't have any democratic legitimacy (let alone add any commercial value)?
Like, 'I identify both as a mainboard and male, your use of motherboard offends me'???
And this isn't some made up controversy. The Biden administration has been replacing "mother" with "birthing person."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/09/pregnan...
As annoying as a woke clippy might be, at times I realize that we're lucky we don't live in a racist clippy alt reality. "Would you like to expand all mentions of "n-word"?"
If someone is being racist, wouldn't we arguably be better off if they used language that made it transparent to the reader-- rather than disguised it with the magic of search and replace?
Real prejudice can't be erased by search and replace but it can be made more plausibly deniable.
So for example, a writer of British English may want to be warned that "Bring me some fags when you return" may be misunderstood by American readers.
This hypothetical checker might still warn you about "master"-- for example-- as there is now a sizable contingent that finds it controversial. ... but it would equally warn you against terms like "birthing person" which is considered by many to be biologically reductive to the point of being offensive, and by most people to be at least highly loaded.
Such a tool would almost certainly not caution you against "landlord".
I interpret Microsoft’s as helpful when considering ESL or other cultures. I interpret Google’s as straight woke. Very different products but you’re probably right that Microsoft led them there.
The left eats its own rather than being patient or tolerant ("I shouldn't have to teach you!") to people who mean well, while the right allows people to fly way off the handle and still be within their tent because their tent expands to include increasingly extreme ideas.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-...
We keep talking about social media and its problematic effects. Like we don't know how to be social or something anymore.
It's not social media. It's profit/engagement media. The social component is just the hook. The point of it all is basic profit feedback loops (which are far less greedy and evil than we make these utilities out to be--they're just doing what they were instituted to do).
My current brainstorm/crazy idea is that something like "non profit" regulations might be how we coral this nuttiness. It's been semi/mostly effective at corralling religion in America for many years. I'm not sure why we wouldn't benefit from moving the Twitter Day Saints and Instagramists and Tik-Tok-ies and SnapChat Witnesses and Roamin Pathic Twitch into the same "you have your place, you can take care of your own and collect enough funds to operate and some, but if you start looking too much like a business and/or play in politics too much, it's going to get really uncomfortable for you."
Which is going to be very hard, because the reason for the association is from black being the unknown. It's the night that hides the predators. It's the shadow where the enemy hides. It's where you don't want to put your foot in case there are spiders or a sharp rock.
Humans are afraid of the dark. I've not even heard of being afraid of the light.
Death and darkness.
I'd like a historian to confirm, but I'd be very surprised if this type of language didn't exist in most places, including before ever seeing a darker skinned person.
But this effort is doomed to fail. You can be afraid of the dark at night and that is not a predictor at all of racism. Indeed, do people with darker skin not get afraid of the dark?
I agree that in some instances, white seems to be primarily used as a synonym for bright/light, and black as one for darkness, shadow etc., such as in the case of white and black box testing.
However, other cases, such as "whitelist" and "blacklist", seem more nefarious at least in some cultures: A list of names, one of people to grant access to some service or facility, the other to be denied...
And as somebody else has already noted, for somebody without that cultural background, it might not even make any sense, unlike the much more self-describing alternatives "allowlist" and "denylist".
If there is an alternative available that is both more straightforward and that has less negative connotations – why not advocate for its use, and assume that those that do so do it out of good intentions (while at the same time not assuming that people using the other terms do so out of a desire to cause harm)?
The main problem seems to be that, as in many such cases, a nuanced discussion of the topic does not fit into a tweet or news headline, nor a Slackbot autoresponse, and least of all into a grammar checker.
https://biblehub.com/john/3-19.htm
> The Light has come into the world, but men loved the darkness rather than the Light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come into the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed…
Another thing; even though this effort might be doomed to fail, do you think there are good reasons to attempt to change language in such a way?
In general, I tend to be against changing language, but I'm open to being convinced that a certain effort might be worthwhile.
