[HN Gopher] Google's AI-powered 'inclusive warnings' feature is ...
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Google's AI-powered 'inclusive warnings' feature is very broken
Author : signor_bosco
Score : 426 points
Date : 2022-04-22 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| u2077 wrote:
| Trying to flatten everything into synonyms is the same reason
| Google search has gone downhill. Now they're bringing that same
| feature nobody asked for into Google docs. Language is too
| complex for any algorithm to "understand"
| julienb_sea wrote:
| I mean, this is the way of things. Corporate slacks have bots to
| correct non-inclusive language, and enforce syntax changes like
| whitelist --> allowlist, master --> main, etc. IMO it's silly,
| but nevertheless increasingly ingrained in corporate America. For
| the many of us that use G Suite for work, this feels like a
| natural extension of other areas to remind us to use current
| language. It's potentially a helpful reminder that avoids the
| awkwardness of someone actually making a gdocs comment about it.
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean I do all those substitutions not because of some weird
| sense of moral superiority but it's literally a zero effort
| thing that might do some good and in most cases improves
| clarity, especially for non-native speakers.
| Kylekramer wrote:
| This is an article nearly entirely built around a viral Tweet
| regarding "landlord" cause Vice writers live in a strange world
| where that is essentially a slur they want to use, and then found
| two edge cases to make it an "article".
| andrewmutz wrote:
| Why would "landlord" be considered a slur?
| tremon wrote:
| It's not a slur, it's just distinguishing people between
| those that own property and those that don't. As such, it's
| offensive to large swathes of disadvantaged people.
| jaywalk wrote:
| "People who own property" and "people who don't own
| property" are very real and in many cases important groups
| to discuss. If the fact that I'm a property owner (not a
| landlord though) offends someone who isn't, well... tough.
| The correct response would be to tell these people to stop
| being so soft and getting offended over absolutely nothing.
| nmilo wrote:
| I can't even begin to follow this line of thought. Is
| 'billionaire' offensive because it distinguishes those who
| own billions of dollars versus those who don't? How, by
| your logic, is 'property owner' not offensive?
| mikkergp wrote:
| > billionaire
|
| I think you meant 'person of means'?
| tgv wrote:
| My guess: "lord" is male, thus offensive.
| dekhn wrote:
| Please, explain your thinking in more detail.
| Kylekramer wrote:
| I object to "articles" that are essentially just popular
| tweets puffed up. Don't think that is good journalism and
| don't think it needs much more detail.
| dekhn wrote:
| I mean, I'm confused why you think the vice authors live in
| a world where landlord is a slur. It's not. It's a commonly
| used term and a small number of progressive individuals
| have manipulated the media and their followers into
| thinking it's terrible. But it isn't. Hence, my request as
| to why you think the Vice authors "wanted to use a slur",
| since it isn't.
| Kylekramer wrote:
| Cause I have worked in NYC media and know that Vice
| writers use "landlord" as an insult?
|
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| An insult and a slur are extremely different things.
| Kylekramer wrote:
| Feels like this is an entirely unrelated topic, but they
| aren't extremely different:
|
| 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.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Who, exactly, is it supposed to be "nearly" an actual
| slur against?
|
| 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.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| What a giant waste of human intelligence and engineering effort.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Oof, this is going to be one of those really really awful threads
| isn't it?
| throw7 wrote:
| This reads like it's April 1st... but it's not. -.-
| ipnon wrote:
| I'm going to delete my Google account today. I'd rather watch
| YouTube without ads, but I can take a little brainwashing for
| some praxis. Corporations only speak the language of money,
| outrage and morals are foreign to them.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Emily Lipstein typed "Motherboard" (as in, the name of this
| website) into a document and Google popped up to tell her she was
| being insensitive: "Inclusive warning. Some of these words may
| not be inclusive to all readers. Consider using different words."
|
| 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.
| quantified wrote:
| FFS
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| "Parentboard".
|
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| A $trillion corporation's garbage product is The Left now?
| jdrc wrote:
| It looks like a great SEO woke language sells, whether you like
| it or not, especially the latter
| karaterobot wrote:
| I dislike this proposed feature as much as the next person, but
| it's worth noting that the main complaint of this article is
| fairly unique: they work on a channel called Motherboard, and
| this feature is going to cause the name of their channel to be
| considered a problem. Most people won't experience that specific
| error case. It's valid, and points to the kinds of unforeseen
| consequences you run into when trying to manage speech in this
| way, but it's not by itself a smoking gun for most people.
| mikkergp wrote:
| I think this article hints at an important thing though which
| is that language is contextual. Even if we think that we should
| describe mothers as birthing persons or fathers as non-birthing
| parents in the general context, I should be allowed to refer to
| myself as a father. People of color can re-claim slurs, which a
| correction to could probably feel paternalistic. There are lots
| of contexts where certain language is ok, depending on the
| speaker or the audience. And I guess it means you're not
| supposed to use google docs for any kind of emotional writing,
| as it tries to correct "annoyed" or the f word. That and there
| is this beauty:
|
| > 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,"
| cowl wrote:
| > Even if we think that we should describe mothers as
| birthing persons
|
| 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.
| foota wrote:
| I think you're looking for the word parent?
| trollied wrote:
| Ok, but it makes no sense in the first place? "Motherboard" has
| long been a technical computer term, that even somebody with a
| passive interest in computers would understand. You would have
| to make an effort to be offended by it in some way.
|
| 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.
| blast wrote:
| It's not valid to censor the word "mother". It's either
| laughable or sinister, depending on whether the people trying
| to do it actually have power.
| wincy wrote:
| This is literally Brave New World stuff. Not exaggerating,
| the word mother was hugely offensive to the people in that
| book. Unfortunately we don't even get the Orgy Porgy parts.
| It's like the worst parts of 1984 and Brave New World mixed
| together.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Be the change you want to see in the world?
| dekhn wrote:
| and as we can see, large numbers of people- there are hundreds
| of us- think that the name of that channel to be highly
| offensive. Actually, no, wait, nobody actually finds it
| offensive.
| elpakal wrote:
| I was extended an on-site interview at Google and after reading
| this and the comments I think I'll pass.
| cato_the_elder wrote:
| If you can (i.e. you don't fear persecution), please let them
| know that this was the reason.
|
| 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.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| Absolutely do not do this. There is massive brigading that
| happens and the folks pushing the "anti-isms" are very very
| focused on this stuff. You will get on a list as some type of
| abuser / racist. Everyone knows to keep heads down on this
| stuff at a place like google or just find somewhere else to
| work. It really doesn't matter if you are liberal in all
| other ways even.
| NtGuy25 wrote:
| There's plenty of other companies that have the other side
| of the coin in values though that would admire people who
| stand up. It's very nice to be a good culture fit at a
| company. I have a Blue Lives Matter flag in the corner of
| my camera during interviews and it's gotten me some really
| good offers and I havn't been declined once.
|
| 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.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| I actually would prefer that most political stuff stay
| out of the workplace. So minimize the crosses, the blue
| lives matter flags, the other stuff.
|
| 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.
| elpakal wrote:
| Yep, I understand this could backfire and thank you for
| pointing it out. It's probably best to let it simmer on HN.
|
| 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)
| tempnow987 wrote:
| The real problem can be that you are not actually told
| what is what first.
|
| 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.
| mjburgess wrote:
| I think you could say, "following *this news* and other
| comments, I feel like my language is going to be constantly
| policed by my colleagues and this is a level of cognitive
| and emotional burden I dont want in my workplace".
|
| 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?".
| [deleted]
| mjburgess wrote:
| I imagine the leadership are aware of how toxic and repellent
| this culture is -- despite, i'd imagine, having no clear
| strategy to reform it.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Shareholders have to step up and get a leadership that can
| take care of it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Google's owners have a majority. There is no real
| pressure shareholders can apply. This is by design.
| nullc wrote:
| Only good advice if the poster is independently wealthy and
| doesn't need to work.
| [deleted]
| nickdothutton wrote:
| It's no wonder they fired the AI ethics department if this is the
| output.
| zefei wrote:
| I don't believe this has anything to do with AI, it most likely
| is rule based (not the entire system, just inclusive warnings).
| People like to shit on AI, but AI wouldn't really make such
| ridiculous suggestions, only human can.
|
| 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.
| kache_ wrote:
| I've been privy to people trying to ban words like "whitelabel"
| at my company. Thankfully, management & executives at my company
| never stood for that BS so I still get to use whitelist &
| blacklist in documentation, and don't worry about those non-
| issues get in the way of me actually doing work.
|
| 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.
| jedimastert wrote:
| Silly question: ignoring any kind of history, why fight for
| terms like "whitelist" and "blacklist" when terms like
| "allowlist" and "blocklist" are objectively clearer, especially
| for folks who's first language is not English?
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| I think there's a good argument to keep terms to maintain the
| historical connection. There's a boatload of math and CS
| terms that are very, very poorly named, but if you renamed
| them, you lose the link to prior sources.
| drdeca wrote:
| Because the people/forces pushing them can't be trusted.
|
| 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| there's hills I'd rather die on but it feels silly. What's
| appropriate is the transfer of the concept, not by how we
| judge the style of the analogy.
|
| 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.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I'd imagine it's because it gets extremely tedious. Switching
| out only whitelist and blacklist isn't a big deal, but with
| the ever increasing list of words being deemed as 'bad' (e.g.
| the 'mother' example) it becomes increasingly annoying to
| communicate. After all, it's distracting from the point just
| to virtue signal to certain types of vapid personalities.
|
| Most people don't see 'blacklist' with racist connotations or
| think 'motherboard' is in any way at odds with
| transgenderism.
| jaywalk wrote:
| I'll fight for these terms because trying to "blocklist" them
| is such a ridiculous thing that I have zero interest in
| entertaining it. Nobody's actually offended by any of it,
| it's all made up by people with nothing better to do and then
| piled on by more people with nothing better to do.
| loudmax wrote:
| The problem isn't that "allowlist" is preferred to
| "whitelist". The problem is that "whitelist" and
| "motherboard" are literally _banned_. Google is a private
| company so they can set whatever policies they want, but it
| 's extremely condescending.
|
| 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.
| adelie wrote:
| I wouldn't be so worried about non-native English speakers.
| 'Whitelist' and 'blacklist' are common enough terms that
| they've become loanwords in other languages. In Chinese, at
| least, the equivalent terms are Bai Ming Dan 'white name
| list' and Hei Ming Dan 'black name list' and La Hei 'pull
| (into) black(list)' is common vernacular for blocking someone
| on social media.
| throwaway47295 wrote:
| I've always pictured a 'blacklist' as a document with
| blacked-out redacted text; a whitelist is just the opposite.
| It wasn't until this substitutional whitewashing[0] of the
| English language that I realized whitelist/blacklist held
| negative connotations for some people.
|
| [0]: like painting over a fence, geez.
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| foofoo4u wrote:
| You may very well may be right that terms "allowlist" and
| "blocklist" are objectively clearer. I'm in favor of the idea
| of changing language to make things clearer and more
| effective. But the contention I have is that these changes
| aren't motivated for the pursuit of clarity. They are
| motivated by a need for cleansing. "whitelist" and
| "blacklist" are innocuous terms. They have been around for
| ages. Used and understood with no controversy by our most
| prestigious institutions from around the world. Then
| suddenly, within a matter of two years, the term is high-
| jacked by upper echelon members of our society. The words are
| re-defined to take on a new meaning and a new interpretation.
| Virtually every one of us who used this term are now deemed
| bad. Oppressors. On the wrong side of history. Racists. Now
| deemed a fireable offense. No room for debate and discussion.
| It is for these reasons that I push back. The motivation
| behind this change is wrong and has the potential to be all
| consuming of our language and culture, deeming innocuous
| terms as oppressive when they are not.
| trollied wrote:
| As I posted to a child: Language also adapts over decades
| so that words are computer/IT terms & have no other
| connotations. Like most of the stuff in this thread. Have a
| think about that.
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| >why fight
|
| 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
| [deleted]
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I just don't like people telling me what to say or write. I
| think it's unhealthy to look for grievances in language and
| that if you get good enough at doing so you might not be able
| to stop. I also think terms like these are just a small part
| of an ongoing effort.
|
| 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.
| kache_ wrote:
| I don't mind those words, and I don't really fight for them.
| I use the words I use out of habit. I just think that the
| mismatch in effort/spun cycles on those terms by the routine
| vocal minority is a testament to how detached to reality
| these people are
|
| The things that worry me are the witch hunts started by the
| same group of people. See my other comment on "fren"
| silicon2401 wrote:
| Your question takes for granted that people are fighting for
| whitelist in blacklist, but it's the opposite. Whitelist and
| blacklist are long-established and familiar terms.
| madamelic wrote:
| No, they are not.
|
| 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.
| filoleg wrote:
| I am fine with "blocklist" instead of "blacklist", because it
| sounds similar. But "allowlist" is just more difficult to
| pronounce.
|
| 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 "chernyi spisok" is a commonly used
| phrase, and it literally translates to "black list", and has
| the exact same meaning as in English.
| nullc wrote:
| > I am fine with "blocklist" instead of "blacklist"
|
| Better hope you're not dealing with a block device or other
| data structure that involves units of data called blocks.
| dymk wrote:
| That's not what the word "objectively" means
|
| Whitelist and blacklist are the words we've been using for
| decades to describe a concept. Everybody knows what they
| mean.
| madamelic wrote:
| > words we've been using for decades to describe a concept.
|
| 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.
| trollied wrote:
| Language also adapts over decades so that words are
| computer/IT terms & have no other connotations. Like most
| of the stuff in this thread. Have a think about that.
| zeveb wrote:
| 'Whitelist' and 'blacklist' have nothing to do with race,
| they _never_ had anything to do with race, and anyone who
| thinks they do is, quite simply, _wrong_. Knowing these
| facts, this is nothing like calling a black man 'boy' or
| using the n-word -- so bringing them up is irrelevant.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| whitelist and blacklist are lazy language, even if you ignore
| the fact that you personally are not bothered by them and you
| don't have the mental capacity to understand why someone else
| might be. They carry no intrinsic meaning, and if you can't
| come up with more descriptive language you are the problem. In
| all cases you can come up with a better word - include, deny,
| allow, block, ban, accept, etc. It all depends on what you are
| _actually_ talking about. Enjoy your high paying job a Truth
| Social (I bet!).
| jaywalk wrote:
| Nobody was bothered by these words until some jackass told
| them they should be.
| orangecat wrote:
| Your ableist bigotry against people with lower intellectual
| capacity has been noted.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| You will now be limited to 1 inclusive language dismissal
| per week. All inclusion warnings past the first one will be
| made for you
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"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.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| This may seem as bad in short term, but it's good in the long
| run.
|
| As the share of ideologically-driven people rises, capacity
| to solve problems and create valuable stuff decreases. The
| organization will die inevitably.
| kache_ wrote:
| I unfortunately have a mortgage and can't live with the
| stress of the fear of being fired for some esoteric internet
| community I've joined. I've heard through the grapevines of
| people starting slack mob witch hunts over people who've used
| terms like "Fren" because of its very slight relationship
| with 4chan.
|
| 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.
| ReadEvalPost wrote:
| I've been publishing writing far outside consensus
| progressive attitudes since the pandemic began with zero
| issue so far. Don't make your workplace your audience or
| invite controversy around your workplace and you're very
| unlikely to have a problem.
| dekhn wrote:
| "I owe money and need to make money to pay it off, so I'm
| too afraid to say even reasonable things in public". Sounds
| like you have 3 problems.
| kache_ wrote:
| Hahaha yeah, sometimes I wonder how quickly I'd get fired
| if I didn't have mouths to feed. I'd probably be
| somewhere in Miami living in a hacker warehouse working
| on my 5th failed crypto project, consuming an assortment
| of drugs.
|
| Instead, it's the white picket fence, steady income and
| BBQs for me
| darepublic wrote:
| Airbnb did a similar thing, var/schema name whitelabel was
| excised. Weirdly black label remained. It caused a frontend bug
| temporarily
| tyingq wrote:
| "Black Label" has positive connotations. So it feels like an
| effort to find anything with "white" where there might be a
| positive connotation. And anything "black" where there might
| be a negative connotation. And to remove all that matches,
| regardless of why the specific connotation exists, why it
| exists, whether it's related to race in any way, etc.
|
| I suppose that's easier than trying to debate every
| occurrence.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| My problem with all of this "progressiveness" in the workplace
| is that it just reeks of laziness.
|
| 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".
