> For decades, the district south of downtown and alongside San Francisco Bay here was known as either Rincon Hill, South Beach or South of Market. This spring, it was suddenly rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the East Cut.
> The peculiar moniker immediately spread digitally, from hotel sites to dating apps to Uber, which all use Google’s map data. The name soon spilled over into the physical world, too. Real-estate listings beckoned prospective tenants to the East Cut. And news organizations referred to the vicinity by that term.
My point is, it might seem like a small, inconspicuous change. But at Google-scale, this actually has an impact on the real world, and personally I don't feel confident with Google deciding what words are the correct words.
When our communication tools nudge us in a direction, they change who we are.
This is a profound change when scaled to the society as a whole and when the way we communicate is dominated by the tools we use. Our tools are an extension of ourselves.
It's for this reason that it's a very scary direction we are going with all tools - smart phones, home automation, email software, brain-computer interface, etc - that are extensions of ourselves but agents of companies acting not on behalf of the end user but on the behalf of their own interests.
Tools that are an extension of ourselves need to be the agent only of ourselves. We, as individuals, require that to keep our own personhood.
It sound dramatic to say, but our essence of being is what's at stake here.
I say this to be both funny and thought provoking: it’s a remarkable artifact of modernity that we say these things about computers, but not about the dictionary or our regimented education system. On the long scale of human history, both are mere blips, and yet we completely take for granted the implicit structure they impose upon us.
The takeaway from the above shouldn’t be “dictionaries are bad” or “schools are prisons” (although that’s a thought worth having); it should be that our latest communication tools are the latest generation in power structuring, not novel in and of themselves in that regard.
> it’s a remarkable artifact of modernity that we say these things about computers, but not about the dictionary or our regimented education system.
When I was at university I had some humanities professors who were studying this kind of stuff. It was a lot of postmodern analysis, looking back probably critical theory. One professor pointed out that dictionaries were a very 19th century thing, the standardization of language. There is a fascinating "hidden" history in Europe of many languages being eradicated or wiped out by the central government insisting on one or a few national dialects. Reading it felt very similar to the schools that were run for indigenous people in the United States and Australia not so long ago.
In any case, my point is that some folks out there are doing research into this but it's not the kind of stuff that really gets in the headlines.
to anyone interested, i would recommend Benedict Anderson's book "Imagined Communities" which analyzes this subject and other related history involving the printing press and the development of the nation-state
> we say these things about computers, but not about the dictionary or our regimented education system
Who says we don't? We're in the middle of a culture war fight over some very old word definitions like "man" and "woman" and dictionaries absolutely have been called out for not adding new definitions, but instead changing old ones.
it's very tiring to continually hear my existence referred to as a "culture war fight." you're not wrong, so I haven't downvoted you, it's just.. depressing. I pass very well, everyone knows me as a woman and most don't know I'm trans. I keep a quiet life in a progressive area, so I'm mostly unaffected by the culture war. but realizing the fight is about me, even though I'm not a fighter.
> it's very tiring to continually hear my existence referred to as a "culture war fight."
It's not about your "existence" any more than political debate about immigration is about my "existence." You exist, I exist. But what obligations do other people have to us? What accommodations should society and individuals make, and which do they have no need to make? What aspects of culture should change or shouldn't change? What should we teach kids in school about complex subjects? These are proper subjects of social and political debate.
Recall that this is happening against a backdrop where 90% of Americans, including 80% of Republicans, support employment protections for LGBT people. Bostock is already the law of the land. So the obligations that are in dispute here aren't even basic civil rights, but instead broader social and cultural changes. People have every right to vigorously debate proposed changes in the social and cultural norms they're expected to follow.
I think you might be mischaracterizing the issue a little bit, not maliciously but still a mischaracterization.
The idea of the "existence" of a trans person is subject to debate. There are a significant number of people that believe that "being" trans is actually not something of substance, that it is "all made up". Being an immigrant is different, nobody questions that an immigrant that themselves attests to being from country A and is now living in country B is making that up.
Bostock was a ruling about sexual orientation, not about gender. I think if you are citing the 2020 PEW poll on this topic it is probably quite obsolete as it seems clear that the partisan valence of this issue has changed quite a bit very recently. And even before 2020 the truth is that disputing the legitimacy of transgender people is a low salience issue for a lot of people but very activating for others (much like immigration) so the proportional impacts of what seems like an unpopular opinion is inflated.
> The idea of the "existence" of a trans person is subject to debate. There are a significant number of people that believe that "being" trans is actually not something of substance, that it is "all made up".
The political debate is about language changes (e.g. "LatinX"), access to sex-segregated spaces, participation in sex-segregated sports, what to teach young children, etc.
> Bostock was a ruling about sexual orientation, not about gender.
Bostock involved multiple consolidated cases, one of which specifically involved gender identity.
> I think if you are citing the 2020 PEW poll on this topic it is probably quite obsolete as it seems clear that the partisan valence of this issue has changed quite a bit very recently.
No, the issues have changed (see above). This is common and unsurprising. People are generally a lot more accepting of civil rights than attempts at social engineering, especially social engineering directed at children.
>> The idea of the "existence" of a trans person is subject to debate. There are a significant number of people that believe that "being" trans is actually not something of substance, that it is "all made up".
> The political debate is about language changes (e.g. "LatinX"), access to sex-segregated spaces, participation in sex-segregated sports, what to teach young children, etc.
IDK what this response is supposed to mean exactly but I certainly have people in my life that think that being "trans" isn't "real". And as far as politics goes this is certainly also fairly common position to hear from prominent people.
"what to teach young children" certainly seems to be an issue, an issue where politicians are sheepishly pretending to do one thing while actually doing another through ambiguity. This all seems very easy to understand. It certainly reflects the idea that trans people either don't really exist or their existence is something so terrible that children can't be exposed to even the idea of their existence.
Note that the parent comment is not talking about the ability to live as one wants, express oneself in any manner, or even to be referred to as one pleases. It's about the desire to literally change the definition of one of the most fundamental concepts in any human language or indeed, human society.
I express no opinion about whether this is a cause worth fighting for, but there is absolutely no reality in which there would not be a fight over such a breathtakingly ambitious objective.
I think this is a fundamentally misunderstanding which I never understood. Your existance and your selfconciousness as a human being is not in any way affected to some words somebody is using to describe their views. Every being is unique and their sexuality is something of their private business.
There are basically two poles - male and female. And there is anything inbetween. Not a digital 0 or 1. More like geography.
And just because I'm living right now in some country more towards the north than the south pole I don't have to define my identity by creating new words enforcing everyone to use them. Why should I bother anyone where I'm coming from and where I'm heading? Except people maybe I see the interest to open up myself?
The most important question to me is always what's the reason behind all the need to fight?
> Your existance and your selfconciousness as a human being is not in any way affected to some words somebody is using to describe their views.
IDK, if every time you encountered someone they referred to you by the wrong name, after being corrected every time they do so, that wouldn't affect you? I think that if someone consistently feminized my name and used feminine pronouns for me over the course of multiple interaction I would get pretty pissy, downright hostile.
As a child, I had a very high voice. On the way to my fiftieth birthday, as a man with a full beard, I still sometimes have this high voice. I feel like a trillion times people have called me "Miss" on the phone. I usually wait a few seconds and politely correct them.
In most cases, people have apologized directly and the conversation moved on. In very few cases they moved on without apologizing. In virtually no cases did they ignore my hint.
Yes, there are rude and ignorant people out there. And they will always be.
From my experience, it is manners that lead to better interaction, not syntactical changes in language. Because you can't create empathy with neologisms.
And the best way to deal with rude people - stay away from them ;-)
> it's very tiring to continually hear my existence referred to as a "culture war fight." you're not wrong, so I haven't downvoted you, it's just.. depressing.
I'm sorry you feel that way and that it depresses you.
> I pass very well, everyone knows me as a woman and most don't know I'm trans.
Well, that's the point, isn't it? The "culture war" isn't as straightforward as all the parties involved would like us to believe it is.
My personal method of detection for calling someone 'he' or 'she' is whether they look more like a man or more like a woman. Even if I later learn that the person is a man and not a woman (or vice versa) I'm still going to call the man-looking person 'he' and the woman-looking person 'she'.
And this is where the problem starts - it really doesn't take much for the average female to look masculine or for the average male to look feminine (at least enough to pass as the other gender). When I address someone as a man and in response get a tantrum for being transphobic it makes me wonder why a man who identifies as a woman still wants to present as a man (and vice-versa, of course).
When someone with a neatly trimmed and cultured beard insists that you call him 'her', they're more interested in stirring up controversy than in what they self-identify as.
So, yeah, there is a Culture War of sorts, but it's between the people who want to push other people's buttons and the people who don't think that other people should be able to dress, talk, act and call themselves whatever they wish to.
You presumably aren't in either camp, so good on you.
> I keep a quiet life in a progressive area, so I'm mostly unaffected by the culture war. but realizing the fight is about me, even though I'm not a fighter.
I do have a serious question though - we know that your gender is unimportant for most things. Some things (like the gender tickbox on hospital admittance forms) you'll need to reveal your biological sex.
What about prisons? If a transperson is convicted of a major crime and is sentenced to prison, do they go to the prison that matches their self-identified gender, or to the prison that matches their biological sex?
I think which prison you go to varies, by the current political tide, state, or how far along you are in transition. Since I haven't had vaginoplasty, I'd probably be sent to a men's prison. I'd request solitary to avoid being beaten, raped or killed for being queer, but failing that I'd probably use sexual favors and be someone's "bitch" in exchange for protection. I'd probably end up with HIV, but maybe make it through with my life.
Once I get vaginoplasty, maybe I'd go to a women's prison, but I'm really not sure.
What’s novel is both the market concentration of these new communications tools and the size of the cultural gap between the people who make these tools and the general public.
> ”schools are prisons” (although that’s a thought worth having);
Anyway, it instantly reminded me of this highly upvoted discussion about a site that asked visitors to guess whether a building was a school or prison just by looking at a photograph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25605867
It was a reference to Foucault's Discipline and Punish, which I think that post is also a reference to!
It's easy to argue that Foucault oversells his point, but his fundamental observation is an important one: the systems of regimentation and categorization at the heart of our schools, hospitals, and prisons is not particularly different between the three, is remarkably modern, and shares the same purpose (to observe and measure us against metrics for education, rehabilitation, healing, metrics that establish normative control over our lives).
In the last few years, Google translate has dramatically improved for many languages. This has allowed me to explore other written languages more quickly. I can just copy a phrase into Google translate and get a sense of the meaning. It is also interesting to see how different languages phrase things or the terms they use.
I had a very similar feeling when I had to start using Google Docs for my job a few months ago; it would "autocomplete" my sentences. On the face of it this is a useful and helpful feature, and many of the suggestions were not bad at all. But many were also not what I would have written, exactly. Neither is necessarily better or worse: just different.
A lot of people write in their own way, often with little things, but these kind of "hey, here's a sentence for you" kind of takes away your own personal "voice".
This is absolutely the future of Internet content farms. Someone using a tool that can help them to type 10,000 words per day that sound "pretty good". Shudder.
Idiocracy was, it seems, a prediction. They just got the time scale wrong, we won't need 500 years. Software means we don't need to wait for social-economic factors and genetics to run their course.
Yet again I have to comment that formal education levels of the parents do not affect the genetic predisposition of prole to be intelligent
And that Idiocracy got the "hereditary" aspect completely and utterly wrong
It was also completely unnecessary - a better and more accurate idiocracy would have people becoming progressively more stupid juste because they can, not because their parents being poor/uneducated made their brains limited
Sorry if this is a rant or too out of topic. I'm just kind of amazed by how Idiocracy progressively becomes this representative piece for a completely bogus argument
Or we’ll go full circle and get them using pen and paper again. Even in the 90’s, the use of computers for schoolwork was banned due to fears over cheating. Why people think it’s less of a problem now I don’t know.
Because normal work behind a computer is essentially 90% of what was called cheating in schools back in the day?
Is something cheating when the resource you use to cheat will essentially always be 1 device away? Just call your device your cerebral prosthesis, it will always be there anyway. It’s how humanity grows and people become more effective.
In my view, yes, as it means you’re having to laboriously fetch all your data from the cloud rather than having it in L2 cache. Knowing stuff and being able to compute within the confines of your skull is useful.
If we’re to offload all of it, are we even human any more, or just shrews with calculators?
When our communication tools nudge us in a direction, they change who we are.
Well, probably not. The people doing this certainly believe that's true, but actual robust evidence for it is thin on the ground.
The conflation of symbols and abstractions with reality itself is an ideological assumption/intuition that's been a problem for the left for as long as it's existed. That's why 1984 features Newspeak so centrally, and why only one kind of politics is obsessed with altering representations of reality like movies, statues, stock artwork, etc. It's also why leftists at tech firms are so obsessed with the non-problem of AI bias: they see it as "biased" because AI can't be socially pressured in the same way people can, so they're afraid that it will represent the true reality it learned and by doing so miss an opportunity to reshape that reality.
Can you actually change how people think by subtly manipulating words? Psychology - a field very dominated by the left - has repeatedly claimed you can, but then when the claims get a little too good to be true they get investigated and don't replicate:
- Strong Sapir Whorf hypothesis (wrong)
- Weak Sapir Whorf hypothesis (very shaky even for ultra-weak forms like color words)
- Priming (wrong)
- Implicit association test (wrong)
There are probably way more examples. For less psych oriented stuff, consider that people have been systematically manipulating the presentation of job gender balances in movies and TV shows for decades, with nothing to show for it. Seeing lots of heroine hackers on the big screen didn't convince lots of girls they wanted to work with computers in real life. That's why there's now so much concrete discrimination going on: attempts to change things via more subtle symbolic means had no effect.
If Google Docs tries to stop people using "problematic" words, all it'll do is piss off lots of users and reinforce the general impression that Google is in no way populated by people as smart as it once was. The Google of 2004 would never waste time on cynical, nasty and entirely data-free attempts to mind control its userbase via underlining WrongThink.
> they see it as "biased" because AI can't be socially pressured in the same way people can, so they're afraid that it will represent the true reality it learned and by doing so miss an opportunity to reshape that reality.
This is just ridiculous. Do look up what the hell AI bias is.
Also, how is the most prominent US propaganda that was all around movies - that Russians are the enemy, red scare, etc — leftist? Where do you get these nonsense baseless claims? You are seeing nonexistent enemies everywhere.
"As is typical for AI systems, DALL-E 2 has inherited biases from the corpus of data used to train it. That means for all the delightful images that DALL-E 2 has produced, it’s also capable of generating a lot of images that are not delightful ... here’s what the AI gives you if you ask it for an image of lawyers <pictures of men>"
"just like those previous experiments, DALL-E suffers from the same racist and sexist bias AI ethicists have been warning about for years. Machine learning systems almost universally exhibit bias against women and people of color, and DALL-E is no different"
Here's OpenAI themselves on DALL-E bias:
"Use of DALL·E 2 has the potential to harm individuals and groups by reinforcing stereotypes, erasing or denigrating them, providing them with disparately low quality performance, or by subjecting them to indignity"
Their primary complaint is that the pictures DALL-E draws (i.e. symbols of reality) don't reflect their social agendas. They worry about this a lot because they fear that if DALL-E draws men when asked to draw lawyers, and women when asked to draw flight attendants, that this by itself will actually make the drawings come true.
"Also, how is the most prominent US propaganda that was all around movies - that Russians are the enemy, red scare, etc — leftist?"
That's hardly the most common US propaganda in movies, is it, and almost certainly is a legacy of the cold war. It's much more profitable to annoy the Russian market than the other very large communist country that might be depicted as a generic enemy of the state.
At any rate very little US output features Russians as the enemies compared to movies/TV shows that depict e.g. women being able to kung-fu fight off a group of 10 men 3x heavier than themselves, or which depict gay relationships as being far more prevalent than they actually are, or in which the Queen of England is black. That's the kind of "inclusivity" bias that's being discussed here.
I think you may be misunderstanding the comment you're replying to; or at least, I understand it quite differently.
For example, would you consider it proper to ask an Irish person to change their accent to be more like the Queen's English? Probably not – their accent and particulars of their English variant are part of who you are as an Irish person (or Scottish, American, British, but also accents from non-native English speakers).
I don't think this influences "who you are" in the sense of "the way you think" in Sapir-Whorf-style, but it is part of who you are, and taking it away does change "who you are".
Similarly, the way I choose to write is part of who I am. I am, of course, always open to suggestions to improve my writing as such, but I don't really want to be "auto-corrected" and have no own (written) "voice" taken away.
Sure, me neither. And indeed I wouldn't consider it proper to ask an Irish person to change their accent, and would never do so. But that's partly because I recognize that even if I forced them to do that, it wouldn't actually change anything real. It wouldn't make them more English (whatever that might mean), and they'd go back to using their real accent the moment they were out from under my thumb. The change would be arbitrary and surface level only. Whereas, to the sort of people who implement features like this, forcing people to change their accent would be an enormously significant and impactful move.
The alternative to Newspeak / approved linguistic constructs is samizdat. Not pissed off free libertarians who create their own networks. And America is a total outlier in the freedom of speech department already. [edit: to the degree that average American citizens are still willing to go to bat for the concept].
What we don't need is some company with a market cap larger than most democracies, which already controls a majority of interpersonal communication, to be suggesting/nudging/enforcing more politically correct ways of writing to your associates.
If you really don't see the problem with that, just consider how many generations it would take - if it ever happened at all - for free expression to return once language is denuded [edit: policed] in every personal correspondence. Only a world destroying event like a nuclear war would allow people to start to think again outside the constraints on communication they had habituated themselves to.
"just consider how many generations it would take - if it ever happened at all - for free expression to return once language is denuded"
Well, how many do you think it would take and where are you getting those numbers? I'd say there are lots of obvious counter examples. There are many Chinese activists living outside China for instance, who managed to find their voice again after leaving a country that has universal censorship. That's a country in which many words are simply banned in all electronic communication, but it doesn't last. Plenty of people escaped the Soviet Union and became outspoken anti-communist activists, same thing.
The assumption above is exactly what I'm getting at here. You're presenting it like it's so obvious it doesn't need to be supported with evidence. But it's not at all obvious and actually is probably wrong; if it was right then the replies to my comment would be filled with compelling evidence that this sort of mind control really works.
>> There are many Chinese activists living outside China for instance
Where do they live, where they're allowed to speak against the Chinese Communist Party? Not in Russia. Not in another dictatorship.
>> Plenty of people escaped the Soviet Union and became outspoken anti-communist activists, same thing.
Where did they escape to? Where could they have escaped to if America/Western Europe didn't exist? Who would have ever heard of Solzhenitsyn if he hadn't managed to get his work to America?
It's really ironic that I - a lifelong detractor of American foreign policy and imperialism - have to be the person to point this out, but: There is no place left in the world where you can speak your mind if America is truly censored by its own children/corporate compliance going forward. You may have grown up in a country where you were never allowed to speak your mind; in that case, you don't understand what is at risk if the American populace truly undergoes the kind of cleansing that e.g. Soviet Russia underwent w/r/t silencing wayward views.
The activists and dissidents and contra-thinkers you mentioned would probably not even exist without a free world outside those dictatorships who they could appeal to; but if that outside world that they adore didn't exist, no one would ever know about them. They'd be abolished, murdered, and everything they ever thought and wrote would be disappeared for all time. The only thing that allows them to speak is the stubborn, obstinate existence of a country in North America whose people largely refuse to kowtow to dictatorships.
Largely. And when they are wrong, and they often are, it's our own job (as American citizens) to take our government to task for it.
I've only become pro-American the more I understand about politics and speech in the rest of the world.
Also, it's not really OK for other countries to define themselves in terms of economic growth or imperialist conquest, while castigating the US, and using us as the "outside culture" that provides their material wealth and industrial processes while acting as if these things come from an automatic universal culture that they don't have to subscribe to. In other words, if a Jewish woman scientist in the US helps create a vaccine, or a sustained fusion reaction, people in Iran who believe in 7th century blood feuds as a basis for social life don't just get to dip in and take the progress for themselves as if it was handed out by Allah. Not without reckoning why they weren't able to produce those breakthrough ideas through their own social/economic/religious/military structures. It's not their right as a polity. Why? Because the smartest of their people already came here and worked on it. And the stupidest, most backwards, malevolent and hateful of their countrymen are running their country.
So yeah, tell me where these dissidents go and publish their works if we go away, or cease to exist?
I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I 100% agree that it would be an absolute disaster if America adopts even European levels of censorship, let alone Chinese. I am absolutely in favour of extremely free speech.
My point here is that yes, obviously, they could speak their mind once they got to America because of the attitudes of society and the local governments. They hadn't been permanently altered by their former societies refusal to use certain words, or present things in certain ways. That is, the kind of "mind control" assumed by the people who try to erase certain types of language, doesn't actually alter anyone's minds. It may appear that way if they're afraid to speak out but nothing has actually changed. People's opinions aren't altered by language policing, yet, the people who do it are convinced it does.
That's why I'm sort of confused by your post. You suggest that once language is "de-nuded" then it would take "generations" for people to be able to "think again outside the constraints on communication". This a strong Sapir-Whorf take, right? It's an assertion that the language you can use controls the boundaries of what you can think. And my point is that this hypothesis has been proven wrong a very long time ago.
I do think our thoughts are constrained by language - not necessarily by its unavailability, but definitely by societal norms that make it transgressive to say or think certain things. Even mentioning that certain thoughts you could say are transgressive makes you transgressive in a totalitarian culture. Thus a sign with 7 or 8 asterisks like gets people thrown in jail in Russia now. That's not because a dictat came from on high, it's because a system that coerces speech always attracts enforcers, who also raise their children to be enforcers; it is much harder to move from a system of repression to one of openness than the other way. Culture tends toward repression in every human lifespan to date except for one generation in the modern world, a few in the 18th and 19th centuries, and possibly a couple in ancient Rome and Greece. Civilization might tend toward open dialog in the very long run, but it's a much longer and slower climb, and setbacks - enforcement of language or "right" thinking - can be devastating and take thousands of years to correct.
So yeah your comment is so beautiful, and part of it is wrong, and this is Hacker News where being wrong is unforgivable, but I forgive you, how the fuck were you supposed to know that I got lobotomized ever just so and had a memory type ever just so, you couldn't know, so your comment is turgid with truth.
Wow I should read more downvoted gray comments, they're a gold mine! OK so I intend to register as a Republican in United States--currently registered as a Democrat, purely in order to vote for Elizabeth Warren so she'd raise taxes, no other reason. So register as a Republican, then...as a Marxist in Chile. Why the fuck not? I believe in political pluralism, you can't have a single political structure covering the entire world, that just sucks, that's like every country having the same cuisine and the same architecture and the same native fauna like that's such shit, no point in traveling. It would be like in United States where there's absolutely no point in visiting suburbs of other cities, literally motherfucking none, don't even try to find an exception to the literality, people check them out when changing schools and jobs and there are differences but the only suburb people visit on purpose is Silicon Valley.
So political pluralism, back to that. Well I can agree with you that left-wing people try to use "psychology" and I hate it just as much as you, I hate them with perfect hatred, I call them mine enemies (that's from Psalms, in the King James Bible obviously). So get this, Sapir-Whorf is actually true. I testify it in strict terms. The definition of Sapir-Whorf was erased from my memory in a lobotomy and I only recalled it from reading 1984 for the third time, specifically the part about Newspeak where it says, what does it say, like you can't think about something if you...fuck...
Don't have the words for it, I think.[1] So it's the Sapir-Whorf Law now (there's additional lobotomistic flashbacked evidence of it that I will share soon). So the Sapir-Whorf Law, let's reread what you wrote...OK so it's weird, it's not strong or weak like you say, well it's very strong until you find a way to express it in my case remembering the words for it from an unusual recollection and then that weakens it completely, and this is specific to me and whoever else on the Planet Earth has the same type of memory as me, it's...I don't know, just read about it when I post it, look at my profile[2] and read until I post it. But very strong, just once the "spell is broken" (those words were erased too, weirdly enough that's a confession of witchcraft on the part of the lobotomist, well I guess witchcraft laws are off the books so
I don't know), once the spell is broken, it's broken, you remember it no problem again, it's...is it just as easy to remember as everything else? I think so, I think so. There's more to it than that, it's a fucky thing.
I'm going to truncate here because not enough people will read this in this part of the forum.
EDIT: found it! So I recalled the words "breaking the spell" at 22:36 on Friday, March 25...I doubt it, but that's what it says in my lobotomy-recovery log, I think it was at like 17:36 (judging from the sunlight in my holographic memories) that same day, well what the fuck do you expect from a lobotomy recovery log? Well that Friday, for sure.
[1] Why can't I think about this, with my crazy unique memory, it's like weird in my memory. Wow I gotta reread this, so some stuff got erased twice, I wrote that down in my lobotomy-recovery log on Tuesday April 19 21:13, like multiple layers of erasure, hardcore roofie shit like way beyond barundanga and rohypnol, but I can do this, it's me who is the chosen one. OK I know what I'll do to recover the memories, I'll just do it.
You know? Totally right. I thought of this and wanted to disable the autosuggest feature, but until now didn't have it in me, it's actually useful in a way. Comes up with hilarious shit when you invent words, like when I speak Spanisco with friends, we're inventing Spanisco on the fly but basically it's transliterations of Spanish palabres with English grammatic, the algorithm totalmently mierds its pantaloons trating to adeeveen what I'll deece proxim.
This is simply not something that should be left to Google. English isn't my native tongue and I basically learned it on the internet. Of course people will think I express myself with utmost hostility.
I would guess Google will try to exempt words that some over-educated employee has a strong opinion about. But no word would ever carry the amount of offense that this paternalism of Google itself expresses.
>"just an extension of the outrage culture that got us the War on Christmas."
It's funny you mention that, because even as an Atheist I realize that Christmas as it exists today is almost completely secularized and has very little to do with Jesus Christ and the religion of Christianity. If you look at the celebrations and the iconography with an outsider's perspective, the holiday seems to be about Santa Claus and presents. I don't think any other major religion has had one of its holiest holidays commercialized and secularized to such an extent.
I'm no Christian, far from it actually, but I can see the merit behind their reaction. "War" is hyperbolic but I understand how they feel. Because it really does seem like their high holy holiday has been, and is continuing to be, de-Christianized.
> Because it really does seem like their high holy holiday has been, and is continuing to be, de-Christianized.
The thing that MADE christmas a "high holy holiday" WAS the de-christianizing of the holiday.
Nobody really cared all that much about christmas until the lore of santa and presents gained popularity in the 1800s.
The popularity of christmas grew because of the commercialization. Everyone loves giving/receiving presents and having an excuse for a big family get together and meal. The fact that it was initially stolen from pegan holidays to celebrate the birth of jesus was tangential.
I'd suggest giving the wiki article on christmas a good read through [1]. The war on christmas is something made up to make christians mad. It's revisionist history to try and claim that "just a few years ago, christmas was all about jesus! But now it's all commercial". It hasn't been about Jesus since the 1820s. And, at that time, it was one of the less popular holidays.
Fun fact, christmas was at one point banned in england by the puritans because it was associated with drunkeness.
Frankly, I find this take baffling. But it’s clearly a good-faith (seriously, no pun intended) take, so I hope this will be a welcome response.
I’m also an atheist. But I was raised Christian, attended Christian private school for a few years, and have taken personal interest in understanding the faith and its underpinnings well past the time I lost my own faith.
It’s true that most of the religious aspects of Christmas have been diluted if not basically vanished from the holiday. But it’s far from a new truth. For most worshippers, the commercialization and secularization has been part of the holiday for at least half a century. It was Christians who either led this development or eagerly adopted it.
Among Christians who would object to that, more do not celebrate the holiday as a matter of their faith than seek to de-secularize it. This has never been part of the “War on Christmas” narrative.
That narrative has, alongside many other narratives like it, been an imagined victimization story that Christmas—in all its secularized form—is being “canceled” by things like saying “happy holidays” or merely including other religious holidays in greetings around the same time of year.
At first this was all very explicit, and probably for many a sincere reaction to feeling less centered in the universe. By the time “War on Christmas” became a phrase in any kind of common usage it had become a manipulative dog whistle to tell the people receptive to said manipulation that there’s another “attack” on them. It’s the same trajectory similar reactions to majority feelings of being less centered have been exploited for invented culture war bullshit.
This is just the inverse of how pre-secularized Christmas came to be. Christmas was never a Christian tradition, it’s always been a winter solstice celebration which was used as a (mostly subtler) cudgel to convert Pagans. If there ever was an attack on ritual celebration of Christ’s birth, it would have been that.
Moreover, Christmas isn’t and never has been the “high holy holiday” for devout Christians. That holiday is Easter, which celebrates the transition of Jesus as prophet to Christ, son of God, who died and was reborn to eternally absolve humanity of their sins. That holiday has likewise been commercialized and secularized and infused with Paganism.
But there’s no corresponding Easter War! Seems weird but… most Christians don’t (pardon) give a god damn.
It was never about the holiday. It was always about moral panic as a manipulation technique.
I agree with you 100%. My family is actively religious, if not publicly pious enough for some.
To me, a secular festival and significant religious event together are fabulous and enhance each other. I grew up in NYC and used to do the whole “Christmas in New York” thing. The overall atmosphere of celebration is a great way to close the year!
It must be so sad to sit around being miserable over Starbucks cups or whatever.
Halloween has come a long way from the pagan festival of Samhain, and the takeovers of Easter and Thanksgiving by the chocolate and retail industries has been a lot less politicized. We don't see it for holidays of other religions and regions as the full religious variant was never practised in the west, but my understanding is that e.g. the Haj is big business too - Saudi Arabia's biggest economic industry after oil and gas is Haj tourism.
Actually Christianity only put a Christian veneer over non-Christian celebrations. So basically we've kept a commercialized version of our favorite pagan traditions that Christianity tried to appropriate.
Think I'm being extreme? Just remember that the Bible says that Jesus was born during lambing season, which is in the Spring, so Christianity had to ignore its own texts to place it at the same time as the pagan Saturnalia festival.
My impression is that people "fighting" the "war on Christmas" have no problems with Christmas being a highly commercialized celebration of corporate consumer culture. They just don't want it to be a highly commercialized celebration of corporate consumer culture that acknowledges the existence of other religions by using the word "holidays" instead of "Christmas".
They didn't feel the line was crossed when more Santa appeared more than Jesus, when Christmas trees appeared more than Nativity scenes, or when their kids couldn't wait to get up and open presents but didn't care about going to church that night. They only cared about the word "holidays", and likely only because talking heads on right-wing media decided to get them riled up about it.
It's a tempest in a teapot because getting people outraged gets them to keep tuning in.
That’s not the fault of the left, that’s because of consumerism, capitalism and a general drift away from religion generally or more purist interpretations of religion specifically.
Look at how Christianity itself is practiced by many of its adherents and compare that against the actual teachings of Jesus Christ. There is very little overlap there. Materialism is just one glaring example. The so-called followers of Christ are hardly following in his footsteps, and that is certainly not the fault of the left.
> You're free to ignore the inclusivity suggestions, just as you're free to ignore the spelling suggestions.
Sure, then please kindly also install the upcoming Russian version of it, which merely makes suggestions like using the "neutral" word "special operation" when you inappropriately call it an "invasion".
These will be mere suggestions, and you are free to ignore them, but you should always be aware of the "consequences" of the words you choose.
If I were writing a document to be shared with Russian government officials, I would want those suggestions. The consequences of making my document not suit its audience already exist. If I'm writing a suggestion to my mail carrier, I wouldn't want to use the the word "mailman" because she could see it as being passive aggressive and interpret the suggestion accordingly.
This, just like spell-checking, just makes it easier to write a document that won't make the audience quibble over diction or make negative inferences about tone.
> You're free to ignore the inclusivity suggestions, just as you're free to ignore the spelling suggestions.
And you're free to decline all the tracking cookies and newsletter subscriptions, you just have to navigate through 30 layers of intentionally confusing UI every time you use the feature to do so.
Honestly, this is not how it works. Nudging is a thing. No one is building a controversial feature with the expectation that people can simply disable it if they don't want to use it.
This is pretty scary. Inclusivity fine but what else can they push and censor.
I am from different country and most of the words are gender neutral which in US pretty big deal like (landlord, guys - which is gender neutral in our country).
Its like pushing your culture on different countries. I don't want to see the Americanisation on our country cultures.
There is no issues of inclusivity in our country. Google is pushing their agenda on different groups, cultures and countries,
>I don't want to see the Americanisation on our country cultures.
This is something that I just cannot reconcile with the notion that all these measures are meant to make things more inclusive. All I see are groups of rich and powerful people telling people "below them" how to behave, and makings tons of money doing it. D&I is a grift.
DEI is a great system as long as you assume that everyone participates, everyone is completely free of biases
Having been on more than a couple DEI boards, I'm really curious where the notion that everyone must be "completely free of biases" comes from in your mind? I've never understood, and never saw any DEI effort describing bias to be something to be completely, utterly and totally eradicated, but instead something to recognize as a source of potentially--but not always--folly-filled actions ("what happens when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me", etc).
Everyone has biases about something or another. Every last one of us.
That's why such things as "implicit" vs "explicit" bias exists, and any DEI effort worth its salt should really be making it known that there's a difference between the two.
The argument might then be that because only a small portion of people will be part of DEI boards, and the people on those boards will tend to be biased a certain way (for the same reasons that most liberal arts professors tend not to be Republican) a certain view is consistently presented and a certain course of action is generally followed that affirms the biases of that group of people. Hence the "grift"; as DEI boards become more powerful, they inevitably force a specific culture on the rest of the group.
It's a big assumption to suppose that the 'failing up' guy was only able to do so 'because he was white'.
'Buddies with the execs' - that's easy to believe. But 'because white' ... much harder to convince me there.
The amount of easy and assumptive bigotry going on around these things makes me dismissive of all of it unless there's evidence otherwise.