I'm also somewhat pessimistic due to thinking that some other changes I've seen might be inevitable in the long run (seeing how these changes are being used by people my age, I hope it is just fashion - oh and I'm not talking here about changes to the English language).
I'm not categorically against it. I'm not in the right country to properly judge "master/slave". Those words have no association with people to me. But I don't care about "master/slave".
Though I can't find it now, I remember encountering cases where actually "blocklist" was a less descriptive term, even misleading.
I think it's great even though "crewed" is a terrible word, I can't think of a better one, and it's good to change away from "manned".
I'm perfectly willing to surrender the word "niggardly".
So it depends.
Banning words like "ninja", "dojo", "white glove treatment", "blind"... like... really?
What I think is doomed to fail is banning any language that involves color.
I'd say some words are in a "grey area", but I've seen people wanting to ban that term.
Mandating language like this is double plus ungood.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2013/02/25/language/the-ja...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
What's your objection to "allowlist" (or "golist") and "denylist"/"blocklist"/"stoplist"?
It's not often that we have an almost universally better alternative, but at least to me it seems like this is the case here. (Yes, allow/deny have one syllable more each, but I think we'll live.)
I don't like "allowlist" and "denylist" because they sound wrong to me: perhaps because the first element of a compound should be a noun, not a verb, but that's just an attempt to explain what I feel. I don't like "blocklist" because that sounds like a list of blocks, something in a file system. Of the ones you mention, I think I'd probably prefer "golist" and "stoplist", which I hadn't really considered before. They're also shorter than "allowlist" and "denylist".
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "stop list" has been in use since 1920, but "go list" is not recorded.
>>His memory was stored with a black list of the enemies and rivals, who had traduced his merit, opposed his greatness, or insulted his misfortunes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting#Origins_of_the_te...
Like what the actual fuck? I sincerely hope this was meant to be a reply to someone else, otherwise you need to drastically improve your reading comprehension.
If we're going to try to re-engineer spoken English, I'd much rather address the root causes, which were the adoption of such literally black-and-white terms as racial identifiers in the first place. Calling light-skinned European-descended people "white" and dark-skinned members of the African diaspora "black" was always a divisive oversimplification of a nuanced web of ethnic heritages.
This doesn't fit neatly into a woke/anti-woke framework, but I try to avoid using "black" and "white" to describe people whenever I can, preferring something either more descriptive or contextual.
I am not advocating for banning the terms above, just to make an attempt going forward to slowly migrate to the other ones when possible.
Focus on how real actions impact the people around you.
(1) It would be useful in the context of a general style guide, like a white-label Grammarly. Corporations could set their own prompts for words, phrases, and structures. This would make documentation more consistent.
(2) This is dystopian as fuck. Google has the ability to see, aggregate, and now influence what you write in Google docs and Gmail. Who is making the decision on what to "correct"? Is this algorithm explainable?
Bias: I already disagree with Grammarly as an entire category of product.
https://www.kolide.com/blog/is-grammarly-a-keylogger-what-ca...
They claim not to be a keylogger, but, you know, Amazon claims that Alexa isn't always listening too and/but/yet also that it'll wake up immediately when you say the right wake word. So, I'd take their claims with a lot of salt.
Strictly Alexa, the device, is always listening in order to trigger on the wake word. It's just that audio doesn't get sent to Amazon until it hears a wake word (then it just streams the audio to Amazon to process it. locally it's only smart enough to listen for a wake word). This is verifiable from sniffing network traffic, it's not sending enough to be a live audio stream at all times unless the wake word is said.
Google hid a microphone in its Nest Protect product. https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a264489...
All it would take for Amazon (or whichever government twists their arm) to listen to millions of households surreptitiously is a quiet software update.
Interestingly Microsoft has that power with the Office suite for nearly 40 years now (only a decade if we want to focus on the cloud connected area), do you see specific dystopian influences on society stemming from that ?
It’s amazing how a Fortune 500 company can release a product that chastises you for using the word “motherboard” because it has “mother” in it, while other people insist that this is a “fringe” type of thinking and not “mainstream” on the left.