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Moral superiority is the cheapest form of superiority.
| jollybean wrote:
| The 'broken' part is that it exists in the first place by
| default.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| AaronFriel wrote:
| > Journalist Rebecca Baird-Remba tweeted an "inclusive warning"
| she received on the word "landlord," which Google suggested she
| change to "property owner" or "proprietor."
|
| > 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.
| causality0 wrote:
| Google's increasing editorialization is why voice typing is
| effectively useless to me now because everything I say gets
| altered and I have to correct it.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| You mean all this time I could have cashed in on some
| microaggression victimhood because of all those daughterboards
| and daughter cards that weren't called son cards? How come that
| never ocurred to me? How did I survive all these decades with
| that boot on my neck?
| motohagiography wrote:
| That's peak Google right there. It's the infection point on their
| organic growth. They've got a long tail of incumbency and
| subsidized dominance ahead of them, but in the lifecycle of a
| company, this is the out of touch moment that demonstrates
| they've passed their middle age. In terms of half life, this
| suggests they've got another decade of some vitality, and then a
| kind of legacy presence in the decade after that before their
| furniture gets picked up by something newer in a growth phase.
|
| They would be well served to update their motto to, "Don't be
| fatuous." It's the best they can do now.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| This topic is always going to be highly subjective, but I find
| the author's examples of how this feature is malfunctioning to be
| extremely uncompelling.
|
| "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.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I really don't get the logic behind the "landlord" one. In what
| world can "landlords" be considered an oppressed group that needs
| special consideration for inclusivity? Is the endgame here Google
| suggesting "benevolent autocratic ruler" instead of "dictator" to
| be more inclusive?
| archhn wrote:
| This is straight up a prelude to Orwellian thought control via
| language modification. Can nobody really see through this
| corporate "woke" smokescreen?
|
| 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.
| thethethethe wrote:
| > There is no debate about these "woke" issues.
|
| Uhhh isn't this thread a debate?
| temporallobe wrote:
| The older I get, the more I fail to understand how the vocal
| minority is able to completely control the narrative on
| everything.
|
| 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.
| nullc wrote:
| Weird. The older I get the more understandable it becomes to
| me. None of this crap matters. At most it matters because it
| enables bullying, but bullies are always going to find
| _something_ to bully over.
|
| "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."
| exo-pla-net wrote:
| Irrelevant nitpick: "gender" in linguistics means "category".
| Objects in grammatically gendered languages are rarely/never
| categorized as "manly" or "effeminate"; they're, for example,
| categorized as "animate" or "inanimate". [1]
|
| [1] https://blog.duolingo.com/what-is-grammatical-gender/
| gdulli wrote:
| I spent many years in the bluest corner of a very blue state. But
| still I can't imagine any objection to the word "landlord"
| outside of (1) a right wing attempt to satirize the left, (2) a
| Google product brainstorming meeting, or (3) a rare sincere
| outlier or concern troll. In any of those cases I don't think
| this is necessary.
|
| 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.
| nullc wrote:
| > (1) a right wing attempt to satirize the left
|
| 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.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Policing Language (and frequently changing it) is one of the
| levers of control that was outlined heavily by Orwell in
| 1984, with the concept of Doublespeak.
|
| 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.
| aendruk wrote:
| The change from "landlord" feels good. I've always felt a
| little awkward when using the word but couldn't articulate why.
|
| Google wouldn't be my first choice, but it's nice that someone
| is able to dedicate attention to this.
| ridaj wrote:
| What about when the landlord is a company? Or an actual man
| in fact? We're going from unnecessarily gendered to
| unnecessarily neutered word.
| aendruk wrote:
| Like most things, it depends on the situation. The point is
| to find something that does work. Surely there's room for
| improvement?
| quantified wrote:
| It's not "landlord". It's "person who lords land".
| shitlord wrote:
| Satirists already made that joke with the term "Person of
| Land". Its initialism is "POL" so it even plays into the
| "POC" angle.
| bombcar wrote:
| Landlord gets hit from multiple sides; those who don't like
| that it contains "lord" which is a male term, those who don't
| like that landlords exist, and those who don't like that the
| concept of owning land exists.
| gdulli wrote:
| Well, switching to a new word isn't going to make anyone
| happy if what they're really upset by is that the underlying
| concept exists.
| jandrese wrote:
| > those who don't like that the concept of owning land
| exists.
|
| 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.
| thrwy_ywrht wrote:
| > people who are just plain nuts
|
| Are you suggesting that it's "plain nuts" to be against
| private ownership of land?
| Stupulous wrote:
| As someone who somewhat supports public land ownership
| (of the Georgism variety), I think you'd have to be plain
| nuts to use that belief to justify discouraging others to
| use the word 'landlord'. Especially considering I hear
| the word more from people who oppose land ownership than
| from anyone else. I'm more inclined to believe that this
| is about gender.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I would be extremely surprised if this came from the left:
| most people I know relish the negative connotation of being
| able to describe someone as a landlord.
|
| 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!)
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > those who don't like that landlords exist, and those who
| don't like that the concept of owning land exists.
|
| 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.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Sure the origin is to do with Lords but landlord isn't male,
| anyone can be a landlord, pretending it's gendered is just
| lying to try and be offended. Presumably, such people think
| the word coward references bovines as it includes the word
| cow.
|
| 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.
| randallsquared wrote:
| > _pretending it 's gendered is just lying to try and be
| offended._
|
| 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.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| Canada, too.
| trollied wrote:
| It's just a modern word. "Landlord". People know what it
| means. Stop anybody on the street and ask them what a
| landlord is? They will tell you. It's an established word.
| What's the point in changing it because a few people actively
| want to be offended?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _it contains "lord" which is a male term_
|
| 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.
| jefftk wrote:
| It's parallel to "landlady"
| flyingfences wrote:
| > As in she's the "lord of the land."
|
| But she wouldn't be; she'd be the "lady of the land".
| unmole wrote:
| Queen Elizabeth II is the current Lord of Mann. And Dame
| Fiona Woolf was the Lord Mayor of London as was Mary
| Donaldson before her.
| lupire wrote:
| Yeah language isn't 100% consistent. You may have noticed
| Elizabeth isn't the King of England.
| drdeca wrote:
| nearest((lord) + (woman) -
| (man),excluding=[(lord)])==(lady)
| bombcar wrote:
| Apartment buildings yes, but most single family homes
| (where people use the term landlord the most I suspect) are
| usually owned by an identifiable individual.
| dylan604 wrote:
| What if your 3) was in 2) pushing 1) only it backfired and
| people in 2) took it seriously?
| gdulli wrote:
| As possible a reason for #2 going wrong as any other. But #2
| thinking they know what's best for humanity is an established
| enough pattern that I imagine it happens organically as well.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'm so tired of SV thinking they are making the world a
| better place. It's such a tired trope.
| troupe wrote:
| Have you seen the people objecting to the term "Master
| Recording" and such.
| flatearth22 wrote:
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| I caught "inclusive" in the list of things Gmail will "suggest"
| "better" words in Google Docs. The scary part of this that this
| enables enforcement. That may seem far fetched now, but in the
| future?
| jchw wrote:
| Fun fact: the longest known distance between two points on Earth
| is the distance between Google product managers and ordinary
| people.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Tao331 wrote:
| > I really, really doubt almost anyone had racist or
| problematic visualizations in their mind.
|
| 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.
| nostromo wrote:
| Who was asking for Woke Clippy? Is Google just bored and
| completely out of ideas?
|
| They seem increasingly disconnected with what their users
| actually want.
| mateo1 wrote:
| If you read the article, it is clear who their prospective
| clients are. Big corporations pretending not to be racist. The
| next iteration will be a corporate-speak translator.
|
| 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"?"
| nullc wrote:
| > I realize that we're lucky we don't live in a racist clippy
| alt reality
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| shadowgovt wrote:
| As a corporate culture, Google very much believes that if you
| ask the pre-car public what they want, they'd say "faster
| horses."
|
| ... and the willingness to take risks has historically served
| them pretty well.
| rurp wrote:
| Google is an ad company whose core competency is getting lots
| people to click on links and buy things in exchange for
| money. They aren't exactly revolutionizing the world for
| good. Most of their innovative ideas get a splashy launch,
| middling support for a while, and then fizzle and/or get
| killed.
|
| 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.
| mrosett wrote:
| Has it actually served them well? How many of Google's
| controversial launches have turned out well? The YouTube
| acquisition was risky but that was more on the commercial
| side than on the product side.
|
| Apple is a different story of course.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > Has it actually served them well?
|
| 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.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| But then Google gives you a car for free, then tells you it
| won't work in six months as they're canceling the service.
| Then they do it again, and again, and then no one wants a
| Google Car because it would just get canceled. The idea may
| have served them, the execution has not. This idea also
| translates into, "I know better than you what you want",
| which leads to not listening, not hearing, and ignoring your
| customer's needs, which is 199% Google.
| mikkergp wrote:
| This is a popular tool in hiring for creating inclusive job
| descriptions. They're competing with companies like
| https://textio.com/
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah, who asked for this? One would think they'd be trying to
| achieve feature parity with Microsoft Office instead.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| MS Word introduced a language censor like this recently (I've
| not seen it, only seen it announced at a workplace), so maybe
| they are following where MS leads?
| jooperdoo wrote:
| It's far less intrusive. It will highlight fuck, for
| example, and tell you "that language might be offensive to
| readers." It also flags on idioms that may come across
| poorly if you aren't familiar with them/know English well.
| In a strongly multicultural company it's been quite nice to
| have it catch a couple of my phrasings that wouldn't track
| well to a non English speaker.
|
| 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.
| nullc wrote:
| I think a grammar checker that warned about cross-cultural
| confusion would be pretty valuable in many writing contexts. It
| would best be constructed in that light: rather than moralizing
| or being activist just noting the fact that some text has a
| non-trivial odds of being understood in a way different than
| you likely intended.
|
| 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".
| canadaduane wrote:
| Yes! This is much more interesting. Audience-based cultural &
| contextual awareness, rather than "assuming one global
| context" that takes the veneer of moral high ground. The
| former would be more helpful to a writer.
| cj wrote:
| You could look at Grammarly ($10+ billion dollar valuation) as
| evidence that there is a market for a tool/plugin that improves
| a user's prose.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Being told I use too many adjectives, my word choice is too
| heavy for my audience or that I used too many clauses is
| useful.
|
| 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".
| nicbou wrote:
| It depends on who you write for. As a non-native, non-
| American speaker, I'd be happy to know if I'm accidentally
| offending the people I'm writing to.
| umanwizard wrote:
| That's the problem, though: the tool doesn't actually
| tell you that. The vast majority of Americans are not
| offended by words like "motherboard".
| [deleted]
| onepointsixC wrote:
| But you aren't. Saying that "Motherboard" is offensive is
| basically misinformation.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I can't even imagine what the supposed offense is here?
|
| Like, 'I identify both as a mainboard and male, your use
| of motherboard offends me'???
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I'm not a native english speaker either. Chances are you
| aren't offending anyone. You probably know exactly which
| words of the english language are unambiguously
| offensive. Words like motherboard just aren't offensive.
| babypuncher wrote:
| In this particular case, the tool being discussed is meant
| almost exclusively for people writing "corporate PR
| approved" content, so it makes sense that the sensitivity
| setting is cranked.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I do a lot of things in Google docs beyond write PR
| releases...
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > you'd let the user set a "sensitivity" level for the
| writing
|
| 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)?
| ayende wrote:
| I don't think I ever heard such an appropriate turn of phrase
| as "woke clippy", bravo!