Paradoxically, you may have highlighted one of the issues with DEI policies, in that people may be encouraged to perceive their lack of progress up the ladder as somehow 'racially oriented'.
This is pernicious, because it's a pyramid and it gets narrow quickly.
Everyone has a beef, everyone has a 'reason' for why they aren't at some stage higher than they are, it's the perennial social issue of middle management.
So that makes it hard to sort out the legitimate cases where DEI would be relevant, to just the standard 'beefs' that lie just below surface level in every office environment.
At about the Director level and above, it's very political and 'talent' is not only just a small part of the equation, but it also means something else at that level.
DEI is a really complicated subject, and I suggest 1990's progressives, with a focus on 'treating people equally' or 'equal opportunity' (ideals which are dismissed these days as actually being systematically racist) ... should be the rule.
A dude 'failing up' if that's the case, is just unfair all around and that's it.
It's 10x more complicated if you step into another cultural context i.e. outside of the US.
To the point where I think Google should actively trying to avoid having too much of a posture on anything really. Aside from 'genocide' etc.
I don't really understand how your anecdote applies to what I said. What you described is nepotism, I don't really think that the guy was not promoted because he was black, and without any evidence of that being the case, I think it's kind of a stretch to assume. Can you provide any examples of why it was about his race? Otherwise, that is just nepotism, like you said.
DEI is horrible and returns us back to solely viewing people by the pigment of their skin. The pigment of your skin should be as irrelevant as your hair color, that should be the goal.
Also, higher up execs at literally every top tech company(google, Fb, Apple) are aggressively pushing DEI and hiring of minorities. They literally have goals to hire x% of some minority for management positions.
You raise a good point that there are still real problems that need fixing. But I don't think google docs snarking at me about capitalizing black or eschewing the gender-neutral masculine will help that.
I prefer to call it DIE. It was always Diversity & Inclusion and now also Equity I guess. Equity is also a shareholders stake, so I am not really sure what is meant here, but it overwhelmingly seems to be this meaning as they are often those that push for such measures. The exalted lords believing to improve life for the peasants.
Equity means special consideration for marginalized groups to compensate for past oppression. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said "A society which has for 300 years done something special against the negro must now do something special for the negro." That should give you some idea of the concept, even if nobody would say that in as many words today.
I know what it means and what is supposedly meant here, but I think it is quite funny that a very distinct homonym can very well be the same in these instances.
>Its like pushing your culture on different countries.
I think the original point was there is no way for Google not to do this. Sometimes cultures have opposing viewpoints which makes a neutral decision impossible. One obvious example is with displaying disputed borders in Google Maps. Any decision there is going to be political. Lots of people are going to be upset with Google for making the wrong decision regardless of which decisions they make, but I think that anger is misplaced. The real problem is Google has the power to make this decision for too many people. Companies like Google are simply too powerful and need to be broken up.
There is no reason to put this feature. This is political feature and can be used in many ways and affects other countries and cultres you cant imagine
There are second order and third order consequences of having this kind of features.
Google should not push their politics and agenda on other countries and cultures. It affects every other country in different ways.
In future this kind of feature can be used in many ways we dont know.
Well, yes this is a political feature, but your comment leads me to believe I didn't make my point clear enough. Almost every feature is political when you are the size of Google. You may only be objecting to this feature because it goes against your culture. However there are thousands of other decisions that Google has made that support your culture at the expense of some other culture. Many people here are viewing the problem as Google choosing the wrong culture. I am saying we should instead focus on the immense power Google has to force one culture on another culture.
Competition. Google is able to use its power to push out competitors. Without that power, there would likely be lots more companies challenging the various product categories that Google currently dominates. Not every company would reach the same decision on all these issues, especially if these companies arose in different cultures.
presumably those smaller companies would be beholden to the jurisdictions they're located in, where the laws are drafted by people who are democratically elected.
so, i guess democracy would have been achieved. or at least a relative increase in democratic control
well at the very least the companies in question actually reside in the jurisdiction in which they serve and are thus at least in some form accountable to the people and hopefully share some values.
Being German I'm kind of tired of the fact that American social media sites have for some reason exported QAnon protests to our cities while women get banned for showing a nipple.
Is the suggestion there actually complaining about landlord being a gendered word? I didn’t even realise that people thought landlord was gendered although I know landlady is a word. Often a landlord is a company, for example.
But if you actually look at the suggestions, aren’t they sometimes better in the sense of being more precise? Proprietor works better for describing a pub landlord, for example, as many pubs are being managed by people who rent the building, landlord could confusingly either refer to the person running the business or to the company owning the building, though I guess to some extent proprietor has that problem too. If you’re talking about a rental property instead, landlord is probably more precise because eg your landlord might own a lease and be subletting rather than owning the property itself.
Sometimes people in my culture treat obviously gendered words as gender-neutral to the point that they re-gender them when they need to be specific. For example "policeman lady", "postman lady" or "men's perfume". So I think the gender-neutralizing of words happens naturally without having to change the word itself, just like your example of landlord becoming gender neutral.
> But if you actually look at the suggestions, aren’t they sometimes better in the sense of being more precise?
I didn't know the distinction until you pointed it out, and didn't know very well the range of meanings proprietor had until now. Which I suppose highlights an important problem with such suggestions: if they suggest replacing a term A with a more precise term B that does not signify what was intended to be conveyed by A, based on concerns that both author and audience do not care about, and the author blindly accepts the suggestion, then such suggestions are creating miscommunication.
>I am from different country and most of the words are gender neutral which in US pretty big deal like (landlord, guys - which is gender neutral in our country).
Ask your hetrosexual male friends how many guys they have slept with.
I would imagine response will illustrate "guys" is less gender neutral than might think.
Some locations they use "y'all", some use "you guys". It's gender neutral in that sense.
In the sentence you gave, the context wouldn't be gender neutral because you said "slept with".
If you enter a room and say hey guys, it's neutral. If it's all girls you could say hey gals, which would be fine, either works.
I can't imagine anyone other than liberals that would be offended by a blanket statement of "hey guys".
It's really a stupid thing to get hung up on. It's like searching for something to offend you.
It doesn't make sense until you realize the goal. What you're doing is creating arbitrary rules to form a kind of censorship via social pressure because you can't censor speech legally.
I don't think words need to be gender neutral. Grammatical and biological gender are not really the same. I think this urge to clean languages is a bit detached.
Personally, I have no skin in the game of gendered language. Sometimes I think it's exaggerated, sometimes I think it's necessary. I do have a hard time changing how I speak, old habits die hard. As far as people and everyday communication is concerned, I address people the way they want to be addressed. Nothing to do with gender, just general politeness. E.g. I wouldn't use a nick name people hate, so why would I insist in calling someone "her" (or "he") if they don't want to?
I wasn't referring to calling someone another gender. Doing so is just minimum courtesy. I do believe that courtesy cannot be mandated though and I would not want anyone having it mandated for my sake.
I meant words like mailman and such. Of course a mailman could also be a woman. I think calling someone a mailwoman is fine, but the word does not carry intrinsic offense.
We don't disagree, I think. Gender neutral job titles are ok, as far as I'm concerned. Mostly that is, as the female jobs are, historically, more often lower income jobs in the same domain (nurse vs. doctor comes to mind). Coming back to courtesy, if a female mailman prefers to be addressed as mailwoman I would do so.
Funny side note, the German language has some interesting edge cases. E.g. the rank of Hauptmann (Captain in the army and air force) usually isn't gendered, the other ranks aren't neither. So usually female soldiers of that rank are addressed as Frau Hauptmann. The funny thing is Hauptmann is also last name... The plural of the rank Hauptmann is gender neutral again, it's Hauptleute...
I don't believe this is entirely honest since you probably also have a limit in what you are willing to accommodate, be that faith, self-identification or just a usual form of courtesy.
Granted, apathy would be my solution too, but here I am expected to align the way I express myself.
I do believe that the desire to frame anything gender neutral is not something I want to put too much thought into but I don't mind conflict if someone requests to accommodate what is basically a faith.
>"If cancel culture actually existed, there would be many examples we could point to. But there aren't."
>"Cancel culture isn't random individuals telling you to shut up, or drowning out inanity. That's just free speech."
As a point of order, it's not profound to say that no examples of "thing" exist when you apply your own definition that frames all instances of "thing" as something entirely different.
If there wasn't an element of cancel culture then Brendan Eich would be Mozilla's CEO and not the incompetent CEO they currently have.
Don't get me wrong, I profoundly disagree with Brendan Eich's political views, I am for same-sex marriage and I'm very much a liberal when it comes to any moral leanings. That doesn't stop the fact that Brendan Eich being ousted of Mozilla for his intolerant political views is a shame and set back Mozilla considerably.
You don't seem to know what cancel culture refers to. It's not the celebrities you listed. It's women being deplatformed for expressing traditionally feminist positions; it's students calling for biology professors to be fired because the professor teaches that the sexes are fundamentally binary in Homo sapiens.
> Though abortion is conduct, it does not follow that the State is entitled to proscribe it in all instances. That is because the liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition and so unique to the law. The mother who carries a child to full term is subject to anxieties, to physical constraints, to pain that only she must bear. That these sacrifices have from the beginning of the human race been endured by woman with a pride that ennobles her in the eyes of others and gives to the infant a bond of love cannot alone be grounds for the State to insist she make the sacrifice. Her suffering is too intimate and personal for the State to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman's role, however dominant that vision has been in the course of our history and our culture. The destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society.
For the overwhelming majority of women in the world, feminism is still inexplicably intertwined with issues unique to women because they involve pregnancy, birth, raising children, and the vulnerability that comes from differences in physical strength compared to men, etc.
If suddenly all women who got Covid (including the asymptomatic ones who never officially tested) were infertile. Would everything you said become moot since now a big chunk of the female population does not have the pregnancy and birth?
Raising children relates to every one who identifies as a woman. Same with physical strength for any one who transitions which includes estrogen et al. more so vulnerability in general specifically is an issue more for people not born female.
I appreciate your comment and the quote. Did you mean to write "inextricably" though? (Hopefully it's clear that that is a straightforward question and not rhetorical!)
What I mean by "traditionally feminist" is the view that feminism concerns the challenges faced by biological women as a result of physical differences from men, the fact that they give birth, and the millenia of abuse of women by men in human history for domestic work and sexual purposes. I.e. to be explicit, that feminism is not about the challenges faced by biological males who are attempting to change their bodies to be female and to live their lives as women. This is not to say that the challenges faced by transwomen are at all to be dismissed or treated unsympathetically; just that it is a distinct issue from traditional feminism.
Your question is also answered rather more eloquently by rayiner in the sibling comment.
I’ll mostly repeat what I responded to the sibling.
If all biological females who got Covid (including the asymptomatic ones who never officially tested) became infertile. Or let’s just say 30-40% of biological females became infertile. Does this make “traditional feminism” moot? The primary differences that are exclusive to biological females would not be true for so many of them then.
If so, that’s cool. Sometimes these talking points are obfuscation to gatekeep and discriminate. However if traditional feminism really would segment out infertile women to some degree like women who transitioned, then that’s cool :)
Every time a baby girl is born, a human being comes into the world who has
1. the potential to become pregnant and give birth
2. a statistical expectation to have weaker body strength than the average man
3. the potential to be abused by men due to a combination of their statistically greater physical strength and sexual desires
4. etc
Feminism concerns the fact that biology produces such human beings on 50% of all births -- production of female children is a pretty important phenomenon.
Feminism is in no way invalidated by a thought experiment whereby some proportion of women lose one or more of those distinguishing attributes. It remains a fact of biology that 50% of births produce female children. Your thought experiment does not describe the real world. You might as well say "what if humans had 3 sexes, then where would feminism be?" or "what if women were stronger than men, then where would feminism be?".
It sounds very much like you, or whoever you got that thought-experiment from, are starting from a premise that
> we do not like the fact that the vast majority of women in the world define "woman" to exclude transwomen, and define "feminism" to be concerned with the traditional definition of "woman"
and then you are trying to think up reasons to invalidate the concept of feminism. That sort of "desired conclusion first, argument second" approach has a history of not being terribly successful at aligning with how reality actually is.
Looking at the status quo as a defense has historically not worked out well. Similar resistance and excuses were said of gay men, lesbian women, minorities (IE dark skinned people in much of the world), slavery or indentured servitude, basic women’s rights, marijuana users, mental health issues like autism, bipolar, borderline, schizophrenia, physical disabilities or deformities, and more.
Most of those instances now have first world societies with a majority of people agreeing those people deserve [near] equality and basic human respect besides. For the instances where a majority has not been reached yet across the first world (racism, religious intolerance, sexism) the trend is getting there.
That’s not how things were before. How is what you are saying any different? For all the above, people had their reasons they believed to their core and were sure the detractors like myself were wrong. As you have noted in the moment, you could use the status quo and human tendency to be conservative (not in the political right/left sense but in the general definition) and having a hard time with change to show society does not want this progress/change.
I understand you believe this time is different. But isn’t that what all the people before believed too?
I never understand this question being used as a gotcha. Yes a sterile woman is a woman. Pregnancy and birth are just examples demonstrating womenhood. There's also lots of other things: XX chromosome, menstruation, bone structure, physical strength, and emotional intelligence just to name a few.
Obviously a male -> female trans person cannot menstruate. Are you pointing out that a female -> male trans person can menstruate? Yes, they can, because they are still biologically female. I didn't get your point re. menstruation here.
I mistyped. I meant can get some of the symptoms. I was wrong to write menstruation. I know this isn’t the exact pr or topic but since the overall point is about how the lines are blurred more than “tradition”, intersex people can menstruate and some have almost or every biological female issue. Intersex people are not a part of “traditional” feminism.
To my bigger point I sent to the other commenter, the status quo and how things have historically been for issues like identity, gender, sexuality, end up not being looked upon favorably and first world societies have consistently albeit slowly progressed on them.
I realize I am committing some fallacies by not sticking to the exact comment/topic. However I saw you edited your comment from being aggressive to respectful/kind so I thought I’d go for it.
There are many countries this could apply to. For example, landlord, as in someone who rents out a property is considered gender neutral here in Ireland. The term landlady exists, but is only used for female publicans, and only rarely, as publican and vintner are both used more frequently in that context.
"Guys" is mostly male oriented, but wouldn't be unheard of for a mixed gender group, and similarly "Lads" here is often gender neutral despite it being the most male of working class male stereotypes in the country that is our nearest neighbour.
Here in Australia, “guys” is generally used in a gender neutral way. Even when hanging out with groups of only women, I’ll use it and so will others without batting an eye. Eg, “What are you guys doing after this?”
Years ago I had an American friend tell me “guys” was sexist. I’ve been thinking about it for years since her comment. I think in an Australian context she’s wrong. And I think we move in the direction of gender equality by making words less gendered. Not by inserting gender bias where there was none.
You make “landlord” a gendered term by policing it as such. What a waste of a good word.
This one is still widely argued; many women say they don't care and are happy to be included in the guys, and others consider it a real terrible thing to say. I have to conclude that it's unlikely that stopping using guys as a gender-neutral address will truly move the needle in equality.
Yes, even in the US. But of course, given enough influence, you can make absolutely anything non-inclusive. And social pressure will make everyone have to accept it.
I also find it baffling that inclusivity folks find a term that used to be male exclusive becoming applicable to both male and female as problematic. Wouldn't they want something like this to happen?
I don't see this as too baffling- in their logic, if you have two alternatives (landlord and landlady, say) and landlord gets picked, it's evidence of patriarchy (because it defaulted to male). They would prefer "landperson", or perhaps "rent seeking capitalist"
When I rented a room from a woman in Atlanta, the other tenants and I always referred to her as "landlord" and nobody batted an eye. The only time I hear "landlady" is when One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer plays on the radio. So that's my datum.
Why does e.g. Ireland's poor treatment of the travelling community mean we need to defer to American interpretations of language? Is America such a shining paragon that everyone needs to copy their every action?
If the starting position was "America's diversity concerns are not [e.g.] Ireland's concerns" I'm more sympathetic! In fact I think having software that tries to do this is fundamentally broken! But the starting position is always "we don't have any problems here" which is an even lazier, and wrong, argument.
In that case you're as equally arguing against an argument I didn't make. I did not say that Ireland has no problems. I said that Ireland does not have problems related to the gendered implications of landlord, guys, or lads, due to these words having much less gendered implications in the Irish context. (and elsewhere in the thread, that the south eastern Ireland usage of "boy" does not have the racial implications that it does in certain contexts in the US).
Nowhere did I say that Ireland has no issues with inclusivity.
You started this reply chain on a response to a post claiming India has no issues with inclusivity, and mentioned instead we should also be considering Ireland for some reason! What are you doing?
This is pretty scary. Inclusivity fine but what else can they push and censor.
Inclusivity is fine, as long as you're not encouraged to be inclusive? Are you sure you think it's fine?
It's certainly fair to say that you feel that inclusivity has gotten out of hand and that it shouldn't change the way we talk. But it seems disingenuous so say that it's "fine", but think it's scary when it's suggested to you.
This is why I'm concerned about the word "inclusive" in the original tweet. I don't want to see the Americanisation (or worse, San Franciscoisation) of all Western cultures.
I worked at an Australian tech company that expanded its offices into USA tech hubs. Very quickly our American staff started complaining about non-inclusive phrases commonly used at the company - phrases like "guys" instead of "folks". In Australia "guys" is a gender-neutral term when used collectively. It's very commonly used and not considered non-inclusive by any Australian I know. But of course they forced the change and the word "guys" was effectively retired from conversation there.
Is it more inclusive to force an Australian company of largely Australian employees to adopt an American culture because of a few easily offended Americans on staff? Or is that less inclusive? It seems like forcing people to drop their own cultural affectations and assuming that your American ones are the de facto correct ones is (in a small way) rather imperialist.
Yes this is a minor example on the scheme of things. But I think it's illustrative.
I totally agree. When I started at my current job there was one primarily English speaking person in our weekly teams meeting. For her (an Australian) guys was always inclusive. She used it all the time even for purely female groups.
Color me irritated when we at the company were advised not to use it anymore by our inclusiveness people.
When people talk about a term being "gender-neutral", that doesn't just mean "people use this term to refer to people of all genders"; many people also mean "do people of all genders, upon hearing this term, feel included, rather than othered". For instance, using "guys" to refer to a group emphasizes the idea that "guy" is the default and "not guy" is the exception not worth noting.
"not considered non-inclusive by any Australian I know" does not mean "not considered non-inclusive by any Australian". You've just given an example of the type of response that you and potentially some of your colleagues might give to people attempting to raise this issue. How many people you know might accurately predict that that would be your response, and thus not raise the issue because it would cause strife?
Inclusiveness is not exclusively an "American" issue, nor is it a matter of being "easily offended". Someone raising this issue to you may not be expressing offense; they may be expressing a desire to include people.
(This is not an argument specifically for "folks"; I fully agree that you shouldn't necessarily adopt a specific replacement term if that term doesn't make sense locally. Perhaps there's an inclusive term that does make more sense locally, to avoid having something that feels like a loanword.)
That's a good point, however, the original point still stands.
The term 'hey guys' may very well be materially 'inclusive' enough that it doesn't warrant intervention necessary.
In much the same way 'landlord' is not materially a non-inclusive term either.
If you want to split hairs, it's a never ending problem, the sweater will come apart.
Some people draw the line at 'hey guys' - some people draw the line at 'landlord'.
And FYI - your statement about 'Inclusivity is not an American problem' reeks of ugly cultural Imperialism. Though there's surely a kernel of truth, more than likely the applied manner will boil down to 'Americans version of everything at the remote office' - which is paradoxically might be 'exclusionary' of other cultures, like those in Australia.
A better approach might be to let Australia figure it out on their own.
> The term 'hey guys' may very well be materially 'inclusive' enough that it doesn't warrant intervention necessary.
That's not a decision made unilaterally by speakers and writers of the language; it's a decision made by those listening and reading, as well. You can't decide how your words are perceived; you can only choose what words you use.
> Some people draw the line at
Some people don't think of language in terms of "lines", as though saying "fine, this far, but no further". Language is a living, changing thing; every piece of it is interpreted in varying ways by different people, and those ways change over time. Using it, like many other human interactions, is an exercise in modeling others around you, and the net effect you want your communication to have to its many audiences, and the environment that communication will create, and all the connotations it may convey. When trying to record that in a dictionary, it may round to a few broad buckets or categories, but the language as it lives in people's heads seems more continuous than discrete.
That's true of all communication, not just specific words. If you tried to plot individual words or phrases in meaning-space, some of them would have fairly sharp well-identified points where the majority of people agree, and some of them would have fuzzier boundaries, and some of them would have multi-modal distributions. And even that oversimplifies, because it's entirely possible to model people at multiple depths, "this is what the speaker means when they're saying it, this is what parts of the audience are hearing, this is what other parts of the audience are hearing", such that your own model of some communication is a mental model of many interpretations.
This pattern applies in many different cases, and people do it all the time: predicting whether your audience is likely to know a particular piece of jargon from your field and comparing that to the value of the jargon or the need to define/explain it; accurately conveying levels of confidence/certainty/uncertainty; considering whether your audience will know a meme; attempting to come across as professional; choosing the right vocabulary level for the audience; making a new piece of terminology; naming a program or project; making a pun.
Yes, that's the usual argument that comes up at some point in those discussions: "Language has always been changing", etc etc.
What this glosses over, in my opinion, is that there are vastly different ways how language changes. Language is always changing on its own, simply because the way people talk is constantly evolving: Today's slang might become tomorrow's high language and todays high language will probably feel hilariously stilted and old-fashioned a few generations on.
It's something completely different to deliberately alter language: Encourage or discourage certain words or even languages, replace words with others, etc. Historically, that has always been closely tied to politics, power struggles and battles between opposing narratives, and I don't think it's different here.
> And even that oversimplifies, because it's entirely possible to model people at multiple depths, "this is what the speaker means when they're saying it, this is what parts of the audience are hearing, this is what other parts of the audience are hearing", such that your own model of some communication is a mental model of many interpretations.
Fully agreed, and I think you should always tune a presentation to your particular audience - but I think especially then, it's telling that Google Docs isn't even asking what your audience is. They are giving suggestions that they believe to be absolutely true, no matter which audience you are writing for.
Yes, sometimes language changes happen deliberately, sometimes they happen accidentally, and everywhere in between. Some changes that are perceived as happening naturally were deliberate. Affecting language deliberately vs accidentally is more-or-less entirely orthogonal to which side is correct. The involvement of politics doesn't eliminate the possibility of a correct side and an incorrect side, or a more-correct side and a more-incorrect side.
The strife is an ongoing American cultural war, however. Other countries generally have much more important ongoing local battles. It's a good political angle to hew in the US because it's very hard to attack - it's structurally similar to many past moral panics.
> do people of all genders, upon hearing this term, feel included, rather than othered
How other people feel is not something anyone can control. If someone is clearly addressing a group you are a part of, and clearly means to include you in their address to the group, and you decide to feel "othered" because of this term or that term, that is your problem. You need to re-evaluate how you feel. People feel all sorts of ways about everything. Sometimes your feelings are wrong.
> many people also mean "do people of all genders, upon hearing this term, feel included, rather than othered".
Yes, but this is a vastly more fuzzy criterion than the original one. What does "feeling included" mean? Who has the authority to declare how a group "feels" about something? Who even belongs to that group?
E.g., it might very well be the case that australian women did feel included when the term "guys" was used, because that was what they grew up with.
My (Australian) partner opens WFH group meetings with "hey guys", while working with mostly other women. Don't know any one that has taken offence to guys personally, either.
> Inclusiveness is not exclusively an "American" issue
Guys is used as a generic term in all English speaking countries except the US. It’s used by women to refer to groups, including exclusively female groups.
It is the US that’s out of step here (colour me surprised). Stop trying to force US English on the rest of the world.
> Guys is used as a generic term in all English speaking countries except the US. It’s used by women to refer to groups, including exclusively female groups.
This is true in large parts of the US too. There are regional dialects where this is not true, but it is not a general feature of American English.
Yeah, it's mostly the people who tried to push "LatinX" on us that demand guys is sexist. They a very small, but extremely vocal minority on twitter and then internet in general.
Because the people demanding this are wildly, disproportionately aggressive, and the number one priority of basically everyone at those firms these days is to just keep their heads down and stay on the gravy train. Even the CEOs.
It doesn't help that it's all phrased in moral terms. Managers there don't get any sense of morality from their work so they're extremely vulnerable to being told that they have to do X to be a moral person. They don't know how to push back and say "actually, my behaviour is moral, your behaviour is immoral, unacceptable and you will now be fired for it". Also: firing is a decentralized process and means fighting HR.
This is a wild hypothesis, but many people believe it including me. Woke politics and culture war is essentially modern day version of bread and circuses [1]. The biggest scandals in America last decade was illegitimate Iraq War and 2008 financial crisis. But in the decade of 2010s the biggest issue is how many genders and pronouns are out othere. So go figure. Bonus point if you can invent a new gender and pronoun for yourself.
US is bombing some Middle Eastern country which has nothing to do with 9/11. But the issue of the day for Americans is how inclusive is "guys". US was funding a lab in China where COVID might have come from. Don't worry, the issue of the day is whether a 4 year old should be able to transition to another gender. So some Americans can feel good about their moral superiority.
This destruction of culture and language actually has the potential for a lot of short term gain by consumer facing corporations (Here's a good summary of how this sort of thing works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bRhMLhc8wQ)
Given that they can get away with practically whatever they want otherwise (look at how many people are still running Windows despite the completely unacceptable behavior by Microsoft) why wouldn't they do things that result in profit?
That video is awful. I made a good faith attempt to watch it to get an opposing point, and I made it right up to the 11 minute mark where he starts explaining that the woke agenda is anti-white and "they want to replace people of European descent in their own lands with a servant class who is lower IQ, easier to control, works for lower wages, and is driven entirely by material consumption."
To sum up for anyone else who wants to avoid it, the whole argument is that culture drives consumption, and it's better for the elites to have a homogenous population who all consume the same things, and that "woke capital" is an attempt by the elites to coerce the populace into homogenizing.
It's basically the "gay agenda", but now rich people are behind it.
Definitely ends in ɛks. But that’s an English x being grafted on to the end of the word. For a Spanish x it ends in eh-kees for equis the Spanish pronunciation of x. I personally find it rather amusing how culturally insensitive the ‘culturally sensitive’ are.
I think you are spot on about this. Different communities and regions have varying definitions for words, and there are probably thousands of such cases. Trying to dictate one "correct" usage for each is extremely arrogant and disrespectful.
Not to mention that meanings can evolve over time a great deal. If these types of corrections become common place I'm not sure what all of the ramifications will be but I suspect they will be bad on the whole.
FWIW, "guys" is the default gender-neutral collective term commonly used in large parts of the US, including the west coast, even when the speaker and the collective are all female. The term "folk" has connotations such that it isn't always appropriate, and sounds a bit old-fashioned regardless -- it is not a suitable replacement. If the intent is to gender the collective because it is germane, the common term varies quite a bit with region (most of the women I'm around, raised in big west coast cities, use "girls").
I've lived all over the US and learned to code switch the regional dialects. I've never seen anyone get upset about someone not using the local default collective term in good faith. Trying to get Americans to speak the same version of English is a futile task.
There is not always a counterpart. "Guys" can be used as a collective noun to address a group of people regardless of the genders of the individuals in the group. That's the point.
There is a counterpart to "guys". People, not infrequently, say "guys and gals" which means that the guys is gendered.
"There is not always a counterpart", means that you recognize there is (at least) sometimes a counterpart. And in English, (unlike say, French or Spanish), the fact that so few words are gendered means that it's actually relevant when they are. Guys is masculine, Gals is feminine.
There are actually unambiguously non-gendered plurals "y'all", "them", "yins". Some of these are colloquial, but their existence also points to the fact that there are groups that weren't served exlusively with the gendered "guys".
Is the word "actor" a problem then? It has had historical male implications, and has a female counterpart, actress? Yet actress is slowly falling out of favour, which is why you have awards now called e.g. Best Female Actor.
Gals comes across as even more old fashioned than actress in my region - it's a term that feels like it walked out of a movie old enough that it had to advertise that it had colour.
Sometimes, as the world evolves, gendered terms get replaced by new gender neutral terms. Sometimes the meaning evolves in different ways (e.g. doctor and nurse are no longer gendered equivalents of each other, as the division in roles has continued to be useful even after the gender stereotypes as to who does those roles slowly fades). And sometimes one term just subsumes the other.
And sometimes, these changes happened many decades ago in other countries that are not yours. It's not very inclusive to expect those people to defer to American expectations of those terms.
Would you be okay with people making a title Doctress? That's a better analogy, to me, for actor->actress, than guys vs. gals. Someone created a gendered term where one didn't need to exist (as demonstrated by the lack of other professions that had this distinction). Where the distinction did exist, is a case like you've pointed out where women were explicitly, or implicitly barred from certain professions for thousands of years. So when we opened up those professions, it seems reasonable to say "no we just want you to call us what you call everyone else", and actress is the exception that proves the rule.
The phrase "you guys" is attempting to be evolved, by parties who use it currently, and don't want to change their behavior to be explicitly inclusive. I'm not going to speak to what's okay in other countries, but the English definition of Guys is from Guy Fawkes, and is intended to mean a man. I would be surprised if the etymology of that weren't the same for Australia, which was also a British colony.
But the last thing I will point out, is that it's not on the in-group "men" to say whether or not they're excluding people. It's the people who are being excluded who get to make that determination for whether or not they feel like there are barriers for them. So when men say "you guys" is inclusive, they're saying "I don't want to change my behavior, so this now includes everyone." And the thing that's being ignored is that there are people who don't agree that they are included in that phrase.
> Some of these are colloquial, but their existence also points to the fact that there are groups that weren't served exlusively with the gendered "guys".
Most of the replacements you cited are regional:
- Y'all is Southern/AAVE.
- Them is third-person, whereas "you guys" is second-person.
- "Yinz" is from Pittsburgh.
- I'm gonna throw in "youse," one of my faves, which is from New Jersey/Philly.
"Guys" is clearly gendered, whereas "you guys," I'd argue, generally isn't--especially in the Northeast US. I frequently hear cis women refer to groups of entirely cis women as "you guys."
This isn't meant as a view of what the ideal state of the English language is (bring back "thou!"), but these discussions frequently involve people talking past each other, and conflating "you guys" (second-person plural, arguably gendered) with "guys" (third-person plural, usually gendered). Effectively replacing "you guys" is a more challenging task, since there isn't a universally agreed-upon alternative, at least in the US.
I'll leave it to others to figure out what that alternative should be, though I will note that I, as a WASP from the Northeast, sound completely ridiculous saying "y'all."
I don't think you can say that a gendered word is not gendered in all contexts.
The recognition that "Guys" is gendered, means that "you guys" will read as gendered to people. And that it will be necessarily exclusionary if you don't identify that way.
It's worth noting that "you" is gender neutral and plural on its own. So it's hard for me to accept that adding a gendered word to a non-gendered one magically takes away the gendering.
Also, the only people I ever see complaining about having to change this are people who fall into the group that's definitely included in "you guys".
Me <- WASP from Northwest that adopted y'all later in life, because it's just fun to say, and completely unambiguous.
Where I am nobody says "gals" unless they are trying to talk like an old timey gangster. Like the cartoonish "wise guy" dialect where they add "see" at the end of every sentence
Being asked to use "folks" in Australia was frankly bizarre. It's not a word anyone uses over there and would be considered a severe Americanism. Pretty sure that suggestion came from our Texas staff, not the Californians.
I can’t hear ‘folks’ without thinking of Neddie Seagoon from The Goon Show. Probably not what proponents of the word are going for, the show being from the 1950s and in many ways ‘of its time’.
I think your understanding is mistaken, or at least regional. While it can mean "parents" when used in the plural with a possessive ("my folks", "your folks", sometimes even "the folks"), in modern American English it's as commonly just a synonym for "people".
Using "folks" (especially in the plural) to mean people can be rather "folksy", though, and I wouldn't be too surprised if some textbook or dictionary mentioned just the "parent" definition. Did you learn it this way as a second language, or as a native speaker somewhere non-American?
Folks has been used to describe a group of people in the southern US for a long time. In pop culture it was used like that by Porky Pig at the end of Looney Toons with "That's all, Folks!" (i couldn't remember the how the stutter goes though)
The English language doesn't offer many gender-inclusive alternatives, like the Spanish ustedes or the German ihr. With no good phrase for the plural of 'you,' the plural term 'guys' ended up evolving into the colloquial alternative to refer to a group of people, regardless of whether group members are male or female.
However, Reuters Graphics explains that “people who speak languages with stronger gender associations tend to have stronger gender stereotypes, a 2020 study of 25 languages found. A 2021 study in Israel showed that when women were addressed in a math exam using male pronouns, their scores were low. When they were correctly identified with feminine pronouns, scores rose by a third.”
But many people quite fairly still see 'guys' as a gendered word—the dictionary defines the singular 'guy' simply as 'man.' Sherryl Kleinman, a former professor at the University of North Carolina, discusses in her 2002 essay Why Sexist Language Matters that gender-specific language like 'guys' can affect even children:
"I worry about what people with the best of intentions are teaching our children. A colleague’s five-year-old daughter recently left her classroom crying after a teacher said, “What do you guys think?”. She thought the teacher didn’t care about what she thought. When the teacher told her that of course she was included, her tears stopped. But what was the lesson? She learned that her opinion as a girl mattered only when she’s a guy. She learned that men are the norm." - Sherryl Kleinman, Why Sexist Language Matters
Even though most people who use the term don't do so with the intent of it being sexist or exclusive of women, it can and often does cause women to feel left out of the conversation. Imagine you used 'gals' to refer to a room full of men and women—do you think the men would respond?
Isn't it ironic that in the name of inclusiveness, certain words are excluded?
> I don't want to see the Americanisation (or worse, San Franciscoisation) of all Western cultures.