But yes, anytime you hear "AI-powered" and "Natural language parsing", these kinds of cases are inevitable. I know google prides itself on technology, but there are some things like language that are moving so fast, with so many states that an initiative like this takes actual humans to debug. But given Youtube, it seems like Google is still stuck in the thought that they can automate everything.
What connection is there between left/progressive thought and this particular brand of corporate speak?
To be less flippant, boy could I not give a shit less about the problem this feature is trying to solve. As I look outside, I try to imagine the idea of any of these people in my neighborhood, playing with their dogs, mowing their lawns, driving garbage trucks, potentially losing sleep over someone using “policeman” as opposed to “police officer.” It’s absurd.
To be clear, I do feel genuine empathy for someone if they experience abject pain from minor transgressions. However, I am skeptical that almost anyone actually has that issue. And if they do, this is not how I believe you solve the problem. At all.
And if someone did use the term “police officer” instead of “policeman”, it would be no skin off my nose. That’s totally fine, both are natural and reasonable. Whatever. But I don’t need my fucking word processor telling me to self-police my language harder. That’s not a feature I want. In fact, I don’t even like the idea of this feature.
This all feels like cargo culting. If we pretend we’re in a society further removed from a racist, sexist past, does that make us further removed? I don’t think it does. Before the issues with blacklist/whitelist or slave/master were brought to the forefront, I really, really doubt almost anyone had racist or problematic visualizations in their mind. I think they had completely abstract concepts in their mind. Plenty of words probably have a deeply racist origin, but if that’s not what people actually think about when they hear the word, does that history even matter? Aren’t we just creating more problems?
Even if you disagree with all of my viewpoints, I hope you’ll agree that this is going to serve to make people much more radical over time as they perceive these features to either serve as an attack on themselves or their way of lives, or as evidence that people who don’t self-correct incessantly are secretly neo-nazis. To me, it just seems like a lose-lose, because it feels like no matter what I do, people are going to view my rejection of these ideals and pigeonhole me into either of these camps. Or is using the word “camp” also a bad idea due to World War II?
I’m sure some people will read this some day and think I’ve lost my mind. I don't care. For the love of fuck, Go Outside once in a while.
Reminds me how we used to have Backlog Grooming meetings, but we had to change the name because apparently "grooming" is something pedophiles do.
Poor naive me, I thought it was something my parents- sorry, birthing persons- had done for their poodle when it was getting too shaggy.
Google: "Hold my beer..."
Try using:
[carbonated malt beverage]
A true AI would respond to user behavior and back off or change accordingly. Reminds me of Google News which keeps inserting articles about Kardashians no matter how often I tell it to "include fewer of these stories". For all the hype of Google's advanced AI, instead we get faceless, imperious NannyTech.
Maybe they're using a language model for part of speech tagging or to suggest alternative words with similar meaning but there's no way an AI decided that "motherboard" is taboo.
Even a toy solution would be smarter, you could compare the TF-IDF of each word in different populations (woke, average, toxic) to identify non-woke language, if that was the intention - not saying it’s right.
This is clearly just someone who ran a regex over a dictionary and didn’t check the output of their script for scunthorpes such as “motherboard”. It’s so low tech for Google, 1990s technology.
But in all seriousness I think this stuff is great. It pushes more people away from insane woke culture. I’m starting to see even the most progressive friends and colleagues pause and think twice about how cringeworthy all of this is.
Let it happen.
no it doesn’t. it does literally nothing except make a person feel like they did something when they did nothing, like posting a black square on instagram, so they can go right back to being a starbucks slurping propaganda watching cow.