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Google Docs will "warn you away from inappropriate words"_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31086310 - April 2022 (964
| comments)
| cabirum wrote:
| "...language is of central importance to human thought because it
| structures and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of
| formulating and expressing."
| tgv wrote:
| That idea is also known as the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, and
| despite many attempts, it has never been proven. There are only
| a few flawed papers that provide some support. We can safely
| assume it's untrue. Instead, it's (trivially) the other way
| around: our thinking shapes our language.
| zionic wrote:
| Thus further evidence of neurolinguistic programming being real
| (or people believing it's real).
|
| Shape the language people are allowed to use and you start to
| shape their thoughts as well.
| riffraff wrote:
| The most hilarious thing about this is that Google has used "AI"
| to create the most un-inclusive tool of all, Google Translate.
|
| I present you the beautiful translation of hungarian gender-less
| sentences to english:
|
| o csinos. o okos. o csunya. o jo.
|
| 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.
| pvillano wrote:
| if only English had a gender neutral pronoun that could be used
| by default when the gender of the subject isn't provided
| :thinking:
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I still unironically want a singular variant to rise in
| popularity, don't particularly care what. There are so many
| times when "they" comes up and I have no clue if we're
| talking about a person or a group. There's already enough
| pronoun ambiguity when talking about single subjects without
| intoducing a dimension of plurality ambiguity.
| wchar_t wrote:
| Many folks I know use "they". Works well enough, I think.
| S0und wrote:
| That's nothing
|
| O jokepu
|
| Becomes, wait for it
|
| She is handsome
|
| Just like in English, handsome is used to compliment a man, and
| pretty to compliment a woman.
| titzer wrote:
| It's computer-brain solution to a problem that is crying out
| for a human. Humans "don't scale". Therefore paying 5 bi-
| lingual experts to teach the machine is "infeasible", but
| spending millions upon millions of dollars on hardware and
| software development, then exposing it the unwashed mess of the
| internet isn't....
| exyi wrote:
| While it's hilarious, it's understandable IMHO - just basic
| statistics, she is more often used in front of pretty/ugly.
| It's showing a glitch in our society more than a glitch in
| Google AI.
|
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| > 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.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Am I the only one starting to get a little worried what will
| happen when the pendulum inevitably swings the other way?
| akomtu wrote:
| I'm waiting for the moment when the woke realise that everything
| they despise revolves around christianity in one way or another,
| and for this reason they'll proudly declare themselves as not
| only anti-racist, but also anti-christian.
| 31098347 wrote:
| There's a few different things to unpack with this feature.
|
| (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.
| jcadam wrote:
| Hopefully LibreOffice doesn't adopt this sort of thing.
| trynumber9 wrote:
| With Libre Office you can be sure if they add such a feature it
| can always be disabled. With Google or Microsoft you never know
| when they'll take the toggles away and you have no recourse
| without source.
| MikeDelta wrote:
| Of master is not acceptable anymore, how are we going to call the
| MSc or MA degrees?
| imgabe wrote:
| I guess Motherboard will just have to change its name to
| Birthingpersonboard.
| cft wrote:
| I have been thinking about this for a while, and came to the
| conclusion that the main weakness of progressivism is its
| arrogance. A progressive simply thinks that she is more educated,
| virtuous or simply better than others. This manifests subtly,
| from "helping poor immigrants", to not so subtle implementations,
| like knowing better what Google queries you actually meant to
| type, to censoring "fake news", because people do not have the
| faculty to decide for themselves, to downright auto-correction of
| people's speech. A progressive copes with this implied
| superiority by casting it as her goodness.
|
| 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.
| dathinab wrote:
| You are lumping all progressive people together.
|
| You also assume they are female.
|
| Why?
| jaywalk wrote:
| Aren't we supposed to use female pronouns when we're speaking
| generally now? It used to be male, but I know that's long
| gone.
| dathinab wrote:
| No, you are supposed to use gender neutral terms.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| My take on the situation is that as a movement and political
| ideology "Progressivism" is steeped in a sense of
| righteousness. I very much sense progressives have internalized
| the notion that what they are fighting for is so obviously
| good, correct, and just that anyone who opposes such self-
| evidently virtuous things must either be 1) brainwashed by
| malevolent forces (Fox news, misinformation, propaganda,
| internalized oppression) or 2) constitutionally flawed people
| who cannot be redeemed and must be fought against
| ("Deplorables", fascists, nazis, racists, etc).
| orangecat wrote:
| It's nearly 100% conflict theory
| (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/).
| mmastrac wrote:
| The pendulum is swinging back and force once a decade or so. Just
| give it a few years to calm down a bit and we'll go back to
| worrying about putting leaves on David and painting over
| renaissance paintings.
|
| Humans act so weird in large groups.
| pgcj_poster wrote:
| mc4ndr3 wrote:
| We haven't gotten _spelling_ assistance right, let alone grammar
| or semantics. Prefer editors with fewer "smart" features that
| distract from writing.
| jonnydubowsky wrote:
| What i don't understand is how they can roll out this feature,
| while the last few weeks I've suddenly started getting spammed
| in Google Drive with obscene garbage that can only be blocked
| on an instance by instance basis. Surely they could offer some
| gate that allows the user to deploy such filters where they
| actually want them?
| changoplatanero wrote:
| > We haven't gotten spelling assistance right
|
| 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"
| wincy wrote:
| L
|
| 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.
| zionic wrote:
| I'm just gonna leave this here:
|
| https://i.redd.it/wqld5v9s5ln81.jpg
| john_moscow wrote:
| Well, such things are always driven by demand. And unfortunately,
| there is a strong demand in our society for policing words,
| renaming formulas and issuing apologies all while:
|
| * 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.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31077525
| ironSkillet wrote:
| What I don't understand is, where is this perceived demand
| coming from? I think it is an extremely small minority that
| happens to be extremely loud on social media and in corporate
| circles, so the perception of how important this issue is has
| become grossly exaggerated. I don't think this is purposeful
| malice on anyone's part, I think it is just a product of social
| media amplification and the elites desire to constantly virtue
| signal to each other that has led to this absurd loop in our
| culture.
| john_moscow wrote:
| Unfortunately, there is a very solid explanation for it and
| it doesn't yield a good prognosis:
|
| 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.
| thorncorona wrote:
| This is an example of where the Twittersphere has outsized
| influence.
| dolni wrote:
| The elites of America use "inclusivity" and race as bait to
| distract from the very issues you describe.
|
| 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.
| mordae wrote:
| Ever heard of Rojava?
| jasonshaev wrote:
| What? The 2008 Mortgage Crisis was the biggest news story for
| at least a year.
|
| 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.
| dolni wrote:
| > What? The 2008 Mortgage Crisis was the biggest news story
| for at least a year.
|
| 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.
| jasonshaev wrote:
| I dunno, you're not providing any evidence to back up the
| assertion that "we" talk way more about inclusivity than
| "powerful elites." Who is "we?"
|
| 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.
| powerslacker wrote:
| Pretty interesting that there are people who legitimately
| believe the megacorps are 'the good guys' because of stunts
| like this.
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| May I ask what the items in your enumerated list have to do
| with "policing words?"
| john_moscow wrote:
| The items on the list are the problems relevant to most
| Americans. Except, the human brain has a limited capacity for
| "currently tracked" problems and tends to pick them
| proportionally to the amount of attention paid to them.
|
| 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.
| zbrozek wrote:
| He's pointing out that focusing on issues that don't have
| real impact is starving us of our ability to focus on
| broader, more serious issues. The shrinking of the middle
| class is a tangible problem. Words being insufficiently
| inclusive is not.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Most depressing thing since Alphacode.
| farmerstan wrote:
| Time to make those on-site interviews more rigorous. Looks like
| too many bad coders are leaking through the interview process.
| foofoo4u wrote:
| Oh, its not about good coders. It's about who they select.
| Companies now explicitly ask DIE (diversity, equity &
| inclusion) questions. Its the new filter to select those that
| follow this new orthodoxy.
| bezospen15 wrote:
| Yet another reason "Product" is a joke
| [deleted]
| guerrilla wrote:
| More reason to use free source software on your actual computer
| less you succumb to the will of 1984+Brave New World as a
| seevice.
| heinrichhartman wrote:
| Question for those in the Beta trial:
|
| Can you disable this feature globally for your account, or do you
| need to disable this in every document explicitly?
| [deleted]
| icare_1er wrote:
| Gosh that wokeness is getting more insane the day.
| efitz wrote:
| Have there ever been any studies that show that using the
| masculine pronoun in the neuter reference in English, impacts (or
| has ever impacted) the well-being of females?
| maxk42 wrote:
| Until a couple decades ago it was well understood that in
| English the "masculine" was gender-neutral and the "feminine"
| was an honorific. Hence why esteemed possessions, countries,
| etc. were referred to in the feminine. Is it possible that
| taking away that honorific from women has harmed their sense of
| self-worth or some other aspect of their well-being?
| subjectsigma wrote:
| I can't even properly describe how angry this makes me.
| nullc wrote:
| Imagine the life of someone who thinks that this is a good and
| important change. It's probably miserable-- a slight around
| every corner and no higher purpose than bulling people over
| terminology. Instead of anger, try gratitude that you're not in
| their shoes.
| gorwell wrote:
| We suggest you replace the word angry with pleased.
| smiddereens wrote:
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| croes wrote:
| The same logic that got rid of the master branch applies to
| motherboard.
|
| And much of this logic ignores context.
| fareesh wrote:
| Controversial suggestion but can the California folks just do
| their own bay area version of products?
|
| 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.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > Words are really just words.
|
| 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.
| nicbou wrote:
| The best example to drive the point home is the Nazi's
| "useless mouths". It's a terrifyingly effective term if your
| goal is to shape public opinion.
|
| Another is the freedom fighter vs terrorist word choice.
| fareesh wrote:
| Imagine you work in Wakanda and slave was s'mballa and master
| was m'chatka and one day the science department said ok we're
| calling it m'butu by default instead.
|
| 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)
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| >and neither did my ancestors
|
| Considering the number of ancestors in your past, this is
| highly unlikely for any human being alive today.
| fareesh wrote:
| If every human being alive has had a slavemaster ancestor,
| all the more reason to not care about the use of the word in
| a completely unrelated context involving hard drives or
| branches of information.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| In the article they use the example of "Motherboard" and
| "Landlord" and seem to suggest that these are areas where the
| Google AI is making mistakes or being overly strict.
|
| 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.
| titzer wrote:
| Woke Clippy (to borrow from up-thread) is going to have a field
| day when it learns German. There. Are. So. Many. Violations.
| dhzhzjsbevs wrote:
| This is the company that fired James damore and then turned
| around and spouted his talking points a few months later not
| even realising the hypocrisy.
|
| https://mashable.com/article/google-youtube-women-in-tech-di...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This attempt at "de-offensive-izing" all language has the
| effect of turning clear, evocative phrases to mush.
|
| George Carlin's skit couldn't be more timely:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isMm2vF4uFs
| routeerror40 wrote:
| Carlin was a genius and ahead of his time.
| MrBlueIncognito wrote:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM
|
| A short-film/parody on how an extreme obsession with
| inclusive speech makes it impossible to communicate clearly
| without consequences.
| rhexs wrote:
| It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| "Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of
| consciousness always a little smaller."
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/450328-don-t-you-see-
| that-t...
| tedsanders wrote:
| Putting myself in the shoes of a kid learning about
| computers, I find some of these phrases to be more clear, not
| less clear.
|
| 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.
| dxhdr wrote:
| > 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?
|
| 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.
| Pxtl wrote:
| "Parentboard" is probably better than "mainboard", but
| given the choice between "motherboard" and "mainboard",
| which are the two currently-accepted terms for that
| particular component, I'm going to go with mainboard.
|
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| Well, there used to be daughterboards (but no sonboards).
| canadaduane wrote:
| Good point. A similar lack of clarity also tripped me up
| when some documentation switched from "master key" to
| "main key" because there actually _was_ an additional
| concept called a "standard key" which seems to have a
| lot of potential conceptual overlap with "main key".
|
| https://twitter.com/canadaduane/status/146573725885034496
| 1
| MikeDelta wrote:
| It appreciate the idea to make language more precise where
| possible.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Rarebox wrote:
| I can believe this. Around the time I left people were patting
| backs for fighting racism by getting rid of terms
| blacklist/whitelist.
|
| 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.
| cynicalkane wrote:
| This entire comment is a lie. Terms like "motherboard" are
| readily findable on Google's internal search. I could not find
| anything referencing a banned non-inclusive words policy in the
| employee policy guide. I have never heard of anything remotely
| resembling someone catching heat for saying "motherboard" or
| whatever.
|
| Source: I also work at Google.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > Terms like "motherboard" are readily findable on Google's
| internal search.
|
| 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.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| You're welcome to ping me internally. It's in the banned
| words list (happy to share a link internally) and I double
| checked policy before posting this comment to make sure I was
| accurately representing the rules that are applied to me as
| an employee.
| dekhn wrote:
| based on dannybee's comments elsewhere, the list you're
| referring to is actually for external product comms, not
| internal googler comms.... could you elaborate on your
| position further?
| mgraczyk wrote:
| That's not true, there are a few internal-only lists that
| have different contents (lots of overlap but not 100%).
| Different PAs have adopted different lists.
|
| 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"
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Okay but that's just a list that someone created. People
| are allowed to create lists; I've never heard of anyone
| enforcing this list.
| itsyaboi wrote:
| Since you work at Google, maybe you can answer this: does
| internal tooling exist to flag occurrences of "bad" words in
| say, code reviews or shared documents?
| anothernerd2 wrote:
| There is at Amazon, it gets brought up as a code violation
| while we're doing security and other kinds of reviews
|
| 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! :)
| Tao331 wrote:
| But isn't the name _Amazon_ inherently exclusionary, and
| one of the oldest distorted stereotypes?
|
| The mote in the employee's eye vs. the log in the
| company's eye
| [deleted]
| dvirsky wrote:
| Former Googler (until a couple of months ago). I've never
| seen anything like it, but maybe I just didn't use "bad"
| words in code? There were presubmit checks for typos and
| such. Also, IIRC I asked people in code/design reviews to
| rename white/black lists to allow/deny lists, but it might
| have just been in docs.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > 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).
| murderfs wrote:
| Yes. There's even a bot that calls you out if you use "bad"
| words in internal chats.
| krastanov wrote:
| I am incredulous at the "mother" to "birthing person"
| requirement. I have seen one or two people with such
| prescriptive views on language but the vast majority of people
| I know consider it ridiculous. And I am in an incredibly "woke"
| social bubble.
| augustuspolius wrote:
| Encountering this aspect of the culture war always makes me
| wonder why are tech companies so focused on these gender
| minorities and not, say, on the disabled groups. There are
| more blind, deaf, mute (etc, etc) people in the US than
| transgender people who will bear a child. It would be equally
| incoherent to attempt to replace all usages of "see", "hear"
| with "perceive".