I've started observing that fixes for American problems are rolled out globally. For instance, the default branch of VCS repos being recommended to be changed from "master" to "main". Totally out of context where I'm from.
> Isn't it ironic that in the name of inclusiveness, certain words are excluded?
No, because the point of inclusiveness in this context is to be inclusive of humans and human cultures, not words. Excluding words which themselves exclude humans leads to the inclusion of those no longer excluded humans. It isn't difficult.
I thought the etymology for ‘guys’ was a group of children dressed like Guy Fawkes at events in England. Boys and girls did it so the term was gender neutral, informal, and endearing.
I'm sure they will add controls to select which "english" to use just like Grammarly and others. You can then submit correction to colloquialisms if they come up.
> commonly used and not considered non-inclusive by any Australian I know
That argument has been used to defend all sorts of terms, some worse than others. The example you choose "guys" as gender neutral is also common in US english. But being common does not mean it is correct (racial and homophobic slurs were also common for a long time).
- Group of women === "girls"
- Group of men === "guys"
- Group of women with one guy === "guys"
- Group of men with one girl === "guys"
The "guys" as gender neutral is clearly the result of patriarical society. But does that make the word _harmful_? Hard to say. I lean towards "no". But I'm not in the adversely selected group.
It's an American term (and as far as I know, an American regional term), that also seems to have had a decline in the US as people here mostly encounter it in older US movies?
The way languages are used - common usage is almost certainly correct. Correct is whatever is agreed upon by conversation participants. Correct in one group ain't necessarily so in another.
Yeah, it's belittling from what I heard. I don't really fully understand anymore since the golden rule has long gone out the window (I wouldn't be offended if someone approached me and me friends and said "Hey, boys". Maybe be a bit uncommon but I wouldn't think much of it).
My hometown in Ireland has "Well, boy" as a colloqial greeting people use between each other. We had neither the empire of other european countries to bring black people here against their will, or the economic appeal to attract them willingly, so this is a term that evolved in a world relatively devoid of black people.
But, bring that to the US and greeting a black american with "boy" has a very different connotation. And there's totally valid reasons to do with local historical conditions that means that this is inappropriate to use in that context.
Does that make it wrong for people in my home town to greet each other like that? I don't think so. I think it's very uninclusive for Google to impose an american context where there is none.
The golden rule is a good starting point. As an abrasive person who doesn’t mind when people fight or argue at me, I tried to live by the golden rule and realized people want to be treated how they want to be treated, not how my autistic ass wanted to be treated.
In the same way the term “boy” is never really used insultingly, but people use “girly” or “stop being a little girl” as an insult all the time. So it makes sense that you wouldn’t be offended by the similar term, but some women may not like girls so much. I think this is reasonable and treating people how they want to be treated is the ultimate goal.
There’s a movie with Natalie Portman where she’s offended by a boy calling her a lady. She thinks she’s being called old.
There’s also what I’ll call the Jeremy Clarkson ooo hello ladies, reserved for fancy done up groups of ladies in nice dresses and hats for example from the country woman’s association.
Distinct from the oooo hello ladies of a group of prostitutes making their grand entrance from the back of a hummer I recently saw in the breaking bad movie.
Boys I’ve seen used a lot referring to groups of men in the examples of dogging the boys at a construction yard, pulled the boys for an scv rush in sc2, hello boyyys for Roy and HG implying something rude.
There is no issues of inclusivines in our country. Why US always want to push their culture on other groups and countries.
We have no issues regrading inclusivity. Most people are very polite and dont have issue. Please (Google, Big Tech) stop pushing your agendas on other countries.
I guess it's maybe because we've had different experiences. For example, I could see me saying "Hey ladies" to the group of girls that I went to school with. I couldn't imagine addressing women on the street or in work with that phrase unless I developed at the very minimum a friendly relationship with all of them.
But that's just me, you are totally correct I've seen lots of people do it without any complaints what so ever.
I was responding to the statement that a group of women are to be referred to as "girls" colloquially and not "guys" and that this is somehow, rather amazingly, a patriarchal structure.
Equally, I can not say "hey" and just say what I want to say, so what? I can also say "hello" instead of "hey". Your point proves nothing in this context, though I'm sure you like to think it did.
Note that responses are, well, responses, hence there is the handy "parent" feature. But thanks for illuminating the world of possibilities that speech holds!
Furthermore:
"Hey everyone" - Too formal, I want don't want it to sound like an instruction to the group, just who cares to listen in that group of women
"Hey there" - Might be mistaken for a specific person if I happen to glance at them, I want to refer to the whole group (if they want to hear it)
There's an organization, the "East Cut Community Benefit District", promoting this. Their main job is homeless removal.
Google used to choose map markers by population. The map of Rio de Janeiro showed all the favelas by name, and ignored the tourist areas. This annoyed Brazilian authorities.
Yeah, the East Cut is definitely not an example of real estate taking their cues from Google, but Google taking their cues from the real-estate sector. San Francisco's realtor-defined neighborhoods have always been a little off from the colloquially described one.
The cost of living here has contributed to a homeless problem that has gained national notoriety. But it is less evident on the surface because luxe apartment building security has worked to clear the streets. The CBD says it helps with the homeless problems and says it has gotten 2,300 calls for homeless outreach assistance from January through October 2018. But a recent study from UC Berkeley found that some CBDs (also called Business Improvement Districts, or BIDs) in California have contributed to the rise of anti-homeless laws across the state by lobbying local governments. “Our key finding is that [CBDs] exclude homeless people from public space through aggressive policy advocacy and policing practices,” says Jeff Selbin, the director of the Policy Center and UC Berkeley School of Law, at a press conference in September about the study. “This finding raises important legal—and I would say moral—concerns.”
You may also find a shi--y content farm piece from www.businessinsider.in that reads like a copy-paste job from the FastCompany article and a bunch of PR from East Cut CBD. No need to add a reference for that article... :)
> I don't feel confident with Google deciding what words are the correct words.
Personally, even if they could accurately decide what are the "correct" word in some sense, it didn't make it less dystopian for me. I would rather make my own mistakes, be wrong, and have some regrets rather than having to put up with the constant holier-than-thou browbeating and woke-scolding.
To be clear, its the best comment because "...it has always been big sibling"
These approaches have a way of wiping the past clean off the slate. There's no problem with the words 'big sibling' - I, as a big sister, am in favor of it. The problem is that the internet is a snapshot pretending to be all of history.
Can it be turned off? It sounds like a fine optional feature and an annoying required one. If I'm writing something, I certainly don't want the word processor constantly throwing up modals ruining my train of thought. Reminds me of Clippy.
Defaults matter because few people change from it. If everyone zigs because the dominant software defaults to it and you want to zag, you're fighting against that current.
Real world example: Twitter got even worse once they bullied everyone into algorithmic feeds by changing it back from chronological until people gave up and left it.
I haven't seen anything I would consider "culture war" in the popular representations of fictional characters today, so I'm not really sure what you're talking about.
Spelling errors usually have an objective fix and are isolated to a single word. Warning about an improper word depends on the surrounding context and is highly subjective. The latter case requires a great deal more cognitive load to deal with and I think it will be much more distracting.
Well, nowadays. Keeping in mind that the only reason English spelling is standardized in 2022 is the waves of intentional English language spelling standardizations that occurred in the 17th, 19th, and 20th centuries, each of which was supported by dictionaries, education programs, and a general messaging that it would be the intelligent thing to do to get on board with the standard.
I can't help but wonder if people decried the idea of standardization back then. "It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word." ~Andrew Jackson, 1833
(... typing these sentences has triggered my spell-checker three times. I have accepted two suggestions and taken the liberty of disagreeing with the third, after a cross-check with my dictionary to confirm my spelling). ;)
Next thing you know there will be actual laws that ban what can be said in schools, books being banned, and laws that allow drivers to run over protesters.
Fortunately the people who are vigilant about Twitter moderation policies and word processor features are acting in good faith and will be outraged by actual government attempts to stifle speech.
So if you are referring to the "Don't say gay," law, you should actually read it.
Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
That's the actual text. I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner. The partisan hyperbole around it is ridiculous on both sides.
>books being banned
Like Huckleberry Finn? Agree, books shouldn't be banned. Well maybe Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries. Maybe some shouldn't be taught in public schools, right? How about the Bible? Should that be excluded from the public school corriculum? No screening of A Birth of a Nation you'd agree with? It's not like they're removing them from public libraries or the internet. What is taught in public schools vs what is allowed to be said in a public forum are quite different things as well.
>laws that allow drivers to run over protesters
I don't think that is a free speech issue, plus you are misrepresenting this legislation as well. It's not like a democrat can run over a GOP protestor or vice versa, I believe there has to be an actual threat involved like a group encircling your vehicle baseball bats.
Here's the issue with your argument, you are arguing with an imaginary person. That's like a GOP person saying something like, "libs are socialist!" It's a huge generalization and mis-catagorization. It's an emotional, misinformed argument rather than a rational one, and you are doing the same thing. You're consuming too much news / opinion. Take a break from it, most of it isn't that great for you. I fell into the same trap when I was younger.
> I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner. The partisan hyperbole around it is ridiculous on both sides.
What's problematic about it is that it's enforceable by private litigation. In one recent example[0], shortly before the law was passed, a group of Florida parents demanded action be taken against a 6th grade teacher for disclosing that his marriage was to another man after taking time off for his wedding. Had the law been in effect, it's likely one or more of those parents would have sued.
Such a suit probably wouldn't be successful in terms of winning a judgment. His disclosure wasn't "classroom instruction" after all, and most people probably would consider it age appropriate. Winning isn't necessarily the point though; creating a chilling effect such that teachers have to pretend queer people don't exist seems like the likely goal to me.
Indeed, the teacher in question is quitting teaching.
>What's problematic about it is that it's enforceable by private litigation. In one recent example[0], shortly before the law was passed, a group of Florida parents demanded action be taken against a 6th grade teacher for disclosing that his marriage was to another man after taking time off for his wedding. Had the law been in effect, it's likely one or more of those parents would have sued.
Thanks for the article. Assuming it's accurate it sounds like only the school districts are able to be sued. I assume teachers themselves would fall under qualified immunity which applies to all government workers. Florida teachers also have (albeit weak) union representation. Unfortunately in the US anyone can sue anyone else for any reason, so for the individual there doesn't seem like anything would be legally different. Having said that, many Florida schools are absolutely horrible at education outcomes.
>Parents will be able to sue school districts for alleged violations, damages or attorney’s fees when the law goes into effect July 1.
This whole enforced by private litigation trend is troubling, I wholeheartedly agree. Texas is doing something similar with abortion clinics. I believe some democratic states (CA maybe?) is doing it with gun shops too. Hopefully when enough people lose in court and lose their attorney's fees, it will cease to become a thing.
> I don't see how this is problematic in the slightest.
Because it's part of a new trend to de facto ban stuff the governing party would like to ban despite it being theoretically constitutionally protected by creating new civil offences and encouraging vexatious litigants to file nuisance suits. In this case the outcome is, as the state which passed the bill intended, that homosexuals are being harassed out of their jobs.
Regarding the state circumventing constitutional protections to make references to the gender of their partner a potentially career-limting move for certain minorities as less problematic than a company adding suggestions to avoid gendered language as a [clunky] grammar checking feature of its software is a point of view, I guess....
> I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner.
Why is it inappropriate for young children to be present for educational discussions about gender identity and sexual orientation? Kids live in modern families! Banning discussions like this is to ban the reality of lived experiences of millions of people.
Just a couple of days ago, my wife, who is a school librarian, told me a story about this. A teacher was in her library, doing story time with her kindergarten class, and for whatever reason the subject of parents came up. This kid stated, “I have a mama and a mami” (it’s a French school in Canada), and the woman said, “no, you have a mama and a papa”. No, the child insisted, “I have a mama and a mami”. And the teacher tried to argue the point, with this five-year-old. Of course the five-year-old knew what she was talking about, and the teacher was being either clueless or bigoted. But that right there is a “teachable moment”, and one that is completely appropriate for children of any age.
>Why is it inappropriate for young children to be present for educational discussions about gender identity and sexual orientation?
Because it's creepy and weird for adults, who are supposed to be teaching math and so on, to have conversations with young children about sex. What I don't get is how this became controversial. Probably because of the internet, again, amplifying the worst takes and the worst interpretations of any given event.
>Kids live in modern families! Banning discussions like this is to ban the reality of lived experiences of millions of people.
The overwhelming majority of kids do not, but that's besides the point and saying "we should wait to discuss sex and sexual orientation until kids are old enough" doesn't "ban reality" in any way. It's instructive that you assume the teacher was "clueless or bigoted" and not, ya know, trying to sidestep an awkward conversation about sex in front of five year olds.
I strongly believe that even if we'd accept the notion that this awkward conversation needs to be sidestepped, it's completely inappropriate to do it by invalidating the reality of that child's family and requesting them to agree to a ridiculous lie ("no, you have a mama and a papa") which insults their family. Arguing about this topic is entirely opposite to sidestepping the issue, it's the teacher explicitly starting the awkward conversation and failing at it.
Furthermore, while that indeed is not the lived reality for the majority of the individual kids, it's IMHO relevant for very many classrooms or teachers which will have at least one family like that; with 20-30 kids in a classroom, a 1% "rare case" will be represented in 20-30% classes and in almost every school.
Also, it's my understanding that the traditional family model is not even the majority in quite a few places where less than 50% of kids are raised in a marriage with both their parents, due to divorces, remarriages, deaths in family and simply single parents; so a kid may have a "mom and two dads" (i.e. the biological dad and mom's husband) or many other family structures; I recall hearing an (tragic?) joke about a particular class observing that there the majority kids were raised by two-woman family, namely, their mother and grandmother; etc. So it is important for teachers to acknowledge the diversity of actual parenting, you can't assume that "a mom and a dad" families are universal because so many families are not like that, those are not rare edge cases or exceptions, and they can't even be treated as deviation from the norm because in current society the nuclear two-parent family is not that dominant to be considered a true norm.
> Because it's creepy and weird for adults, who are supposed to be teaching math and so on, to have conversations with young children about sex.
> It's instructive that you assume the teacher was "clueless or bigoted" and not, ya know, trying to sidestep an awkward conversation about sex in front of five year olds.
That's a strawman argument. Sexual orientation and gender identity != sex. Nothing about this conversation needs to be awkward. "Oh, interesting, NAME, you have two moms? Well, everybody, that's true, you can have a mom and a dad, or two moms, or two dads. Some people have one parent, and some are raised by their grandpa or grandma or someone else. Does anyone else here have two moms? Does anyone have two dads? Or a single parent?" Blah blah blah. It's not awkward, it's not sexual, and it normalizes the experience for the great many children who live in "non-traditional" families.
> It's instructive that you assume the teacher was "clueless or bigoted" and not, ya know, trying to sidestep an awkward conversation about sex in front of five year olds.
This is exactly what people are talking about, by the way.
"I have a mama and a mami" is a potential awkward conversation about sex that needs to be sidestepped. "You have a mama and a papa" is no problem.
If we accept that as a premise, don't you see the issue with the law?
Are we going to pretend that LGBT parents are somehow completely incapable of explaining to their kid(s) that their parenting situation is somewhat unique, and that this must be offloaded to teachers?
> Because it's creepy and weird for adults, who are supposed to be teaching math and so on, to have conversations with young children about sex.
If kids don't learn about it from the good adults in their life, they're going to learn about it from the dangerous adults in their life. CSA thrives on the culture of silence imposed by those who think any discussion even obliquely related to sexual relations (and you're the one saying having two moms is "about sex"!) is inherently "creepy and weird".
Kids have a need to learn words to describe things which might be happening to them, and a right to see their self-image, family structure, and any proto-romantic/sexual feelings acknowledged.
> What, exactly, should the school be teaching the kids in that moment
How about this: "There are lots of different types of families, and among those many types, there are ones where there are two moms or two dads, and that's okay". [1]
> and how would this law prevent it?
IANAL but according to this analysis [1], 'Classroom “instruction” could mean eliminating books with L.G.B.T.Q. characters or historical figures. But “classroom discussion” is broad. That could discourage a teacher from speaking about gay families with the whole class, even if some students have gay parents.'
In other words, precisely the scenario I just described. This is a gag law that prevents educators from having the kind of conversation that should have happened in the library at my wife's school.
1: The first part of this lesson is a simple fact, and the second part ("that's okay") is a value judgment, but given that gay marriage is legal in FL and constitutionally protected, and that same-sex couples can, for instance, adopt children, that value judgment seems to be not just ethical but legally enshrined.
> How about this: "There are lots of different types of families, and among those many types, there are ones where there are two moms or two dads, and that's okay".
“That’s okay” is non-neutral moral judgement that exceeds the teacher’s purview.
“People are different in many ways; in this classroom, we treat everyone with respect regardless of our differences” is a content-neutral restriction on speech that does not exceed a teacher’s purview.
> IANAL but according to this analysis [1], 'Classroom “instruction” could mean eliminating books with L.G.B.T.Q. characters or historical figures.
The law is not tied to any particular sexual orientation (or gender “identity”); if that analysis were true, the law would also eliminate books with straight characters or historical figures.
> The first part of this lesson is a simple fact, and the second part ("that's okay") is a value judgment, but given that gay marriage is legal …
“That’s legal” is a statement of fact; it’s very different than “that’s okay”.
We could easily get into semantic or philosophical weeds here, but maybe instead of that, let me ask you: is it okay? Is it okay that this particular five-year-old has a mama and a mami? And if that’s okay, why should it be a crime to say that?
> 4. The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.
This is not a simple matter of “inclusiveness.” The nature of men, women, the purposes of marriage, is a fundamental moral and religious concept. In my part of the world, it has nothing to do with “two people who love each other” but is instead a fulfillment of Mohammad’s exhortation to get married and have children as a central moral obligation of life. It’s deeply intertwined with what God’s purpose is for us on earth.
The reason people want to talk about this in school is to counterbalance the influence of the world’s largest religion and alter the moral views of children on a question central to religious morality. The very reason they want to do it is why it’s not a legitimate purpose of instruction in public schools.
NB: As a convert to mainline Protestant Christianity, I happen to think it’s okay. Most people in the world, including the world’s fastest growing religion and the religion followed by the fastest growing minority group in the US, do not think it’s okay.
> The very reason they want to do it is why it’s not a legitimate purpose of instruction in public schools.
The interface between church and state in the US is always friction-filled, because the separation of church and state creates an immediate contradiction: we must separate people's faith-based morality from the conduct of the government, yet we recognize that morality is an inextricable part of every individual.
In this case, these children are growing up in a society with laws that recognize the dignity and value of every one of those families. One parent, two parents, four parents, same-gender parents, different-gender parents... Regardless of the lessons children learn at home, it's the responsibility of the school to teach them that the law and the culture they're living in consider those families all equivalently correct.
So it's clear for the state (via the school) to have a say in this. That leaves the question on the table "is kindergarten too early for that say," and I'd argue it's not because kindergartners already have to interface to the society and sometimes have questions on these topics. My largest concern with this law is it badly ties the hands of educators if such questions come up organically. And that does a disservice to every student in their care, and harms the state's interest in educating its citizens about life in the state.
(To be more clear: when I say "badly ties the hands," I don't mean to imply there should be no constraints. Rather, the enforcement mechanism of opening up private lawsuits creates a situation where what should be a collaborative process, the education of children, is structured adversarially; the law doesn't encourage collaboration, it gives parents a cudgel to try and beat school systems with. That's bad law because it creates perverse incentives counter to the goals of the education process. Parents, too, have a vested interest in their children learning how to live in their society; how well do we imagine that will go if the process is "If I don't like what you're teaching, I will harm you financially?").
> The interface between church and state in the US is always friction-filled, because the separation of church and state creates an immediate contradiction: we must separate people's faith-based morality from the conduct of the government, yet we recognize that morality is an inextricable part of every individual.
The American notion of "separation of church and state" refers to pluralism, not secularism. It's a nation founded by groups of religious nuts who sought to create a system where we could leave each other alone. We're not a country like France where there's a secular "civic religion" into which everyone must be socialized: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/12/france-...
> In this case, these children are growing up in a society with laws that recognize the dignity and value of every one of those families.
Our laws require equal rights and equal treatment in various contexts: government services, employment, etc. They don't say anything about "value" because in a pluralistic society people have different values.
> Regardless of the lessons children learn at home, it's the responsibility of the school to teach them that the law and the culture they're living in consider those families all equivalently correct. So it's clear for the state (via the school) to have a say in this.
Law, culture, and morality are separate domains. Americans share law. They don't necessarily share culture or morality. Public schools can teach about the law and behavioral expectations. But they aren't permitted to intrude into the domain of what's "correct"--i.e. moral right versus wrong: "The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions."
Asserting that schools get to socialize kids into "culture"--whose culture?--is the off ramp where you lose lots of parents. (Note that this law has strong public support in Florida, from a population that also strongly supports same sex marriage.) What’s the scope of this principle? What other aspects of sexual morality do teachers get to tell kids about? When I got married, my (Bangladeshi American) mom told my (white American) wife: "You know, we don't get divorced." There's lots of things that Muslim Americans accept as legal and part of white American culture over which they maintain distinct moral standards in their own families and communities. I suspect though I can’t be sure that Hispanics in Florida are in a similar boat. Pluralism requires respecting those boundaries.
> The American notion of "separation of church and state" refers to pluralism, not secularism
It's both. Agnostic or atheistic belief is one of the many faiths understood to be supported and protected by the separation of church and state. If a person can have faith in one god or many gods, they can have faith in none. It isn't French-style, but in a country where, for example, interracial and same-sex marriage is legal (in direct contradiction to the teachings of several religions), there are times where the state must step in to protect its citizens from having their rights stripped by organizations acting as a formal or informal arm of religion, so it can sometimes look like a state-sponsored secular faith.
The question is complicated and has gone the other way too; some religious ceremonies of native American cultures involve the use of psychedelics that are federally banned. Most Christian churches' celebrations of their covenant with God involve the imbibing of alcohol by people under the age of 21. In some cases, federal lawsuits have been involved to determine when the state is overstepping its authority to impose behavioral constraints on people.
> Our laws require equal rights and equal treatment in various contexts: government services, employment, etc. They don't say anything about "value" because in a pluralistic society people have different values.
In my mind, dignity and value are synonymous and the law definitely protects the dignity of those families. I'm unaware of a non-synonymous way to treat those terms, but if there is one I agree with your take on the law.
> "The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions"
The United States has never recognized the UN's full authority over its own laws or the interpretation of same. In the case of that quote, it's sourced from the ICCPR. The ICCPR was adopted by the United States with a declaration and proviso that fundamentally give it no force of authority here (https://h2o.law.harvard.edu/text_blocks/28885). In other words, the ICCPR is, at best, a declaration of morality and has no force of law, so if the US shares no morality or culture, you can't use it in this context to make an argument about how the US should act.
... which highlights the problem with the logic that the US shares no morality. Of course it does. We figure out what our shared morality is via the process of democratic election, debate, and construction of our law. That law reflects the shared morality of its people, which grows from our separate but overlapping faiths.
> whose culture?
The culture decided upon through the interaction of the school board and the election of the board by the people. With an overlap of the federal Department of Education. It's a complicated process, but it's there. There's definitely a culture to a school; without one, one cannot explain any proviso of any student handbook.
> pluralism requires respecting those boundaries
It absolutely does, and if a kid came home crying because their teacher told them they were living in sin with two fathers at home, that would be a major breach of trust on the part of the educator and we already have processes in place for dealing with that. But if the kid comes home crying because one of their classmates has two dads, the teacher said that's okay and the parents had told that kid it isn't? Then we have a clash of religion and the consensus culture of the country, and the school is correct in terms of its duties to teach students how to live in this country. For the law is clear, and the law is a reflection of the consensus morality. In this place, in the public square, in the streets, workplaces, and halls of government, it is okay to have two dads. This does not impinge on what one's heart says is okay.
My faith has an old saying, passed down from its prophet, which sums up this dichotomy nicely: "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's."
> It's both. Agnostic or atheistic belief is one of the many faiths understood to be supported and protected by the separation of church and state.
Pluralism is fundamentally different from secularism. Pluralism accommodates agnostic/atheistic beliefs as one of many protected belief systems. Secularism turns over the public sphere to agnostic/atheistic beliefs and relegates religion to a private role. In the U.S., a Muslim is a Muslim all the time--in school, when they vote, when they hold office, etc. In France, Muslims must be agnostic/atheistic in public, and can be religious in private. Thus in the U.S., banning a Muslim girl from wearing hijab would be a civil rights violation, while it's the law in France.
"Separation of church and state" thus operates fundamentally differently in the two systems. In the U.S., it means a narrow procedural framework to allow Christians and Muslims and atheists to get along. The government can't establish an official mosque. And the government can't discriminate between Muslims and Christians or play favorites. In France, by contrast, it means the creation of a parallel agnostic/atheistic belief system to govern public affairs, to which everyone must subscribe and into which children must be socialized. That's not the American system.
> It isn't French-style, but in a country where, for example, interracial and same-sex marriage is legal ... there are times where the state must step in to protect its citizens from having their rights stripped by organizations acting as a formal or informal arm of religion, so it can sometimes look like a state-sponsored secular faith.
It's important not to mistake American tolerance for shared American morality. In a pluralistic system, people can often believe that other people should be able to act according to their own conscience. That's wholly distinct from a shared secular morality or agreement about what's acceptable and not acceptable that can be taught in public schools. For example, 60% of Americans think it's immoral for teenagers to have sex, and 90% think married people having an affair is immoral, but nobody is trying to ban either. At the same time, people would probably object to teachers commenting on those issues. Muslim Americans are a stark example of the difference between tolerance and shared morality: a large majority support same-sex marriage, but virtually no mosque in America will perform one: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progres....
> The ICCPR was adopted by the United States with a declaration and proviso that fundamentally give it no force of authority here (https://h2o.law.harvard.edu/text_blocks/28885). In other words, the ICCPR is, at best, a declaration of morality and has no force of law, so if the US shares no morality or culture, you can't use it in this context to make an argument about how the US should act.
While the ICCPR is not legally binding in the U.S., religious pluralism is a fundamental right in our Constitution. The ICCPR is an important and widely adopted articulation of what religious freedom means and how it should operate. In that understanding, freedom to socialize your children in your own moral and religious beliefs is a core principle.
> The culture decided upon through the interaction of the school board and the election of the board by the people. With an overlap of the federal Department of Education. It's a complicated process, but it's there.
I'm pretty sure there is nothing in the organic statutes of these entities giving these bodies the power to declare and evangelize a "shared culture" or "consensus morality." This attitude also confirms why the Florida law has such strong public support. Educators really do believe that they're champions of what you call this shared public morality and that it is within their ambit to socialize kids into that moral framework. That's exactly what people are afraid of.
I have to say, in all sincerity, that I respect your logical explanation of your position. You've clearly articulated where the disagreement lies.
> I'm pretty sure there is nothing in the organic statutes of these entities giving these bodies the power to declare and evangelize a "shared culture" or "consensus morality"
Children spend easily half their waking day with their educators five out of seven days a year, about eight out of twelve months. The power is there by default because the school has to have a functioning micro-society out of the immediate purview of the parents of the students. For example, classrooms can teach stealing is wrong (and enforce it via code of conduct). They're not brainwashing the youth with a belief in the value of private property and societal protection of it when they do so. Nor are they brainwashing the youth into believing in the correctness of division of labor if they hang one of these in the classroom (https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Resources-Helping-Hands-Pock...).
Similarly, if it comes up in conversation that someone has two dads, a teacher isn't brainwashing the youth when they say that's okay. It's certainly not conduct where a private lawsuit is appropriate against a person doing the job they've been entrusted with.
> That's exactly what people are afraid of.
That's an excellent concern for parents to have, and school boards are usually excited to hear feedback on the curriculum if there is a perception that students are being taught a morality that clashes with their parents'. Building a curriculum that benefits students as much as possible is a collaborative exercise.
> Children spend easily half their waking day with their educators five out of seven days a year, about eight out of twelve months. The power is there by default
That's exactly what people are worried about--schools using their monopoly over children's time and attention to exceed the scope of their mandate.
> For example, classrooms can teach stealing is wrong (and enforce it via code of conduct). They're not brainwashing the youth with a belief in the value of private property and societal protection of it when they do so. Nor are they brainwashing the youth into believing in the correctness of division of labor if they hang one of these in the classroom (https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Resources-Helping-Hands-Pock...).
That schools have the power to set and enforce rules, and explain to kids what's socially "allowed" and "not allowed"--e.g. bullying, for any reason, is not allowed--is not in dispute, and doesn't require teachers to opine on disputed moral issues.
> That's an excellent concern for parents to have, and school boards are usually excited to hear feedback on the curriculum if there is a perception that students are being taught a morality that clashes with their parents'. Building a curriculum that benefits students as much as possible is a collaborative exercise.
Public schools and parents don't "collaborate" on the moral education of children. That's squarely in the domain of parents. That's one of the basic bargains that allows pluralism to work, and a key reason why America has largely avoided the disaster with integrating Muslims that France has brought upon itself.
Again, it is impossible for schools to have no say in the moral education of children when children are spending about half their waking hours there. Children are sponges and they will learn what is right and wrong from the observation of the environment they're in; there's no realistic understanding of how children learn that indicates a way to turn that off.
So collaboration is the best-case scenario, because the alternative is a fight. I dislike that this law seems crafted to say "Yes, a fight is the correct approach." That puts children in the middle of an adversarial situation and is therefore unwise.
> Again, it is impossible for schools to have no say in the moral education of children when children are spending about half their waking hours there.
That's just an inherent tension when you combine a Constitution that guarantees robust religious pluralism with taxpayer-funded public education. You have to think robustly about how to give effect to pluralism in the face of practical necessities.
> So collaboration is the best-case scenario, because the alternative is a fight. I dislike that this law seems crafted to say "Yes, a fight is the correct approach." That puts children in the middle of an adversarial situation and is therefore unwise.
Whether there is collaboration or a fight often depends on whether the parties clearly agree on their respective rights and roles. If you build your house partly on my land, my response is going to depend in large part on whether you acknowledge the boundary line or attempt to deny it.
A fight is brewing here because there's a disagreement as to rights and roles. In Tinker, the Warren court wrote that educators could exercise their in loco parentis to prevent conduct that would "materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school." It may be that there are incidental moral teachings that bear on that function. So long as we all agree about the limited scope of that authority--only as need to maintain discipline, etc.--we can collaborate on the details.
If educators insist, however, that their role--by virtue of their profession and education--is to teach kids about their view of evolving "secular morality," and displace the moral teachings of parents, then collaboration is not possible and a fight is in order. Because that's a sweeping expansion of educators' role. And it jeopardizes the compromises that a lot of people have made with the larger society. As my mom told me growing up, "just because your American friends can do something doesn't mean that you can."
> "just because your American friends can do something doesn't mean that you can."
That's an excellent example, and I would hope the public education system would teach you that you have exactly the same rights as every American, in contrast to the incorrect information you are receiving from the home. For as Jefferson once said, the purpose of public education is "... To enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom."
> Why is it inappropriate for young children to be present for educational discussions about gender identity and sexual orientation?
Because kids’ brains aren’t fully developed until age 25 and sexuality is a complicated and potentially damaging force that parents try to insulate their kids from until they’re old enough to understand what it is and what it isn’t.
Also, more fundamentally, because many parents are just fresh out of trust: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/planned-parenthood-st-loui.... There’s a vocal faction of the left that’s obsessed with sex. These are the folks who thought same-sex marriage was a bad thing because they wanted more sweeping changes to sexual and gender norms. These folks are always trying to sneak in the door behind people advocating for equal rights, and right now we’re in a phase where the broader center left doesn’t have the backbone to stand up to them.
I would argue that saying, "some people have two mommies," is arguably age appropriate, but adding, "because some women like to have sex with other women," would not be. The teacher in question should have just said, "ok," or something and not tried to bring in a deeper discussion about sexual preferences.
The problem is that a reasonable reading of the bill bans both the latter and the former, so either the law was incompetently crafted, or it was not intended to serve the distinction you've laid out.
As I pointed out in my other comment, re-read that sentence, it's two separate clauses joined by or. As in, it bans {any discussion of the topics {K-3 OR not "age appropriate"}}.
>may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 *or* in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
That "or" is pretty crucial, and any lawyer worth their salt will point out that this will not limit it to K-3. It bans ALL discussion of the topics, "age appropriate" or not, from K-3, AS WELL AS opening the way for private litigation for discussion that some parent decides is inappropriate for ANY grade level.
Per the New York Times:
>The impact is clear enough: Instruction on gender and sexuality would be constrained in all grades. But its language is vague and subject to interpretation.
>The language highlights the youngest students, but the “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate” provision affects all ages. Those terms are highly subjective, and parents, school staff and students are likely to clash over the ambiguities.
As to whether the topic "is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader" I recall kindergarten discussions on students who might have two mommies or two daddies, which would be banned by a reasonable interpretation of the law.
I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner.
I'm confused. If a child has two parents of the same gender, or a parent that is transitioning gender, or is friends with... or has reletives that... etc.? What if a child wishes to present as a different gender?
Why isn't it appropriate to discuss all of these? Young families that I know now own some children's books with "non-traditional families" (yuck, I don't know a better term -- please suggest!) Of course, the books are age-appropriate.
The point is to normalise gender and sexuality diversity as early as possible. Generations before had to learn much later.
>If a child has two parents of the same gender, or a parent that is transitioning gender, or is friends with... or has reletives that... etc.? What if a child wishes to present as a different gender?
>Why isn't it appropriate to discuss all of these?
Totally fine with that in the home. This topic is not appropriate for public school teachers instruct to their students in a K-3 setting. If, as a parent, you feel it is appropriate with your children at that age, instruct them at home.