“Shifts in our speech like swapping “manned” for “crewed” spaceflight are attempts to correct histories of erasing women and non-binary people from the industries where they work.”
yea I can’t wait for the sequel to Hidden Figures where we learn it wasn’t actually black women who were responsible for landing a man on the moon (should we say land a person on the moon?), it was actually nonbinary otherkin with purple hair who really made it happen. it will be called Extremely Hidden Figures
* Property ownership is becoming out of question for an increasing fraction of Americans
* Any kid of retirement (as in not having to work and enjoying life off your savings) has become a pipe dream
* Having a single-income family with one parent dedicated to raising the children has become unaffordable.
* Even if you managed to put enough effort to teach your kids the values of hard work and setting long-term goals, the public education system is set to confuse them and kick them off that path, so they will never be competitive with those who received education abroad.
At the same time, the media oligopoly [0] keeps ignoring the problems and pushing the narratives how addressing short-term emotional problems is the top 1 priority, and anyone who wants real prosperity instead of taking a part in the never-ending mutual comforting game is the enemy of the people.
I wonder if people will ever realize they are being manipulated into poverty before it's too late.
Notice how we, as a society, spent relatively little time discussing the 2008 Mortgage Crisis and Occupy Wall Street.
Meanwhile news outlets have been beating the "inclusivity" / race / gender drum for _years_.
Time to wake up, folks.
Comparing that to "inclusivity" is also strange because inclusivity is not an event. A single event has a natural decay of relevance, the further into the past it gets.
It was an event that absolutely decimated MANY people in America financially. And for many of those people, their only fault in the whole thing was, I guess, being ignorant enough to be taken advantage of.
We spend a lot more time discussing things that are a lot more irrelevant than that.
> Comparing that to "inclusivity" is also strange because inclusivity is not an event. A single event has a natural decay of relevance, the further into the past it gets.
OK, then instead compare the general theme of the 2008 Mortgage Crisis / Occupy Wall Street. Specifically: how much time do we spend talking about a small group of powerful elites pulling the financial strings in this country? And how does that compare to how much we talk about "inclusivity"?
The money and power concentrated into the hands of relatively few is an issue that is _several_ orders of magnitude larger than the "inclusivity" stuff we're fed much more often.
That's not a mere coincidence.
HN? Are you talking about in the news? A specific news outlet?
The imbalance of power between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of us is in the news all the time, at least that I watch and read.
So the media is abusing it by spamming people's attention with disproportionately exaggerated problems that don't cost the elites anything to solve, so that people won't have any time left solving the problems that would look bad on the corporate bottom line.
1. There is a small minority of people who truly believed in it in the first place.
2. Then there are people who exploit the system by charging hefty sums for diversity trainings (and calling any opponents to such spending racist).
3. Then there are people who sold the #2 group the student loans and gave the degrees where all you need to graduate is to repeat a fairly basic set of dogmas.
4. There are people who are disillusioned about the whole thing, but are now stuck with the student loans and no other way to make comparable money.
5. There are entrepreneurial people that want to make a change, but since most business niches are occupied by the corporations, the only outlet they have found is to join the diversity & inclusion effort.
6. There are people that want to get rid of their competitors. And since being not inclusive enough is now a firable offense, they are stuck competing who can say more things they don't really believe in.
Ironically, it reminds me of the political situation in Russia, where many people support the war despite suffering economically from it, despite having their children slaughtered, despite losing the rest of civil freedoms in the past months. The mechanism is the same: if you don't play along with the narrative, the competition will eat you alive. And it you overplay it in a clever way, you can get a promotion or a government contract.
I wish sociologists actually studied such phenomena rather than being another echo chamber for the same narrative as everyone else.
I think you meant 'person of means'?
The impetus for this piece was someone wrote a tweet that got very popular implying Google is somehow trying to cover for "landlords" by calling them "property owners". Vice writers are upset about that and would prefer to use "landlord" cause in their culture it has a negative connotation.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slur
1a : an insulting or disparaging remark or innuendo
And to the point, in NYC media circles, it is nearly the equivalent of an actual slur which is why I called it that. Just one writers want to use as opposed to one they think it is inappropriate to use.
Because I'm sure that actual landlords don't have a problem being referred to as landlords, so you must be referring to some other group.