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| Because the "other side" wouldn't take offense to it.
| Newton's 3rd law applied to the social sciences.
| Mezzie wrote:
| Oh, I have OPINIONS about why this might be, as someone who
| was one of the teenagers on LJ back when this weird
| ideology (the bastardization of intersectionality/identity
| politics that's taken over all non-right discussions)
| started. I'm a disabled lesbian, so I get a front row seat
| to how some forms of discrimination 'matter' more than
| others.
|
| 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'.
| duckmysick wrote:
| Twitch removed the "blind playthrough" tag not so long ago.
|
| https://www.eurogamer.net/twitch-removes-blind-
| playthrough-t...
| bentcorner wrote:
| FWIW, they do. There's constant efforts to ensure apps are
| accessible if you use a screen reader and to not
| exclusively rely on sound for notifications. Additionally
| there's care to not assume people are using keyboards and
| mice when interacting with something ("tap" vs "click" vs
| "select" vs "pick", etc.). At least with the teams I've
| worked with there's a considerable amount of effort done in
| these areas.
| madamelic wrote:
| Trans people are frequently in tech. Go to any college and
| you'll see the CompSci department is the one with the most
| amount of LGBT individuals.
|
| The same can't be said for people who are blind or deaf.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| But wouldn't an underrepresentation of disabled people be
| cause for concern in the industry? There are more legally
| blind people in the USA than there are Native Americans
| yet at the political stage there is very little interest
| in coming up for those people.
|
| 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.
| Mezzie wrote:
| LGBT people or trans people?
|
| 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.
| enriquto wrote:
| > Go to any college and you'll see the CompSci department
| is the one with the most amount of LGBT individuals.
|
| 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.
| madamelic wrote:
| Interesting. I don't have data, but it heavily correlates
| with my school and what I had heard from others. There
| was like a big cadre of trans people in the CompSci
| department, then a few in the Math department.
|
| 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.
| DontMindit wrote:
| mrosett wrote:
| This gender-neutral terminology seems to be standard in
| official materials in the ob/gyn academic world
| titzer wrote:
| This front of the culture war is an unwinnable quagmire that
| seems to elicit ever-increasing smarminess yet has no victory
| conditions.
| cloutchaser wrote:
| Because saying this stuff is akin to vowing your allegiance
| to the party in authoritarian regimes.
|
| 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.
| gfodor wrote:
| The point is previous things you thought were ridiculous were
| normalized, in a very deliberate process. So to it will go
| with "mother", if the past is any indication. However, it may
| not be, because people are (ironically) waking up to this.
| rhino369 wrote:
| I've been incredulous to this stuff for 15 years, but
| violating rules I was incredulous about 5 years ago would be
| fired and black listed from my industry now.
|
| Maybe the pendulum will stop or swing back, but "that's not
| going to catch on" has been wrong for nearly two decades.
| hervature wrote:
| > you're also not allowed to say it privately in chats or
| emails
|
| 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]?
|
| [1] - https://www.newegg.com/Motherboards/Category/ID-20
| mgraczyk wrote:
| It's a code of conduct violation and the other employee can
| ask you not to use the word. If you continue using it that's
| an even worse violation.
| varispeed wrote:
| That's part of Marxist long march through institutions. They
| achieve these goals through bullying and accusations. Nobody at
| work wants to be (unfoundedly) accused of racism so they
| silently accept these new rules. I mean it's a small
| inconvenience that is probably worth the salary they are
| getting. But the truth is people in these organisations are
| afraid of speaking their minds in case they say something that
| is deemed wrong by woke police. I noticed that people have
| become less open and many limits conversations strictly to the
| tasks at hand. It's kind of how corporate goals meet with
| Marxism - they believe people no longer engage in "pointless"
| socialising that affects the bottom line and if they want to
| engage, they have a minefield to navigate. Many of my (former)
| friends who worked at these big corporations have become
| zombies - it's not possible to have a conversation with them
| about day to day life, events etc. It's really fascinating and
| worrying.
| andrekandre wrote:
| which things did marx say that these companies are now
| implementing?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| As someone fairly familiar with the SJWs in a variety of FANGs,
| motherboard/mainboard doesn't even offend me any more. I kind
| of get it, even though it is lame logic.
|
| I'm waiting until they start marking "Latino" as non-inclusive,
| and start forcing "Latinx".
| tempnow987 wrote:
| LatinX is complicated. If (white person) corrects someone of
| hispanic origin that using the word latino is offensive and
| they should use latinx - I've gotten some pushback. It may be
| best to just let the folks who care about getting to Latinx
| hash it out themselves. I've started seeing folx as well
| instead of folks. Was curious about the offensiveness of
| folks?
| xg15 wrote:
| Wasn't the x originally a gender thing? As in "folks" is
| gender neutral while "folx" actively acknowledges non-
| heteronormative genders.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| Thank you, very interesting. I'd always taken gender
| neutral to include non-heteronormative genders. But I
| started seeing things like folx - confusing because I
| hadn't understood the word to be gendered or only gender
| normative.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > Thank you
|
| Don't you mean "Thanx"?
| tempnow987 wrote:
| I think it's a bit unique to folkx because instead of
| using gendered language (hey guys) folks have moved to
| hey folks. So I've only seen it on things like that
| (gender neutral references to other people).
| skrbjc wrote:
| Folx is just a way to signal that you are woke. Since they
| have pushed folks for everything and co-called "normies"
| are using it now, they need to go a step further to make
| sure you know they are part of the special group.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _motherboard /mainboard doesn't even offend me any more. I
| kind of get it, even though it is lame logic._
|
| 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.
| filoleg wrote:
| I mentally cannot process "Latinx" to be pronounced as
| anything but "Lah-tinks". I am prepared to be fully shafted
| if I ever have to say that word outloud at work, because
| people seem to visibly cringe when they hear it pronounced
| this way.
| [deleted]
| xg15 wrote:
| Same here (though not a latino and not in the US, so I
| wasn't yet under any pressure to use it).
|
| The "-inx" suffix (when pronounced "inks") somehow makes
| the word sound _more_ objectifying, sexist and even lewd
| than the original words.
| filoleg wrote:
| > though not a latino and not in the US, so I wasn't yet
| under any pressure to use it
|
| 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).
| nullc wrote:
| > To be fair, I've literally never heard anyone try to
| pronounce "latinx" outloud,
|
| 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.
| filoleg wrote:
| Nothing made me quit NPR, i just prefer to consume it in
| the same form as most of my news-related stuff, in
| written form. Nothing against listening or watching it, i
| just find it easier to process things like that by
| reading.
|
| 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.
| xg15 wrote:
| I mean, media has enormous influence. If a term is
| constantly present in every newscast, movie or newspaper
| around you, people will probably start using it at some
| point.
| filoleg wrote:
| > people will probably start using it at some point.
|
| 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.
| nullc wrote:
| Yeah, fair point. Unless your social circles include
| ultratwittered people and/or media personalities you'll
| likely never hear it in meatspace-- even living in the
| bay area.
| causalmodels wrote:
| I find "Latinx" to be so unbelievably stupid because the
| English "x" sound doesn't exist in Spanish. Rather than
| using the gender neutral form "latine", some moron decided
| we should start injecting Anglo idioms into the Spanish
| language
| umanwizard wrote:
| Latinx is used almost exclusively by English speakers.
| One doesn't have to actually speak Spanish fluently to
| identify as Latino or Latinx in the US.
| [deleted]
| timmg wrote:
| As someone who also works at Google, I agree that there is a
| vocal minority who want Google to be a promoter of progressive
| values, but: I think you nay be exaggerating things here.
|
| 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".
| mgraczyk wrote:
| It's in the banned words list, I can share a link internally
| if you want.
| ushakov wrote:
| why does a company have a say which words are allowed to be
| used?
|
| 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?
| IAmWorried wrote:
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| When do you feel cancel culture started?
| pageandrew wrote:
| Started kicking off in universities around 2014-2015,
| really accelerated on social media (and by extension
| legacy media) through the Trump years, and has been
| solidly established across the corporate world as the
| college students of 2015 entered the workforce.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| In the United States the fundamentalists have been doing
| it for much longer then that as well as people such as
| the members of the Parents Music Resource Center who
| controlled a considerable amount of political power.
|
| This idea that it is a recent invention isn't really
| supported by the reality on the ground. Things like the
| satanic panic, Dungeons & Dragons / Metal being satanic,
| Rock being evil, and a host of other things have long
| been used to remove "undesirable" people for a long time
| before 2014 on both the local and national level.
|
| The extremes have always used shunning and economic
| warfare tactics to shut up those who disagree with them.
| flippinburgers wrote:
| Uhhh ok yeah all those people who lost jobs and couldn't
| find employment because they listened to rock
| music/played DnD. Sure.
|
| The DnD panic was about kids. It was about kids. I find
| it absurd to go after DnD like that but I don't recall
| ever reading about people being shunned, losing there
| jobs etc as happens these days.
| IAmWorried wrote:
| With the rise of social media. The modern "cancelling"
| could not exist without the viral phenomena that social
| media enables. Of course, you could always be fired for
| saying unaceptable things in the past, but now it
| actually ruins your entire life, you can't escape it.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| Please see my response in this thread.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I'm pretty skeptical of labor unions in the U.S., but I
| can see how they could help with this kind of issue.
| cornel_io wrote:
| bombcar wrote:
| I'm not sure they wouldn't be on the forefront of coming
| up with new words to add to the lists.
| morgante wrote:
| They 100% would be. In fact, people in the Alphabet Union
| are on the forefront of DEI initiatives like this.
| DannyBee wrote:
| The banned words list they are referring to is about what
| words should be used in external product documentation
| and marketing :) Not about what you are allowed to say
| inside google, or anything like that.
| ushakov wrote:
| the point still stands though
|
| could you please explain to me, a non-native english
| speaker, why using "mainboard" is better than
| "motherboard"?
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| I guess because it's kind of exclusive of fathers and/or
| stereotypical of mothers as the "family orientated
| parent".
| deschutes wrote:
| Find me a reasonable person offended by this terminology
| and I'll show you an unreasonable person. That
| connotation doesn't come through at all.
| slg wrote:
| It is the same logic as why we switched from "fireman" to
| "firefighter" or "stewardess" to "fight attendant"
| decades ago. Because some people find the old word
| offensive. The only real debate is the size of the "some"
| and whether that "some" is small enough to ethically
| ignore.
| fallingknife wrote:
| It's not about the size of "some." It's about their
| objection being stupid.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| The thing is, those substitutions are logical because
| "fireman" doesn't refer to female firefighters. But
| "motherboard" is different, because "board" doesn't refer
| to a person.
| slg wrote:
| Perhaps, but this is your opinion. Maybe you are in the
| "some" for certain words and not others. I am not in the
| "some" for "motherboard" so I can't tell you exactly why
| people are offended, but I know they are. Whether the
| rest of us think someone taking offense is logical
| doesn't stop them from being offended.
| fluoridation wrote:
| I very much doubt anyone is actually offended by the word
| "motherboard". More likely it's a dumb inductive
| argument. "Some people are offended by some gendered
| words => every gendered word might offend someone =>
| every gendered word must be eliminated as a precaution".
| flippinburgers wrote:
| The exact same pattern was leveraged against blacklist -
| a word that has absolutely no connection with the skin
| color usage. It has been removed by notable projects and
| people were up in arms talking about it being necessary
| due to "people being offended".
|
| 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".
| slg wrote:
| This is basically a semantic debate, but I guess this all
| is anyway. I don't disagree with the pattern you are
| describing, but I would describe it a slightly different
| way. There are people getting offended on the behalf of
| other people who potentially might get offended. Even if
| this second group never materializes or doesn't even
| exist, that first group is still getting offended on
| their behalf.
|
| 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".
| verve_rat wrote:
| Exactly. Mainship instead of mothership? I guess male and
| female plugs/sockets are off limits now too.
|
| 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.
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| Some languages have gendered words as a fundamental
| grammatical aspect of the language (though since this
| language aspect evolved out of earlier grammatical
| distinctions that had nothing to do with "gender",
| frequently the gendering of words is kinda random).
| English doesn't have grammatical gender, and it has a
| relatively small set of words in its vocabulary that are
| specifically gendered. The argument goes that the use of
| some of this vocabulary is harmful, and that it's easier
| to try to move away from using the whole class of gender-
| specific vocabulary words outside of actually gender-
| specific scenarios than it is to try to define and keep
| track of which gendered vocabulary words should be
| discouraged. Words like "motherboard" are collateral
| damage of this broader effort to discourage use of terms
| like "mothering", which can be used in English to mean
| both "being mother to", but also in a metaphorical
| generic sense as "being responsible for and looking
| after", even of things that are not children, and is
| discouraged in favor of "parenting" or "caretaking",
| which have the same implications but without the gendered
| aspect.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Parenting and caretaking don't have the same connotation
| as mothering.
|
| It seems like people who object to motherboard don't
| understand analogy?
| crdrost wrote:
| If the objection were to parenthood, which is to say if
| nurtureboard or parentboard were similarly offensive,
| then I agree this would have been a stupid stupid choice.
|
| 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...
| ushakov wrote:
| so it's a belief system then?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Imagine a future where babies can be incubated in an
| external enclosure, rather than a womb.
|
| 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."
| jstanley wrote:
| > there's not necessarily any "mother" (nor "father") in
| that scenario.
|
| Is there not still an egg supplier and a sperm supplier?
| marton78 wrote:
| "Don't mention the war!"
| imgabe wrote:
| mainboard does not even communicate the same concept. A
| main board might be one of several disconnected boards
| where it performs the primary function, not necessarily
| the singular substrate on which all other components are
| hosted.
| dekhn wrote:
| We're sure it's in a List, but the point is that the List
| is not uniformly enforced, and "motherboard->mainboard"
| definitely seems like one to go to bat against because it
| Doesn't Make Sense to get rid of it.
| elihu wrote:
| Does "motherboard" even make sense as a term? It's not
| like a motherboard gives birth to little baby boards that
| eventually grow up to be mother and father boards of
| their own. It's just one of those weird words we accept
| because it's been part of a shared vocabulary for so
| long. I don't particularly see any harm in assigning a
| gender role to a hardware device, but I don't see
| anything is particularly gained either. "Mainboard" is
| fine.
| UberFly wrote:
| All the little components live on the Mother Board just
| like you live on the Mother Earth.
| kansface wrote:
| Presumably, that would be _Main_ Earth.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| I'm fairly sure that "motherboard" came about as a term
| specifically for computer logic boards with slots that
| other cards -- "daughterboards" -- plugged into. It's
| very much from the 1970s era when we referred to
| "microcomputers", "minicomputers" and "mainframes".
| Granted, I'm a Mac user -- the last time I bought a
| "motherboard", I think it was a Pentium 4 -- and we tend
| to use the phrase "logic board" over here in Apple land,
| probably because, other than debatably the Mac Pro, we
| haven't had motherboards using the canonical definition
| for a very long time.
|
| 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.
| zionic wrote:
| > We're sure it's in a List, but the point is that the
| List is not uniformly enforced
|
| 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.
| DannyBee wrote:
| The list it is on is about what words to use in external
| product documentation and marketing. Not some "if you use
| these words internally the word police are going to come
| after you" list.
|
| 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 :)
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Motherboard isn't offensive. It shouldn't be offensive.
| If someone is offended by it, that is a problem of
| theirs.
|
| 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".
| DannyBee wrote:
| Sorry, but i'm going to trust the folks who think hard
| about what should and should not be in documentation that
| ends up in literally hundreds of different countries more
| than an an absoluteist HN statement that "it's not
| offensive" from a random person.
|
| 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.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I "trust the experts" on a number of things, but the
| spectrum shifts a little with cultural discussions, and
| it's precisely because Google is so incredibly
| influential that I am suspicious of actions taken that
| seem to be the modus operandi of a portion of so-called
| socially-progressive people who try to "nudge" society
| through the intentional shifting of language.
|
| 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.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Saying that something is or isn't offensive doesn't
| require being and expert in cultural studies. You just
| know it by the virtue of being part of the culture and
| observing what the trends of the majority are.
|
| 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.
| DannyBee wrote:
| "part of the culture".
|
| 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.
| flippinburgers wrote:
| This is about censoring the word mother clearly. It is
| nonsense.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Again, you literally know nothing about how or why the
| decision is made, but are 100% sure about what happened
| and why. Yet they are the problem and not you?