Look at it this way, by allowing it, you are essentially forcing parents with teachers who want to bring up the subject to have their kids instructed on gender topics in K-3; a subject the parents didn't opt-in for either. Not only that, there's no guarantee some Math or English teacher is even qualified to teach the subject. That's definitely not cool.
>Is the topic of a child having a biological mother and father at home appropriate for K-3?
No, man. Kids are learning colors and how to spell basic words and basic math and how to interact with each other. Some kids don't have parents, some kids only have grandparents or only aunts and uncles, some kids only have a single parent, some kids have step parents, some kids swap between divorced parents, some kids are adopted and some kids have parents who abandoned them because of drug use, or are dead or in prison. You wanna broach the subject of same sex parents, you gotta cover all that shit and you've opened a can of worms way bigger than you thought. Teachers shouldn't bring that shit up. Allow them a little time in their lives to be innocent and not worry about that shit. Spread your politics to adults, leave the kids alone.
Life doesn't leave the kids alone though. Those families you've described were all my fellow students in kindergarten.
Can't help but wonder how much damage we did to them by reinforcing they were abnormal when we talked about mommies and daddies and they didn't have those. Guess we take talk of nuclear families off the table too, for everyone's safety.
... And then we've made a strange world where kids can't talk about their parents at school.
>Those families you've described were all my fellow students in kindergarten.
Yes, it's quite common unfortunately. I've always heard it referred to as "a parent or guardian," by schools which is a pretty good approach in my opinion.
>... And then we've made a strange world where kids can't talk about their parents at school.
No, you're misrepresenting the opposing argument. The law only concerns classroom instructions by school personnel or third parties. In my mind, this would be akin to, "today's lesson is about LGBTQ studies." The law doesn't apply to what kids are allowed or not allowed to discuss amongst themselves.
>Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties
> In my mind, this would be akin to, "today's lesson is about LGBTQ studies." The law doesn't apply to what kids are allowed or not allowed to discuss amongst themselves.
The problem is that the teacher is the source of truth, so that discussion is likely to end up in the teacher's lap. What do they do then?
What I'm afraid this bans is the teacher being able to respond with something like "Yup, some people have 2 dads. And some have 2 moms. Some people have families that look nothing like yours, but it's not a big deal."
Basically I would hope for explanation and normalization along the same lines as divorced parents. Nobody is expecting them to explain why people get divorced, or what sexual orientation is. Just an acknowledgement that it exists, and it's fine, and little Timmy isn't a weirdo because his parents are gay or divorced.
Maybe on Pride Day they read a children's book where the parents are just incidentally LGBTQ. The "Timmy goes out to play in the rain with his dog, and comes inside muddy. His moms/dads are mad that he tracked mud all over." Doesn't have to be a whole lesson gay identity and culture, just a reminder that not everyone has the same kind of family. They honestly should do the same thing with single/divorced parents; I don't feel like they exist in children's books either.
>Basically I would hope for explanation and normalization along the same lines as divorced parents. Nobody is expecting them to explain why people get divorced, or what sexual orientation is. Just an acknowledgement that it exists, and it's fine, and little Timmy isn't a weirdo because his parents are gay or divorced.
Yes, I don't think the law bars that discussion, especially if the child initiates it. I would hope it wouldn't. Of course it will be up to the courts to interpret what classroom instruction means.
>Maybe on Pride Day they read a children's book where the parents are just incidentally LGBTQ. The "Timmy goes out to play in the rain with his dog, and comes inside muddy. His moms/dads are mad that he tracked mud all over." Doesn't have to be a whole lesson gay identity and culture, just a reminder that not everyone has the same kind of family. They honestly should do the same thing with single/divorced parents; I don't feel like they exist in children's books either.
I think on Pride Day, they should teach colors and math and reading just like every day to K-3 kids. Why introduce this to the curriculum? Why introduce the concept that some kid's parents are drug addicts? It just doesn't belong. Parents can do that if they feel it's important for their kids to learn, not the public schools.
Also consider the kid who's parents are gay could certainly feel that this whole discussion is singling them out and not like having the teacher bring it up. Just because a teacher intends the discussion to make someone feel inclusive doesn't mean it won't have the opposite affect in a child's mind. Kids can also be cruel, imagine during the discussion some kid says, "Ha ha, Jimmy has two mommies!" followed by snickers and laughs. That's certainly not the outcome you are imagining, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility. Now the kid feels like an utter outcast, the exact opposite of the intent. Best just to stick to the basics of elementary education and not let teachers go, "off script."
> Yes, I don't think the law bars that discussion, especially if the child initiates it. I would hope it wouldn't. Of course it will be up to the courts to interpret what classroom instruction means.
That might be the disconnect for us; I think it will end up being pretty broadly defined. The term doesn't seem to be legally defined (in this context), so the closest I can find is Florida's legal definition of a teacher:
"(a) Classroom teachers.—Classroom teachers are staff members assigned the professional activity of instructing students in courses in classroom situations, including basic instruction, exceptional student education, career education, and adult education, including substitute teachers."
Given that it doesn't separate out discussion, I would guess that effectively anything that happens in the classroom is "instruction".
Only time will tell, I could totally be wrong.
> I think on Pride Day, they should teach colors and math and reading just like every day to K-3 kids. Why introduce this to the curriculum?
Kids at that age are learning what normal is, and by the end of it are starting to judge things as not normal. You can see it in those stupid Children React videos; those kids already have an idea of normal and not. Or if you were to offer an American 3rd grader some kind of cultural delicacy. They'll say it's gross and weird, meaning it doesn't fit into their definition of normal. Kindergarteners will happily eat it, because they don't have a sense of normal just yet.
The purpose is to help them realize it's a normal thing. We still teach them what pigs and cows are, even though most people will interact with far more gay people than pigs or cows. If pigs and cows are taught as normal in an urban area, why would it be so weird to introduce the idea of gay people? It's certainly more pertinent.
> Why introduce the concept that some kid's parents are drug addicts?
I probably should have gated that with "loving and healthy parents". The goal is to teach children that there are other normal family arrangements, not to drag 2nd graders into a discussion about the nature of evil.
> Also consider the kid who's parents are gay could certainly feel that this whole discussion is singling them out and not like having the teacher bring it up. Just because a teacher intends the discussion to make someone feel inclusive doesn't mean it won't have the opposite affect in a child's mind. Kids can also be cruel, imagine during the discussion some kid says, "Ha ha, Jimmy has two mommies!" followed by snickers and laughs. That's certainly not the outcome you are imagining, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility. Now the kid feels like an utter outcast, the exact opposite of the intent. Best just to stick to the basics of elementary education and not let teachers go, "off script."
That would be traumatic, but also basically the default outcome unless you somehow believe that children are kinder to each other when the teacher is gone. If the kids are going to snicker and laugh while the teacher is there, I can't imagine they'd be any kinder if they found out on their own.
I don't think it will always be perfect, but I don't think leaving the kids to figure it out themselves is going to lead to a better outcome.
> That's the actual text. I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner. The partisan hyperbole around it is ridiculous on both sides.
The way it's being enforced is the issue. I don't see any issue with discussion of gender identity with kindergardeners or 3rd graders. If they can understand that mommy and daddy love each other and got married, they can understand that daddy and daddy or mommy and mommy did too. The law's intent is to allow the first, but prevent the second (and we see evidence of this due to age-appropriate books featuring gay characters getting removed, but not age-appropriate books with straight relationships).
> Like Huckleberry Finn? Agree, books shouldn't be banned.
No, Huck Finn shouldn't be banned.
> Well maybe Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries.
No. If they're taught they should be taught in context (and admittedly you're probably not going to read Mein Kampf cover to cover outside of a college course), but if it's relevant to the curricula, sure (and I'm sure there are excerpts in some euro-history textbooks!)
> Maybe some shouldn't be taught in public schools, right? How about the Bible? Should that be excluded from the public school corriculum?
No, there are obvious contexts where the bible should be taught as part of the curriculum! When we discussed world religions came up in my high school history we absolutely read bits of the Bible and Quran, as well as some Vedic verses and more.
> No screening of A Birth of a Nation you'd agree with? It's not like they're removing them from public libraries or the internet. What is taught in public schools vs what is allowed to be said in a public forum are quite different things as well.
I watched clips from Birth of a Nation in my HS history classes, again: as long as it's contextualized well, sure, in fact more than sure! Yes, we should encourage well-contextualized viewership of shameful things from history.
Also as a bit of an addendum, if the worry really is primarily around "grooming" and childhood sexual assault, some age appropriate instruction about sex and specifically how and what is inappropriate for adults to do is one of the most effective things to keep children safe. If a kid doesn't have the words to describe what was done to them, or the understanding that it was inappropriate, they're much less likely to report.
> I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner
My brother was born when I was in kindergarten. When there's about to be a new family member, how that happens and where they come from is a natural topic to discuss. And if you're going to discuss reproduction, the topic of men and women being attracted to each other is already on the table which means that the fact that not everybody has that attraction is also on the table.
My main problem with the law as written is the clause "in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students." The science of education is less than 100 years old, and modern child psychology is younger than that. I don't think anybody has any idea what is or is not age appropriate. This law takes something that should be addressed on a case-by-case basis by the parents and teachers who know the students best, puts a cudgel in the hands of one of those parties, and says they should be set against each other. That's profoundly stupid.
>When there's about to be a new family member, how that happens and where they come from is a natural topic to discuss. And if you're going to discuss reproduction
You should not be teaching reproduction to kindergartners as a public school teacher.
>The science of education is less than 100 years old, and modern child psychology is younger than that. I don't think anybody has any idea what is or is not age appropriate.
> You should not be teaching reproduction to kindergartners as a public school teacher.
As it did no harm to me, I cannot agree. In fact, I have yet to hear one instance of a child coming to harm learning that knowledge in a healthy way at the kindergarten age.
My position is that is a case-by-case question. Does it need to be on the syllabus (what passes for a syllabus in kindergarten)? Maybe not. Should parents be able to sue if the topic comes up organically? No, that's quite disruptive to what should be a collaborative process. And given how little we know of the hard sciences of either child psychology or mass education, bringing force of law down on this topic is severe government overreach.
By “ban” you mean the government that is providing a taxpayer-funded service choosing what content is provided as part of that service by taxpayer-paid employees, right?
I think they mean the government providing a taxpayer-funded service letting citizens bring private lawsuits instead of going through the regular channels for addressing errors if deviations from curricula occur because for some reason those channels (which are also government-defined) are inadequate, yet cannot be improved.
We'd best not pull the thread on why they can't be improved.
Who is suggesting that Google employees be restrained?
Also, the complaint about Google employees is a liberal one. It’s about a small, wealthy, highly unrepresentative group of people having outsize power over society and culture.
As if I haven't read thousands of "these companies are public utilities" arguments ever since conservatives embraced Trump's politics of total war against perceived enemies.
> Trump's politics of total war against perceived enemies.
Trump was a Democrat for most of his life, after all. You know, the folks that turned on a dime to defend corporate free speech the moment the big corporations were on their side. I'm too nerdy to stomach the hypocrisy, but it's hard to fault someone for playing to win.
Nothing is being censored here; it's a simple recommendation. If they start censoring personal correspondence, they open up a huge opportunity for another option to disrupt them. It's not an impossible scenario, but it's an unlikely (and more importantly: self-correcting) scenario.
Self-correcting because frustrated users will simply start their own Google? Even if that happens, their second generation of employees will start a revolt if their company doesn't follow the latest DIE best practices.
I honestly think that only the Russian/Chinese model of a nationalized IT ecosystem has a chance to resist these trends.
Self-correcting because Google already has competition in the cloud editor space. Office suites are valuable software with an obvious business model for monetization.
> I honestly think that only the Russian/Chinese model of a nationalized IT ecosystem
That wouldn't solve the underlying problem if the nation decides some words are inappropriate (in fact, if we're thinking anti-censorship you may have chosen two particularly bad examples ;) ). It's power structures all the way down.
You can turn it off, but would you. Would you risk turning it off at work where everyone else that looks at your doc sees the purple and you never even got a heads up.
If Google were to affect search ranking for something like that, it would be much simpler to just affect it based on the presence of the actual keywords that would have been underlined than retaining some metadata about the configuration of the editor when the document was written.
Spoiler alert: Google already has a deny list of words that will cause a page to not show up outside of focused queries for it. Most people have no idea how much porn is actually on the internet.
If you like the username, you should listen to the song.
The punchline is that the protagonist spends his life paranoid about shadow organizations watching his every move. In the end, he ends up dead in the trunk of a local strongman who gets away with it because there is no greater order in the world to save or harm him.
I use Chrome. I like it better than the alternatives. But, I turn off Google completion suggestions. To see what I mean, go to Google.com in English and type "tr" in the search box (do not press enter). Suddenly things I don't want to see are suggested to me. The same is true in Chrome's address bar unless you opt out (PS: I get most people might find it useful or not care and I'm in the minority). I get if I actually did the search I'd get google's suggestions but something about it completing with pictures to partial input feels more off for some reason.
But, even more, the default home page of Chrome shows the day's Google Doodle. I often like Google Doodles, but, at the same time, often the Google Doodle is some celebration of a person and while that's semi innocuous, one day it suddently felt like someone else's propoganda in front of me. I quickly changed my new tab page to something without Google.
It's scary to me that a few people at Google get to choose each day what to make a ~billion people look at. It seems different than say the NYTimes because the browser is a tool to me, it's not the source of content itself. Sure if I go read the NYTimes they get to choose what's on the front page. But I can choose not to go to the Times. But, by default, Browsers are a source of content (Except Safari? Though it does by default promote 10+ company's sites). Even Firefox, by default, shovles content someone else selected, in my face, intentionally or un-intensionally pushing their agendna on me.
> a concern which is not necessarily distilled down to "big brother" or "corporate overlords".
My first thought was the time that Google banned a genocide researcher and froze their Drive account because it contained images and video of warcrimes for their research. I can only imagine this `feature` going the same way over time. This is going to affect people who are legitimately studying social problems, more than it is likely to help fix the problems they're studying.
For example, the Nuremberg Trial transcript probably contains some pretty choice words. If Google starts suggesting edits, or worse auto-applying them like they do with spelling, we run the risk of whitewashing documents like this unintentionally.
It wasn’t just google that wanted the name change though.
> The East Cut was established in 2015 by residents and business owners as a community benefit district. The goal is to provide this neighborhood its identity separate from South of Market and South Beach neighborhoods.
I used to work on Rincon Hill and the East Cut thing happened after I moved away, so I had long wondered whether it was an old name being revived (it kinda has a gold-rush ring to it) or another real estate scheme like calling the Tenderloin “Lower Nob Hill.”
Going by the article maybe you can just pay a branding company and they’ll get Google to rename your neighborhood whatever you like?
Eh, I don’t think that’s the point the OP is making and is something we’ve heard ad nauseum during the pandemic.
Google controls what appears on YouTube. That’s not really very surprising. But the idea that Google’s choices (over words or neighbourhood name) spills out into the offline world and alters it… that’s something else.
Google's choices spilling out into the offline world is exactly what the GP was getting at -- by choosing to expose Youtube users to a specific type of content, Google has chosen what escapes into meatspace.
That’s like saying that the New York Times editors’s choices spill out into the offline world because they choose what appears on the pages of the newspaper
YouTube's primary function is to be open to the public. Anyone can go there, anyone can post videos there. They are like a mall or other privately-owned-but-publicly-open place. Google should not be censoring speech there, beyond already-illegal stuff and other content that is broadly prohibited in public places (porn, etc.)
For example they removed some videos that said the virus spreads via aerosols. Now, one and a half year later most agree this is true and good ventilation could have saved a lot of people.
Not really, at the time the science suggested that was the best path. Youtube is a private enterprise and has every right to remove material that they consider dangerous based on their research teams. You were perfectly free to make a video and release it on you own website or peertube or via torrents/usenet. You have a free voice but you don't have the right to mass distribution, that is up to you (the hypothetical generic "you") to see that it happens.
> at the time the science suggested that was the best path.
Science is not a monolith. I can find a hundred distinguished scientists who disagree with that statement.
... that is an especially controversial statement for anyone who remembers how (1) SARS was airborne and (2) masks did help, contrary to the public position of the WHO/CDC.
This cognitive bias is something that is really ingrained in the population by pop-sci media, usually ones that start with "Scientists now say that ____". Technically it's correct that "(some) scientists say that ____" but laypersons can easily misunderstand that "(all) scientists say that ____".
Yes, legally YouTube is in the right.
Morally, society needs to solve the problem of the private platforms that are quasi-utility services.
Can you imagine when/if your power company, water distributor decides to cut you off because you disagree with the official record?
As far as I understand, at that time the science did not suggest that this was the best path - at the time the science was inconclusive with reasonable support for both aerosol and droplet options; and the blocked videos had just as much, just as good scientific basis as the official position. They were blocked purely because of the WHO political decision to promote one option over the other, and that WHO decision did not have a proper scientific backing - and when that was challenged in public, the response was to block the scientific arguments which were valid and reasonable already at the time, and some time later turned out to be conclusive.
Furthermore, there was a long gap of many, many months between a scientific consensus that the WHO position was literally wrong and the changing of that position - and during that gap any blocking of these videos was not only without a scientific basis but even directly going against what science suggests.
Not activists and not entirely black, but I know that Youtube works with the Metropolitan Police in the UK to remove drill rap videos that the Met considers too violent (violent content, of course, being one of the things that is against Youtube's TOS).
(As always, content removal is a controversial topic, and that includes this topic.)
Youtube has been stung by various "scandals" in the past where advertisers temporarily "boycott" (or, at least, raised a ruckus) when an ad appears next to content the advertisers consider objectionable (such as, as I recall, child exploitation content and al-Qaeda / jihadist groups several years ago). As an ad supported platform, I do think that Youtube certainly should have the right to monitor their platform in order to remove content that they believe is bad for business, including protecting advertiser brands from content they don't want to appear next to. Youtube also has legal requirements to follow (eg copyright law) and may do some things more to manage their own brand, or even perhaps manage legal liability. It would be nice if Youtube was more transparent about the whys of their content management, but as a private company they are not obligated to do so.
Youtube is not the last word in streaming videos. There are several platforms dedicated to hosting videos that would fall afoul of Youtube's content policy. Many of the ones I can think of are not funded by advertising, though some platforms are big enough where "niche advertising networks" are possible (eg big adult video networks like Pornhub).
As an aside, I think login to, but it’s weird. It can be separate, joined to ‘log’ as in login or in some contexts with ‘to’ as in into. Perhaps it should just be ‘loginto’?
> rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the East Cut.
There was briefly some gentrified name for the area between Soma, Portrero Hill and Mission, around where the Muji was and the highway overpass still is.
I remember it rhyming with SomaSopa from that one episode of South Park, but even more ridiculous because it concatenated 3 words alluding to each of the 3 adjacent neighborhoods. Does anyone remember it?
EDIT: Huh, they've seen to have settled on 'Showplace Square' now. That's new.
It is interesting about the Maps thing. We have a similar one in our city, where part of the CBD is designated 'Frog's Hollow', which was the colloquial name for a small area (basically mostly a slum) for a time in the 1800s. It makes it look like that's the actual name of half our CBD!
But it hasn't slipped back into actual use, it's just a curiosity. Interesting that it's been like that for years and they still haven't fixed it...
I think what is most difficult is the inability to attribute this change to a clear intent, which can be then be clearly opposed.
What's likely happening under the hood is a Google PM thinks this a good idea bc they have an MBA from a good school, see the market research on grammarly (sp?), knows it nods to helpful social movements sometimes, and decides to roll it out as an OKR from a team of a sub-team of a product of Google of Alphabet.
Who do you push back on against this? Putting aside the massive network effects GOOG can wrangle to roll this out and have it standardize.
The same thing happens with an Amazon warehouse in Rural PA that is doing shady things with workers and data tracking, a Walmart in Montana. The city council decides to do something about it. Who exactly do they complain to with actual impact? There is no one really.
The village name, from the village next to my village (in Switzerland) is wrong on Google Maps since ever. But it seems, nobody does care or is impossible to reach somebody on Google to correct it.
Have you tried clicking on 'Send feedback', the very small link on the bottom right of the map?
I did when Maps was failing to route through a junction near where I lived in London, because it thought going straight through wasn't legal (it was). It was fixed a few weeks later.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google but nowhere near Maps, and my experience of correction predated my employment. And I don't speak for Google.)
Where Google Maps has a dedicated way of providing corrections, you can get things fixed quickly.
Where it doesn’t, and you have to use a more generic feedback form, my experience is that it never gets corrected. Zero times out of perhaps a dozen that I’ve tried, for several different types of errors (misplaced town markers, a missing consonant in the Bengali spelling of a road name, can’t remember what else off the top of my head). I just don’t bother now. Most seem to get fixed some years down the line, probably incidentally as part of some other more generic data or processing algorithm update. The only time I’ve had any sort of prompt success was when I reported something on a Google Maps-related HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23367961. The fix in that instance was evidently done as a one-off exception, but looking at a few places in Google Maps now, I think the underlying systemic issue is finally fixed (for now).
As far as I can tell, that feedback goes into a black hole. I've sent many corrections there, not a single one has been adopted, including ones where entire streets didn't exist (i.e. they exist on Maps but have never existed IRL).
In the city I used to live, they had to put signs up at the entrance to a street, warning people to ignore Google Maps. It tried to route people the wrong way up a one-way street, and the government had failed to get Google to fix it.
I think “allowlist” is oppressive and humiliating so can you please stop using it altogether?
It’s all about demonstrating that you have the social power to control other people’s words, even when (perhaps especially when) your justification for doing so is completely and obviously nonsensical to everyone involved.
I think it qualifies as an oppressive form of social violence.
If you at all cared about the lived experienced of the folks you’re oppressing, you’d stop using it.
There is nothing humiliating in it, so I'm going to politely ignore your suggestion. In practice, though, the "gentle suggestion" is a thinly veiled threat to report heresy to inquisition.
I identify as non-binary. Your erasure of my identity is just as problematic as your use of social violence to compel speech and oppress marginalized and under-represented groups.
Your responses and refusal to acknowledge the effects of these words only demonstrates you being insensitive about the pain of many of your brothers and sisters who find the echo of social injustices in the seemingly insignificant word like “allowlist”(white) and “denylist”(black). You may even understand why they feel one way or other about it , it is just that you choose to not acknowledge it.
A world where a corporate entity (or any entity for that matter) tries to interfere with the way we communicate is not "better". As someone wrote in this thread already, tools we use are an extension of ourselves, and we should be able to form whatever thoughts and opinions we want, without any sort of "influence", no matter how minor, even if it's optional. People go for defaults and this seems like a giant slippery slope.
They are auto suggestions. If you don’t want the feature disable it. But don’t ask society or the majority to agree with you. Most people agree with what google is doing and find it helpful otherwise they would simply turn it off.
The majority of society will not even be aware of such a change, because the majority goes with the default settings provided to them. Also source on people agreeing with BigCo being helpful, please.
You could think of it as Google wanting to police people, OR you could see it as Google seeing that a ton of people use Grammarly and clearly want this feature. (Remember, Google Docs is used for lots of formal docs. It's not a chat app or Twitter clone.)
As it turns out, a lot of people choose to be inclusive and non-inflammatory.
> As it turns out, a lot of people choose to be inclusive and non-inflammatory.
I think you are making the implicit assumption here that there is a single path towards "inclusive" and "non-inflammatory". But that's not always the case. For example, some people prefer the term GSRM (Gender-Sexual-Romantic Minority [1]) in favor of LGBT because they see it as more inclusive. Others see it as problematic [2]. Should Google Docs push one term over the other? Or just not make a stance? But how do they choose when to make a stance? Because once they do start making a stance, it has massive influence over the public. And that's the real issue; these features allow companies to have greater and greater influence and power over the public discourse.
One would hope that social progress means that people learn inclusiv[ity|eness] as an abstract ethical concept and, from that, language and other social practices follow. Instead we're down a route where we're force-fed a kind of saccharine social justice orthodoxy that can only have two outcomes: hypocrisy or backlash.
I think the previous generations of leftists achieved their goals of inclusivity but now that we have it, it turns out it didn't eliminate wage gaps and all that so new leftists have decided we need to turn it up to 11 instead of stepping back to figure out what's actually causing those differences between groups. They can't allow themselves to consider that it might be something other than sexism/racism because that's an existential threat to their ideology. So the only way forward is ever more aggressive "inclusiveness".
>As it turns out, a lot of people choose to be inclusive and non-inflammatory.
Ideologues deliberately gloss over the fact that the "inclusiveness" has become inflammatory.
Edit: our D&I consultant does not allow us to use words like "analysis", "independent", "lead", "driven", and "competitive" (there is a whole laundry list) in our job postings to foster "inclusiveness" [0]. The implication that these traits, which are virtues in my culture, are undesirable, is offensive, as is this top-down culturally mandated feminization. Google is doing the same thing here. Its a minority imposing their culture onto others. Let's not even get started on the views that we are supposed to have regarding, say, gender.
The same "research" is undoubtedly underpinning Google's "inclusive" suggestions. Is this really benefitting anybody? It's worse than mere coddling, it's antithetical to the equality movement, fosters a toxic workplace for straight men, and we should all be pushing back against it.
Your D&I consultant is saying this because those words make certain demographics less likely to apply. They aren't trying to police language; they're trying to help whomever hired them increase the diversity of the people who apply.
If you think straight men are the victim of toxic workplaces because of this, imagine how other people feel.
I'm not sure why having a more diverse applicant pools should even be a goal. Often diversity hinders team cohesion and creates communication barriers. What's wrong with homogenous teams and organizations?
Furthermore, when did the (highly subjective) masculine/feminine coding of a word become more important that its actual definition? What if you do in fact need an "independent" person? Does that mean you need a man? Aren't we just back to stereotyping then?
My understanding is not that independence as a trait is more common in men, its that independent women are less likely to apply for positions when its specified they're looking for an independent person.
Like, for example, if I read for a competitive, independent, ownership, whatever buzzword position, I think "wow is this some kinda hostile all-blame culture or something where everyone is out for themselves? I'll pass, thanks".
I would say I'm a fairly independent dev who takes a lot of pride in my craft. But a lot of toxic workplaces in my time excuse their toxicity in saying their employees just aren't tough enough to handle the workplace.
> wow is this some kinda hostile all-blame culture or something where everyone is out for themselves?
But what if that's an accurate understanding of the company culture? There are surely people who thrive in these sorts of environments, even if you (and I) are not among them. Are you suggesting that these people are mostly men?
I made one point that women (apparently) apply less to something with X language even if the language describes them. Then I made a completely separate, personal experience anecdote of how I feel when I'm exposed to that language because of what it tells me about the culture. I didn't link my personal experience to that of a gendered experience representative of anything broadly, you did.
My point was that if this hypothetical company, in the interest of inclusiveness, modified the language in their job postings to be less masculine-coded, they would be actively destroying useful information that you and I would use to pass them over.
homogeneous teams made up of people who think the same way, have similar backgrounds etc are more likely to have blind spots. Having a diverse set of viewpoints involved in decision making means you are less likely to overlook some corner case that is obvious to some people but not others.
And how do you define "diversity"? Through externally presenting traits? Through who and how people decide to have sex? Much of diversity efforts seem to focus on these things instead of actual diversity of thought and experience.
You might have three "white guys" and one grew up in poverty in the US south and made his way out of it, one who was born in a tiny town in eastern europe, and one who grew up in a middle class family in the SF bay area. But there are many people, if seeing those three guys in a photo, would make some snarky comment about "tech bros" or "white dudes" and completely discount the fact that they are three unique people that have grown up with completely different backgrounds and come with completely different experiences and approaches to life.
Most, if not all, diversity efforts I have come across, including where I currently work, focus exclusively on externally presenting traits like race and gender, with the explicit goals of reducing the numbers of white men in category.
The first question is not hard to find answers to if you genuinely want them. But it has a lot to do with how the claim in that paragraph is not true: homogenous teams are less effective in some measurable ways. Plus our society is not homogenous, so from what mechanism does the homogeneity of the team emerge? Is it completely benign and spurious?
The actual definition is the meaning ascribed by users of a word as it is understood by their audience. The dictionary is a recording of meaning, not a creator of it.
> homogenous teams are less effective in some measurable ways
And more effective in other, measureable, ways. This is very much not settled science. There are many ways to measure effectiveness - idea diversity is only one of them.
Surely you would agree that hiring a white American as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant where only Mandarin is spoken by the kitchen staff (not uncommon) would hinder the effectiveness of the restaurant?
The fellow may bring a new perspective on how to run things, but if the owners are not interested in his perspective (which they are entitled not to be, right?), then all they're left with is the communication difficulties he would face performing his function.
> Plus our society is not homogenous, so from what mechanism does the homogeneity of the team emerge? Is it completely benign and spurious?
Generally the mechanism has been that many people actively seek to associate with people similar to themselves, people they can easily relate to. This generally includes hiring. I think it's perfectly benign and quite natural for people do cluster around cultural similarity. It's why we have things like Chinatown.
Most other behaviour, to me, seems to be in this category: people preferring the (professional) company of those they can relate to. If it's OK for a Chinese restaurant to only hire Chinese people, why is it wrong for an investment bank or programming firm to only hire people similar to the founders? It seems to be the same mechanism at play.
> Surely you would agree that hiring a white American as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant where only Mandarin is spoken by the kitchen staff (not uncommon) would hinder the effectiveness of the restaurant?
This isn't the position though. This is adding additional hypotheticals like language barriers. It would be more like hiring a white american waiter of a chinese restaurant, where both the white american waiter and the chinese kitchen staff don't have significant language barriers. In that case it might actually be helpful depending on the demographics of people eating at the restaurant.
Culture and language are inexorably intertwined. Just ask anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language. A cultural barrier is just a softer communication barrier, where language has to be much more formal than speakers are typically accustomed to, in order to be understood and not to offend.
When I'm speaking to people whom I relate to well (including colleagues), half of it is movie quotes, rude jokes, varyingly subtle digs, etc. I suspect most people are the same. In order to write for a wider audience, I have to add rather a few more layers of thought and consideration to what naturally comes to me - to formalize my language.
This burden of formalization is in fact exactly what Google is trying to help with. It is only required when people don't relate to each other well. Having a homogeneous team eliminates the problem.
>But it has a lot to do with how the claim in that paragraph is not true: homogenous teams are less effective in some measurable ways
As far as I'm aware there is a single contrived study which looked at financial metrics from boards with female representation to come to that conclusion. This is a tenet that activists desperately want to believe but flies in the face of conventional experience and basic reasoning. At the very lease some minimum common culture, like language, is necessary for a functioning team. How do you expect a team to function if half the members believe that traits like "independence" are toxic and words like "analysis" are offensive? That's culture too.
>Plus our society is not homogenous, so from what mechanism does the homogeneity of the team emerge? Is it completely benign and spurious?
Another recently popular fallacy used to justify these toxic policies. That a team is composed primarily of one demographic does not imply sexism. People who share cultural values and personality traits are likely to gravitate toward certain disciplines, it is an entirely emergent phenomenon and does not require invocation of discrimination to explain. For example, regardless of the amount of sexism actually present in the tech workplace, it is absurd to expect gender parity if one acknowledges that women are fundamentally less likely to be interested in programming in the first place, as a consequence of human nature.
These policies all feel great but are ultimately half baked, and the danger here is that for merely questioning them, as any rational person should, we risk our livelihoods. The consequences for society are bleak, as we are now explicitly prioritizing gender and race over competence. This is, ironically, top-down mandated systemic racism/sexism.
Edit: in fact I would go as far as to say that all communication is predicated upon common culture, because words, symbols, gestures, and inferred intentions are all inherently cultural. Even things like correcting mistakes of others and questioning seniors/elders are vary with culture. There is absolutely no reason to believe that diversity is an absolute good and cannot hamper communication and cooperation when certain cultures are mixed. We've gone totally off the rails because the same people pushing for these policies have created a system where their discussion is forbidden.
I was actually thinking of the internal google study about their teams from a few years back. And a similar (unpublished outside the org) study a company I worked for did, where they found that teams with the highest racial and educational diversity had new members onboard faster than ones with less.
But if we're at the point of looking around at this world and saying "Ah yes, human nature caused this and certainly nothing else did" then I don't think I have anything to contribute to that project.
>I was actually thinking of the internal google study about their teams from a few years back. And a similar (unpublished outside the org) study a company I worked for did, where they found that teams with the highest racial and educational diversity had new members onboard faster than ones with less.
You don't think, given the zeitgeist, that these studies might be a little biased? Maybe designed to produce certain acceptable results? What kind of scandalous pushback do you think google would get from activists if they dared to suggest results which went against this forced D&I consensus?
> Williams and O’Reilly (1996) review dozens of studies showing that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on group performance. In the two decades since, more research has reinforced that result. Alesina and La Ferrara (2005) find that increasing ethnic diversity from 0 (only one ethnic group) to 1 (each individual is a different ethnicity) would reduce a country’s annual growth by 2 percent. Multiple studies (La Porta et al., 1999; Alesina et al., 2003; Habyarimana et al., 2007) have shown that ethnic diversity negatively affects public good provision. Stazyk et al. (2012) find that ethnic diversity reduces job satisfaction among government workers. Parrotta et al. (2014a) find that ethnic diversity is significantly and negatively correlated with firm productivity.
> This may seem strange to you. If you’re like me, you probably enjoy diversity. You probably don’t observe the problems of low morale and high marginal costs that researchers have found in ethnically diverse workplaces.
>Your D&I consultant is saying this because those words make certain demographics less likely to apply.
Yes, I know very well what the alleged rationale is for this toxicity. But can you spend more than half a second actually thinking critically about the implications of such policy? Let me put it this way: if a person is so sensitive as to be unable to handle a job posting listing objectively desirable traits and behaviors like "leadership", "competitive", "analysis", "objective", etc, then I would question their ability to function as part of a competent team, or even as an adult. The implication is that women are so fragile that they need to be protected from words otherwise representing totally desirable traits in a team member.