|
| 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.
| native_samples wrote:
| Trust the experts? Really? To people on HN, most of whom
| have been using the term motherboard their whole lives
| without incident and who are, in fact, computer experts?
|
| 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?!".
| DannyBee wrote:
| I'm talking solely about the internal wordlist the
| grandparent is whining about, not the AI writing thingy.
| I don't have a real formed opinion yet on the latter.
|
| 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.
| flippinburgers wrote:
| I don't see how that matters at all.
| lubesGordi wrote:
| I mean, I'm still pretty shocked to hear 'motherboard'
| isn't allowed in external product documentation. I don't
| think it matters if it's internal or external.
| mattkrause wrote:
| "Mainboard" is arguably a bit more literally descriptive:
| it is the _main_ board of the device.
|
| 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.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Often power is transmitted from the motherboard to be
| daughterboards, and the two are connected via a conduit
| like a fetus in the womb. It's not a completely arbitrary
| metaphor.
|
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| yes, I left google because of stupid shit like this.
|
| 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.
| kurupt213 wrote:
| From a purely linguistic point of view, doesn't 'content
| moderation' imply a work slowdown? I would think any
| company would be against using anti-productivity
| language.
| bombcar wrote:
| I think all companies realize they have a large amount of
| "sway" in the actual work that gets done, and things like
| TPS reports and content moderation get in even if they're
| a net productivity loss.
|
| 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.
| scythe wrote:
| "Allowlist" and "denylist" are sonically awkward. Why not
| "inlist" and "outlist"?
| scottyah wrote:
| In the context of IP filtering, I would assume those lists
| would differentiate one-way traffic instead of the regular
| all or nothing.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Directional terms like that would be confusing in a lot of
| infrastructure discussions. An outbound firewall rule's
| "outlist" is the list of things that _don 't_ go out.
| gs17 wrote:
| I'm still not sure why blocklist wasn't the goto
| replacement. Depending on your accent, you might not even
| notice!
| rougka wrote:
| I want to offer greenlist and redlist
|
| And to those who say this is not inclusive to the
| colorblind, I say traffic lights
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| Well yes, traffic lights are a problem, I'm red-green
| color blind myself. But the brain is smart enough to
| supply the right ,,color" because it knows that red is on
| top and green is below. Wait a second, is that offensive
| towards the color green? ;-)
| sgustard wrote:
| I've always wondered how you handle those lights at
| night, if you can't see the enclosure; and how you handle
| the occasional horizontal traffic light, which my town
| has one of.
| onion2k wrote:
| Greenlist and redlist would fail in a global company.
| Plenty of cultures use red as a color that promotes
| positivity rather than a negative color. Japan has blue
| rather than green for their "Go" color. And so on.
| layer8 wrote:
| That'd discriminate against the outgroup. Although I guess
| "denylist" would be offensive to <whatever> deniers?
| brunooliv wrote:
| So... essentially you have to go around hoops in the way you
| communicate internally? LEL.
| she46BiOmUerPVj wrote:
| Sure if you believe it. We also don't speak to each other to
| cater to people who are deaf, and we don't use sign language
| to cater to people who are blind.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ipiz0618 wrote:
| When the same kind of people banned "master" branch for being
| offensive I was surprised. Not so much now if I think in their
| logic
| [deleted]
| mrtksn wrote:
| Okay, for a moment, forget about your position or feelings
| about the issue. Would you say that these restrictions or
| changes actually changed anything for better or worse? Is there
| some kind of evaluation going on to track the results of these
| policies?
| xg15 wrote:
| Out of couriosity: Why then didn't flag it the actual n-word of
| all things?
|
| > _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.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| politician wrote:
| Initial ranking depends on the author's karma. From there,
| the other factors take over.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Perhaps certain words disable the feature entirely?
|
| 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.
| xg15 wrote:
| Good point. maybe even Google didn't want to be seen as
| "hey, here are some suggestions how you can make your
| speech about murdering Black people more inclusive..."
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| We need Clippy back, with webcam functionality. That way he
| can suggest ending the word in an "a" if you're black. If
| you're not he'll report you to HR.
| brobinson wrote:
| Genuinely curious: what do you do internally for "male" and
| "female" connectors?
| mgraczyk wrote:
| That one is in the public list.
|
| https://developers.google.com/style/word-list
|
| You're supposed to use "plug" and "socket" instead.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| That google is at a point where they can pay employees to
| waste time on crap like this and yet still print money is
| incredible.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Haha jesus no wonder they added the "AI-powered" hints
| because who the fuck can be expected to keep track of all
| this nonsense?
|
| > hang, hung
|
| > Don't use to refer to a computer or system that is not
| responding [..] see Avoid unnecessarily violent language.
| marton78 wrote:
| Oh, that's due to violence? I thought because it evokes
| phallic associations, as when someone is well hung.
| MatteoFrigo wrote:
| To be fair, the male/female nomenclature for connectors has
| been a mess for decades.
|
| 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/wordpress1/2014/05/0
| 5/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.
| londons_explore wrote:
| plug, socket
| formerly_proven wrote:
| ... tells you where it is (cable-mounted or panel-
| mounted/fixed), not the gender.
| plug socket male exists exists
| female exists exists hermaphroditic
| exists exists changeable exists exists
| ajross wrote:
| > Many Google employees are just so out of touch with the real
| world
|
| 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?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| If Google had shipped a feature that autocorrects my
| grandparents' slang to "dank" and "yeet", I'd be equally
| concerned! There's a huge difference between using fun new
| terms yourself and going around asking everyone to stop using
| the old ones.
| babyshake wrote:
| Not trying to troll here...but are there people advocating that
| we replace "Mother's Day" with "Birthing Person's Day"? If a
| person gave birth who no longer identifies as a woman is it not
| inclusive to gender the holiday as we do?
| GiorgioG wrote:
| Thanks - this gave me the kick in the ass to switch from Gmail
| to FastMail.
| she46BiOmUerPVj wrote:
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >sub with birthing person
|
| 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.
| svnpenn wrote:
| Post a screenshot, otherwise I agree with others that you're
| just lying.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| That is not allowed (for good reason) and I don't want to get
| fired, if you work at Google you can ping me and I can send
| it to you.
| burnished wrote:
| What is that good reason? The only thing I can come up with
| is "don't release internal documents", which is a blanket
| reason and not what I'd consider compelling, but I suspect
| I'm having a failure of imagination
| umanwizard wrote:
| Practically no big company would allow you to post
| internal documents on Hacker News. Why isn't that a good
| reason?
| olalonde wrote:
| Reminds me of when GitHub stopped using "master" for the
| default branch because it was somehow offensive.
| dekhn wrote:
| When I built a distributed system, I wanted to avoid the
| terms "master and slave" for the "coordinator and worker", so
| instead I chose something I thought was relatively less
| controversial- daimyo, honcho, and peasant. Only later did I
| realize I had merely recapitulated the power structure of
| feudal japan.
| Tao331 wrote:
| I prefer sovereign and vassal. No one has called me out on
| it.
| darkwater wrote:
| And the world moved on, nothing exploded and new generations
| will be used to 'main'.
| native_samples wrote:
| Actually quite a lot of things exploded. You just don't
| care about the people who had to pick up the pieces.
| Moreover, lots of git repos still use master so "new
| generations" will just have to do deal with pointless
| divergence and breakage for _nothing_. The change wasn 't
| progress. It wasn't useful. It didn't stop anyone being
| offended. It was and still is pure make-work for absolutely
| no purpose beyond the demonstration of power over
| irrelevant things.
| burnished wrote:
| Main is better. Master/slave has uncomfortable connotations.
| This one isn't a big deal.
| veeti wrote:
| Where is the slave in git?
| bloak wrote:
| There is no "slave" in Git, but the term "master", like
| many things in Git, is taken from BitKeeper, which did
| have a "slave". Or so I've read, for example here:
| https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/474419/does-
| the-...
| influx wrote:
| Just FYI, it's Master as in Master record. This is
| different from database terminology where there is a master
| and slave.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I agree that "main" is better, purely because it's a more
| intuitive word for that role.
|
| 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.
| tomp wrote:
| > Master/slave has uncomfortable connotations
|
| 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!)
| Tao331 wrote:
| Can you please not use the word s____? My ancestors were
| Slavs, and when I see the word it is a painful reminder of
| how they were treated as property by Romans who bought and
| sold their "ex slava" captives.
|
| Your use of the word is violence.
|
| /s?
| Tr3nton wrote:
| If you support this, don't complain when you're found
| guilty of thoughtcrime for something that seems normal and
| natural to you.
| BadCookie wrote:
| Slavery was horrible and should not be forgotten. Erasing
| all related words so that we can all comfortably forget it
| ever happened seems ... wrong? That's another way of
| looking at it, anyway.
| troupe wrote:
| I'm waiting for companies to demote anyone who had a
| promotion based on having a master's degree.
| [deleted]
| knorker wrote:
| Reminds me of when GitHub kicked out a paying customer for
| using the word "retard" as a verb in the mathematical sense.
| vincnetas wrote:
| had to look that up
|
| Retarded differential equations (RDEs) are differential
| equations having retarded arguments.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S03770427
| 0...
| MikeDelta wrote:
| And quantum physics has degenerate energy levels.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_energy_levels
| trollied wrote:
| Large planes tell pilots vocally to "retard" when
| landing...
| bombcar wrote:
| Which can be amusing if you don't know what's going on,
| it suddenly sounds like the autopilot is pissed.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmbzKsqKQoI
|
| 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?
| madamelic wrote:
| My opinion:
|
| `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.
| packetlost wrote:
| Except for the decades of documentation, blog posts, etc.
| that will now cause confusing to newcomers.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| The mental model of how you use a certain branch could
| indeed be best expressed by the word "main", so no one can
| say the word isn't the best one for you to use.
|
| 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.
| tomp wrote:
| > costs nothing to remove something someone might find
| offensive
|
| 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
|
| from https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4450
| whymauri wrote:
| I don't think Latinx is a good example. The GP mentions
| there's no functional cost to `main`, and this is true.
| Latinx has a functional cost in that the Spanish language
| literally does not support the phonetics of Latinx.
|
| 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.
| umvi wrote:
| I don't mind "main" for the main branch but for existing
| projects...
|
| > 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
| skrbjc wrote:
| But main also might be offensive because it's implying one
| thing is more important than another and some marginalized
| people who have not been the main group of people may not
| feel great about that. Really we should use one and two.
| But we should also be careful and should convene a working
| group with broad representation to come up with a more
| inclusive term for this.
|
| 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.
| temp8964 wrote:
| Main is offensive because it sounds like man and spells
| like man.
|
| Here you go...
| ungruntled wrote:
| Someone somewhere will be concerned by the literal words
| you speak, or the way you say it, or what you actually
| meant, intended or unintended. They will do it with good
| intentions or not, and no meaningful discussion will occur
| because it would be shorter, cost nothing, and offend no-
| one if you just let them win.
| V-2 wrote:
| Your point makes sense, but it wasn't the official
| explanation.
| jwond wrote:
| My best friend was killed when a water main burst, and
| every time I am forced to use a branch named 'main' it
| causes me immense psychological stress.
|
| 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
| dogleash wrote:
| >costs nothing
|
| 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?
| tryptophan wrote:
| Its worse because suddenly 20 years worth of tutorials are
| slightly 'wrong' and will confuse new users even more for
| no reason.
|
| "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!"
| valeness wrote:
| Does this mean we should never make progress or change
| anything?
|
| 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.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| What about giving master a new meaning? Actively banning
| it conservers its original meaning. Probably nobody today
| thinks about woman sitting in a room doing calculations
| when we speak about computers.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| I fail to see how changing the names from "master" and
| "slave" makes any "progress" at all. What is the most
| concise way to express the idea that one entity is
| totally subordinate to another, and must comply with
| every request the other sends?
|
| 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.
| akomtu wrote:
| This is when Ministry of Truth comes into play. The main
| character's job in 1984 was literally this: rewriting
| history when it came into conflict with the updated
| "truth". Orwell didn't foresee that in a world of
| computers, such updates are trivially made: no need to
| reprint newspapers and books, since all of them are
| virtual.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| This is tech. 20 years of tutorials are always becoming
| slightly wrong.
|
| 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`...
| rurp wrote:
| They were responding to the claim that the master -> main
| change has "no cost", which is clearly untrue.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Refactor mercilessly.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| Chesterton's Offence: Before we change a word, we should
| first understand why it was there in the first place. :P
| throw10920 wrote:
| > `main` is better. It's shorter, it's more descriptive,
| and costs nothing to remove something someone might find
| offensive.
|
| 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).
| Pxtl wrote:
| > 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".
|
| 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.
| simion314 wrote:
| I had a script that broke because someone changed master
| into main, put in an equation the 100 people that got
| satisfaction from this change and the tousands of people
| getting frustrated because of it.
| subjectsigma wrote:
| Except that it broke all my fucking scripts that use git
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| "Motherboard" is particularly unbelievable. The motherboard
| runs the machine. It's a woman in a position of power. Isn't
| that what everyone says they want?
|
| 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
| ehsankia wrote:
| > It's a woman in a position of power. Isn't that what
| everyone says they want?
|
| 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.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| There are a lot of cases of the left trampling on women to
| raise up men with gender identity issues. It's quite sad
| really.
| snek_case wrote:
| Well they're not trying to raise up men, they're trying to
| destroy any notion of gender, see "gender is a social
| construct".
| [deleted]
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| It's contradictory, there was already a movement
| (feminism) that promoted "gender is a social construct"
| which was to say, no one should be pressured into acting
| inline with gender stereotypes. Women can be masculine,
| men can be feminine, let bygones be bygones - the way you
| act and dress should ideally have no relationship to your
| sex.
|
| The "men with gender identity issues" referred to by
| parent have this up-side-down, instead thinking that
| "social transitioning" aka "living as a woman" is a step
| towards _being a woman_ , this is not destroying notions
| of gender, this is elevating gender over sex
| nullc wrote:
| > they're trying to destroy any notion of gender
|
| That would be nice, but you have it backwards. In most
| cases the an attempt to make gender more central and
| essential, rather than less, by decoupling it from
| biology.
|
| Which is why in some parts of the country children are
| sometimes being told that if they like boy sterotyped
| activities like tree climbing or boy stereotyped attire
| that you _are_ a boy, rather than saying any activity or
| attire is available to anyone.
|
| Rather than erasing gender it's power as a tool for
| enforced conformity is amplified by eliminating any
| requirement for agreement with a person's biological
| properties.
|
| To exaggerate in order to make the point, it's as if
| we've gone from: "It's a womans' job to do the dishes" to
| "Anyone can do the dishes." to "The person doing the
| dishes is a woman, by definition."-- and the middle
| state's inclusiveness is increasingly seen as hateful
| because it denies people the ability to identify as a
| gender other than the one suggested by their biology
| through the performance of stereotyped behavior.
|
| Erasure of "mothers" seems contrary to the trend at first
| blush, but it's made more clear when you see the
| suggested replacements like "birthing person" or
| "breeder"-- in this world view "mother" is a biological
| function, so it must be decoupled from gender so that the
| strongest possible gender sterotypes can be imposed on
| people regardless of their biological abilities.
| woodruffw wrote:
| You've written a very long comment about what you think
| other people believe (or intend), but it's not really
| clear to me that any of it is true.
|
| For example, I don't think that _anybody_ actually holds
| the sentence "The person doing the dishes is a woman, by
| definition" as true in their heads. That's simply not a
| thing people believe, anywhere along the political (or
| any other) spectrum.
|
| If you _actually_ talk to trans people, you 'll find that
| most of them fall into the "nonconforming" bucket rather
| than some gender essentialist one. A lot of them are non-
| binary or otherwise have gender/sex identities that don't
| cleanly map onto maleness or femaleness. Given that state
| of affairs, it's a remarkable stretch to think that these
| people _themselves_ would see neutral language as
| "hateful." And, in fact, they don't.
| nullc wrote:
| Perhaps I'll reach out to you for assistance the next
| time someone suggests to myself or a family member that
| they're trans simply because they engaged in an activity
| that broke gendered stereotypes. Maybe we'll both learn
| something!
| woodruffw wrote:
| I don't understand the relevance of someone offering you
| unsolicited opinions about your gender. The fact that
| they may or may not be wrong about both you and what it
| means to be trans doesn't have any particular bearing on
| whether transgenderedness itself is fundamentally
| "essentialist" in its performance of gender. Which it
| isn't.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| They'd do a lot better if it was pitched as giving people
| the freedom to dress and act as they desired as long as
| they weren't hurting anyone else, rather than trying to
| act like biology wasn't a thing.
|
| I have zero problems with people dressing however they
| like, having whatever affectations they want and having
| sex with whoever is willing. I might not always find it
| tasteful, but that cuts both ways I'm sure so we can
| agree to be civil. The buck stops when you try to shame
| me for not calling a man a woman. Using pronouns should
| be a kindness like holding the door open for a disabled
| person, not something that sends emotional children into
| a socially supported temper tantrum when absent.
| mpfundstein wrote:
| russia is our way out of this timeline
| [deleted]
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| The most tragic part of the endgame of transgender ideology
| is the erasure of gender.
|
| 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.
| MikeDelta wrote:
| Nature is full of males and females (with some species
| being exceptions); the concept of gender is baked in nature
| and will remain so for a very long time.
|
| 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.
|
| https://youtu.be/XjJQBjWYDTs
| sidibe wrote:
| If your job is to come up with banned words and they've
| stopped using the banned words, you've got to keep looking
| for more if you want to keep your job. I don't think anyone's
| real job at Google is to come up with the banned words, but
| some people see it as their big impact and have been
| commended for it in the past (by leaders looking to bolster
| their DEI cred in the fakest, easiest ways) so they keep
| going even when the words seem less and less ban-worthy.
| she46BiOmUerPVj wrote:
| It's particularly unbelievable because it's particularly
| false.
| azth wrote:
| I had mentioned this in the previous post about this topic[1],
| yet some people casually discredit it as nothing. The slippery
| slope is real folks
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31086310&p=3#31087238
| MrBlueIncognito wrote:
| People like turning a blind eye to what they feel
| uncomfortable accepting. That the world we live in is being
| increasingly influenced by just a few profit-maximizing
| entities.
| Tao331 wrote:
| How about "motherboard/fatherboard"? If we just use that
| everywhere they'll all be happy. No fatherboards will feel left
| out. Mother-of-pearl can just be nacre, and I don't know what
| you'll have to call mother-of-vinegar. Maybe just say it's
| something special and not to think too much about how
| fermentation works - especially if it causes you to have evil,
| non-inclusive thoughts.
|
| If I'm writing about a ship and refer to it as a "she", does
| that set off the autoinquisitor?
| silisili wrote:
| Can someone reasonably explain to me why mother or motherboard
| is offensive...at all?
|
| 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.
| droptablemain wrote:
| Sounds like woke gibberish. I suppose we can take some solace
| in the fact that they haven't renamed "motherboard" as
| "birthing-person-board."
| twobitshifter wrote:
| On landlord I can't think of a proper synonym. Property owner
| and proprietor are broader categories of what a landlord is.
| They don't mean the person you're paying rent to for your
| housing.
| foofoo4u wrote:
| To play along with this game, one can say that replacing
| "landlord" with "property owner" is offensive to those with
| ancestors who were deemed property.
| nullc wrote:
| It ought to be offensive to women because it suggests they
| can't be landlords-- a word which is already perfectly
| gender neutral in American English as far as I can tell.
| [deleted]
| jmalicki wrote:
| lessor? Out of curiosity for legalese, I found a California
| assembly member is actually trying to change landlord ->
| lessor in its laws https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/b
| illTextClient.xhtm...
| twobitshifter wrote:
| What if you are a tenant at will (without a lease)?
| skrbjc wrote:
| What and utter waste of time and effort.
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| rentier - one who lives off the income of property or
| securities.
| marton78 wrote:
| Sounds like reindeer.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| A landlord can still have a day job.
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| faucet-fixer?
| cyral wrote:
| paint-over-any-imperfections-er
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I see you haven't interacted with many landlords.
| umvi wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| as300 wrote:
| A worse one is to me is that they aren't allowed to say
| "Quantum Supremacy", because it reminds some people of "White
| Supremacy"? Nevermind that you actually give that concept more
| power when you make it so that even discussing it or
| inadvertently bring it up is stigmatized. Things are starting
| to get kind of Orwellian.
| designium wrote:
| I wouldn't mind calling Motherboard site to Personboard...
| ehhehehe
|
| It would be interesting to call landlord as landperson.
| thedrbrian wrote:
| Could be birthing person board.
| david38 wrote:
| You have got to be kidding. Was this some retaliatory complaint
| by some dude showing dudes can be triggered by female-
| emphasizing phrases as well?
|
| Should it have been renamed to birthing-person-board? What a
| joke
| dogleash wrote:
| >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).
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| gorwell wrote:
| I can't imagine most employees agree with this. Why aren't they
| pushing back?
| londons_explore wrote:
| Pushing back against this type of policy is generally a bad
| idea... There is a very vocal minority who will make life
| hard for you. This is a case where the vast majority know
| it's best to keep their thoughts to themselves.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > the vast majority know it's best to keep their thoughts
| to themselves.
|
| 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.
| ryathal wrote:
| Why would they push back? There is evidence doing so can get
| you publicly shamed and fired if other take sufficient
| offense.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Probably better to fly under the radar in most cases
| especially if they have recently been locked out of the
| office for not getting mRNA injections.
| vimy wrote:
| This is why I'm pessimistic about the West winning the second
| cold war. While Chinese engineers are working hard on world
| dominating AI models and other hard tech, Western engineers are
| wasting man hours on crap like this.
| slig wrote:
| >wasting man hours
|
| _People_ hours
| IAmWorried wrote:
| But it's over Anakin, we have the moral high ground!
| jpindar wrote:
| As someone who lives in a valley, I find that phrase
| offensive.
|
| /s
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Interesting comment. Putin is continually making "west is
| degenerate"-ish remarks as a kind of justification for his
| invasion of Ukraine, and yet his words fall flat. It's
| obvious he's being disengenius.
|
| 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?
| mpfundstein wrote:
| read Aleksandr Dugin and you will understand
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The west will win the second cold war because the communist
| party will not be able to release its iron grip on its
| populace. The Chinese people only accept that iron grip now
| because it's carrying them up from a low place, but once that
| stops the constriction will become suffocating, leading to
| civil unrest and diaspora of the upper tier of Chinese
| society.
| throw10920 wrote:
| There's a saying - "the market can remain irrational longer
| than you can remain solvent".
|
| 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)
| Tr3nton wrote:
| >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
|
| 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.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Oh come on now.
|
| 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.
| vimy wrote:
| It's about a lot more than just forbidden words. The
| 'social justice' fanatics are a black hole for
| productivity.
| tomrod wrote:
| Google is a large corporation. Large corporations will often
| enact arcane rulesets to give HR ways to manipulate their labor
| costs. This really sounds a lot like why this type of approach
| would be supported.
| she46BiOmUerPVj wrote:
| This sounds entirely fabricated. I've been in the hardware
| department for more than 10 years. Maybe you put a word in a
| list. I've never even heard of someone considering this.
| user3939382 wrote:
| If we're going to play this game, I think dissuading people
| from using "mother" in the example of "motherboard" is
| offensive. Mothers are the source of human life on earth, and
| in that capacity are revered and honored. When we say
| motherboard, we're making an analogy that suggests the board's
| significance and universal connection to everything.
|
| 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.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| The official PC term is now "birthing person", "birthing
| people", "people giving birth" and similar.
|
| Think of that what you will.
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm looking forward to birthing-person-in-law jokes.
| bombcar wrote:
| Which completely loses that for many people, their _mother_
| is NOT the woman who gave birth to them.
| imglorp wrote:
| English has such a rich array of word choices for many
| parental situations, with many subtle variations
| conveying tone and meaning. MW has roughly 83 synonyms
| including both noun and verb forms, just for mother. I
| don't see how choosing any one of them for my particular
| situation will detract from anyone else's identity or
| journey: they are free to chose as well. Unless your tool
| bans 82 of them.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| That can't possibly be true. If nothing else, it's erasure
| of adoptive parents, or mothers who didn't give birth,
| among which gay married couples are overrepresented. I
| realize there is infighting and factionalism even within
| minority communities, but come on, this stuff doesn't ring
| true. I've never heard someone called a birthing person
| outside of a joke.
|
| 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.
| snek_case wrote:
| I think this completely falls apart because most of the
| women who give birth identify as mothers, and would be very
| offended if you told them they couldn't.
|
| 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.
| mattkrause wrote:
| What about a motherboard is specifically maternal?
| klyrs wrote:
| Better question, are PCBs viviparous or oviparous?
| canadaduane wrote:
| I've always associated motherboards with motherships--the
| larger thing in charge of making all the other little
| things behave well together.
| nullc wrote:
| > is to demote women and their role as mothers.
|
| 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.
| azth wrote:
| It's the natural outcome of far leftist ideologies. People
| need to wake up and start rejecting this destructive ideology
| where a person is evaluated only based on their identity. I
| think MLK had something to say about that.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| MLK was a leftist - and arguably a "far leftist" for his
| time. If you're going to use him as an example, you may
| have to concede that this is not a "natural outcome" of
| leftist ideologies in general, but rather the outcome of
| some other selection pressure that rewards diversion from
| initiatives that actually affect peoples' material
| conditions.
| azth wrote:
| I'm referring to modern far leftism, an offshoot from
| Marxism and post modernism.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| As a first comment here, I'd point out that defining
| women independently from solely their role as mothers
| _is_ judging them on character rather than identity, so
| you should support such a thing if that 's your rallying
| cry.
|
| 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-...
| UncleMeat wrote:
| MLK explicitly supported affirmative action and other
| programs designed explicitly to benefit black people in
| order to make up for past discrimination. I suspect he
| would be tired of being used as a justification for
| absolute colorblindness.
| troupe wrote:
| What he stood for changed over time, but at one point he
| said he hoped the decisions people made about his
| children would be made based on his children's character
| and not the color of their skin.
| Tr3nton wrote:
| So Affirmative Action is revenge discrimination?
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't think it is.
|
| 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.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I know we all see this as a slippery slope, but let's
| remember what's at the other end of the slope.
|
| 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?
| cornel_io wrote:
| Why not?
|
| 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.
| akomtu wrote:
| You can refactor a piece of software you wrote, or a piece
| of your employer's software with his permission. But
| language doesn't belong to anyone, it's a collective
| consensus on how to say things. If you believe you have
| authority to ignore this consensus and force your opinion
| on others, you must have an incredibly inflated ego.
| skrbjc wrote:
| But that's implying that only mothers give birth, and erases
| those who don't identify as mothers who give birth.
|
| 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.
| positus wrote:
| Ontology will always and forever trump autonomy.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Is there at least some sort of mailing list you can subscribe
| to to know which phrases are verboten this week?
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| rglover wrote:
| This is why I'm quite bullish the technocrats will fail miserably
| in their move to homogenize the planet into some freakish, Jim
| Jones beehive.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| > Social editor Emily Lipstein typed "Motherboard" (as in, the
| name of this website) into a document and Google popped up to
| tell her she was being insensitive: "Inclusive warning. Some of
| these words may not be inclusive to all readers. Consider using
| different words."
|
| If blacklist is considered non-inclusive language, why isn't
| motherboard? Motherboard is a needlessly gendered term that
| perpetuates stereotypes.
| protomyth wrote:
| I suppose the fear is that Google will add this to search and
| penalize sites that have words that are flagged.
| akhmatova wrote:
| Why don't they just plant a chip in our brains that prevents us
| from typing these words in the first place, and be done with it?
| zac23or wrote:
| Virtue signaling is a hell of a drug.
|
| 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.
| fluoridation wrote:
| You mean to tell me that all this time black people were the
| reason the black plague, black mambas, and blacktop exist?
| zac23or wrote:
| ...and black hole...https://youtu.be/Hu2rluUb8ck
| diseasedyak wrote:
| [deleted]
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Since when is black and white primarily a racial thing anyways?
| It seems a little inverted, like a black flag or a black mark on
| an account, it's not like it's called "negrolist", black and
| white are colors before they are slang for race/culture. Maybe
| instead of neutering the dictionary we could try a different
| angle and quit lumping people into "white" or "black"? Some
| people are Kenyan, Irish, Nigerian, German, nobody is actually
| white or black.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| This is the hypocrisy of radical leftists in a nutshell. They
| claim to fight racial thinking while in fact just making it
| more prominent than it's been in decades.
| [deleted]
| madamelic wrote:
| It's also what will cause the far right to succeed.
|
| 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.
| nullc wrote:
| Google is teaching people about wrongspeak with this new
| feature! it's on you if you don't want to obey!
| sjtindell wrote:
| Both sides eat their own. It's a result of social media
| cancel culture, which both sides engage in. No moderate
| opinions allowed anywhere. The right constantly rejects
| people who aren't extreme enough. "Rino" is a huge term
| now.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Are you inferring/suggesting that the "right" avoids eating
| its own?
| lxgr wrote:
| Exactly - if anything, research suggests that there might
| be some underlying mechanism affecting both ends of the
| political spectrum. I found this to be a very interesting
| read on the subject:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/soci
| al-...