We can't find a female senior python engineer because there are almost none in the pipeline, not because our job postings are "gendered". Of course these D&I grifters would be out of a paycheck if they admitted as much. But the gaslighting and forced discrimination is absolutely infuriating and totally demoralizing.
How on earth is "analysis" a non-inclusive word? What if you're hiring someone to do some sort of analysis? Or, for job title that's literally "analyst"?
It's probably the case that a lazy researcher saw a fewer URM applicants for jobs with those words and assumed the causal factor was the word, rather than factors like education requirements or something else.
> Your D&I consultant is saying this because those words make certain demographics less likely to apply.
but if I want to put lead and driven on a job ad for a person, that's because I want someone who feel they can lead and are driven for the job. If prospective applicants don't feel they have those quality (or are ready to apply them for the job offered), why should I care?
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this, but this will help explain it. (I will note that the paper often uses the word "analyze" itself, for what it's worth.)
Yeah, that's the point. The words are supposed to be gender stereotypes, and they are in fact taken from literature circa ~90s-00s (not the 80s but we all know the stereotypes were still prevalent then). It's not supposed to be insulting, these are presented in an academic context with extensive references to the prevailing literature.
Thanks for the pointer, but I am still confused about the categorization of "analysis" and now also "competitive".
For some reason, both of these words are included in patterns ("analy*" and "compet*") in the "Masculine Words" list; however, the methodology for Study 1 indicates that the word "competitive" is agentic and has to do with agency rather than gender.
It then references several papers for where they sourced their lists, but I can only access some of them. In the ones I was able to access, I can't find discussion on why "analysis" or "competitive" are considered masculine words. Many of the ones I can't access are older studies, perhaps not incidentally.
I work with "analysts" many of whom are women and they are expected to perform "analysis" as part of their job.
A research study I found[0] indicates as much as 48% of women are in "Analyst" roles.
The study referenced in the paper you linked looked at roles where the largest group of women in a male dominated profession was 26% for computer programmers.
I am sure it is very complicated and I'm missing lots of things in my quick survey, but in this admittedly cherry-picked example I don't understand how "analyst" is considered a masculine word when there is near parity between genders in "analyst" roles.
I wonder if some of these words are coded based on biases from times gone by -- maybe back in the 1970's and 1980's most "analysts" were male and therefore most "analysis" being performed by males, but in 2020's this does not seem to be the case.
>Thanks for the pointer, but I am still confused about the categorization of "analysis" and now also "competitive".
Let me try to abate some of your confusion: you are approaching this with the assumption that the research and policies originate from a position of good faith. They don't. The motivations are petty jealousy, greed, and insecurity. It's much easier from an emotional perspective to blame "the system" (i.e. white men) than to acknowledge that some groups are more likely to be better suited for certain occupations than others. Racism and sexism are convenient excuses which direct attention away from personal insufficiencies. That's partly why this dogma is so intoxicating - and the other reason is that it's misleadingly presented in a way that implies it can only result in more positive outcomes. Add in the stigma against questioning any of this and the outcome is a rigid orthodoxy which is totally removed from western liberal values of equality of opportunity, which is being deliberately conflated with equality of outcome.
> our D&I consultant does not allow us to use words like "analysis", "independent", "lead", "driven", and "competitive"
I wonder if each of those words have been rigorously studied on their effect on applicants, or if your D&I consultant is just imposing someone's sexist stereotypes on your listings?
The link strongly suggests that it's the latter.
The thing that hurts the most about many of these inclusiveness pushes is that they are actually endorsing, enabling, and promoting sexist, racist, or otherwise discriminatory stereotypes while pretending to be holier than thou about it.
And crosses became inflammatory when Black people started getting civil rights in the U.S.
I, for one, refuse to cede any influence whatsoever to bigots attempting to control our discourse by throwing temper tantrums about inclusive language.
Yeah, I guess I'm a bigot because I don't want to go into countless places and change my git repos from "master" to "main" for the default branch, for example.
There's room to disagree on whether this change is useful or necessary. But there's a sizable gap between having a difference of opinion and being a jerk about it.
I've personally made the change because I see no harm in it, and it makes my colleagues happier. Being kind and considerate has low cost and high rewards.
Changing your repo to Main from Master is probably the least useful thing you could possible do to fight modern slavery or to fight racism or to do anything but virtue signal to your co-workers.
You are not being kind you are belittling and making a real event that hurt many into a silly game. Racism and slavery are real things you and your co-workers can fight against them if you truly care.
The common theme in the discussion here that doing X "makes my colleagues happier". Do you know a real person that became happier once you changed "master" to "main"?
Also you said "high rewards". What are rewards in this particular case?
That’s a fair question. No individual has ever personally communicated to me that they care. And to be quite honest, I never considered the term “master” to be problematic in the scientific or mechanical context in which I’ve used it before.
However, there are groups of people at my work who say that “main” is a less controversial term and in fact a better term for a “trunk” of code development (“mainline”). Since I see no harm in using it, I figure, why not?
The rewards for me are having better relationships with my colleagues and less friction, which in turn leads to a more promising long-term career outlook.
The critically important question is where these rewards are coming from. Do you have better relationships with your colleagues because your new language choices have resolved real problems they were facing? Or do you have better relationships simply because you've joined their subculture, learning to speak how they speak and write how they write? The latter would be a pretty substantial inclusion problem for anyone who's unwilling or unable to join that subculture.
I am not sure the answer matters much. Society evolves beyond our individual power to control it. Being able to adapt to that change is a useful skill that yields benefits not only in the workplace but in society generally. I don't know about you, but I don't want to become one of those grumpy old men who does nothing but complain about "those kids today."
My question would be, have you ever adapted to a social change that you think is bad? It seems almost impossible to live by the standard you're describing, unless you define "society" so narrowly that it only includes causes you're on board with. If I'm the lunch room talking about my tasty chicken curry, and a few PETA members come by to explain that the new term is "bird flesh", should I listen to them?
Good question. I'm not sure I would necessarily bend to them, but it really depends on the situation. What's on the line? What are the costs and benefits of acting, or not acting? Do I really need to die on that particular hill at that particular moment? Can I just smile and nod and save that argument for another day, or move to a different room?
I will admit that what makes this easier for me is that I think society is generally moving in the right direction, towards more diversity, more equity, more tolerance, less racism, etc. If I felt things were going in the wrong direction, I would stand up against it. But it's always easier when the river carries you in the direction you want to go.
Sorry I don't have a great answer here, but what I do know from experience is that most of the time, standing solely on principle while the hilltop is crumbling underneath you isn't a very safe place to be. :-)
Have your team meetings literally ground to a halt because someone on your team says "I'm sorry I refuse to work here until the name of the git branch is changed"?
You seem to be conflating controversial with clearer
No, that's never happened. If it did, I guess we'd cross that bridge when we got to it. There are people better than me (HR, etc.) at resolving these sorts of conflicts.
You aren't being kind, you're being a bully with a thin veneer of social piety. Your standard of behavior leads directly to tyranny of the most demanding and intolerant minority and you aren't even brave enough to own it as your own.
We have no obligation to do or say anything other than "What you're telling me to do is unreasonable, you can get stuffed."
It's authoritarian and the new heresy, full stop. It's no different than evangelicals who try to impose their morality on everyone else. "That word is sinful. Here's the proper word and idea." They also think it's simply about being a good person and defend it with that frame. To be a good person use the correct words and correct ideas as defined by us, the good people. If you disagree you are a bad person.
It's simply adding context to words and giving you the option to change it.
This is useful for speaking on the international scene. It is impossible to be aware of all possibly harmful words.
Take for example "Eskimo". Many people outside Canada would not know that the people who it is used on prefers to be called Inuit or better yet the names of their own language (Inupiaq or Yupik). But to a Canadian, this would be a glaring mistake as many consider "Eskimo" to be insulting.
If I am writing a support text for that demographic and use the wrong word, I will be happy that my text editor adds a little hint that says "Are you sure you want to use this word? It might make people angry."
The alternative is to use the dictionary search feature on every single noun. I can think of a lot of such words. This is heavy and slow, so tech comes to the rescue. This feature already exists on a lot of spellchecker.
It’s not “context”. Context implies a universal truth or law of nature level of absolute. This is a highly subjective, fundamentalist, quasi-religious definition of “context”.
"The name Eskimo is considered derogatory because it was given by non-Inuit people and was said to mean 'eater of raw meat."
is a historical and sociological context.
If you are writing about the uses of the word "Eskimo", you click "skip this word" and the word will remain in your text.
If the added context has you believe that using the word in your text might anger the very demographic you are writing a text on, you click "replace word".
If you choose to ignore the context and keep using the word at the risk of angering the community you are writing about, you click "never show this again". But at this point, don't complain if people are angry at your text.
That's it.
I bet you can simply turn off the feature altogether like you can in other software.
> "The name Eskimo is considered derogatory because it was given by non-Inuit people and was said to mean 'eater of raw meat." is a historical and sociological context.
It is not universal or unimpeachable context, it carries a certain set of assumptions that may or may not be true:
- "is considered derogatory" suggests that everyone (or nearly everyone) considers this offensive, when in fact some people still call themselves Eskimo. To suggest that "Eskimo" is always or usually derogatory is therefore non-inclusive of people who use the word to describe themselves.
- The theory that Eskimo means "eater of raw meat" has been called into question; an alternative theory is that it derived from the French word esquimaux, meaning one who nets snowshoes. To circulate the arguably more offensive association of the word may itself be reinforcing untrue and possibly offensive connotations of a word that some people prefer.
Any attempt to present one particular interpretation of a word as universal truth, or one framing as the true "context", is often overly reductionist and prescriptive, even non-inclusive.
Another great example of this: indigenous people in the USA generally prefer the term "Indian" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ), and yet polite American society will pressure you to say Native American instead. Something tells me that this feature in Docs will not be suggesting that you change "Native American" to "Indian", despite the fact that the people themselves often prefer it.
It's word policing that doesn't take into account context, ie the person that it's being written for or how it's being used.
It itself is not adding context, and it should be disabled by default if added at all.
If PC nazis want this they can install an extension or enable it.
I don't need Google to give me moral lessons or be the arbiter of truth and feelings.
Dear Google docs team, just stick to spelling and grammar checking in your word processor, thank you.
Maybe next they can add a Clippy with a neckbeard that pops up and says "ackhtually... this is bad, would you like to censor yourself?"
It's not about feelings, it's about conditioning self censorship.
EDIT: @madeofpalk, spelling is not subjective, grammar is but it's a style guide based on structure. PC rules change on a dime based on feelings and politics. But yes you can be a grammar nazi and a PC nazi. Generally the two overlap because it's a certain type of zealot personality.
This is why it is a hint that asks for an action. It also covers active/passive sentences, run-on sentences, etc. In other words, all the features that modern grammar & spellchecker have.
The added colors that are not present in Google Docs are incredibly helpful.
The fact that you feel threatened by a tooltip that includes text that is present in most dictionnary is irrational.
See for example what Merriam-Webster already has under "Eskimos":
"Eskimo is a word that presents challenges for anyone who is concerned about avoiding the use of offensive language. Its offensiveness stems partly from a now-discredited belief that it was originally a pejorative term meaning "eater of raw flesh," but perhaps more significantly from its being a word imposed on aboriginal peoples by outsiders. It has long been considered a word to be avoided in Canada, where the native people refer to themselves as Inuit, a word that means "people" in their language. But not all the native people who are referred to as Eskimos (such as the Yupik people of southwestern Alaska and eastern Siberia) are Inuit. Eskimo has no exact synonym; it has a general meaning that encompasses a number of indigenous peoples, and it continues for now in widespread use in many parts of the English-speaking world."
Meanwhile Cambridge Dictionary has "Note: Some of these people consider the term Eskimo offensive, and prefer the word Inuit."
Collins has: "These peoples now usually call themselves Inuits or Yupiks, and the term Eskimo could cause offence."
This is not new information pushed by Google. This is simply technology making our lives easier.
> This is why it is a hint that asks for an action.
If you want or need a PC word checker to not piss off liberals thats's fine (they are the ones getting offended on other's behalf, not the people they are "fighting" for), but most people don't.
I see no reason to have this enabled by default.
EDIT: @Karawebnetwork, I don't see any Inuits proposing this, just liberals who love censorship, love getting offended on other's behalf and redefining words to make themselves feel like they've done something.
Are you advancing that the Inuit population is majoritarily liberals?
There is more than one country in this word. Not everything is about the American political dichotomy.
Professional editors already do the work that is provided by this feature, they simply use dictionaries and their professional experience instead. Now even the writer is able to see and adapt the text as they write, which results in more natural texts.
This is just what those features are, a replacement for an editor. And like of a human editor that sends back a text with lines under words and comments in the margins you can simply ignore it.
Edit:
As per your edit, I would recommend you leave your house, drive north and ask. I can assure you that people want to use the names of their people and not an arbitrary word that has been pushed on them by strangers.
A way to explain it that I have used before is to compare it with people who call Americans "Burgers".
Sure, most people don't mind it. You chuckle, roll you eyes and continue with your day. But if from now on all official texts no longer had "Americans" in it but "Burgers", you can be sure there would be anger.
Especially if when people said "We were called Americans before and never stopped calling ourselves as such" they were answered with "No one actually cares about this, I have called you Burgers for decades. Don't get mad, that's just how we call you over here."
> As per your edit, I would recommend you leave your house, drive north and ask. I can assure you that people want to use the names of their people and not an arbitrary word that has been pushed on them by strangers.
I'm not applying this social pressure to self censor, maybe the people doing so could drive north and ask. Have you?
> Sure, most people don't mind it. You chuckle, roll you eyes and continue with your day. But if from now on all official texts no longer had "Americans" in it but "Burgers", you can be sure there would be anger.
Your hypothetical is nonsensical. A group decides what to call themselves. Americans themselves would need to decide that in your scenario.
What outside communities call you (yankees, etc.) is separate and cannot be controlled.
In general, I'd suggest not getting offended on other people's behalf or looking for things to be offended about. Words don't hurt you unless you let them.
> I'm not applying this social pressure to self censor
The pressure is on being educated enough to be polite with the people you discourse with.
I do not know how we can meet in the middle ground since you believe that using accurate words to describe people is censor.
Yes, what outside communities call you is outside of your control. However, what you call outside community is within your control.
Since it is within your control and you can choose to use any word you want (as long as you are fine with the repercussions), this is not censor. You can absolutely call anyone by any word you want.
That said, refusing to expand your vocabulary will diminish the range of you thoughts. Keeping with the previous example, calling two different and unassociated tribes by the same name will prevent you from learning about them separately.
> The pressure is on being educated enough to be polite with the people you discourse with.
Oh I'm well aware of the PC rules, I disagree with them. They have nothing to do with being polite or educated.
> I do not know how we can meet in the middle ground since you believe that using accurate words to describe people is censor.
Most of the time the PC words are not accurate at all. They are confusing to everyone involved, by design.
> Since it is within your control and you can choose to use any word you want (as long as you are fine with the repercussions), this is not censor. You can absolutely call anyone by any word you want.
This is why I said self censor, you're bullying people to conform to your silly rules.
> That said, refusing to expand your vocabulary will diminish the range of you thoughts. Keeping with the previous example, calling two different and unassociated tribes by the same name will prevent you from learning about them separately.
Oh I know your PC words and my thoughts are expansive. I just disagree with the entire premise.
I call Inuits as such, if I've ever referenced them? I don't think I've even used the word Eskimo ever before, as it just doesn't come up.
Sure if you're referring to people of a specific tribe, and it's important in the context that they're from that particular tribe, then it would make sense.
If you're referring generally to people from that part of the world 99.99% of people would understand Eskimo to mean a person from any one of the many Native American tribes in the far northern part of North America. It's not any different than saying "Middle Eastern" or "Asian" or any other indication of geographic origin and it doesn't carry any derogatory connotation.
Only the 0.01% of people who go out of their way to look for things to get offended about are going to get offended.
> Only the 0.01% of people who go out of their way to look for things to get offended about are going to get offended.
Or the people who are.. constantly reminded of the ignorance around them. Consider that people who are actually called Eskimo by others, might hear this more often than someone who doesn't look the part.
Frequency really changes the game here. Everybody who had a little brother will know: someone saying something annoying to you once is easy to shake off, someone who saying the same annoying thing to you constantly, day in and day out can be nervewrecking. Now imagine how much worse it is if the annoying thing comes from whole parts of society and every day. If you talk to people affected by such things (e.g. women by sexist remarks) the main thing that makes the difference is how frequent those things happen and my feeling is that many people can't even imagine.
It is nice to see that many people can not relate to this, because they had it easier, but confusing your own perspective with all shared reality is not an advantage.
Or one could also choose to not deliberately misinterpret words and thus not get annoyed about it.
Like if you’re a software engineer and someone refers to you as an engineer, you don’t get all annoyed and pedantically explain that you’re not someone who drives trains, because you know that’s not the sense in which the person meant the word.
Have you met software engineers?
I imagine there are plenty who very pedantically explain the difference.
In my experience, it’s hard not to take offense when the word being used is frequently used by people who are intending offense. Our brains are hardwired to perceive attacks, and if I’ve been attacked by people using similar wording before lower-level functions are assuming anyone using that wording is attacking me.
The example used in this thread, Eskimo, is probably harmless from people who don’t interact much with Inuit people. But to an Inuit person, the people who live near them using the word Eskimo are probably being insulting. Sure they might judge that e.g. a Belgian internet commentator didn’t mean offense, but their brain is jumping to that conclusion and then being talked off that ledge.
Okay, so show those suggestions to IP addresses geolocated in the relevant communities. But don’t chastise me for writing “Eskimo kiss” on the other side of the planet, thousands of miles away from the nearest Eskimo. North America has no right to police the language of the rest of the world.
I'd suggest that the set of words which are appropriate or inappropriate are strongly dependent on the writer, context and the type of writing, and attempting to impose a single specific set of words as a privileged set of appropriateness/inappropriateness is indeed simply imposing their morality on everyone else.
In many cases they are making a false assertion that a particular word is inappropriate, simply because it's inappropriate for them in their context/culture/morality while it's entirely appropriate for the writer's context/culture/morality; and those false assertions essentially attempt to change the writers' own notion of what's appropriate or not towards what Google considers appropriate - and I don't agree that Google should be allowed to apply such social influence.
They’re not enforcing shit, they’re just letting people know that the word can have a negative connotation. This could be extremely helpful for a newer English speaker, someone from another culture, or god forbid someone who just wants to use language that won’t make someone upset.
Yep, it would have helped you to capitalize "God" and not offend Christians. Or better yet, not even written the word itself. You can use "G*d" to be safe.
This is a nuanced take that I hadn't considered, fair enough. For people just trying to go along to get along in their communications and feel there are minefields everywhere, I could see this tool being a relief/helpful. I personally don't think that relief is worth the tradeoff, but I def can agree to disagree.
Would you say it isn't enforcement then, and if so how?
I certainly spell my words differently if I get a red squiggly line. Do you not?
Tech rarely "enforces" via direct controls unless a regulation is forcing it. What it does instead are nudges like this, and pretending the nudges don't have notable and similar impact is either naive or in suggested bad faith due to the company one works at.
> I certainly spell my words differently if I get a red squiggly line. Do you not?
You always have the option to just not. It's called enFORCEment, not enSUGGESTment. I presume the reason you choose to correct spelling is that you know it will be received better by your audience if the words are spelled according to convention. If you are spelling a word outside of the dictionary and you get a red line under the word, do you then change it to something you know to be not what you wanted? Of course not. If however you could only write words in the dictionary, then that would be enforcement (especially if you couldn't add words to the dictionary).
Presumably you have the same choice here. I really don't see the difference.
It's really striking to me that a number of issues today where everyone is exercising their free will are somehow twisted to be authoritarian overreach. Someone is upthread calling it authoritarian and a new heresy. I mean... come on. The histrionics are getting out of hand. Now a squiggle is "authoritarian".
The first english* dictionary which leads into the knowledge-base that generates the red squiggly line is from 1604.
The first problematic word dictionary that leads to the green (?) squiggly line in this tool came out of a nlp neural network in the past few few years, folks aren't quite sure how it works, and it has some additional best-effort labeling of phrases from the product team.
That's 400+ years of semantic/syntactic development vs. <20, likely <10 years, but let's start shifting the language all the same because we're a FAANG?
If you really don't see the difference, again it is bad faith, or naive. The conceit from teams that build and launch these tools without any consideration for the above is astounding.
> If you really don't see the difference, again it is bad faith, or naive.
Great way to engage with someone. Am I supposed to take your personal attacks against me as demonstration of your good faith attempt to participate in debate? Please refrain from this rhetoric in the future.
Anyway, I'm not sure I understand your point. What does the age of the first dictionary have to do with any of this? I can kind of see a point if I squint, but I'm a bit lost. Your position seems to be couched in the idea that this kind of thing will "shift" language but I don't understand the mechanism by which you feel this will happen. Maybe in your next reply you could expand on this idea (if I'm right about the thrust of your comment), omitting any personal attacks please.
Because the way I see it, if you want to say something you can still say it, and if you disagree with any suggestions Docs gives you, you are free to hold firm to that disagreement and use any language you want. Your idea would only seem to apply if you think that Google has hegemonic dominance over document production... which I don't think is remotely true.
> Maybe in your next reply you could expand on this idea
From my earlier post in this same thread:
"I didn't imply GOOG was setting up gulags, but I will refer to my early comment in response - it's either naive or bad faith to say that network effects from dominant players do not lead to enforcement in everything but name, and that the scope of concerns from engineers and the products they build should stop at "well, its just a feature." Algorithmic news feeds on social media was just a feature too.
Enforcements, mandates, suggestions, impacts, governances, features - spitting hairs semantically on the overall issue that tech "features" shape areas that tech and its product owners have no business shaping/influencing/impacting/enforcing but still do anyway, let alone even understand, and the downstream ramifications are significant.
They get away with it partially via enablers like your view which minimize the dynamic to local examples that open up framing the counterpoint as something absurd - yes, Google's gulags aren't built yet.
Edit - to put at least one impact of tech like this another way, it's not Google that puts a user in a gulag. It's the coworker of the user who notices a phrase the coworker also typed, was caught by Google, and the coworker corrected - why didn't that user also change it? All these second order effects were doubtlessly considered by that Google product team, I'm sure? Putting aside my original point that Google doesn't even belong in this space by a mile."
I didn't imply GOOG was setting up gulags, but I will refer to my early comment in response - it's either naive or bad faith to say that network effects from dominant players do not lead to enforcement in everything but name, and that the scope of concerns from engineers and the products they build should stop at "well, its just a feature." Algorithmic news feeds on social media was just a feature too.
Enforcements, mandates, suggestions, impacts, governances, features - spitting hairs semantically on the overall issue that tech "features" shape areas that tech and its product owners have no business shaping/influencing/impacting/enforcing but still do anyway, let alone even understand, and the downstream ramifications are significant.
They get away with it partially via enablers like your view which minimize the dynamic to local examples that open up framing the counterpoint as something absurd - yes, Google's gulags aren't built yet.
Edit - to put at least one impact of tech like this another way, it's not Google that puts a user in a gulag. It's the coworker of the user who notices a phrase the coworker also typed, was caught by Google, and the coworker corrected - why didn't that user also change it? All these second order effects were doubtlessly considered by that Google product team, I'm sure? Putting aside my original point that Google doesn't even belong in this space by a mile.
If I were to argue that AAVE speakers should not be forced to see red squiggly lines when their spelling doesn't conform to "standard" spelling, using the same argument you make above ("A coworker might ask why they didn't correct a supposed misspelling") would you agree that a spell-checker is racist/inappropriate?
Engaging trolls gives them only more power. But for the sake of hope in good faith, I can try.
Evangelicals could resort to extreme measures (violence, unwanted proselytization, bad faith arguments, etc.) If you ask them to shut up, they'll just not do so or leave entirely.
This is just a feature you could turn off. The rest of Docs would still be usable.
Yall are really getting inflamed over nothing. There are better ways to use your energy. You can just turn the feature off or not use the product. Comparing this to evangelicism dilutes the harm actually caused by evangelicals.
Imagine if Google was dominated by religious conservatives and their "inappropriate" language suggestions flagged "gay parents" or "pro-choice" as 'wrong' by default.
I can imagine a ridiculous Black Mirror-like scenario in which a Tesla suggests that instead of driving to a Bernie Sanders event as planned, that the driver go to a conservative one instead. After all, Tesla could decide that Sanders' politics are inappropriate and harmful (to society/its bottom line).
It's fun to begin to think about how much "soft power" companies have in ways we don't even expect. If Apple Maps decides to route traffic down a different street than normal, that could have substantial effects on business on that street.
We like to think we make informed rational decisions at every point in our life, but we don't; the inputs matter a lot and companies control more of those than we would want to admit.
Imagine if the actual government was dominated by religious conservatives and they tried to make it illegal to discuss "gay parents" in schools or for doctors to discuss abortions with their patients.
Depends on the govt at the time the judge was apppointed. And what level.
The theory on the federal level is "this judge was appointed by president X-1, so they aren't influenced by president X". So for better or worse (depending on which president that filled the vacancy), they may go against what is popular in administration X. The federal supreme court tries to be shielded away from the immediate politics of worrying about re-election and stuff.
On the state level, well... as usual it's a free for all. Just to list the "hot" states of subject:
- Texas: the people vote for them, 6 year term. no different from voting for a senator/representative.
- Florida: More complex, but in short: the governor chooses from a list of candidates handed to them, and the chosen judge serves one term (4 years) before the people decide to keep them or not.
So the people on the state level here have some sway. But then again, the people here are... well, Texas/Florida people.
Except that the same political actors who passed these laws have spent decades working to stack the Supreme Court with justices who will let the laws remain in effect…
I think you’re blowing your own areas of concern to hyperbolic proportions, but cannot or will not even see why others would find this far more concerning.
There is a war going on between Russia and Ukraine. If you go to Russia's TikTok, you will find no mention of it. Not because someone at TikTok said "let's make a feature that users can opt out of to highlight insensitive things," no, it's because you will go to jail if you upload content that Russia doesn't like.
Let's compare. You say things Google doesn't like, a purple squiggly goes under your words that you have the option to turn off. You say things Russia doesn't like, and armed men barge into your home to take you to jail.
How disconnected from reality do you have to be for me to have to make this comparison explicit???
The existence of the war in Ukraine doesn’t mean we stop caring about anything else. If you got punched in the face, I think you would still care even though there’s a war on.
If anything, the actions Putin is taking to control the information landscape make me much more upset about woke clippy. Liberal society should be about a free exchange of ideas. It’s not just another orthodoxy with soft manipulation instead of hard manipulation for thoughtcrime.
If you don’t understand why this seems manipulative and tone deaf to lots of folks, that means you’re confused. Not right.
If you truly believe worrying about the war is more important than talking about woke clippy here on HN, I’m confused. Why then are you here taking part in this conversation? You clearly don’t care about the issues I (and others) are raising in this thread. But if you actually don’t care, why take part in the discussion at all?
I do think there is a problem that merits discussion. But to ring such alarms and place it in this context doesn't do that discussion justice. There is more nuance to be had.
Most people never bother to change the default behavior of the software they use. This change will influence the behavior of billions of people around the world and meaningfully change our reality, so it's not as simple as just disabling the feature on your own computer.
I agree that defaults matter, and I agree that this is an attempt to shape culture.
I don't agree that it's authoritarian, because if you don't like it you can turn it off. It's no more authoritarian than opt-in-by-default (aka opt-out) for organ donation that some countries do; i.e. not authoritarian.
Oh, come on. It's not telling you what to change, it's giving you suggestions. Even the suggestions can be turned off. Most paying customers of Google are using it for business communications. This is a useful feature for them. Language (like everything) has become politicized, so people have a stronger reaction to this than when Word added grammar suggestions back in the day, but it's basically the same feature and Microsoft had a more dominant market position then than Google does now.
(Full disclosure, I'm a former Googler, but that has little to do with this)
> It's not telling you what to change, it's giving you suggestions.
By giving you suggestions it's telling you that it thinks you are wrong. There is no way around that. It's a judgement plain and simple and that changes people's behaviour.
> Even the suggestions can be turned off.
Let's be honest. No one changes the defaults.
> Language (like everything) has become politicized,
This is a cute comment, but don't muddy the waters. There's a big difference between correcting "their" / "there" and telling me off for using the word "landlord" because someone in a foreign country wants to police how my country uses our native tongue.
"Everything is inherently political" is no excuse for making things even more political.
You can turn it off. I suspect some people in this thread think no one should have this feature; and it should never have been shipped, so the arguments are rather indirect.
Ironically, this thread is part of the culture wars commenters are claiming to be against.
> I suspect some people in this thread think no one should have this feature
I think this feature should be opt-in rather than opt-out. If its turned on for everyone, it should only promote non-controversial suggestions, like the spelling of "their"/"there"/"they're".
You would probably balk if google docs made "suggestions" to call the war in Ukraine a military exercise. Or if it suggested removing any criticism of the CCP because some people may take offense.
Scolding me for using the word "landlord" here in Australia (where its a gender neutral term) feels to me like the same sort of unwanted intrusion into my mental life. This feature makes me really angry.
What will Google do when Russia or China ask them to add their own set of locality-specific "suggestions" to google docs?
I also experienced a Google's Photos feature I thought should have been opt-in, as it wasn't working well for me (auto-labeling in its early days) - but it didn't make me angry; I simply turned it off. I genuinely would like to know why this change is triggering to so many people, in case my assumption is off the mark (i.e. Google is entering the culture war fray on the "wrong" side)
When I'm sitting alone, thinking, I live in the privacy of my own thoughts. Sometimes I have half formed thoughts that others might not agree with. This is important - you can't have good ideas unless you also have bad ideas, after all.
Sometimes I journal. The piece of paper becomes an extension of my mind. There's a sanctity of that space. It is deeply private, and free because ... well, because thats the point of journaling. Sometimes you have to say the idea wrong to figure out how to say the idea right.
And by "piece of paper", I mean, I type into my computer.
Into this context, google wants to insert itself with woke political opinions on my writing? Or suggestions on how I'm not using an "active voice" enough? No. That comes across like an out of touch, entitled 20 year old in another country is reading over my shoulder while I'm journaling in order to make asinine, inappropriate suggestions about my writing. Or so it can judge my politics. All this, in the sanctity of my own mental palace.
Would you take political advice from a google docs AI? Would you take its advice on what the word 'landlord' really means, in the context of your own community, in another country? I wouldn't. If you want to convince me of your politics, take a stand and make your argument boldly. I need to be able to hear what you say as an argument then feel free to disagree with you. Don't dress up a political campaign as writing advice.
It makes me angry because it feels manipulative. Like you're trying to trick me into replacing my words with your words, in order to advance your political agenda. All administered via an AI that I conveniently can't debate. I'm angry because I don't want to have to be on guard against political manipulation simply in order to have my own thoughts, in the privacy of my own mind - or the extension of my mind called a computer. If I mostly agree with the political stand its almost worse - because I won't notice the manipulation as easily.
I also can't help but wonder what would happen if that stupid, entitled AI gets uppity and disagrees with any of my politics. If Google already has an AI thats reading and judging the political content of what I write, where does that end? Will there be consequences down the road for me if I say the wrong thing in my own journal? Probably not. But I'm not absolutely certain. Maybe I should self censor my own thoughts preemptively just in case? In my own journal?
No. F off. I'd much rather burn google docs out of my life than worry about any of that. Which is a pity, because its otherwise a good product.
What google is failing to understand here is that my computer needs to be an agent of my will. Not an agent of google's. Violating that principle is a betrayal.
I don’t know what you mean by “service product”. But isn’t “it’s like a piece of paper but better” basically the whole pitch for a word processor like Google docs? Since when is writing not part of Google docs’ core feature set?
Meaning, Google offers Docs to you as a service, not as a consumable. You are not entitled to full control of their product, because that would be antithetical to what a service is; the point of a service is to deal with tasks so you don't have to. Storage, up to date grammar checkers & translators, and now whatever this is; these are all things that Google needs to maintain so you don't have to. The greatest control you could have over these functions is to implement them yourself, and that would defeat the point.
Unfortunately, corporations in their ruthless efficiency, don't take to the deconstructionist argument. It would appeal to a large part of the market to have streamlined templates for legal documents, marketing pitches, etc. These are all per se "pieces of paper" at the end of the day but that's not very useful to think about when 45% of your users keep using the same templates for the same purposes. I would imagine some significant segment of the userbase are politically centric marketing drones, and would love a feature like this. I think they have no taste, and that corporate centrism is a problem, but separate from actual authoritarianism; and focusing on Google misses an opportunity to focus on the root issue.
> I think that corporate centrism is a problem, but separate from actual authoritarianism; and focusing on Google misses an opportunity to focus on the root issue.
Docs is incredibly pervasive and changing its defaults would alter how a good number of people think. But that's not even a bad thing, it becomes quite bad when you consider that these changes are being lead more by taste than by ethics. Our social elite have confounded the two - that's the problem. Nobody knows when a word is ethical or not, but the influential certainly know when they are put off by a word. By nature of their influence, many are willing to accept at face value that their "positive" and "inclusive" attitudes are a good thing.
I can see the evangelicism now, but I think it's dumber than that. I really do think they're just competing with Grammarly or trying to streamline some process. Changing Docs isn't going to solve the issue, changing the culture is. The culture of relabeling problems as quirks, toxic positivity; and more importantly the sincere confidence in the feeling of good/right that all that entails.
I work in academia. Frequently, I need to convey various levels of confidence about facts when writing emails to my colleagues.
Microsoft Outlooks suggestions are more than a mere annoyance on this front. They consistently suggest that "probably" and "perhaps" and "maybe" and "almost certainly" should be removed from my writing precisely because they convey uncertainty. That is why I wrote them in the first place! If I knew a result confidently, I would say so.
Please, let's not have another venue algorithmically pressuring everyone to uniformly remove nuance from communication. There is no one-size-fits-all threshold for "too wordy" or "too passive" or anything else with regard to language. Context is everything.