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Yep. Read and appreciated that article. And I will say
| what I have been repeating in these forums for a couple
| of months now again. It's ironic in this case, because
| today's hot topic is "the meaning of words".
|
| 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."
| dang wrote:
| (We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123767.)
| astura wrote:
| "Blacklist" and "whitelist" suck anyway because they require
| the cultural knowledge that "black is bad and white is good" to
| understand their meaning. "Allowlist" and "denylist" don't
| require any cultural background to understand - their names are
| purely descriptive. They are just better terms.
| bloak wrote:
| What about "redlist" and "greenlist"? The association between
| "red" and "stop", and between "green" and "go", seem more
| arbitrary than the associations with "black" and "white" but
| almost everyone in the world is familiar with traffic lights.
| (And the inhabitants of the North Sentinel Island probably
| don't need to configure mail servers or whatever.)
| svachalek wrote:
| Red and green mean stop/go but only in a narrow context. I
| would have no idea what redlist and greenlist means. Red
| and green also bring to mind Christmas and Martians. Red
| means communism, green means environmentalism. Green means
| money, red means a negative entry in your account. There's
| a lot of culture-specific meanings too. Red in China is
| associated with good fortune and happiness.
| lxgr wrote:
| Red and green traffic lights (and indeed even the
| distinction between green and blue) are not universally
| understood either:
|
| https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2013/02/25/language/the-
| ja...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinctio
| n...
|
| 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.)
| bloak wrote:
| I'm aware that many languages don't distinguish blue and
| green, but English does distinguish them and we're
| talking about English terminology here. (Apparently in
| Japan the green traffic lights are officially allowed to
| be slightly bluer than in other countries because the
| word they use for them includes blue: an interesting case
| of language changing the world.)
|
| 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.
| nix23 wrote:
| Blacklist has nothing to do with skin-color...you fall in the
| same trap as those wannabe corrector's:
|
| >>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.
| ..
| mortenjorck wrote:
| This is indeed the root of my problem with the attempt to cast
| "blacklist" and "whitelist" as problematic. It confuses cause
| and effect.
|
| 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.
| ehsankia wrote:
| I think the debate over whitelist/blacklist is often
| pointless. Yes there is not cause/effect link, but it
| honestly doesn't really matter. Allowlist and blocklist are
| much better words imo because they are self-descriptive,
| whereas whitelist/blacklist requires context and pre-existing
| knowledge to understand. And to you it may be obvious, but
| not everyone is from the same culture and has English as a
| first language. Why not just use the better terminology?
|
| 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.
| lokar wrote:
| If you view these things from a POV of empathy for others and
| how to minimize their stress and sense of being disfavored vs
| trying to win some technical argument it will make more sense.
|
| Focus on how real actions impact the people around you.
| knorker wrote:
| I think they're trying to change language to disassociate
| "black" with negative meaning.
|
| 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?
| bloak wrote:
| Yes, I think that's right: black is logically linked with
| darkness, and human beings, like other diurnal lifeforms,
| don't like the dark. The association is found throughout
| literature, from the biblical outer darkness, where there is
| wailing and gnashing of teeth, to the Black/Dark Riders in
| The Lord of the Rings, via traditional fairy tales in which a
| beautiful but evil sister is described as fair/white of face
| but black of heart.
| quenix wrote:
| This makes sense to me. Why is it downvoted?
| lxgr wrote:
| Probably because that's not the only possible
| interpretation of the issue.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ask_b123 wrote:
| On the mention of being afraid of the light I thought that
| something like that was probably mentioned in the Bible, and
| sure enough:
|
| 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).
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Google has flown completely off the rails. I don't know why
| shareholders aren't stepping in, but if they don't I will be
| stepping away from google.
| [deleted]
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > 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,"
|
| 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.
| meetups323 wrote:
| I wonder if this is an example of not knowing your audience (or
| rather assuming one's self represents a wider audience than it
| does).
|
| 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!"
| [deleted]
| kbos87 wrote:
| This comes off as an angry tirade full of projection and
| lacking any real insight.
| Icathian wrote:
| This explanation rings a lot more true to me than the rest of
| this thread. Everyone here seems to be looking into shadows for
| the woke gestapo, when I'd be willing to bet that this
| explanation is a lot closer to how this tool actually came to
| exist.
|
| I appreciate you adding to the conversation.
| badwolf wrote:
| They probably just don't want their employees sending their
| valuable company data to Grammarly.
| morgante wrote:
| It's a little of both. There's enough woke influence over
| corporate communication to drive all employees to want to
| avoid non-inclusive words in docs. At that point, this
| becomes useful even for employees who don't agree with it--
| I'd rather just have the word flagged now and fix it instead
| of going back and forth later.
|
| However, the net result is that words are driven out of the
| language even if everyone involved in the document wouldn't
| care.
| slg wrote:
| >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.
| lupire wrote:
| Yes, a lot of people see any infringement on their
| freedom of expression to be unacceptable, while expecting
| everyone to engage with that expression.
| morgante wrote:
| > No one uses "fuck" in corporate communication either.
|
| 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.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| michaelt wrote:
| There's a market for 'help you write english better' tools that
| spot things like grammar errors.
|
| 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.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| There is a market for grammar checkers. Word has one for 30
| years. But it doesn't try to turn your writing into a textual
| form of Alegria art.
| DancesWTurtles wrote:
| Just like Google is not an actual search engine but a
| "recommendation" engine that prods users into getting
| recommended just what Google needs to recommend ("did you
| mean...?") this is not an actual writing assistant but a
| "write (and think) the Google way" mould
| [deleted]
| yeetsfromhellL2 wrote:
| Actually I've seen an English linter to help you maintain a
| passive voice for papers, remove waffle words and unnecessary
| fluff, etc. I'm not sure I can find the exact one I'm thinking
| of, but wasn't too bad overall, it spotted errors and made
| helpful suggestions. It was cool too, because it would read
| from stdin and integrated into vim pretty well with a few lines
| in my config.
| ketzo wrote:
| Not sure if these are the things you're thinking of, but I
| know Grammarly and Hemingway are apps/services with similar
| functions.
| lupire wrote:
| Why would you want to maintain a passive voice? That's
| terrible writing unless you are defendant in litigation.
| ra0x3 wrote:
| This actually...doesn't not make sense
| la6472 wrote:
| I support it and I don't work for google. I like this feature
| that encourages more empathy in this strife and hate filled
| world.
| nxm wrote:
| So Google execs now decides how we speak... brave new world.
| You like it until it corrects you for not being woke enough
| esrauch wrote:
| It's not like it's silently editing existing docs, it has
| an underline and you can voluntarily see what alternative
| wordings might be.
| Stupulous wrote:
| While I don't doubt that an intent of this is to promote
| empathy, I would need to see some evidence before I could be
| open to the possibility that that is its effect. Anecdotally,
| these things seem to incense anger and hatred- I've never
| heard anyone say that being language-policed made them a
| better person, but I have seen people behave in a way that
| suggests the opposite. Personally, I become less empathic
| when someone assumes authority over what I say or write.
| riedel wrote:
| IMHO OK if the feature would actually provide explainations and
| it would be based on some sort of rulebook rather some random
| decision of individuals. I also would be fine if there is a
| warning if I use the word 'property owner' because some random
| internet user says that is deeply capitalistic. In the end I
| could decide if I want to follow the argument. Just nudging
| people to get away with a warning is bad and will lead to no
| warning. I doubt even that it will lead to a more inclusive
| world because no reflection is involved.
|
| 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.
| 62951413 wrote:
| AlexDragusin wrote:
| What I can see is that on Google own websites, the term
| motherboard is used aplenty so seems to me they fail their own
| standards, if what is described in the article is accurate.
| Wondering when humanity will become aware of the ridiculous path
| this whole thing is.
|
| Examples: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/systems/the-past-
| presen...
| https://sustainability.google/progress/projects/circular-eco...
| jdrc wrote:
| This will be hilarious with people writing scientific papers
| DancesWTurtles wrote:
| > suggested he change it to "angry" or "upset" to "make your
| writing flow better."
|
| 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
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| Microsoft is in the process of rolling 'inclusive' checking out,
| in (at least) the web version of Outlook 365. You can see by
| clicking the gear icon (in top right) -> View all Outlook
| settings (at bottom) -> Compose and reply -> Microsoft Editor
| settings (bottom). It is 'very broken'.
| kurupt213 wrote:
| Google's office suite has always been amateur hour.
| buro9 wrote:
| Somewhere I wonder if people have read too much of Orwell's 1984
| and Iain M. Banks Culture series and have decided that between
| Newspeak and Marain is an idea that whilst we may not better the
| world today, if we can obliterate language we can obliterate an
| idea.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| dekhn wrote:
| One of the reasons I left google is that their "content
| moderation team" (the folks who make you take down wrongthink
| memes) is so far out of touch, that somebody had to explain to
| them there are people in the world who are discriminated against,
| but aren't black. They simply didn't know that was the case! And
| if that's the people who are moderating content...
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Mezzie wrote:
| > somebody had to explain to them there are people in the world
| who are discriminated against, but aren't black.
|
| _blinks in disabled lesbian_
| nebulous_two wrote:
| Put yourself in the shoes of your average content moderator.
| Aren't they there for the paycheck like most people at their
| jobs? Why does everyone assume these people are first and
| foremost bastions of acceptable behaviour? They are instructed
| by executives as to how to do their jobs. Now executives are
| learning nuance and say "oh there's more to this than _you_
| thought, so here 's the updated guidelines to follow now", to
| shift blame for this broken system to the moderators when all
| along they were following orders from above.
| macksd wrote:
| Are other cases of online abuse, workplace harassment,
| discrimination, etc. so rare that people are actually chasing
| problems like this for a paycheck? It would be wonderful if
| that was the case, but I doubt that it is.
| skrbjc wrote:
| Many people willingly do things like this voluntarily at
| their jobs to the point that the job they were hired for
| seems like a second priority for them.
| dekhn wrote:
| No, those folks are not there just to get a paycheck. They
| are _evangelists for a viewpoint_ who _use their moderation
| powers_ to _eliminate thoughts they don 't like_.
|
| 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.
| qmarchi wrote:
| 1st rule about memegen, is don't talk about memegen >.>
| piaste wrote:
| Man, memegen was covered by Buzzfeed _ten years ago_.
|
| It ain't exactly the hottest, edgiest shitposting club
| out there.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I think the point you're missing is that often moderators are
| in that position because they specifically want the power
| that comes with it. We see this all the time with volunteer
| moderators getting high on their power, pushing through
| whatever agenda they have regardless of user opinion.
|
| 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.
| newjersey wrote:
| >> I think the point you're missing is that often
| moderators are in that position because they specifically
| want the power that comes with it.
|
| 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!
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I hadn't actually thought about applying that reasoning
| to the police and while there is a higher bar to becoming
| a police officer, I do have to agree with the overall
| idea.
|
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| Once the pool for some jobs gets large enough, the self
| selection of those who apply for it can become a problem.
|
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _so far out of touch, that somebody had to explain to them
| there are people in the world who are discriminated against,
| but aren 't black._
|
| 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.
| knorker wrote:
| Not only that, but there are more than three times as many
| slaves TODAY as ever were in the transatlantic slave trade
| that is the only one the US knows exists.
| hedora wrote:
| There are more slaves added each year in the US today than
| at the peak of transatlantic trade:
|
| 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.
| godelski wrote:
| It's really undermining the atrocities of the
| transatlantic slave trade by comparing it to prison. We
| wouldn't compare it to indentured servitude, which is
| much closer to the penal system (monetary debt vs social
| debt, but both are contacts even if not purely
| voluntary). The federal government also doesn't have
| complete ownership over prisoners. Yes, prisoners are
| mistreated, but what they face isn't at the level of
| those from the slave trade and so you're effectively
| diminishing those atrocities.
| golergka wrote:
| You may not like the US prison system, but calling it
| slavery is at the very least intellectually dishonest.
| andylynch wrote:
| Why? The Penal labor exemption is the one case where
| slavery or involuntary servitude is still permitted in
| the US constitution.
| dekhn wrote:
| That's not really correct from any reasonable
| interpretation.
| andylynch wrote:
| I may missing something but it seems plain enough in the
| thirteenth amendment? " Neither slavery nor involuntary
| servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the
| party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within
| the United States, or any place subject to their
| jurisdiction."
| godelski wrote:
| For one, most people don't equate indentured servitude
| with slavery. We generally think of lifelong service when
| we say slavery, which isn't part of the penal system. The
| penal system also isn't generational and people aren't
| born into slavery. There's grounds to call it slavery,
| yes, but the context you're bringing it up in is in
| comparison to the African slave trade and you're
| diminishing the suffering those people went through by
| saying that what happened to them was just like what we
| do to prisoners today. What happened to them was much
| worse.
| golergka wrote:
| Because worrs carry not only direct meanings, but
| subjective connotations, and most people consider slavery
| an unjust subjugation of another human being, and think
| it is immoral by definition, in any circumstances. On the
| other hand, even most of the people who aren't fans of US
| prison system still consider the general idea of prison
| to be just, as the general idea of prison labour as a way
| to repay society.
| bombcar wrote:
| Also if you're in prison and refuse to work, what are
| they going to do, send you to prison prison?
| formerly_proven wrote:
| The same stuff that happens when you don't comply in
| other ways in prison?
| bombcar wrote:
| From my understanding, the main punishment for not
| working as prison labor is losing the small wages you do
| get (i.e, normally one of the punishments for misbehavior
| is prohibiting you from working).
| drdaeman wrote:
| Idk how this works in the US in particular - but I
| suppose that - essentially - yes. Harsher conditions.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| yupper32 wrote:
| Sorry but did you just say one of the reasons you left google
| was the memegen moderation team? I can't imagine that being a
| legitimate worry that would impact my employment decisions.
|
| 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.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The terms 'guestlist' and 'shitlist' would perhaps be more
| accurate in terms of what those two forms of security access
| control are really about. Using a guestlist to control access
| is more secure (as you can background check everyone on the
| guestlist), but limits traffic; conversely allowing anyone in
| except those known troublemakers on the shitlist gets more
| traffic but means undesirables might slip in and become
| nuisances.
|
| On the other hand, all that nonsense about 'master' was
| ridiculous. Master's degrees, the master boot record, come on
| let that one go.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| I find this a very reasonable approach. I also find it
| natural that language evolves and sometimes it can even be
| marginally beneficial to artificially guide the evolution.
| All in all, in practice it just doesn't matter in my life.
| djitz wrote:
| nicbou wrote:
| You're right. I use the new terms and move on. It's really
| not that bad.
|
| 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.
| uoaei wrote:
| > What you say gets invalidated because you used the wrong
| password.
|
| 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".
| mattzito wrote:
| Yeah, I'm the same way - also a googler, I used the term
| "grandfathered" in a meeting with a bunch of people and
| someone on Meet chat corrected me to "legacy" or something,
| and I said, "oh, okay, no problem" and corrected myself and
| moved on.
|
| 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.
| nicbou wrote:
| What's the new password?
| mattzito wrote:
| Starting when I was a kid, I used the expression "gypped"
| without concern or awareness, and then at some point
| someone maybe in high school or college took me aside and
| explained that it was based on a stereotype. I was
| nonplussed for a minute, and then I moved on. And I just
| don't say that anymore. I don't feel bad about having
| said it in the past, I don't have any deep guilt, I
| just...got on with my life.
|
| So I guess the password is "don't use a colloquialism
| based on an ethnic stereotype ", and that seems pretty
| straightforward and reasonable.
| dekhn wrote:
| Similar thing happened to me- I used the term "biner" to
| refer to a carabiner, but was told that it was an insult
| used to refer to hispanics who collected beans in the
| central valley of california. At the time, I was in
| Connecicut. I've also had people tell me I can't call a
| particular card suite a "spade".
| psyc wrote:
| It sounds like you've already totally internalized the
| notion that what you said was _incorrect_ because _anyone
| at all_ had _some problem_ with it.
|
| My response would be more like: And just who are you?
|
| So in a way, you're right.
| mattzito wrote:
| I mean - it feels like you're creating a combative
| situation where one does not exist. "And just who are
| you?" - what is the point of that? To what end and whose
| benefit?
| native_samples wrote:
| That isn't language evolving, that's you being
| arbitrarily 'punished' for no better reason than to
| reinforce the false idea that the other person is better
| than you. The right response is to refuse because that
| treadmill is endless and its potential speed is
| unlimited.
| mattzito wrote:
| How was I punished? What tribunal did I face?
|
| 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.
| native_samples wrote:
| You were being "corrected" by someone else, weren't you?
| They knew the "right" language and you didn't. What do
| you think would have happened if you'd disagreed with
| this particular correction?
| mattzito wrote:
| Like if I had said, "thanks for the feedback but I'm
| going to continue using this other word"? I think we
| probably would have just moved on and the individual
| would have been offended, but - why would I do that? To
| whose benefit? Mine?
|
| 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.
| AJ007 wrote:
| It's also terrible for real long term projects to be
| continually renaming things and modifying naming
| conventions. Engineering isn't fashion.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| Given we are talking about Google them randomly renaming
| things isn't exactly new :)
| yupper32 wrote:
| > 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.
| knorker wrote:
| > 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 get Damore'd?
| dekhn wrote:
| I'm not worried about being Damore'd, as I have a lot more
| experience fighting progressives than he does.
| [deleted]
| mwint wrote:
| What things did Damore do wrong that you would do
| differently (honest question)
| psyc wrote:
| Mispredicted how people would read his essay. I asked him
| if he honestly didn't see it coming. He said he honestly
| did not. That's very naive.
| dekhn wrote:
| I would have edited the manifesto to focus on at most
| one-two points based mainly around the dopey stuff they
| were doing in DEI classes at the time, Drop all the big-
| five psychology stuff, and eliminate nearly all the
| biological claims about women's different ability and
| interests.
| bombcar wrote:
| Also known as picking your battles and reducing your
| surface area, fight one fight at a time.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The easiest way to not be Damore'd is to apologize and
| repent. Damore doubled down and at that point (because the
| gap between "manager" and "employee" at Google is so
| narrow) became a walking Title VII violation. Once his
| coworkers came out in public saying they wouldn't be able
| to work with him, Google was backed (legally and PR-wise)
| completely into a corner.
|
| It turns out American companies are not the Athenian
| Lyceum, and some topics are not up for debate.
| nullc wrote:
| > The easiest way to not be Damore'd is to apologize and
| repent.
|
| 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.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123615.
| blueflow wrote:
| > that somebody had to explain to them there are people in the
| world who are discriminated against, but aren't black
|
| 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...
| uoaei wrote:
| Holy straw man, Batman!
| duxup wrote:
| One of the challenges with moderation teams like that or
| similar is that the folks who REALLY want to do that job .. are
| the folks who absolutely should NOT be doing it.
| newsclues wrote:
| How do we make jobs activist proof?
| tempnow987 wrote:
| This is I think a major issue. The passionate people on these
| committees have views that are perhaps in the 10% edge of
| spectrum. No mothers, birthing persons etc etc.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| For anyone reading this, I volunteer. My moderation level
| would be based on words that were considered bad in the year
| 2005. I won't have to do much work and you still get to say
| that you have someone that's doing the job. Win-win.
| slg wrote:
| I wonder what your age is in comparison to your chosen
| ideal of 2005. As I am getting older it is easier to see
| the patterns in all this. Most people just want the entire
| world frozen from the time they were young. That includes
| everything from the cast of SNL to acceptable language. I
| have seen enough decades of people complaining about
| policing language to know that we survived multiple waves
| of this before 2005 and we will survive all the waves that
| came and will come after. I would bet that 20 years from
| now, Gen Z will be waxing nostalgic about the language of
| today while Gen Alpha and beyond will be pushing for more
| change. It is just the way language evolves.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I dunno, man. You're right that the term "mainboard"
| isn't going to kill us, and I wouldn't advise anyone to
| make this their main crusade in life. But that's a pretty
| high standard of dismissiveness and I've never seen
| anyone apply it to language changes that genuinely bug
| them. If we discovered that Google employees call
| codebases which have a lot of bugs "gay", and people got
| angry about it, would you tell them that it's not a big
| deal because Google has just developed the language a
| bit?
| slg wrote:
| >But that's a pretty high standard of dismissiveness and
| I've never seen anyone apply it to language changes that
| genuinely bug them.
|
| 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"?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It's true that things were different when we were young,
| but that's true of any new phenomenon and it's not the
| heart of the objection. If young people these days want
| to avoid saying "wonderful", or use women by default in
| hypothetical scenarios, or go around checking their pulse
| while they say "sheeeeesh", I have no real concerns about
| those things and I think most people on team
| "motherboard" would agree.
|
| 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.
| slg wrote:
| >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
|
| I would argue this is a symptom of the same phenomenon
| and therefore the heart of the objection is still the
| same.
| lokar wrote:
| Be careful with the word crusade
| humanistbot wrote:
| Ah, the culture war version of the famous Douglas Adams
| quote about technology:
|
| "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."
| duxup wrote:
| What is funny to me is that for me 2 and 3 are swapped.
|
| 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.
| xwdv wrote:
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I very much relate to that sentiment.
|
| One thing that keeps me in check is that, I assume, the
| feeling is mutual. I'm guessing that in both camps there
| are people who have trouble believing that the other side
| is arguing/acting in good faith, because their position is
| so obviously ludicrous.
| grishka wrote:
| > somebody had to explain to them there are people in the world
| who are discriminated against, but aren't black.
|
| 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.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > 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.
|
| "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_
| grishka wrote:
| Either way, people here aren't discriminated based on their
| race. Never were. This particular problem seems to be
| uniquely American because of their history.
|
| We do have a word for racism by the way. It's,
| unsurprisingly, "rasizm".
| wardedVibe wrote:
| Racism is a problem in large parts of Europe, and
| generally any country with a history involving enslaved
| Africans. I wouldn't be surprised if ethnic
| discrimination in Russia went a different direction
| though, since their colonization all happened in central
| Asia, where skin color isn't all that informative.
| grishka wrote:
| > I wouldn't be surprised if ethnic discrimination in
| Russia went a different direction though, since their
| colonization all happened in central Asia
|
| Yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31126173
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| (Not a historian, so fully expect half of this to be
| wrong in one way or another.)
|
| > 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 Konigsberg into
| Kaliningrad and Danzig into Gdansk? 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?..
| GordonS wrote:
| America certainly takes racism to extremes, but it's not
| a problem unique to the US - racism is a thing all over
| Europe and Asia too, to varying degrees.
|
| I've never been to Russia, but I'm finding it hard to
| believe racism doesn't exist there.
| kofejnik wrote:
| having lived in Russia, I assure you there's a lot of
| pretty open racism there, racist slurs are openly and
| widely used for anyone who's not a slav, and even some
| slavs now as well (e.g. Ukrainians)
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Either way, people here aren't discriminated based on
| their race. Never were. This particular problem seems to
| be uniquely American because of their history.
|
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Russia
| drdaeman wrote:
| > Our society just doesn't have the concept of racism
|
| 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).
| bagels wrote:
| A black person could not have been born and raised in a
| Russian city?
| grishka wrote:
| This is of course entirely possible, but would be extremely
| unusual. I personally haven't ever met a black Russian.
| [deleted]
| kevingadd wrote:
| While I'm sure the shape of discrimination in your culture is
| different and not heavily racial, it's unwise to conclude
| that racial discrimination isn't happening just because you
| don't see the textbook version of it in front of you. The
| assumption that a black person can't possibly be local can
| lead some people to act in a discriminatory way that would
| produce bad outcomes.
|
| 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?
| grishka wrote:
| > Also, if people get discriminated against based on their
| nationality and you just said a black person can't possibly
| be From Here...
|
| 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?
| psyc wrote:
| This part of the culture is in the grip of a mania. Mania is like
| improperly overclocked insight. Turn the zeal dial too high, and
| out comes confusion.
| Exuma wrote:
| geephroh wrote:
| MS: "We now concede that Clippy was the most annoying,
| patronizing and flawed UX feature ever created."
|
| Google: "Hold my beer..."
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers.
|
| Try using:
|
| [carbonated malt beverage]
| thfuran wrote:
| I'm allergic to malt.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I'm allergic to carbon.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Well, the Earth's climate sort of is.
| sva_ wrote:
| To quote George Carlin: "The planet is fine, the people
| are fucked."
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdSi9NW5u3E
| [deleted]
| hcrisp wrote:
| This AI strikes me as being so dystopian. Time to break out and
| read Orwell's _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ again.
|
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| is it even AI? They claim it's a language model analysing
| human bias but it's blindingly obvious that it is just a
| human curated blacklist.
|
| 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.
| jzackpete wrote:
| Blacklist? I think you mean blocklist
| [deleted]
| bitwize wrote:
| Isn't Microsoft rolling out a similar feature into Word 365,
| though?
| Tao331 wrote:
| > Cutting phrases like "whitelist/blacklist" ...out of our
| vocabulary... addresses years of habitual bias in tech
| terminology
|
| 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".
| gorwell wrote:
| This is straight out of Brave New World where the word "mother"
| was viewed as obscene.
| notadev wrote:
| The word "mother" is already considered obscene because it is
| not inclusive of uh "men who give birth".
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-budget-proposa...
| foofoo4u wrote:
| Check out this video uploaded just recently: [Health department
| refuses to define 'woman' in Senate
| Estimates](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX_1QNXgjDM).
| Australia's own health department struggle and eventually
| refuse to answer the simple question. Look at how uncomfortable
| they are with such an innocuous request.
|
| 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.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| In a dystopian future you'll have a score indicating how often
| the algo had caught your wrong-speak.
| slickrick216 wrote:
| You can't imagine anyone with a shred of real dignity or rational
| thinkers had anything to do with this. So they sent their B team
| at it.
| chrisfosterelli wrote:
| > Cutting phrases like "whitelist/blacklist" and "master/slave"
| out of our vocabulary not only addresses years of habitual bias
| in tech terminology, but forces us as writers and researchers to
| be more creative with the way we describe things.
|
| > 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"
| monkeybutton wrote:
| Why not use proprietor?
| burkaman wrote:
| If you say "I paid my proprietor this month", nobody will
| understand what you mean. It's simply a different word with a
| different definition.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Why not use Landlord, a word everyone understands?
| akhmatova wrote:
| Because it promotes wrong and harmful thinking. And must
| therefore be extinguished.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Here's the definition of landlord I see
|
| > 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.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > How is that different from "property owner"?
|
| 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.
| causalmodels wrote:
| Because it leads to confusion.
|
| Example: Is the proprietor of a bar the person running it or
| the landlord who owns the building?
| akhmatova wrote:
| Actually, it is generally understood that the
| owner/proprietor of a bar is the business owner (aka
| license owner) -- and that this in general is not the same
| person who owns the bricks.
|
| 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.
| causalmodels wrote:
| Agreed, I was just trying give an example of why using
| proprietor would create confusion.
| akhmatova wrote:
| Right -- the "bar's landlord" is in general not it's
| proprietor.
| nicbou wrote:
| Perhaps it's a very specific answer, but I write in simple
| English, since many of my readers are not native speakers. I
| stick to words people are likely to understand.
|
| 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.
| nmilo wrote:
| I think you're misreading. Nowhere in the article did the
| author say she "liked the tool" for removing
| whitelist/blacklist.
| awofford wrote:
| Obviously the former example is written in more positive
| language than the latter.
| glasshug wrote:
| > On a more extreme end, if someone intends to be racist,
| sexist, or exclusionary in their writing, and wants to
| draft that up in a Google document, they should be allowed
| to do that without an algorithm attempting to sanitize
| their intentions and confuse their readers.
|
| The author does position themselves against algorithmic
| sanitization generally.
| skrbjc wrote:
| "Being more inclusive with our writing is a good goal, and
| one that's worth striving toward as we string these sentences
| together and share them with the world. "Police officers" is
| more accurate than "policemen." Cutting phrases like
| "whitelist/blacklist" and "master/slave" out of our
| vocabulary not only addresses years of habitual bias in tech
| terminology, but forces us as writers and researchers to be
| more creative with the way we describe things. 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."
|
| This is a whole paragraph in the article where the author
| agrees this is good thing, just that google implemented it
| poorly.
| ElFitz wrote:
| And now the rest of the world will be very happy learn that they
| will once more have to silently deal with the aftermath of
| America's latest political trend.
|
| 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.
| londons_explore wrote:
| This isn't unique to SV. There are plenty of examples of words
| and behaviours that were commonplace and then over time evolved
| to be unacceptable to use in polite company.
|
| 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!
| aasasd wrote:
| Yeah, it's a continuous process, called 'euphemism treadmill'
| (not a technical term though):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan
|
| However, personally I'm pretty sure that the US is overdoing
| it.
| londons_explore wrote:
| There must be some way to measure that... Eg. Percentage of
| language 'cancelled' per year.
| IAmWorried wrote:
| > There are plenty of examples of words and behaviours that
| were commonplace and then over time evolved to be
| unacceptable to use in polite company.
|
| 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.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| This SV culture is being exported to the rest of the world at
| an alarming pace.
|
| https://www.economist.com/international/2021/06/12/social-me...
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Supposedly they hate imperialism.
| omginternets wrote:
| It probably won't make you feel any better, but even in
| America, there is a feeling of SV is shoving its political
| trends down our collective throat.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| >banning world-famous paintings from Facebook because they
| dared show a breast
|
| Issues with breasts aren't exactly a new thing in the US, just
| ask Janet Jackson.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Yeah but they have absolute freedom of speech so they're better
| than us /s
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