There's an example tweet where Google suggests that 'landlord' is not inclusive and 'property owner' or 'proprietor' could be used instead.
This will encourage people to avoid the word 'landlord'. They will start using 'property owner'. I'm not okay with that. A homeowner is a property owner. A landlord rents out the property they own. The terms shouldn't be conflated like that (as much as many landlords might want them to be).
I agree that sometimes a landlord might be subletting something and therefore they might not own it, but what you write is mostly ridiculous: if a landlord owns the property, they are the property owner.
I think you missed the point. In math terms: landlords are a proper subset of property owners, not equivalent. Using the latter term instead of the former is likely to change the meaning of the sentence.
For example: "landlords should pay more taxes" is very different from "property owners should pay more taxes".
Your explanation doesn’t square with the weird comment about landlords wanting to be conflated with property owners, which I read as meaning that the parent thought they weren’t subsets.
Apologies if I was unclear. I meant 'conflate' as in 'treat as equivalent'.
As for landlords perhaps wanting to be treated as equivalent to property owners, I think the previous poster gave a suitable example of why this might be the case. In many places landlords are being targeted politically (rightly or wrongly). It would be to their political advantage if all reference to them was conflated with regular owner occupiers by use of the term 'property owners'.
That poll says most prefer Hispanic, it also says most do not find Latinx offensive. It also seems like a bit of a push poll since it doesn't ask any questions about whether or not they find "Latino" offensive.
Latinx is revolting, full stop. Nobody who speaks (using the lips and tongue) Spanish as their only language will adopt it.
Spanish isn't the jumbled mess that English is. It has a lot of rhyme and reason to it. While not without exceptions, its rules are generally quite reliable.
"inx" is a not a Spanish syllable. You can't pluralize it. You can't rhyme with it. Hell, you can't barely pronounce it.
I get so tired of people popping up to defend the idea as if it's not so bad, invariably citing data collected from bilingual, second-generation US immigrants. Stop. If it's important to you, then at least have the sense to argue for "Latines", which at least kind of makes sense and doesn't sound like something invented by an English speaker who had only ever seen Spanish written, not spoken.
> Nobody who speaks (using the lips and tongue) Spanish as their only language will adopt it.
Your argument isn't cogent to me: it's an English word used in an English context. Your line of reasoning could be used to argue that "Anglo-Saxon"[1] is not a legitimate term because the Germanic tribes didn't use the term to refer to themselves.
1. The same goes for "German", "Chinese" or "Belter"
German is an English word that English speakers use to describe Germans. It doesn't have any etymological relationship with the word that Germans use to describe themselves.
Latino and Latina are Spanish words that American English speakers have adopted in the last ~80 years due to the significant intermingling of Spanish and English speakers. Their use spans a spectrum of Spanish-only speakers, bilingual speakers, and English-only speakers. Not only does the English word "Latino" (my eyes roll typing that) have an etymological relationship with the Spanish word "Latino", their etymologies haven't even diverged. English speakers who took a Spanish class in high school even pronounce Latino in the Spanish way, "lah-TEE-noh" instead of "luh-TEE-no", because they think of it as a Spanish word.
Latinx is a Spanglish word. You seem offended by the very existence of Spanglish. Personally as a gringo who was born in a majority-hispanic neighborhood in Texas Spanglish is my culture.
As someone who speaks Spanish I agree with you as a matter of taste, the word feels ridiculous when I say it out loud. Latines honestly sounds roughly as ridiculous to my ear. (Of course even though I was exposed to Spanish at a very young age living in San Antonio English is my first language.)
I have friends who self-identify as Latinx, and use the word, I have friends who say Latine, I have friends who say Latino. Language evolves and I don't think your vitriol is warranted.
Generally speaking, when a wide sweeping change is going to take effect, the onus of proof about why it should be done is on those advocating in favor of the change, not on those defending the standard. That is, "How is this change useful?" vs. "Why wouldn't this change be useful?" The latter assumes the change is good and asks for proof which cannot exist yet, while the former focuses the questioning on the underlying value of the change prior to implementation.
This particular change is a complex one. It clearly has w*stern politics crammed into its carcass, which are tedious to read, and doubly so to speak on. For that reason, I'll try and avoid such topic. Besides, I tend to assume your question is asked in good faith, so I would simply ask:
Can you give an example of where it making a "good" suggestion is helpful?
Under optimal circumstances, the ability to "help" the writer would be subjective, right? Under suboptimal conditions, the suggestion would be: unwanted, unneeded, or wrong.
> Can you give an example of where it making a "good" suggestion is helpful?
Sure:
Upon writing, "That guy is a loser," a response from the computer: "You're using using emotionally-loaded and ambiguous language. Consider revising to provide constructive criticism."
Ideally, the feedback a computer would provide would be similar in scope and wisdom that feedback from an experienced human editor would provide.
The projected cultural judgements are plain in your comment:
> "You're using using emotionally-loaded and ambiguous language
Whats wrong with emotionally loaded content? Are you afraid of feelings? That statement doesn't seem ambiguous at all to me - but even if it was ambiguous, I believe ambiguity is sometimes appropriate.
I'm partially with you - I don't often utter things like "That guy is a loser" either. But there are still plenty of contexts in which I'd happily write those words. For example:
- When writing dialogue in fiction
- When supporting a friend with an abusive partner, to let them know emotionally that I'm on their side in the conflict
- In conversation like this
But to go deeper, the language I use is an expression of me. There are very few things as intimately tied to our identity and world view as our choice of language. I can't think of many things as dehumanising to an adult as taking away their choice of how they express themselves.
Imagine if the suggestion, when writing about the war in Ukraine was "Using the word 'war' is inflammatory to some audiences. Have you considered 'military exercise' instead?". Or "Using the word 'they' is ambiguous language. Have you considered using he/she instead?". It doesn't feel as good when you don't agree politically with the suggestion.
To this day people cite doublespeak as one of the most chilling aspects of George Orwell's 1984. This whole thing spooks me for the same reason.
There are undoubtedly times when this sort of feedback is undesirable. If you're writing fiction, or poetry, or just want to flame somebody (damn the consequences), these sorts of prompts just get in the way. Similarly, if you're writing math equations, there's not much use in a spell or grammar check.
But as others have said, writing feedback -- automated or otherwise -- is a resource. Sometimes it's helpful, particularly in the professional context. Other times, it isn't. We still have the freedom to choose when to use it and when not to. And I see no harm in having the tools available to help when needed.
I hear what you're saying. I'm sure people who work at google appreciate an AI making sure they don't accidentally post some wrong-speak to an internal mailing list. Especially when doing so might get them fired.
I just think politically controversial writing suggestions should be opt-in. We don't all work at google. And not all documents are corporate memos. Its extremely important to a liberal society that people are free to think and express heretical thoughts without feeling like we're being watched and judged for doing so.
Getting political judgements ("suggestions") from an omnipresent AI looking over my shoulder while I write sounds dystopian. That sort of technology skeeves me out. I don't trust the sort of people who think this should be turned on by default with access to my private notes. And you shouldn't either.
I'd rather not outsource my morality to the arbitration of an algorithm, regardless of its provenance being of a company that claims to "not be evil." This honestly seems like a particularly flagrant application of this feature; we have enough human interaction mediated by coercive tech, the way we communicate personal beliefs about one another shouldn't be the next pillar to fall. That it's "just a suggestion", as others have argued to excuse it, belies how strongly its UI implies authoritativeness -- users reflexively view the squiggly underline as a sign that something is unambiguously wrong with what they've written.
I forgot to write in my previous reply "Thank you for your levelheaded response. I know these types of discussions can get out of hand, so thank you for approaching without that baggage that sometimes comes with the territory."
Saying both is fair. I generally assume there is a primary intended target, but both is workable too. Your assessment is that both parties benefit from the change?
Imagine working on a tax policy and having a proposed tax on “landlords” changed to a proposed tax on “property owners”. If that slipped through and was made public it could be a career limiting mistake.
Imagine working on a tax policy and having a proposed tax on "moles" changed to a proposed tax on "holes". If that slipped through and was made public it could be a career limiting mistake.
Thankfully HN wasn't around when spell-check was introduced.
Proper english grammar and left leaning political grammar are very different examples. If Microsoft introduced religious grammar suggestions it might offend a few people and provide benefits to others.
That there is such a thing as “proper english grammar” is itself inherently contentious and political. DFW's review of Authority and American Usage unpacks this a bit, if I recall. It's hard to find online because it's still under copyright, but I found this: https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWAuthorityAndAmericanU...
I don't agree that it's political but I do agree that it's contentious for English. However, if we see this as a template for other languages, it makes more sense what with Spanish, French, etc having rigid definitions and control[0] over their respective languages.
With all due respect to descriptivists, when engaging in any sort of formal communication (written or spoken), prescriptive grammar matters. There are "proper" and "improper" ways of communicating on a formal level.
"Ain't" is a perfectly normal construction in some dialects of English, but if you use it in a formal setting, people will notice and will think it's strange.
It could be useful for a product like Google Docs to tell you not to use dialectal grammar like "ain't." If you're writing a formal document, you probably want to avoid that kind of language. However, if Google Docs goes beyond that and starts telling you to replace completely normal words like "blacklist" with woke alternatives like "blocklist," that feels more like an attempt to establish some sort of religious orthodoxy. It gives the same vibes as if Google Docs were to start trying to push Evangelical religious sensibilities on its users. It's not helpful, unless you think your audience is extremely uptight and you want to avoid upsetting them.
Descriptivist language can absolutely describe things like "ain't", by saying "here's what it means, and also here's how you'll be perceived if you say it". Similarly, descriptivist language can tell you what people mean when they say "irregardless", and also tell you that it's commonly perceived as incorrect usage. (That's more useful than just saying "that's not a word".) You can look up a slur in the dictionary, and you'll find it there, along with some history and context and how the word comes across to people. Descriptivist language includes "how formal is this", "how offensive is this", "how correct is this", and so on.
It's useful, especially for people who aren't already steeped in cultural norms, to have a reference for "how might I come across if I say this". Words simultaneously communicate meaning and connotation, and it's helpful to understand both the meaning and the connotation. People aren't going to misunderstand the author of a text that says "blacklist"; they're going to understand just fine, perhaps including ways that the author would prefer not to have been perceived, or perhaps in ways the author intends to be perceived.
Tooling like this won't change the minds of people who are determined to be offensive (with or without the added assertions that they don't think it should be considered offensive). The point is to inform people how they may come across. It would be incorrect to say "this word is universally considered offensive", just as it would be incorrect to not label the word at all; it'd be more correct to say "this word's status is [disputed/transitional], with [an increased trend towards being considered non-inclusive], and consequent [doubling down by conservative language users]; consider avoiding due to any or all of offense, controversy, or politics".
"Ain't" is pretty universally viewed as informal language, and therefore out of place in formal communication.
Until just two years ago, "whitelist/blacklist" was completely normal language with no racial connotations, and I would wager that it's still viewed as completely normal by the vast majority of people. However, in just the last two years, people of a certain political persuasion in the US have decided to make these phrases into an issue.
If it is critical for you to communicate and come off well to a relatively small subsection of upper-middle-class liberal Americans, then these suggestions might be helpful. If it is critical for you to communicate with fundamentalist Evangelical christians, then a different set of suggestions might be helpful. I view the two situations in exactly the same way. However, if you're just writing for a generic audience, then these suggestions come across as unwelcome proselytizing.
The problem is, by doing that in a platform of Google's size, they have effectively declared themselves the arbiters of what is inappropriate.
I suppose all copy editing features do the same, but being the arbiter of spelling is easier, since spelling isn't morally charged and you can just go with Merriam-Webster for US English.
And I suppose if they were to use that power to flag old slurs, including those people might not know, especially for non-native speakers, great, they might catch some embarrassing errors.
Instead they decided "landlord" is bad word, for some reason, and now I will make fun of them.
I feel triggered when a recruiter contacts in a non-gendered form, while I clearly look a like an average MALE on my picture. Do I look feminine? Haven't you seen my picture? Is it a mass-message designed to be as much sly, sneaky and greasy way as possible?
Well, it turns out people are more interested in avoiding upsetting people through gendered language than through non-gendered language. You can't please everyone, and your worries do seem less important if you ask me.
This is a great example of how a lot of these methods of "avoiding upsetting people" seem to really be ways for people to make themselves feel good for doing something that they think is nice, like how almost every latino has no problem with the gendered form and has never heard of "latinx".
Why? Using non-gendered language avoids misgendering people, and even though there are people who are offended by not being gendered this seems like a great trade off.
But your argument boils down to "it's what I want, and even though there are people who don't want it, who cares?" Here is your argument, but adjusted to argue for my position. I didn't have to change much!
"Using gendered language avoids not gendering people, and even though there are people who are offended by being gendered this seems like a great trade off."
It's because, even though I'm a cis male that has never been misgendered, I can empathize much better with the pain of a misgendered trans person than with the pain of any person that was treated by as a "they". To be completely honest I can't even understand why someone would be offended by this. So yeah, I prefer to run the risk of offending by using gender neutral language. And this seems to be the consensus among most institutions that are actually thinking about this kind of things.
To some people, using non-gendered language is offensive. I recall a woman who got upset because someone else referred to her as "they". She was offended because her profile picture was very clear. She felt the other person was making it seem as if it was unclear whether she was a man or a woman.
I am all for trying to be as inclusive as it gets and to be honest, English’s gendered pronouns are just unnatural to me due to my native tongue not being gendered to begin with.
But other than the old “he/she” (annoying) repeated thing or perhaps “they”, some other constructs feel pretty forced. I feel that without starting a conversation where both sides partake, no consensus will ever happen. Or, probably the foremost should be the actual targeted demographic be consulted, because in plenty of cases these are not coming from them and they don’t even approve of these changes, making it the old feel-good changes for the sake of it.
Can I ask what sort of traumatic experience would lead to such a trivial thing triggering you? Understand completely if it's still too raw to share publicly.
Ugh that looks horrible and forced. I'm not a native French speaker and i really don't have a solution for neutral forms of nouns in gendered languages, but all the stuff I've seen looks really.. off. And complicated to pronounce for me.
In an email to you, in what ways are you being referred to in a non-gendered form? I'm straining to think of how I would include "they/them" pronouns in an email to someone.
EDIT: I did assume English, and it is fair that other languages treat genders differently. I was wrong here! That being said, I think the likely answers are, in order, 1/ mass-sent emails 2/ just not being worth offending someone.
No one would complain if they offered grammar add-ons in Google Docs. People could turn it on if they liked, and could choose their specific ruleset depending on what they were writing. Pushing it as a default to everyone is the problem here.
The big issue for me is that it's all or nothing. I would like to have grammar assistance. I do not want that to be mixed in with the Google's PC rules du jour.
No. I can't get fired, and I actively choose to try to make my coworkers feel comfortable. Is things like flagging "landlord" a big goofy? Maybe. But there's a ton of unconscious biases that go into language, and I'm always happy to have things flagged so I can make a decision via an opt-in feature.
If you think people are only being inclusive and non-inflammatory to not get fired, I think maybe you simply just don't understand that some people are genuinely caring and empathetic.
You've taken the stance that people who do not use inclusive language are not genuinely caring and empathetic. People I know who are minorities in tech seem to not care very much. Most have more pressing issues like handling the practical implications of mat-leave or pushing for equitable resume reviews. The people I know who care the most about this are also universally not minorities.
It's bizarre to me that strong sapir-wharf seems to be the dominant thought in 2022.
I've found there is a world of difference between virtue signalers and people who actually want to help with real problems. The virtue signalers only care when they can look good or bludgeon others over the head. Actual help is tiring.
In several English-speaking countries "guys" is not at all gendered (used universally by people of any gender to refer to groups of people of any gender), while "y'all" and "folks" are basically just not in the language at all and would just get you confused looks. I have no idea what "folx" means as this is the first time I've ever seen it.
"You guys" is just the most common form of the 2nd-person plural in American English. "Y'all" is strongly dialectal, and it sounds forced when someone who doesn't actually speak the dialect says it.
People who speak with the thickest appalachin and thickest black english dialects (two pick two ends of the spectrum) can barely communicate with each other and "y'all" sounds perfectly natural from either of them.
It's a class thing. Which is why it sounds forced when a CEO who doesn't have a preexisting american accent of some sort says it.
As a Texan it sounds jarring and wrong when said by a non-Southerner. A bit like a lily white person suddenly dropping into AAVE. It's just cringe-inducing and I would like people who do it as an affectation (rather than something they grew up saying) to not do it.
A quick search of my emails suggests that while I commonly use "everyone" and "y'all", I haven't used "you guys" in a business communication in...years
I don't think "folx" is going to be one of the recommendations, it isn't synonymous with folks anyway, so the replacement would be rarely make sense unless you were explicitly talking about particular queer or marginalized communities.
Some people are genuinely trying to make other people feel included. Some people just do it because of social pressure. One way or another this does feel like a force for the better.
It's not virtue signaling. Virtue signaling would be putting a decal on your car which says "I support the police". You're signaling to the police officer who pulls you over that you're a good police-supporting person, and they should let you off with a warning.
No, it's simply a hint that your message might be better received if you change your word usage to something which is more current, more inclusive, or less triggering. For example, in the U.S. the word "master" might be triggering, given that black people were enslaved, tortured, and murdered for hundreds of years in this country. I'm OK to avoid it. If you want to use it, you can ignore the squiggle, but none of this has anything to do with "virtue signaling".
> For example, in the U.S. the word "master" might be triggering
Before a few years ago, I seriously doubt that innocuous uses of the word "master" were triggering to anyone beyond a very small group of political activists. It's a common word that is used in many contexts completely unrelated to slavery. Nobody with their head soundly on their shoulders was triggered when they heard phrases like "master chef," "master bedroom" or "master's degree."
There's a difference between avoiding language that actually does have strongly negative or prejudicial associations and actively seeking out reasons to be upset about completely innocuous common phrases. There are words that really do become polluted (like "Führer" in German, which used to be a normal word for "leader," but which now is strongly associated with a certain someone), but there are also words that are completely harmless that people work to try to make an issue out of for ideological reasons (e.g., "whitelist").
There's a certain strain of politics in the US which does actively seek out and attempt to remove "problematic" language. You may agree with that politics. But a lot of people (myself included) don't think that "problematizing" innocuous phrases like "master chef" is actually helping anyone, and rather see it as a form of bullying.
I get the feeling that the controversy around the use of the word master started with the master-slave terminology used in hard drive technology (which was problematic) which then just spiralled out of control.
Call me suspicious, but I’m not convinced that the arguments extending the debate to all use of the word master are entirely made in good faith. In fact, it seems a lot like controversy for controversies sake and I can’t help but wonder if some troll isn’t out there fanning the flames.
I really feel your usage of "enslaved" and "tortured" are not very inclusive. There are people whose ancestors experienced such things, and words like that might be triggering and make them uncomfortable.
Maybe you could use friendlier words like "not free" or "hurt"?
What’s wrong with what GP just said? They were speaking in a historical relevant context where the words were used in their literal meaning rather than the figurative one that would devalue its meaning outside of pure figurative works.
If a word like "landlord" can be "triggering" then we can't even discuss actual historical events like slavery or torture, etc (one would at least presume torture to be more triggering than landlord).
Eh, yes. PowerPoint was about how to do interviewing in ways that eliminated bias. A week later I'm having a conversation with my boss, who's telling me that I was reported to HR for misogyny and sexism because the presentation was about how to ensure that people don't hand out jobs based on sex or race. The logic seemed to be that if people are trained to eliminate bias in hiring, the the results will be sexist because not enough token women would be hired.
I told said boss exactly how many times the complainant should be fired but needless to say, their identity was protected and nothing happened. If you believe that can't happen you're not really aware of how these people think. The next step is an admin/site-level setting that allows "uninclusive" language to force-disable sharing. You wait and see.
"The logic seemed to be that if people are trained to eliminate bias in hiring, the the results will be sexist because not enough token women would be hired."
If this was implicit in your presentation, then I think I can see why you were reported to HR.
But, look, maybe you didn't deserve to be reported. Anyone can report anything to HR.
Did you mean to write explicit? The presentation wasn't actually about gender representation or affirmative action and didn't mention those things, it just had a slide or two where it pointed out that working out a fixed interview plan before doing an interview was a good way to avoid bias of various kinds, and mentioned age/gender bias as examples.
Obviously, if you're teaching people how to eliminate bias in an interview process then people who believe that absence of pro-female bias is "sexism" will consider it implicitly sexist, regardless of intent. But that's a nonsensical inversion of basic English and morality. People who report others to HR for that would be fired in any competent company (this one wasn't).
How is that relevant? People are concerned about bad things that might happen to them but haven't happened to them yet. Just because it hasn't happened to them specifically doesn't mean their concerns are invalid.
Because the frequency of an occurrence is valuable data relating to its likelihood, just like knowing whether your house is in a floodplain is valuable data in making a decision as to whether you should worry about your house flooding.
I mean, how many times has this happened to anyone, let alone the individual in question?
If they are using those terms in a way that is trying to stir up trouble, it makes sense to report them. If they did it without any intent to cause trouble, there wouldn't be an issue.
I don't call Japanese customers Japs even though that used to be a valid English term because it is now widely considered offensive. These are terms that some groups find offensive and more may find offensive in the future. It makes sense to stay ahead of the game and not cause offense if it costs me nothing to do it, and it makes sense for Google to help people who are trying not to offend people do so easily.
Because “uninclusive” and “inflammatory” are just how these folks say “heresy”, and violations of orthodoxy must be punished if ideological doctrine is to be successfully enforced.
Coming to this late, but I am interested to know if your view is still the same as when you wrote this 13 hours ago.
I don't think you have really answered the question about the logical incoherence put to you in another comment [1], which was replying to this comment by you (now flagged, sadly):
> If a bunch of people are saying "this thing hurts me" and your stance is "well you shouldn't be hurt so shut-up".
> Yeah, you're an asshole.
Honestly, genuinely: my feelings are hurt by reading your comments here - I find it a bit chilling, it makes me uncomfortable. I'm a free speech advocate, and I perceive (rightly or wrongly) a frightening swing away from free speech values in the last few years, and your comment triggered uncomfortable feelings. Perhaps I'm wrong about this, perhaps my view is biased somehow. We could debate it, and maybe you'd point out something I hadn't considered, and maybe I'd change my view. But until then, the fact is, my feelings are hurt by your comments. And I'm definitely not the only one - there's more than a "bunch" of free speech advocates in the world who find this line of argument chilling.
As a free speech advocate, I believe you should have the right to say what you want, and that my hurt feelings should not prevent you from doing so. But don't you see the logical incoherence in your position? How can you argue that you are not an asshole under your own logic? (To be clear, I am not calling you an asshole, just pointing out that your own logic would seem to conclude that you are an example of one, while also containing the statement that you are not one.)
You call people assholes, dismiss people's arguments out of hand, and quote people saying things they didn't even say (in quote marks, too). I think you're just a dick. I'm glad you consider yourself a free speech absolutist though, that's something I guess.
I never said you violated anyone's free speech. I shouldn't have called you a dick though, I just got frustrated. I was trying to make a nuanced point, maybe it was a dumb one, but if so, it would be nice to be put right rather than dismissed.
Please don't post this sort of flamewar rhetoric to HN, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. It just dumbs everything down further and makes it even meaner.
Plenty of users are making similar points to yours in thoughtful ways that are within in intended spirit of the site. If you'd please do that instead, or else refrain from posting, we'd appreciate it.
Okay, so the response is, "You deserve to be hurt because you're harmful so shut up"?
Anyway,
You're twisting words to try to pretend that "woke scolding" exclusively means "asking people to stop one-sidedly hurting others for no real reason".
So I'll ask again in a narrower form that is harder to deliberately misinterpret:
Telling me I'm privileged (especially as a rationale for excluding me from certain groups at work or school) hurts me. It makes me angry and/or sad. What's your response?
I personally dislike the conversation around "privilege" since the word invokes an objective response, instead of the subjective one that's intended.
Worse, the whole concept of privilege is meant to be academic and thoughtful. Instead, it gets used as a weapon to dismiss opinions and belittle a speaker.
If a completely new word had been invented to describe the concept, I doubt the concept would illicit the reaction it does. But given the reactions people do have, I avoid it.
> The idea that one person saying "this hurts me please stop" is logically or morally equal to the person doing the harm
You are saying that a person saying "this hurts me" means that they are actually being harmed. I don't agree.
People frequently lie, usually with a motive.
And if you think words can cause harm, than perhaps you can see that the words "this hurts me" can be used to get what you want, your motive, and that can cause harm.
It's a constant censorship presence looking over your shoulder and reminding you to say things "properly". It's an effort to infect your instincts and thinking.
On my android phone's home screen, there is a "discover" page if you move the view towards the left that opens up a news feed. It is easy to accidentally swipe onto it and I find it kind of annoying. One of my friends asked me how to get rid of it. It took me something like an hour to figure out how to turn off the "discover" feed. I learned that they have moved the toggle in a past version.
Yesterday, I accidentally scrolled onto my discover page and saw that google has added a new distinct information section to it. I don't feel like having these headlines clamouring for my attention whenever I scroll. Now I will have to learn how to turn that off.
These "auto-opt in" features have a psychological attrition effect on the user as the toggle moves, and people's time and attention is distracted elsewhere, and also by the features themselves as they are added and cannot be customized. You should update your model of this comment section's subject matter to account for this fact.
This word insinuates that a tyrant can only be of male gender. Plenty of women have broken the glass ceiling on this one. Please consider using the word "overperson".
Also worth noting that editing recommendations are a part of the M365 office suite. I agree with those voicing concern as AI is very new still and can have huge implications at FAANG scale, but I’m not surprised to see Google at this.
Exactly. The paranoia among the plugged in libertarian set (quite frankly Andreesen is one of the worst) gets a little over the top sometimes. This is very clearly Google chasing another product's feature set. They're not even the market leader in this space!
This expression may be offensive to people who prefer the expression "special military operation". Also, you seem to be accessing Google Docs from a Russian IP, so you can potentially be locked up for 15 years. Please reconsider ...
I don't really know how I feel about this, the headline is a bit jarring but I guess it is from their own documentation.
But without more than the one "landlord" example, it is hard to really get a feel for what this may be doing. That is a strange example though... I have never seen anyone complain about the word "landlord".
Regardless, I don't like the idea of Google or any company having the power to dictate what is socially acceptable or not in what should be a private document.
Especially when important context will likely be missed.
To add. I am gay, I have certain use cases for the related "F" word. I can almost guarantee it will complain about it... but using it is also my right. And some people find "Queer" offenses and some do not, I have seen some heavy debates about it in the community. I would not want Google to take a stance on that.
Edit: I was curious to test this theory for myself. It looks like this is only in a workspace document and not google docs as a whole right now. So... maybe someone else can confirm what happens?
Also, depending on a locale those exact words have active and totally unrelated meanings. (cigarettes and weird).
Landlord, landlady, I mean, that's ridiculous. Google and all other language activists will have to deconstruct all languages and purge them of historical artifacts that get in the way --all languages contain these things.
I suppose they can slowly replace everyone's languages with a single universal synthetic language like Esperanto but one that's further purified and also controlled by an Academy that ensures meanings remain static and don't deviate from official definitions and uses.
Totally. I understood that from your phrasing and I was sure you were aware of what you were describing. You set up the pins so I knocked em down. (also, I was fascinated with Esperanto as a kid.. and also with Orwell. So your twisty path to saying Newspeak was right on my wavelength and I skipped a few preambles)
[edit] Your profile says "google fanatic". Is this a good time to maybe elaborate on that? I would love to know..
As another comment mentioned, Google scale makes things very complex; a non incidental (i.e. English) global language might be very welcome in certain groups, but it being de facto requires, as you said, of a governing body that can regulate and enforce that.
At least in Spanish, there is such a body, the RAE (Real Academia Española, The Royal Spanish Academy), which decrees "unanimously" which words and phrases are canonical Spanish and which not, including regulating regionalisms found across every Spanish speaking country. As you might expect, outside a certain... circle, the RAE is a laughingstock.
The idea that a single entity could rule the way people communicate at that level of granularity, so insidiously, from the perspective of a layman looks unprecedented and unfathomable, that is, until you present them with a taste of the modern scale at which mega corporations operate.
So, consider for a minute an organization like the RAE having Google scale and Google reach. Would something like that mean the starting point of a (very) slippery slope, a snowball rolling down, powered by the pockets of the wealthy and the might of the policymakers? A future where the principles governing the cryptocurrency world will end up driving global policy?
I mention cryptocurrencies because one of their most prominent characteristics is that "Code is Law". As i see it, it's the inexorable outcome resulting from the underlying technological platform, its limitations and its philosophies, not something intended but more of an emergent property exposing the fundamental tradeoffs required to automatically run strict policies at a scale that large.
What would it take then for public policy to go the same route? For a hypothetical evil group of policymakers in awe of the success of Google et al exerting such outsized influence, to take over the same path, and to transform actual, fiscal law into an unwieldy paradigm, a sort of "Law is Code is Law".
We already see glimpses of it when there are leaks and whistleblowers illuminate us about the dark operations of the governments using megacorps to influence the public, but how far would success with this sort of policies with "innocent" subjects like grammar would bring them closer to applying it to the whole cake?
Well, back then grammatical genders had not been conflated with sexual genders. It was, pardon the language, inconceivable, that they would be conflated. Lots of languages have gendered nouns and some have gendered verbs.
Nouns aren't actually grammatically gendered in Esperanto. But when a noun refers to something that can physically have gender, male is the root or default.
Esperanto was invented by a single individual who spoke several languages but who didn't have formal training in linguistics.
It basically started off as a pet project of a young (teenage) language enthusiast, so I wouldn't scrutinize his decisions too carefully or expect every decision he made to be optimal.
Or every decision made back then to conform to today's societal values. no language will ever meet that bar. instead of allowing this natural evolution, seems Google (and let's say 10 people at Google) seem to have decided to be the arbiters of linguistic integrity.
> But without more than the one "landlord" example, it is hard to really get a feel for what this may be doing. That is a strange example though... I have never seen anyone complain about the word "landlord".
The slippery slope is real. I'm sure they'll come after words like master, slave, "pregnant women", etc.
Yes, but the implication is that if you don't use the suggestions you are evil.
If you type "teh" and refuse to correct it to "the", people will just say you're wrong. But progressives have started to frame everything as being either good or evil. (This used to be the domain of the religious right.) So if you stick to "landlord", you don't have a classic opinion on spelling, instead you're denying "landnonbinary's" right to exist.
Something like this happened 8 years ago when a maintainer refused a merge request to replace "he" with "them" in libuv because he thought it was a valueless change. He was destroyed because of it. https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015
I believe this side of the debate is way too exaggerated. I really dislike this language policing, but slippery slope is a logical fallacy for a reason.
Maybe they'll end up with a similar approach to border disputes on Google Maps, where they show everyone what they want to see.
Imagine how confusing it'd be if all your references to the "master branch" are replaced with references to a "main branch" for anyone else who reads your technical document.
For the 150 million kids who use Google Classroom[0] (which includes Google Docs), these optional little purple squiggly underlines would wield unquestionable authority, indelibly shaping word choice for millions of uncritical children, subconsciously guiding an entire generation away from words that might facilitate wrongthink.
But thankfully the people wielding this power are unelected, unaccountable and far from Capitol Hill. Otherwise it'd be Orwellian authoritarianism, and that'd be awful!
Still sounds silly to me. The bogus anti-CRT panic is a much more real and direct threat to education. Or Texas’ longstanding ability to effectively veto the textbooks used by schools nationwide.
If, say, Ron DeSantis was in charge of the system and was using it to discourage inclusionary language that would bum me out. But that hypothetical is still several orders of magnitude less serious than the current reality of banning the discussion of disfavored topics in classrooms under penalty of law.
One is "regulating" speech in schools only indirectly and with a gentle nudge that can be disabled entirely by school districts or simply ignored by teachers and pupils.
The other is directly regulating speech in schools by force of law, statewide, and with no ability for local districts or teachers to override or ignore it. Imagine if instead of banning discussions of gender identity, the bill banned the use of those words that Google puts a purple line under. I think we would both agree that's bad? Whether you agree with the outcome or not, the Florida bill is a much more serious threat to speech and education.
I think every state has a curriculum and guidelines but we do not, in fact, regularly ban topics from discussion or provide a private right to action for offended parents.
You shouldn't have the free speech to talk about sex with kids in kindergarten or third grade.
Public schools should be for everyone. You can talk about that with your own kids, but not in public schools. Kids shouldn't be forced to hear your speech about sex.
> To add. I am gay, I have certain use cases for the related "F" word. I can almost guarantee it will complain about it... but using it is also my right. And some people find "Queer" offenses and some do not, I have seen some heavy debates about it in the community. I would not want Google to take a stance on that.
Sigh. This has become such a point of contention and it really makes me sad. I despise playing the "I'm gay" card, but I've had so many straight people try and police me for my vocabulary or demeanor. A couple years ago I was walking out of a theater with some friends, and I called a ridiculous scene "gay" in the lobby; to my surprise, a woman in her mid-20s looked up from her phone and rushed over to me so she could lecture me on how derogatory I was being. Having to explain to her that my boyfriend is waiting to pick us up in the parking lot is not a discussion either of us wanted to have.
Again, I really do hate talking about my sexuality, mainly for reasons like this. But I genuinely find the "LGBTQ white knights" types more harmful to my daily life than the people who are just blatantly homophobic. If someone hurls an insult at me, I can just ignore them. If someone stops me to correct my behavior or educate me on queer sensitivity, now I have to humiliate the both of us. I don't want to spend my time doing that.
It's a good day to be a Libreoffice user, I guess.
I feel you 100%. I don't come off as gay (nothing wrong with that if you do, but as I generally say... I knew I was a nerd far earlier than I knew I was gay). I don't wear rainbow anything.
So unless we are talking about my partner, you may not know. There have been times I have been working closely with someone for a year plus and they were shocked to find out.
I say that because, yeah being called "homophobic" for the way I speak... is one of my biggest pet peeves. Like I get it, your heart is in the right place. But this policing of language is the easy stuff, it is a feel good "I did something for someone else" that really doesn't move the needle at all.
It is the same thing when white people get upset about a person of color using the N word. Or any other words that have been demonized in the past but as a community many of us are actively trying to take back those words.
Frankly I hope that there is a point that the "F" word is no longer considered derogatory because we took it back. We took the power away from those that wish to use it as a homophobic slur. We turned into something else entirely. But we can't do that when there are tools like this that will forever continue to give those that wish to use the words in a negative way power over language.
I too have never heard of "landlord" being non-inclusive, and I actually do follow a lot of un-inclusive talk(ie guys, motherboard, whitelist/blacklist, master/slave database, black/Black off the top of my head), and the suggested replacements aren't even actual synonyms - "property owner" and "proprietor" don't mean the same thing as landlord. A property owner may not be renting a property to a 3rd party, and a proprietor is the holder of any business or property, not just housing properties that are rented to 3rd parties.
I don't even understand what the problem with landlord could be...is it because it is masculine and landlady should also be included? Because I know literally zero people who have ever made the distinction that a landlord is a male. Or is it the "lord", implying an underclass(more like master/slave)?
I'm guessing that landlord/landlady doesn't leave room for alternative genders. Perhaps they need to invent "landperson". But inventing new words is probably outside their remit for this feature rollout. Bonus for removing the class implications. Oh and any trace of usefulness in the word's historical meaning.
Yeah this is actually a good example of how comfortable capitalism is subsuming subversive countercultural forces for its own purposes.
Landlord is a fairly loaded, and therefor powerful, word. It doesn't hide the archaic relationship it represents, or the power imbalance inherent in it. I'm sure a lot of landlords would prefer we use a more euphemistic term that does obscure those elements.
It is also gendered, which is unrelated to the first thing but can provide a proximate reason to encourage people to switch to a euphemism.
I'm not trying to conspiracy-brain this or argue that's a specific intended goal of google or this product or anything. It's just a fun illustration of a powerful and frightening trend that has been noted in all kinds of spaces for decades at this point.
Now this is a fucking interesting take. Yes, "landlord" has a history rooted in the middle ages, when lords literally owned the serfs who lived on their property. The (google-initiated??) attempt to remove that word from the language even after it survived into the modern day could very well be a subtle first attempt to see whether a corporation can deprive us serfs of the words we need to describe their dominance (and the offense it embodies to individual rights).
It's not quite conspiracy brained, because someone else pointed out here that no one - not even the wokest of woke - took issue with the word "landlord" before. This appears to be an example of a marketing team at Google going through tons of patterns and words that they would flag and trying to find one that won't yet be offensive to anyone because it's not yet become part of the culture war. They may even have invented it themselves just for the purpose of marketing this, uh, "feature".
I think you're right close to the center of describing what's happening in the corporate thrust to leverage wokeness as excuse to control speech on platforms. And I'm someone who appreciates good moderation - and always tried to practice it in my forums - but this ain't that.
That's so nineties it's quaint, even cute. Using the default masculine was totally reasonable for policewomen and actresses and manhole covers... but only made sense when the goal of rearranging language was about removing inequality, rather than establishing new hierarchies based on "identity" - which is a thing you can claim you chose or claim was forced upon you, as it suits you, depending on the rhetorical context. No, definitely a single or dual gender noun won't work. Maybe a system of emojis or animated gifs instead of the "lord" part of the word. We might need a new version of Unicode for this.
Someone else mentioned locale differences (and has been mentioned a few places here) and that particular example came to mind since I have it in my first comment.
Not being British, I don't know how often that is used now (anyone know?).
But this also brings up important discussions like what if you are doing a time piece. You could be talking about a bundle of sticks. "Don we now our gay apparel" is something many of us sing (or at least hear) and I don't consider it offensive. But you wouldn't really write anything "new" with it, but if what you are writing is related to that time period... then it fits.
Side Note: South Park has a FANTASTIC episode on the "F" (gay) word that to me is one of the best episodes they have ever made and does a great job at pointing out that this issue is not cut and dry by any means. Season 13, Episode 12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_F_Word_(South_Park)
>> Not being British, I don't know how often that is used now (anyone know?)
Anecdotally, in Glasgow, it is still far more common to hear “I’m going out for a fag” than “i’m going out for a cig” - maybe 5 to 1-ish more common.
That said, smoking is pretty rare these days, certainly compared to ~20 years ago when the indoor ban was introduced.
There’s plenty of the population here would draw a blank and look at you confused if you tried to use the word as a slur - they’d eventually get what you mean but the slur term is not really used here, it’d be jarring to hear someone use the word that way.
Thank you for the insight, that makes sense. I mean I know I saw it referenced in comedy a lot so why change it.
Yet here we are with Google (likely, again I can't confirm it but what are the chances that "fag" and similar words are not part of this list) imposing a US English view on the world. Even if it is just a recommendation you can ignore, slowly that influences you.
How does a red squiggly line make a problem here? In a non-English language I get tons of false-positives on actually correctly written words and I just either ignore them, or “add to dictionary”. I assume dismiss or something similar is just as easy to do here, it really doesn’t worth raising our heart rate over.
Which is why this kind of feature is useful. I'm British and I live and work in the USA. Having software prompt me that the word I use for cigarettes may not be interpreted the same way here provides me real value.
I see the potential value in it, but are you always writing for a USA audience?
If you are not, you are using a tool that (seemingly) is pushing US language norms on other users of the English language.
Further, because the app could be pushing you to not use those words that are perfectly suitable in your culture. Overtime you may find yourself not using them in every day which would be gradually changing your unique culture.
Maybe there is some functionality here that I am missing that actually takes audience into account. But from what I can tell from the outside this is pushing one English ideal onto the world.
Google Docs has a language setting, which I use already - if I'm writing for a US audience I set my document language to US/English and it helps me with spelling words like "favorite" and "neighbor".
US language norms have been taking over the entire world ever since syndication of US-produced media began.
Even thirty years ago there were jokes about how you could go to Australia and understand every word they said and not understand what was said at all. That's decreasing each year.
100 years ago you could recognize where in the US someone was from very easily; now we all speak variations of "Californian".
If that's how you wish to express yourself, go ahead, but if you're writing as yourself (as opposed to writing in the name of someone or something else) there's nothing wrong with using the words and spellings from your own dialect rather than that of your audience. Would you try to hide your accent when speaking in person?
I am already overexposed to these American cultures, and I find the idea of them telling me that the way my culture speaks and expresses its self is "wrong" to be rather disturbing, considering the effect that mass exposure to US culture has had on us.
I wonder where the rabbit hole ends. If the acceptable replacement for landlord is 'property owner', what happens after someone points out that 'property owner' is easily a synonym for 'slaver' if you go back a few years?
I strongly believe in equal rights for all, but it is hard to ignore the mounting evidence that a lot of people just want to go through the motions and not try actually make it happen.
As usual with these forced changes in language, like master and main, there is zero proof these word are offensive. Usually it’s only the activists who care instead of the supposed victims who need to be protected.
It’s a very tiny but very vocal minority pushing these changes. Unfortunately a lot of those people work at Google and other tech companies with a huge reach.
The master/main thing drives me bonkers. Master has several meanings in English, one of which is in "master recording"; the original recording of a song, or the final, delivered recording of a song. It has zero to do with slaves. Another definition of "master" is to fully and completely understand and grok a topic of learning, or a technique.
> It’s a very tiny but very vocal minority pushing these changes
This vocal minority would have no power if it didn't also serve corporate interests. I don't think all these companies are "victim" of a vocal minority here, American companies actively push these ideas because while people are bickering on wedge issues or blame each other's race/sex for all their problems, there is no time left to look into the ethics of their business practices.
> It’s a very tiny but very vocal minority pushing these changes.
I agree. Though I think it's arguably more than a 'very tiny' minority, it is still a minority nonetheless. My wife and I are pretty far to the left, but in the sense that we really want to see America become a modern social democracy, a la Western Europe. The culture wars over racism and other minorities doesn't really resonate with us. But the Republican platform really doesn't resonate with us. I think there are a lot of other people like us that are aghast at the current political climate, where the wings seem to have taken over.
I miss the old Democratic Party, when it cared more about labor. I wish we could have some of that back, along with a healthy dose of Medicare for All. And maybe we could stop tossing around the word 'privilege' as accusation, while we're dumping the war over what words are least offensive to sensitive readers. I haven't even met any black person (and a third of my team is black!) who cared about that shit, they just want to be treated like everyone else.
Do you think there will come a point when you will vote Republican? It's anecdotal but the last year I've heard several Democrats saying they are voting Republican next election.
I think that is unlikely, but never say never. It is pretty easy, as a Gen X white male, to feel like the Democratic Party most assuredly doesn't have my interests as their priority. But the lip service they give single payer healthcare is a good bit stronger than anything the GOP will ever support, even if it remains just lip service.
For me to vote Republican, though, it would need to be more than just voting against Democrats because I think they're misguided. The GOP would have to stand for something. "Whatever Democrats don't like" isn't much of a platform.
Uh-oh. I'm Australian and we love a good swear-word every now & then. It's gonna be raining purple squiggles for me.
We once had a tourism campaign that ran overseas. The slogan was "So where the bloody hell are ya?". In Australia, it's very common to say "bloody" in everyday conversation, and it's not at all offensive. But in the UK apparently this was very offensive, and the ad was banned. [1]
We're so cavalier with swearing, a tourism campaign for the Northern Territory was literally "C U in the NT" [2]. To this day I still see the stickers for this campaign on cars, all the way down in Melbourne!
My point being, different cultures have pretty different attitudes to what is "offensive".
That was my first thought, the americanisation of global culture (especially online) already causes so many annoying issues. My kids get confused on how to spell things because everything online and in TV/movies is different to what we tell them. They get auto-correct on their devices telling them they're making mistakes when they're not (such as Firefox in this very comment underlining "americanisation" and telling me it should use a Z, despite my language being set to EN-AU). We have people forgetting our own slang and historically-common phrases because they've been replaced in popular media with American equivalents.
Is Google going to detect the persons location and suggest things relevant to their local culture? Of course not, they're going to tell my kid to speak more american or punish them with red (or purple in this new case) underlines which makes them feel bad... despite them doing nothing wrong.
This is actually helpful. Right now even definition of "woman" is a mine field.
Foreigners often struggle with most recent dialect of P.C. English. Imagine someone who learned English from 1980ties movies and Southpark, and did not updated much...
For example we could use "African-American" in non ironic way, correct word now is probably capitalised "Black", that was offensive just a few decades ago.
This is also "the problem" of the internet where pretty much the US "dictates" the discourse, words that are perfectly acceptable in other countries/cultures effected by this. See also the spanish word "negro". One of the most ridiculous example was the Uruguayan soccer player Edinson Cavani who plays in the UK and used the word "negrito" in an Instagram post and had to apologize https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-soccer-england-mun-cavani...
Hope there aren't many Google Docs user in Montenegro!
There are at least a dozen or so common insult words, that at one point in time or another were medical terminology for mental retardation.
Whenever you have a term for something sensitive or disadvantaged, there's a tendency to rapidly cycle terms. Attempting to "outrun" the baggage is easier than solving it.
I mean, there is also the option of politely refusing to have the definitions of words changed from under our feet. I have no trouble using the word "retarded" to indicate a mental deficit. Why do you? Why does anyone? So what if some people used it as an insult? Why do they get to control the narrative?
I think it's fine to use "retarded" like that if that's your culture and how you learnt it. People will know you're from a different background, maybe very old or foreign, or whatever. But if you're just trying to force an old meaning onto it, people will misunderstand you since you're not using the common "protocol".
I guess the problem is it's hard to pinpoint when precisely the "current" meaning becomes the "old" one. This is doubly difficult for meanings which contradict each other (see "woman").
What happens when a substantial portion of the population refuses to adopt the new meaning? It seems like the language gets forked then. This doesn't seem to do any good at all, increasing polarization and creating obstacles to clear communication.
At this point the vast majority of everyone alive has only ever heard 'retarded' used as an insult, few people today ever had it applied to themselves in any legitimate context. For that reason I think there's not much point in trying to police its use as some kind of special case -- at this point it is exactly like calling someone a dumbass.
Indeed, but is that really what's happening here? Is it really collective if all these changes are being pushed by american fortune 500 companies, and most people who abide by them are doing so out of fear?
Okay, fine, if I take away that last bit, would you acknowledge my main point? If this is all just a natural evolution of language, why does it all come from american academic institutions and corporations?
That's one way of looking at it. Language can also be looked at as a communication protocol - a way of transferring thoughts and ideas from one mind to another.
With this perspective, it is extremely important for all users of the protocol to agree on the definitions of the primitives (words). If they don't, they're basically forking the protocol, forcing overhead to clarify terms on every interaction with people who speak a different version.
It's also not how all language works - French for instance has a prescriptive dictionary. Many useful languages do in fact.
It's literally how language works. Words are wholly invented things, whose meaning is completely derived from usage and context. We make up sequences of sounds and over time we get each other to accept what ideas those sequences of sounds represent.
Yes, the Académie Française exists, but fun fact … it's reactive to usage. And it's by no means an absolute authority on the language as it's used colloquially.
I'm not sure the wider speaking public is driving a lot of this politicization of English, particularly in the US. It seems to be a small minority with an outsized influence.
I'm not sure you should discard the perspective of language-as-protocol so readily either. Computing protocols are also languages, specified to a necessary degree of precision, and maintained by a standards body. These also evolve with usage, and there are many instances of common usage being added to the protocol specification for things like HTTP.
All I'm suggesting is that we evolve our language consciously, and all together, and not allow a fringe group to hijack the process.
How many new words are minted by a single speaker, or song, or movie, or pop culture moment? How many from a single group who merely entered the zeitgeist at the right time? How many come entirely from corporations, and advertising?
Language is always an "all together" process but it is also always a process that starts in the fringe, and spreads out.
I agree that many words are created and spread as memes. But I struggle to come up with examples (outside of religion) where the meanings or usages of words are prescribed by a small group, and great offense is taken when the words are not used according to the prescriptions.
I don't believe language prescriptivism has any merit. Words have value because they imply a meaning and if I can use a word, and you understand my meaning when I use that word, the word has value.
Prescriptivism doesn't "work pretty well in programming languages". It's a frustrating requirement of current programming languages and runtimes.
If someone were to release a runtime that could reliably do "what a programmer means" instead of "what the programmer types" that runtime would be heralded as one of the greatest advancements in computer science in history.
Thankfully, the human mind is not as limited in its ability to parse context.
Ah yes, but how do you interpret "what the programmer means" besides "what he types"? If what he types is open to various interpretations, it becomes impossible to divine what he means without asking him for clarification. This is the case with spoken language, especially to audiences with differing contexts. That's exactly why having a maximally simple and clear reference to the meanings of words is important. It's in order to avoid having to clarify what you mean when you say "women's swimming competition", for instance.
>Because language is a collective action. Definitions evolve with usage.
>That's just how language works.
I'd call language a social construct. Whereas Using language is an action.
The former is a noun (person, place or thing -- in this case, a conceptual thing) and the latter is a verb (word describing an action) phrase relating to that thing.
And except for group chants (e.g., "Let's Go Mets!"), choirs, etc., using language is definitely an individual not collective action
That said, as a social construct, languages change all the time, exactly as you pointed out, based on usage.
You'll never catch me calling an SO (significant other -- which is a decades-old attempt to be more inclusive -- and private) 'bae', nor will you hear me say 'very unique', no matter how many other people use those terms.
Am I a bad, evil human being because I won't use various terms that are in broad use? I say 'no'.
Why? Because I (my brain/consciousness) control my communication systems, not popular usage.
I do my best to be kind and empathetic to those around me, not because I'm being forced to do so, but because I believe that doing so is a trait common to decent human beings, one of whom I aspire (and usually succeed) to be.
I'll go even further and say that context matters. There are many things I might say while down the pub with friends that I'd never say in a professional context or among strangers.
There's actually a term for that. It's called "code switching"[0].
And that brings up an odd, but widespread, change in our social discourse.
The online world, and especially social media, has (unless one takes steps to avoid doing so) comingled our personal, private and professional lives. Which is why I took/still take to heart advice I got nearly 30 years ago:
Don't put anything online that you wouldn't want
to see on the front page of your local newspaper
(back then, local newspapers were still a
thing).
My boss/colleagues/clients/customers don't need to know what I do when I'm not working unless they happen to also be a part of my personal life. And those in my personal sphere don't need to know what's going on in my professional life.
That's not to say there's never any overlap, but different facets of our lives don't need to intersect. Nor, in many (most?) cases, should they.
What's more, It's my choice as to what words I choose to express. And it's absolutely the choice of other folks to call me out if they feel that those words I choose aren't appropriate.
I'd add that I have a big mouth and am often deliberately inappropriate in (mostly successful) attempts at humor. But not in contexts where such things are socially unacceptable (e.g., in professional situations).
And if some folks don't appreciate me or my sense of humor and shun me as a result, that's just fine. No one is required to be subjected to me or my language.
I want to be around people who want to be around me. And not all of those either.
I don't require anyone's approval with regard to what I say or when. But if I misjudge the context of a situation, I may find myself (and I have) facing judgement, and sometimes consequences, for my speech.
Fortunately for me, at least in the US, I can say pretty much (with certain exceptions) anything I want without legal consequences. But that doesn't stop anyone from taking issue with what I say.
I'd ask that you go back and re-read my comment (several times, if necessary) and let me know if I'm not being inclusive or empathetic. That should be amusing.
I have no problem with what you said, as there's an acknowledgement that your choices can face consequences.
Every generation leaves behind huge numbers of individuals who do not evolve their usage of certain words. And every generation struggles with the previous' generation's collection of those people.
>Every generation leaves behind huge numbers of individuals who do not evolve their usage of certain words. And every generation struggles with the previous' generation's collection of those people.
Fair enough. But it seems to me that as long as people can make themselves understood and aren't actively engaging in douchebaggery, why should anyone care?
While I encourage and respect others' ability to speak their mind, I'm amazed at how invested some folks (and they are of all stripes, too) are in telling other people what to say, do or think.
We used to call such folks "busybodies"[0].
And there used to be a stock phrase to use when interacting with such people:
Mind your own fucking business.
Which usually didn't work, but made one's position pretty clear.
How is that word doing anything other than standing in for the concept above?
A quick google search for the phrase "x is doing a lot of work there" netted just this one "relevant" result[0].
That link appears to think it's roughly similar to "that requires some unpacking."
If that's the sense in which you used that phrase, I'd be very interested to hear what, exactly you think needs to be "unpacked."
Especially since there was no hidden/obfuscated meaning in my use of "actively." In fact, I meant it exactly, no more, no less than the the definition above.
I'd really appreciate it if you'd elucidate on that. Thanks!
>By your own admission, you use words with the intent to give offense as a form of humor.
I think you're talking about me (nobody9999) not thegrimmest.[3]
With that in mind, what I said was "I'd add that I have a big mouth and am often deliberately inappropriate in (mostly successful) attempts at humor. But not in contexts where such things are socially unacceptable"
Let's "unpack" that. I am "deliberately[0] inappropriate[1]" in this sense:
deliberate (adj.)
2. characterized by awareness of the consequences
inappropriate (adj.)
not appropriate
which is useless without defining the term that's being negated[2]:
appropriate (adj.)
especially suitable
There is certainly intent, but inappropriate doesn't mean "giving offense," it means not especially suitable.
As you've implied and I agree, words have meanings. But you're ascribing a meaning to a word that isn't accurate.
Why is that? Are you unfamiliar with the word? Or are you simply making an assumption as to my motives and/or thought processes?
In either case, I'd ask that you reassess your statement.
>The rest of your comment is bad faith condensation.
Is it? I (unlike you) didn't quote me out of context.
I (unlike you, despite being asked to do so several times) responded with specific informattion to clarify my point.
I (unlike you) assumed good faith on your part and attempted to more clearly explain my thoughts. You did nothing of the sort and made a point of putting words in my mouth that I never said or implied, and don't believe.
It's unfortunate, but it seems I've been caught not taking my own advice[0]. Again. More's the pity.
>You're claiming that you're deliberately inappropriate but only when it's appropriate and never when it would give offense.
Yes. That is almost exactly what I said and definitely captures my meaning. I'm glad I could (after a fashion) get my point across to you.
>Why isn't "people of color" as offensive as "colored people"?
Great question. I was surprised when "people of color" came into the lexicon given the history of its similar sounding term. I wonder who decides what is offensive and what isn't? Who gave "people of color" a pass while being so close to the other?
Not zmgsabst, but: It's like calling someone a homosexual. The phrasing reduces someone to that characteristic. People of color emphasizes they're whole people with a characteristic. Also be aware there is no more unity of thought among people of color than there is among other demographics, so this is just one person's understanding based on listening to comrades of color.
There's also history in geography. What's offensive to people in one city, county, state, country, etc won't hit the same everywhere. In the UK, a fag is a cigarette, and queer was the more popular pejorative. I don't have a good view on how terms for ethnicity/race/etc evolved elsewhere, but there's probably lots of variety.
> The phrasing reduces someone to that characteristic. People of color emphasizes they're whole people with a characteristic.
If it were just that you would see a lot more pushback against phrasing like "LGBTQ+ people", "Black people", etc.
I think it's mostly the history: this is one of many terms we have moved away from, and using an obsolete term marks you as likely having obsolete views.
People wanted a generic word that collectively refers to all people who aren't white. They didn't want to use "non-white" because they wanted a positive word that emphasises what people are rather than what they're not. And they didn't want to use "colored" because that word has too much historical baggage (at least in the US.) So "people of color" was born.
I’ve heard it said people with disabilities is better than disabled people because you should put people first, rather than define them by what’s different. I’m not American or a minority, and coloured people has been a bad phrase all my life. We’ve stopped using BAME apparently.
And there is starting to be a movement against the use of the POC term, because it lumps everyone with more than a given amount of melanin into one homogenous “non-white” category, instead of recognizing the actual diversity of people from across the world. Like, what does a recent Malay immigrant culturally have in common with an American whose ancestors were forcibly brought over 200 years ago and enslaved?
To be honest, I can see why ‘POC’ would be culturally reductionist and have been kind of surprised at the progressive adoption of it. Seems obvious that it will be deprecated.
The point of "POC" was to form a political coalition of all the non-white people so they wouldn't fight each other; Irish and Italians "became white" earlier in US history by basically showing off they could be racist to black people too.
It can't last forever, since young people always want to start new language, but the replacements like "BIPOC" aren't catching on since nobody knows what it means.
part of the issue is people use language as a way of differentiating themselves from the wrong kind of people. this is why language needs to constantly change because eventually the wrong kind of people learn the new way to talk.
I work in Japan, and this is so hard for non-native speakers. An example, an HR staffer meant to say "female empowerment" but said "woman-power" instead. There is an implicit assumption of bad faith or "not of our tribe" if one doesn't get the euphemistic language exactly correct, it really is a bunch of shibboleths.
> I work in Japan, and this is so hard for non-native speakers. An example, an HR staffer meant to say "female empowerment" but said "woman-power" instead.
Were they thinking of "joshiryoku"? That's a Japanese word that literally means "woman-power", but it's not feminist - it doesn't refer to "girl power", it means you're good at looking pretty.
Hmmm... excellent point. I think there is a clear cultural difference where "female empowerment" in the West includes things like women being equal to men and filling roles traditionally filled by men, where in Japan the ideal (among women to a greater degree) tends to be for women to be better at women's traditional roles, which goes beyond just looking pretty. So in this context the whole discussion around "female empowerment" may have been misguided, it's not clear this Japanese HR person had the same thing in mind as a Western HR person would.
(To the extent that "female empowerment" can imply "smashing the patriarchy"/tearing down the existing order, this usually not fully achievable in a corporate context.)
Well, apparently for the Supreme Court -where never the less the appointee inadvertently used biology as a basis for its determination (vg: I'm not a biologist...)
I wish this were true, but the minefield of the topic has grown out of the twitter-sphere. 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 once respected 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". This is a short step from what Google's new politically correct auto-suggestions are conditioning us towards.
> Right now even definition of "woman" is a mine field.
It is not. New words have been added to the vocabulary in order to better describe the world around us. So someone might choose to be called by one of those new words. But women are still women and people who are not women, well, they already weren't women.
Think of it like code. It used to be that the only options were ["man", "woman"]. Now new strings have been pushed to this list because people noticed that it did not cover all users.
What you are describing is the frustration that some people feel on being called by the wrong word.
But this has always been the case.
Call any human by the wrong label and frustration will be felt. That's not new.
I have clear memories from decades ago of a long haired man who I was friend with being angry at being called "woman" and one of my aunt who has a deep voiced being angry at being called "sir" over the phone.
The problem is that it actually is hard to define. If you’re a normal human being you won’t do dna tests or inspect people’s genitals or whatever to decide how to carry out your social interactions (and maybe you shouldn’t care anyway). You’ll probably end up with some combination of memory, guessing based on name, and ‘looks like a woman’. If you’re a state and are trying to make these classifications in law you’ll find it’s actually fraught with difficulties. This isn’t some modern problem with transgender people; there are plenty of people for whom biological sex is hard to categorise too, eg various kinds of intersex people, or those with unusual chromosomes or gene expression. Historic solutions would look like:
- apply social ostracism
- give some combination of legal rights of men and women
- go with however the person presents (and possibly avoid talking about it/have the person avoid the risk of confrontation about the matter)
- don’t define man or woman in the law and let the judges/people figure it out if need be
Maybe the problem is that the thing that tends to matter really is the social construct and not something that can be easily measured if only you had the right instrument. And then perhaps the issue is that legal definitions tend not to be as rigid as those used in, say, mathematics.
Another fun question to try to answer is what the definition of a person’s name is or should be. In my country there isn’t really such a thing as one’s legal name and the state/courts will go for a name you use for yourself or a name people know you as. But it’s still possible in society to get someone’s name wrong or to see cruel nicknames in the playground.
It’s very easy if you ignore the edge cases. Adult human female. Otherwise it’s like saying you can’t define “sandwich” because hotdogs exist. Almost any noun is like this
What's stopping you from using "African American"?
The switch to "Black" is part of an update to the style guide of newspapers and magazines. They publish articles describing the change, because it matters from an institutional history perspective. Someone looking at news stories before and after 2020 would notice that, so it merits explanation.
That being said, it's a style guide change. It's not a law. You won't be cancelled for not using a capital B.
> correct word now is probably capitalised "Black", that was offensive just a few decades ago.
Genuinely asking: is that correct? I had thought the "correct" way was something between Afro-American and Person of Colour/PoC, apparently I was living in the past. I'm asking because I'm not from the States.
> For example we could use "African-American" in non ironic way, correct word now is probably capitalised "Black", that was offensive just a few decades ago.
I could consider that a substantial improvement, to be honest. I actually knew a real African American, but almost everyone I've met who is called African American seems to in fact just be American. I wouldn't want to be called European American, myself, so I have always thought 'black' and 'white' where sufficient when a racial descriptor needs to be used for whatever reason.
I've read definitons that say "African-American" specifically refers to the descendants of slaves whereas immigrants from Africa are called <country>-American. For example, Elon is South African American.
That would certainly raise the complexity level a bunch. I wonder how many generations would it take to lose the qualifier? Am I a "German American" because 14 generations ago some guy named Casper immigrated to the US? I do look a bit German, and my name certainly is a derivative of a German surname, but at 14 generations I think it's safe to say the actual amount of German blood in my veins is vanishingly small.
Then likely youre not talking about the same thing anymore. Usually we talk about 'men' and 'women', and assume it makes up >90% of the population. Anyone else can simply pick whichever they feel like, can't they? So if you're pre-hrt trans, what is stopping you from just calling yourself a woman? Isnt that the whole point?
And twitter is like 50% of Internet and marketing. I do not want to be harashed by some weirdos. Just give me authoritative source for the most recent translation from 1980ties English.
US went through Cultural Revolution, deal with it!
> Would you enlighten me as to what it means, exactly? I'm not being facetious.
Depends on whether you think that word define objective individual traits and sexual characteristics or it is purely subjective. That's the true debate. It cannot be both.
All I know is that 5/10 years ago everybody knew what that word meant...
People who assert that the definition of "woman" isn't really in dispute usually say that women are "Adult Human Females." Others say this definition is exclusionary to some women, and therefore bigoted, and therefore an act of violence.
>Right now even definition of "woman" is a mine field.
Only for those who have an interest in placating the emotionally handicapped. The beauty of speaking freely, clearly and without censoring yourself out of regard to those with childlike sensibilities is that the only people you end up offending are those who deserve to be offended.
The verbal inclusivity effort, looked at from a distance, seems to be an unending exercise in neuroticism or a strange variant of compulsive obsessive disorder. Pity that Freud isn't alive today, he would skewer it in his characteristic witty style.
There isn't any chance of arriving at any stable "non-offensive" language if being offended is a virtue and some people must go out of their way to find a new outrage for their Twitter bubble everyday, if they want to stay relevant. Inclusivity is an effort to build a skyscraper on quicksand of ever shifting standards.
Not that standards were ever set in stone, but they tended to develop a lot slower. Nowadays their development is dictated by speed of a clicking tornado, which means that condoned language of 2015 is incredibly offensive and out of date by 2022.
I agree. Being offended cannot be the means to creating a more inclusive society. In fact it has the opposite effect, dividing society though the lazy mechanism of the “you are either with us or against us” gambit.
Rather, being offended is the means for the offended people to feel power over others, and to achieve catharsis through anger. No wonder it’s called “Outrage porn”, as indeed there is a certain orgasmic quality to expressing one’s anger.
Twitter, boxing, wars, medieval witch hunts, football, ... they are all various shades of the human craving for conflict.
> God help us if "rejects inappropriate word recommendations" is being added to people's ad profiles.
I tried to reproduce the "landlord" warning in Google docs, and I was unable to. So perhaps Google already makes personalized predictions regarding whether or not users want such suggestions.
Inclusive language corrections are currently only available in gsuite Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus.
Spelling and grammar checks have been around for ages and we use them all the time. However there is much more to good writing or reporting than just spelling and grammar and these spell check functions haven't been great at picking up on more than that.
Microsoft Word as part of its grammar checks also looks at refinements that include "Embarrassing Words", "Jargon", "Simpler Wording", "Words expressing uncertainty" and has a section around Inclusiveness and Slang to name only a few. But I don't see this reflected in a tweet somewhere around big brother nonsense. Grammarly are also creating a business model on providing these additional insights.
As someone who writes reports as part of my job I am glad that there are further refinements coming, especially around conciseness which is something new graduates struggle with.
I wonder if Google is applying their own guidelines here. Avoid words like "crush", "kill", "scale", "network effect", "market power", "market share", or even "market".
It makes sense in that context, but when people start coming at developers for having documentation that refers to "killing a process", blacklisting language starts to seem a bit silly. Automated tools tend to ignore important context.
Cool! I hope they'll eventually have a feature where you can put $placeholders in your document, and they get replaced automatically with the latest politically correct phrasing!
It just says that it'll just warn you with a purple underline. I don't think this is that bad tbh; it helps people write documents that are SFW and eliminates the anxiety of publishing something faux pas
for the people who use google docs for more illicit things, just ignore the underline??? It's not like google is saying "you can't use these words", more of an implicit nudge that you can choose to address or ignore
I think a lot of people disagree with it on a practical level.
Someone posted about how the word "Eskimo" should not usually be used, as it literally means "meat eater" and can be offensive. That's great information! I wouldn't mind an underline that told me that.
When words like "landlord" start getting underlined, the idea starts losing its appeal. Landlord is not an offensive word, and to try and remove it comes off as overly controlling for no reason.
I feel like programmers also have a more emotional connection to words like master, whitelist, blacklist, etc., because they are terms that are not offensive at all in context. When people try to change them, it always feels like someone is coming in and saying "I don't know what's going on, and I don't care. >:( You must conform to my worldview!!". Any offense is completely ungrounded, so tools that automatically try to fix "offensive language" have plenty of opportunities to quickly stop being useful.
I don't see the problem with it either. I write reports as part of my job and conciseness as an example, is something many new graduates struggle with.
Word has all of these areas currently within Microsoft Word and they also have an entire section around checking the inclusiveness of wording, but I don't see a tweet about that...
Actually, it is only going to be enabled for "work mode". It is not being turned on for everyone by default. Certainly not if you are talking about the consumer version of Google Docs, and not even all paid versions of Google Workspace. So not only does your employer have to pay for the feature, they may have to pay extra if they are currently purchasing one of the cheaper tiers of service.
Specifically, it is only going to be enabled for these editions of Google Workspace: Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus
It is *not* going to be enabled for: Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Enterprise Essentials, Education Fundamentals, Teaching and Learning Upgrade, Education Standard, Frontline, Nonprofits, G Suite Basic and Business customers
Even for those business accounts where this feature is enabled, the Workspace Admin for that domain can turn these stylistic suggestions on or off. (And you can turn off the inclusive language suggestions, while leaving other suggestions, such as for "concise language" on or off. There is a certain amount of granularity as to which classes of stylistic suggestions are enabled or not.) And users can also turn it on or off for themselves, regardless of what your Workspace Admin has decided about the defaults.
So sorry for bursting your righteous outrage bubble, but the intent is to enable this for those companies that might want to nudge their employees towards using more professional style of language. And if you don't like that, you can always leave and go work for some other employer....
I thought this was a great explanation up until I got to the unnecessary quip apologizing for "bursting my righteous outrage bubble". I haven't exhibited any outrage in my simple question so I don't know why you felt it necessary to add that.
They way you phrased your "simple question": "Then why don't they give the option to enable this in a "work mode" and not turn it on for everyone by default?" assumed that Google had turned it on for everyone, and it read as if you thought that was unreasonable and outrageous.
It might be nice if people assumed good faith, as opposed to assuming that anything that $BIG_COMPANY might do is unreasonable and evil. Certainly many people on these threads immediately leapt to the assumption that it was enabled for everyone and was trying to coerce people into some kind of DEI hell that conservatives hate.
I think you read a little too far into my original question since there isn't any indicator of how I feel about this one way or another. Though, to your second point, $BIG_COMPANY doesn't always have the general public's best interests at heart, especially not Google, so it's not hard to see why people are skeptical or worried about this sort of a change.
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
INCLUSIVE WARNING
Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers. Try instead:
'property owner' or 'proprietor'
Those are not suitable alternatives for the word 'landlord'. The word has meaning that the others don't. Trying to delete it from our language is regressive and oppressive.
If Google's new 'service' is going to start training people like this, I hate it.
INCLUSIVE WARNING
Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers. Try instead:
'utitlity' or 'benefit'
The best part of that example is the idea that 'landlord' is bad but 'property owner' is good. What? Tell that to people whose ancestors were property.
What about situations where being vulgar is appropriate? Can google vacuum up the context directly from the writer's brain?
As an aside, I find it funny how the English language shies away from calling vulgar words what they are in absolute terms, but instead uses a relative term "inappropriate" without answering the question "inappropriate for what?". That gives me the paternalistic vibes of "for you".
Similarly, "explicit" art is all around, but only vulgar is marked as "explicit".
> What about situations where being vulgar is appropiate? Can google vacuum up the context directly from the writer's brain
That's why it's a suggestion and not a feature that blocks you from writing whatever you please. It's like how I can type my last name into documents on computers I have never used before: the spellcheck indicator will show up and I will choose to just ignore it.
In the light of the sibling comment, small nudges can still result in large consequences. Even without forcing people to do something, chastising them for not adhering to google's vision of language is not something I'm looking forward to.
>What about situations where being vulgar is appropiate? Can google vacuum up the context directly from the writer's brain?
Uh, I'm going to be bold and assume the tool is just not made for vulgar tirades. Just how spell checking will bother you if you quote something that's not grammatically correct. /shrug
Well, grammatical correctness is at least standardized and thus absolute.
Oh wait, not in English.
But at least respected dictionaries exist for grammar, offering a vague consensus. But is there a dictionary for "absolute inappropriateness", against which we can check google's checker?
Even in languages with much stricter rules than English many people just ignore the strict rules except for a few pedantics, which are widely considered to be a bunch of insufferable twats.
There's plenty of dystopian fiction to show where things like this will end up. It continues to puzzle me why most people either want that totalitarian future or just dont seem to care.
Word has all of these areas currently within Microsoft Word and they also have an entire section around checking the inclusiveness of wording and has done so since 2020, but I don't see a tweet about that...
I can understand why. Google is the primary information distributor for billions of people, and they have the power to push said people towards any policy they so desire. Regardless of one's political background, any push of Google towards defining what is and is not acceptable for people to say or believe is EXTREMELY disturbing.
As I said, Microsoft has been doing these same checks for a number of years but nobody has thrown their arms up in the air at Microsoft. I would argue that Word is more common than Google docs.
Not everything is a malicious agenda, inclusiveness as an example and it’s use in writing is a big focus across a large number of organisations. Having my text editor pick up my systematic use of gender specific language would be helpful for me to consider.
Word is more common and also less intrusive, and unlike Google Docs, you can still use a much older version before they introduced this stuff (and I suspect many people do.)
I don't know what you mean by "a number of years" but I'm reasonably sure Word 2016 didn't have this, or if it is, it's not enabled by default.
You can't if you use the Office 365 suite of products.
My point is I don't understand the point of this Tweet or its relevance. The title of the article in question says "Google Docs will start nudging some users to write less dumbly". The article also references the fact that Google is introducing these features to compete with companies like Grammarly who are offering these types of service already.
In addition, these additional features are only enabled on the workspace version of Google, for now.
In my opinion, there is no problem in releasing features which improve the long standing spelling & grammar checks word processing tools have had for many many years.
I see this as basically the same thing as a grammar or spelling checker. It's essentially a suggestion that "some people might find this wrong". As long as I'm free to ignore this and use whatever words I please in my own Google doc, I don't really care. However, it's getting harder and harder not to see these moves as incremental steps towards corporate-backed censorship and violations of free speech. I could see Google removing my documents down the road if their algorithms backed by internal policy finds them "objectionable" -- with this feature as the first step only in hindsight. It's pernicious because if I freak out about it now and it doesn't happen then I'm a conspiracy theorist or alarmist. If I don't complain and it does happen, then it's probably too late and has become embedded in culture as acceptable forms of social regulation. It might be time to just do the hard work and run my own hardware and tools.
I'm not sure what the fuss is about, these are just groups of suggestions that can be turned on or off by the user. In the same way that you can specify you want spelling or grammar suggestions turned on or off. Grammarly has supported this for several years.
If you're worried about Google deciding what you can write, why are you using an online editing tool rather than a word processor app?
Google has gotten increasingly editorial. Voice Typing now alters my grammar and word choice to the point it's more like a game of telephone than a transcription service, and I regularly have to change the phrasing because it flat-out refuses to get the first word right. As a fun exercise, I invite everyone to just try and get Google to voice-type the word "o'clock".
Once they know how inappropriate you are they will be able to discontinue service for their most problematic users. History of using objectionable language in your gmail, texts (for Android users), and gmail? Maybe some of Google's activist employees will decide the company should discontinue service for the bottom X percentile of users.
As an anti-tech-censorship absolutist, I can see the utility of this as an opt-in feature for non-native English speakers. I don't love it, sure, but I'd rather us break up the tech monopolies entirely, than play tug of war with little political speech issues like this.
As a non-native speaker, I agree. Such tools are not new and extremely helpful when writing professional documents.
I also think that we are nowhere close to actually censoring words in editors like Google Docs, MS Word, ... even though it might seem like a small change from providing suggestions to enforcing them. But when you think about it, it's a huge change, both from a technical standpoint and even more so from an ethical one.
Providing writing suggestions is certainly far from the worst thing that tech monopolies have ever done.
The problem is that once you expose any surface area for censorship decisions, some of the loudest voices point to it and apply "inaction is violence" (an appropriate concept in some contexts, I should say.) Because the Euphemism Treadmill is a real thing [1], there's always grounds to pressure companies to ban or steer people away from newly incorrect language.
I can see many asking: Why steer writers away from slurs but not "biological male"? Is everyone at Google just... unaware of what's happening right now? I find it hard to believe that there's no one there who can explain what's wrong with this term or how badly we need to raise awareness about it.
I figured that this would be a general list that then uses some semi-intelligent language parsing to detect common workarounds. But stuff like 5h1t made me doubtful.
Then I got to this lovely streak of words:
boob
boobs
booobs
boooobs
booooobs
booooooobs
And realize that maybe I was thinking too smart for this.
Though, I am surprised "breasts" is on the list, I don't know how much more formal I could get describing pectorals without sounding like I'm trying too hard to sound smart.
on a last note, "viagra" is also a bit humorous given that it is in fact a brand name. I guess this list was sponsored by Revatio.
These kinds of lists are also extremely silly because they're quickly worked around and new words are created for the same concepts. E.g. sex -> segs or titty -> tiddie.
They'll just release an update to the list, the same how I refresh my adblocker. It's not reasonable to expect things to reach a final state, the world is in constant change.
As a form of protest, I am going to find a way to put at least one offensive word into every writing I do from now on, so that the people who are slaves to the reductionist thinking that any usage of these words is bad are upset.
Fortunately for you they are defining offensive so broadly that you can resist this being lorded over you without using any words that will offend essentially anyone.
I don't honestly expect to take any action whatsoever. I suspect that in the course of normal conversation, I will use every word they deem "inappropriate". The question is if I will be blacklisted for it; Lord knows that I was on enough "GG Autoblock" lists without having tweeted for years when that was a thing.
If this is left unchallenged, G docs and MS docs will soon prevent you from using certain words, be it the word 'master' in the US or 'Tibet' in China, then the censorship will advance to browsers, so Chrome and Safari will have a strong opinion on what you can write on HN, then it will spill onto phones, so your private chats over sms or whatsapp will be censored by your phone.
The US gov has found a clever workaround for 1A: they can't censor speech with laws, but they can create monopolies (big tech, mass media) and let them play the censor role.
Before we panic and start wailing and gnashing teeth let's find out if there is an opt-out. You probably don't want “fuck” in your sales pitch to your local archdiocese.
That's an oddly specific example. Pretty much everything I've written in Google Docs has been internal only, where I would rarely have an issue with the fuck word.
I would take that up with Freud rather than Google. Or maybe the Devil made them type that, in which case an exorcism would be easily performed in that context.
Better living through chemistry, until we’re all filed down into featureless automatons.
This feature turned on for me today, and ignoring the problematic 1984-ish implications, it’s also nudging me very hard to change my writing style.
I’m not a perfect writer or close to it, but I’m not bad. Part of my word choice is what makes something written by me distinct from something written by someone else. I’ve accepted and even embraced some of these idiosyncrasies. Hilariously the system seems to have a hardcore vendetta against the word “sophisticated” despite it being a perfectly cromulent word in the context I was using it IMHO.
I’m just ignoring the suggestions (as a google PM would certainly suggest in defense of this feature) but I’m sure many people won’t, and all our writing in docs will start to look and sound the same.
Pros - will make corporate speak in writing much easier to pull off. Being capable to write like an MBA/HR bot is a good skill for engineers to have.
Cons - will homogenize language away from the diverse, semi-structured, creative space it is, and toward MBA/HR bot speak. Shakespeare invented a few words, and those words likely would be flagged. Sure we're not all Shakespeare, but the ramifications of flattening a language are significant and need to be taken seriously. Misinformation thrives in brittle ecosystems where the semantic meaning is flexible and the supporting ecosystem is brittle in the ability to respond to changes. Tools like this do this flattening and brittling specifically.
MS Word has had similar features for a few years now, so I think the world outside of HN already has some experience with it. In a professional setting, it's very useful. It's not just about ethnic slurs, which usually don't even find their way into my documents, but also about checking for clarity and conciseness. In the end, I've found that they usually improve my writing.
Of course, when writing text messages in WhatsApp or composing a novel, these suggestions are not necessary or even harmful. As long as these tools are optional, however, I don't see any harm there either.
It is a suggestion, people. The same way you're allowed to missspell words as much as you want despite the little red squiggly line thing, you're welcomed to either ignore or disable the little purple squiggly line thing.
That's not how this stuff works, at all. Once something becomes an automated suggestion, see Slack bots gently suggesting you don't use a certain expression ad nauseam, it de facto becomes a standard.
People start to wonder why you couldn't just follow a "commonly accepted best practice" and instead you went out of your way to insist on terminology that is now considered insensitive, hurtful, harmful.
People start to wonder why you made that conscious choice. What does that say about you? Are you a bigot? Do you harbor hatred for those harmed by such language? Are you making a political statement? Why can't you just do what you're suggested? It's only a click away after all.
>People start to wonder why you made that conscious choice. What does that say about you? Are you a bigot? Do you harbor hatred for those harmed by such language? Are you making a political statement? Why can't you just do what you're suggested? It's only a click away after all.
And such folks can ask me what I meant or they can just fuck right off. Even if that means a few parting barbs from such folk or even a coordinated campaign to damage my reputation.
I have no control over what other people think, do or say, other than to speak my mind as well.
As Justice Brandeis put it[0] nearly a hundred years ago:
If there be time to expose through discussion the
falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the
process of education, the remedy to be applied is
more speech, not enforced silence.
This features right now is restricted too google docs for work. But imagine it was in all documents, emails, texting on android, etc.
Overtime if you constantly get these suggestions you will likely find yourself doing differently subconsciously.
The key problem here is not only is it Google dictating now what is right or wrong in the English language but also applying a US centric view on that.
Many words have different meanings in different countries or even in the same country. Different societal norms and it doesn't mean it is any less inclusive. They just consider it something else.
It didn't take that long for spellcheck to automatically start fixing spellings, a feature that many of us likely could no longer live without. I don't know the last time I actually interacted with spellcheck. That same thing can happen here if we allow this to be acceptable.
Turn off the feature and go about your day. That's what I do with grammar checkers, anyway, for many of the reasons you just described. As far as I can tell, using the passive voice or saying "I think" too often has neither harmed me personally nor professionally.
I think the vast majority of users especially outside the HN/technical crowd will not do as you. Default settings are powerfully influential UX. See dark patterns.
Your description is quite simplistic and your comparison is fallacious.
The correct spelling of words is defined and agreed upon and there is no moral judgement involved.
That is not the case with "inclusive language", yet by making these alternative suggestions Google is making a judgement that my word choice is wrong because it doesn't fit politically correct standards espoused and insisted upon by a vocal minority of society.
An editor used by millions should auto-correct spelling not decide what words are morally correct. It doesn't take much imagination to see where this is headed.
I don't share or endorse this specific concern, but it's disingenuous to dismiss extrapolations like this as a category. The exercise of power is not always apparent at face value.
Damn, Google is gonna upset two (probably mutually exclusive) groups of people with that one. Those who refuse to use change to inclusive, gender neutral language and those who hate landlords.
It would actually be nice if Google Docs could keep the gender right in a sentence. Like if you say, Lucy, my landlord and the suggestion were to change it to Lucy, my landlady.
I think it is like actor actress. Landlord can be inclusive (genderless/generic term) and used regardless of gender and is accepted use --but if you want to be specific you can use landlady.
In american english it had become genderless, but that isn't acceptable to gender-existentialist that insist on forcefully assigning gendered interpretations to everything possible.
They are decent replacements, but I also don't think "landlord" is actually a gendered word in modern language, so I'm not sure what there is to be offended about.
Microsoft Word already shipped their version of this feature, and it informed me that it was not inclusive to describe the main character of The Music Man as a "salesman".
Presumably the core of this feature is things like the n-word. But how far does this go into grey areas (ie things some folks believe are problematic but not everyone)? And do "suggestions" count as censorship?
I mean if someone is choosing to write the n-word I don't think a Google suggestion box is going to change their mind.
The use cases I see here are either words with multiple meanings (particularly when the meanings differ between cultures or the offensive meaning is on the obscure side) or words that are meant completely harmlessly but are historically linked to (or even just sound too much like) something racist/sexist/etc.
This could be helpful for people who were about to accidentally say something offensive, and maybe it could also give pause to someone that was trying to be subtly inflammatory. But flagging words like "landlord" seems on the sensitive side to me. I wouldn't call it censorship but it does further normalize hypervigilance about language use given how sensitive it does appear to be.
I would feel better about it if I knew more about the settings - if I dismiss the landlord suggestion (for example) once will it stop giving me that suggestion in future docs? I would use if so. If not it will definitely get on my nerves and I'd like to turn it off outright. Hopefully that is an option.
FWIW, I think "inappropriate" is being misinterpreted here. A word or phrase can be semantically inappropriate even when the grammar and spelling are otherwise correct, like "most unique" or when it's clear from context that "penultimate" was used to mean "final."
All the specific examples given in other comments are about suggestions for inclusive language, which Google calls out separately in the blurb, but Andressen et al are up in arms about "inappropriate words."
Who is asking for this? I generally laugh at things like this, but there is something corrosive of also not being able to disable such nonsense.
And presumably google will now keep up with each nation's zeitgeist? Over time words change e.g. from negro->colored->african american->black. Which one is appropriate google? Why so? Or, flipped around, why aren't you warning about these "inappropriate" words?
Interestingly I couldn't read this tweet because apparently @pmarca has blocked me even though I've never interacted with him. I'm guessing I have been added to some shared blocklist because I expressed wrongthink somewhere. So much for @pmarca's belief in freedom of expression.
How about we have our peers actually read our work when it matters so much, or we just accept peoples idiosyncrasies and gently nudge them as we see appropriate.
The idea that every digression must be flagged and corrected is a quick ride to a uniformatic dystopian hellscape ruled by faceless, soulless drooling drones.
This is what happens when you let your software auto-update. The developers have all the power and they know it. That's why they push these things that they know you will hate. "I can do this to you, and you can't stop me." An intoxicating power trip I'm sure.
Aggregation business model ultimately can become evil. Doesn't make any diff whether it's Amazon, Google, Uber, AirBnB, etc. The network has to become strong and trustless enough that any aggregation business model must operate with the fear of being de-platformed.
I hope this tool isn't going to be wielded politically but knowing SV I assume this tool will trend towards helping people optimize speech for political correctness/equity/inclusiveness/etc.
First this and soon you will be "Fined 1 Credit For A Violation Of The Verbal Morality Statute". Who would have thought that demolition was such a visionary movie.
> But to tell users that 'landlord' is 'inappropriate' is way crossing the line.
It does not.
It says "This word is gendered. Do you want to use a non-gendered version instead? [Yes/No/Report]"
If you are writing a text where the goal is to help abuse survivors in a women's shelter to become land proprietors, it might be of use to you. But if you are writing a text for your men's sport team you simply press "ignore".
The term 'Landlord' has gendered elements, that's fine, but so does most of our language, and that's mostly fine as well. Rarely, it's not.
"If you are writing a text where the goal is to help abuse survivors in a women's shelter to become land proprietors, it might be of use to you."
And since this is a 0.00000001% use case, you can see why it's ridiculous.
In fact, that 'use case' you've conjured is possibly never likely to have happened in all of history and even then the term 'landlord' may be perfectly justifiable.
It's not just that the suggestion itself is almost always going to be de-contextualized, it's for that reason that the software is effectively 'political' in a way.
Google is telling us to 'de gender' our culture when the vast majority of people are fine with 'most' things the way they are.
This is a bit like the 'Latinx' people - educated White people telling the Latino Plebes, who don't use or want hat language, how they ought to think.
Worse, I don't even think the motivation is entirely legit - Google has a ton of extra money, they have ton of busy bodies, everyone wants to get their 'inclusivity brownie points' all the way up the executive chain, humble brag to others, make something nice for the Big Conf.
Admittedly - as an intellectual concept it's not far off, but in it's application, it's ridiculous. At very minimum it should be 'off' by default.
I want to second the Latinx thing. Every latino I know, even the non-binary ones, find that particular change to the language offensive and uneducated. I'm sure there are some native spanish speakers who support it, but they seem to make up the minority. It just doesn't make linguistic sense.
It's not a language issue it's an ideological issue that exposes in clear terms that Social Justice Populism is more an antagonizing than it is about 'Justice'.
Latinos don't want this specific social change, but the 'vanguard' of Social Justice demands the change and utilizes it as an effort to both give evidence of the 'evil racist world in which we live' - and to 'one up' and take the the supposed moral high ground.
Put another way - there will never, ever be an end to the claims of racial injustice, because the opportunity for bad faith populism provides an opportunity for some groups to gain leverage and power.
Social Media has amplified this dramatically so in a world that is actually getting much more fair on racial terms, we scream and argue more about to the point of raising pedantic elements into total hyperbole.
In 'polite Canada' they used to have language wars. The 'STOP' on the stop sign is a political issue, because it's technically English. So they argue about having 'Stop / Arret' - i.e. 'bilingual' stop signs - on federal property so that the French speaking person in Alberta, who may not know what 'Stop' means, will get the right idea.
These ridiculous discussions drown out any meaningful social reform, because the rational, pedantic progressives are actively culled by the radicals. In much the same way Stalin's control over the Germany Communist Party in Weimar Republic led him to attack the SPD (Social Democrats) as 'the primary enemy' over the far right.
This entire post could be restated in terms of populist right-wingism as well, particularly in regards to making something out of nothing and attacking their more traditional peers , with small differences.
The people who decide these things (journalists, I guess?) have ordained that “Black” should be capitalized while “white” should not. And I hate that I’ve told you this because I’m not a fan of the asymmetry, and you quite likely don’t care (I don’t blame you if you don’t!), but I suppose it’s exactly the sort of thing that Google Docs now warns about.
Apparently there is more disagreement about this than I realized. People started capitalizing Black in 2020. It seems to be more popular to lowercase white than to uppercase it, but not all organizations are aligned on this question. I wish they’d left both lowercase!
They'll definitely capitalize it when they're talking about White Supremacy. And by that I don't men 'Men In Pointy Hats', I mean 'Friends', the TV show, as an example of White Supremacy, and I'm not even kidding.
> (You) to tell users that 'landlord' is 'inappropriate' is way crossing the line.
> (Me) It does not. It says "This word is gendered.
> (You) No, and you've made my point for me.
What is that "no" referring to?
The feature does not tell you that a word is "bad" or "good". It provides context, the same context that a dictionary or a professional editor will provide.
In this example, it enters the realm of etymology. The word is made up of "land" + "lord".
The appellation "lord" is primarily applied to men, while for women the appellation "lady" is used (which in itself is dated). The tool does not know the identity of the people who you are writing about. So proposing "landlady" is a not a good option. It would simply shift the issue across. Instead, it will proposes "proprietor" which is an accurate title for someone who owns a building or piece of land and rents it no matter what their identity is.
Another example would be if you write "policeman" and it proposes "police office". The tool there would not be saying that "policeman" is wrong and should never be used. It hints you that if you do not know who you are talking about, you might want to use one of the alternatives. Emphasis on "might", since the feature is presented as a suggestion.
Even your example of "latinx" could be included under such a feature. What you did here was the same thing as what the hint does.
Did you censor me by explaining to me the historical context of "laninx"? No. Even if your explanation means I will never use the word, it does not censor me.
It simply provided me with added information so that I can make an enlightened choice when it comes to my vocabulary.
'Landlord' is a perfectly reasonable word, and there's not reason to try to correct it, or get into the etymology of it.
You're down an crazy rabbit hole of splitting hairs and lack of contextualization, which is why you're having trouble understanding why it's an absurd kind of 'correction'.
If I wanted to take apart anything you ever wrote with such fine grained and pedantic inanity, I could, and you could never write anything.
'Landlord' is an accepted term - there's no reason to correct it.
"The tool there would not be saying that "policeman" is wrong and should never be used"
Again, no. It's a more complicated term, but it has it's use.
This is 'Social Justice Fascist Authoritarianism' - unhinged ideological moralization, perniciously and hypocritically pursuing an aggressive agenda through all vectors i.e. corporate, private.
If you want to be corrected by Social Justice Fascists at every turn with an ever increasing number of ridiculous claims on language - it's your choice. You can buy that plug-in and for it.
The rest of us do not want to have our language corrected in an ideological manner.
I have no problem if the city council stops using the term 'Policeman', that's fine, but I also don't care if anyone uses the term otherwise, and nobody else does either.
This seems like another attempt at generating controversy for its own sake, as though the mere existence of functionality that helps people write effectively is worth having angst over. If people want it, they’ll use it. If not, they won’t. Same as with grammar and spell checkers.
Don’t rich people have better things to do than incite others over trivialities? There’s a world of problems that need solving that people like Marc and his ilk could really move the needle on if they set their minds and put their resources to it.
> If people want it, they’ll use it. If not, they won’t. Same as with grammar and spell checkers.
Well, it’s enabled by default. Many people won’t know, or won’t bother to find out, how to disable it. They’ll likely just click through and accept the suggestions. In any case, the mere suggestion is bound to have some effect on people writing. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory.
Hell, maybe that’s a good thing. Using inclusive language is good. But let’s not sit here and say “this is just a non-issue” because it isn’t.
Is it, though? Using "inclusive" as a terminal value for writing means that other values, such as "conciseness" and "clarity" and "beauty" decrease, for the same amount of effort.
As an extreme example, that front page in the Lancet that referred to woman as "bodies with vaginas".
And for that cost, I don't believe there is any benefit.
Even aside from cost/benefit analysis, I strongly disagree that tech giants ought to nudge the writing I create and consume. People respond to propaganda, and my values don't align with theirs.
>> "As an extreme example, that front page in the Lancet that referred to woman as "bodies with vaginas"."
I haven't read this exact article, but I can near 100% guarantee they were actually trying to be inclusive of trans men, AFAB nonbinary people, and people who have had bottom surgery to flip their bit (not all are women), not refer to women specifically. There are common medical issues that affect all of them and it does no one any good to pretend like cis women are the only people worth including.
I can't understand why you want a medical journal to use imprecise language that excludes a growing number of patients. Even doctors who don't have a problem with trans people don't realize many trans people deal with the same stuff women do and need the same treatments.
Too many friends have been turned away from (or laughed out of) doctor's offices because people making arguments like the one you make here keep the practice, and the insurance they have to obey, from being able to think about and change policies to be more inclusive.
You picked this example, not me. This is the worst possible example for your point because the lack of precision you argue for gets people killed.
>lack of precision you argue for gets people killed.
Does it? Does it really? Does a single doctor that reads the Lancet not understand what a woman is? One (1) single doctor?
How does that work, exactly?
Does that hypothetical doctor read the lancet, sees "woman" on the cover, and think to himself, "wow, that sure applies to my patient with a penis and disphoria", and then goes on to prescribe a drug that is deadly to men and not women?
> Using "inclusive" as a terminal value for writing means that other values, such as "conciseness" and "clarity" and "beauty" decrease, for the same amount of effort.
Do you have any data that points to this? It's not clear that there is a zero-sum game here, or that conciseness and inclusiveness are diametrically opposite goals with metrics that completely cancel each other out.
> What data could I possibly have here? Even theoretically?
Learning and language researchers have metrics they use to quantify reading comprehension. And in the inverse, reading comprehension skills and performance are tested in law school entrance exams (just as a personal example).
Inclusive language and sterilized business language are probably different beasts. You can also be courteous while using vulgar language in certain contexts. I guess Google employees won't have an option to not use the "inclusive" option. This is nothing else than corporate language policing.
If it were actually narrowed to highlighting phrases that might cause offense to sizable populations it would probably be pretty useful!
E.g. It might warn a speaker of british english that their text "Remember to bring some fags" is likely to be misunderstood in a rather unfortunate manner.
The fact that it alerts _landlord_, however, suggests to me that its false positives will deprive it of most of its utility and that people will either turn it off (/ignore it) or will slavishly follow it and write confusing or even offensive text as a result.
The problem is that this private company has a list of words that they decided was inappropriate. By highlighting these words in their monopolistic product (Google Docs), they are influencing discourse and shaping opinion and implicitly educating children that use the docs, by providing them with their opinionated advice and suggestions for replacement.
Look up Eskimo, Gypsy and c**n (racial slur) in most dictionaries.
I have Merriam-Webster open in a tab right now, so let's check.
It says "plural Eskimo or Eskimos, now sometimes offensive" (with a long explaination paragraph under), "usually offensive, see usage paragraph below" (again, with a long paragraph explaining) and "offensive —used as an insulting and contemptuous term for a Black person.
Being aware of inappropriate words in not new.
Dictionaries are available in schools. Should we ban them now?
> Can you provide a list of cloud-based shareable free office suits?
You've moved the goal posts to narrow the focus onto Google Docs, though. When my grandma wants to write a letter, she doesn't go searching for a "cloud-based shareable free office suite". She launches whatever is already installed on her computer.
Monopoly, no. But Google certainly dominates education in the US:
"Today, more than half the nation’s primary- and secondary-school students — more than 30 million children — use Google education apps like Gmail and Docs, the company said. And Chromebooks, Google-powered laptops that initially struggled to find a purpose, are now a powerhouse in America’s schools. Today they account for more than half the mobile devices shipped to schools."
Again, I don’t agree they “dominate education”. That’s like saying that Bic dominates education because a huge percentage of kids write with a Bic pen or pencil every day.
Teachers who accept work with pen and paper will be able to accept work if non-Bic pens are used. Bic pens aren't used to drive classroom learning, collaboration, and assignment completion like Google Classroom, Gmail, or Docs. Bic pens also don't stop to correct you when you misspell a word or suggest that you use a different word when you've used one that it deems to be offensive to a hypothetical audience.
I'm not sure how someone can have a notable majority in anything and not be said to be dominating that thing.
Can you provide any concrete examples of the suggestions being provided in the document authoring context; how they are incorrect, inappropriate, or harmful; and how you might correct them? If you can demonstrate an actual problem, that would lend some weight to this argument.
Right, the typical "why are you so upset" smug dismissal that seems to be the fallback when something doesn't have any merits, including casual insults or provocation like "having angst"...
But somehow it's still important to comment and mock, lest others might think he has a point.
When I saw the article, I knew that MS Word has had something like this for a while. I thought is was stupid but not worth my "angst". But people taking the time to speak out against this silliness are doing something good, and casually dismissing and mocking their concerns, rather than taking part in the conversation for or against, or just not commenting, is basically cowardice.
My favorite part about the "why are you so upset" argument is that it almost always gets used against both sides in the "culture wars". I doubt anybody commenting on HN is frothing at the mouth, but given that we treat stating an opinion as being upset these days, literally everyone that has any opinion at all is upset over something trivial - because the whole fucking thing is stupid.
Like sure I should be doing something better with my time than philosophizing about whether it is okay to delist a couple random Dr. Seuss books. It's true I never actually intended to buy them and would've never noticed otherwise. But hello somebody went through the effort to cancel them in the first place. Don't those people have something better to do than worry about whether one of the dated illustrations in a not particularly popular children's book is a little culturally insensitive?
Google is the one that put a non-trivial amount of engineering hours into this feature. I can see ways in which it would be helpful, I can also see how it could be problematic. Regardless though, if we think about the big picture, Google is the one that could have meaningfully increased their impact by redirecting their efforts towards more serious problems. The time spent commenting on this issue on HN pales in comparison and I'm not sure how one could ask the "don't you have anything better to do?" question of commenters without asking it of Google. At least if their opinion truly is that this doesn't matter either way.
I agree. The serious problems that need solving are things like police killing Black people unjustly and young gay people harming themselves because their parents don’t accept them. This excessive language policing is a distraction from the real problems in my opinion.
> There’s a world of problems that need solving that people like Marc and his ilk could really move the needle on if they set their minds and put their resources to it.
Meanwhile you're commenting on their activities rather than off moving the needle yourself. Why do you concern yourself with such trivialities, hmm?
Calling into question a new Google Docs feature isn't some massively time consuming process. Suggesting that the time saved by ignoring the feature could lead to some real human improvement is about as stupid as suggesting that the time saved by ignoring the criticism of the feature could lead to some real human improvement.
I find it funny OP did not question if the time spent implementing the feature could have been better directed elsewhere. Only the much shorter time spent criticizing it. And now on a meta level it is okay to spend time questioning the criticism apparently. Makes it seem like the underlying concern has nothing to do with "directing energy elsewhere".
I think this is a bit of a shortsighted take. The fundamental question is: should Google allow its systems/software to be used to generate homophobic/sexist/racist/transphobic content? If Google can determine with high likelihood (perhaps through a combination of language modeling of your Google Docs/email + examining your browsing history, search history, email contacts, purchase history, physical location, etc) that you are generating that sort of content, why should you be allowed to use Google for anything?
Home Depot generally has no way to know how you're using their products once they're sold. The very nature of an internet service means that Google continuously monitors your usage of their products.
But that isn't at all what Google is trying to do here. The first example in the Twitter thread is an "inclusiveness warning" about the word landlord.
On the one hand, nobody is forced to use their suggested words just like nobody is forced to fix the grammar mistakes Google underlines. So it may have some cultural influence but it isn't really authoritarian. It's also not creepy in the sense that it is not using your data outside of what is directly in the Doc.
On the other hand, it is not flagging actually bigoted content, it is more akin to GitHub renaming the master branch (or at the very least that is a subset of what this flags). It would be horrifying if that kind of "infraction" actually did prevent you from using Google services. And I'd be seriously skeptical of any attempted bigotry detection like you're describing that is built on top of the system discussed here.
That sort of naive libertarian view is grounded in a false atomistic anthropology. We are individuals, yes, but intrinsically social animals who need society to live and to thrive, and language is a matter of the common good.
Control language and you control thought; control thought and you control action; control action and you control the world.
This is overtly political and has nothing to do with being "nice" or "empathetic". The corporations have inadvertently made an arrangement with critical theory leftists to transform society into a capitalist monopoly on top, and socialism on the bottom. That's the deal.
It's been dubbed "Woke Capitalism" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vog7Wn1WGRM), where the managerial class has reached a compromise in which they get to keep and - through being appointed as stewards of the political movement - gain power, while activists of the movement get the transformation they demand.
This particular warning in Google Docs is just that. It's Google managing the changes in society that certain activists want, in order to maintain corporate power. Changes like this will keep being added (as we should know by now) while our social structures change into something comparable to a social credit system. These changes are promoted by manufactured social pressures and financial incentives from large investment banks and so are implemented by any company that wishes to grow while under public scrutiny.
Discussions about this have been like groundhog day since 2015, no one seems to be able to get past the surface level of what is probably the greatest transformation of any society since the 1930's, and it's astonishing. It's a gradual escalation of demands from woke activists, backed by the behemoth corporations and banks, then adopted by governments.
For anyone who wants to help others, or to resolve injustices in our society, having true empathy for the plight of those oppressed and wanting to solve social problems: you know this is bullshit. Even for the activists this isn't about actually helping anyone, it's about pushing us into accepting a shuffling of hierarchies, of which they didn't bother to iron out the injustices.
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
Google is so large that any stance they take, no matter how minuscule, has immense influence.
Case in point, from this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/technology/google-maps-ne...
> For decades, the district south of downtown and alongside San Francisco Bay here was known as either Rincon Hill, South Beach or South of Market. This spring, it was suddenly rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the East Cut.
> The peculiar moniker immediately spread digitally, from hotel sites to dating apps to Uber, which all use Google’s map data. The name soon spilled over into the physical world, too. Real-estate listings beckoned prospective tenants to the East Cut. And news organizations referred to the vicinity by that term.
My point is, it might seem like a small, inconspicuous change. But at Google-scale, this actually has an impact on the real world, and personally I don't feel confident with Google deciding what words are the correct words.