I wonder if this is an example of not knowing your audience (or rather assuming one's self represents a wider audience than it does).
The people vouching for this at Google are likely product marketing managers, public relations folks, social media managers, etc. All they do is write corporate garbage all day, and much like we have "nit"s in PR's for formatting, variable names, etc; they likely have similar reviews that get flagged for "non-inclusive language" or whatever this is. So they have brilliant idea: the Code people use auto linters/formatters that we enable by default (hey gofmt) and everyone loves it, how about we do the same for the Prose people!
Basically: "All I write is corporate garbage, and all the writing I consume is corporate garbage, and all my coworkers only write corporate garbage, therefore everyone would love a corporate garbage-ifyer!"
This explanation rings a lot more true to me than the rest of this thread. Everyone here seems to be looking into shadows for the woke gestapo, when I'd be willing to bet that this explanation is a lot closer to how this tool actually came to exist.
It's a little of both. There's enough woke influence over corporate communication to drive all employees to want to avoid non-inclusive words in docs. At that point, this becomes useful even for employees who don't agree with it—I'd rather just have the word flagged now and fix it instead of going back and forth later.
However, the net result is that words are driven out of the language even if everyone involved in the document wouldn't care.
You're at Google. You need to do some kind of project that can be called a success -- within one quarter. What do you do?
One possibility, the disastrous effects of which we've seen, is to build Yet Another Incompatible Chat App.
This is another possibility. A very safe one, in a way.
You constantly have to demonstrate that you are "useful, self-directed, and doing important things", in an environment where usefulness and importance are extremely hard to judge, and so become very socially-constructed. It can get pretty brutal -- even if, when you step back and take the long view, it all seems ridiculous.
So when you look at what comes out of these companies, it's useful to remember that. Imagine the horrible games in which their employees have found themselves trapped.
(Money's a hell of a thing. Shame you seem to need so much of it.)
>However, the net result is that words are driven out of the language even if everyone involved in the document wouldn't care.
No one uses "fuck" in corporate communication either. Is anyone worried about that word being "driven out of the language"? I don't think corporate speech is as influential in overall language use as you are implying.
Funny. I remember graduating over 20 years ago. My first job out of University was on a construction site as a supervisory engineer. My direct manager, a crusty old guy, took me aside one day and explained to me the importance and necessity of applying the word "fuck" as part of my role. This was not a joke on his part. He had observed that I was a soft university educated well spoken book type. Nobody who I was supervising was going to take me seriously ever. I never actually applied his advice to the full extent but I did learn to toughen up somewhat .
"Fuck" and "badass" are relatively common in job postings in Utah. I assume it's because people from out of state are worried they'll join a company with a bunch of stiff Mormons so we need a signal to let them know that's not the case. Benefit #1 on the list is beer on Fridays.
Anyway, that's what scares me about this, I like language naturally evolving like it is in the above example, to address a specific communication need. I'm really not a fan of some remarkably privileged people using an insanely powerful company to coerce my language in whatever direction they see fit.
When I Google it, the first result is... your post, and none of the other results include the word.
Adding quotes to "badass" turns up (on the first page) a mechanics job posted in January, four hits for the same CNA job from over a month ago, and one hit for an administrative job, posted this month.
That doesn't seem like a lot of postings, certainly not enough to be considered an outlier.
Of course to verify that I'd have to do fifty Google searches and chart the data, which I don't really want to do...
I think you should, though, so next time you make such a dubious claim, you have the data to back it up. :)
> No one uses "fuck" in corporate communication either.
Swear words are specifically used to be provocative, so naturally they're not going to disappear. Words like "motherboard" or "whitelist" were historically neutral and primarily used in professional settings, so removal from corporate speech is correspondingly a much bigger factor.
To be clear, I'm not particularly worried or concerned about this. I don't consider it any great loss if we start saying "allowlist" and have happily changed my projects to match. It's not a big deal, and the kind thing to do is to go along with those who do care a lot.
It's a perverted version of Pascal's wager, the "You lose nothing by pretend-believing" argument of theologians, but reinvented for an age where social mobs are the new wrathful God. If you stick your neck out and refuse the newspeak, you present a target for Them, you're essentially betting they're too weak to do anything to you, a bet you could either win or lose. But if you comply, then you're safe no matter what the actual influnce The Mob has. The Nash equilibrium is always choosing "COMPLY".
The classic mistake that Pascal and everyone using his argument to argue for their favorite God lies in the simplifying assumption :
- Compliance is cheap, low-risk and fixed-cost relative to taking a stand
Which gets less and less true as the Wrathful God (or His spokespeople) sees you're completely submitting and realizes they can continue making more and more increasingly humiliating demands. Soon enough, you discover you wish you had drawn the red line earlier.
Yeah, I generally either mock them or go into malicious compliance mode. Once they realise I really don't care about losing my job they stop pretending to care about this stuff
“Political correctness is America's newest form of intolerance, and it is especially pernicious because it comes disguised as tolerance. It presents itself as fairness, yet attempts to restrict and control people's language with strict codes and rigid rules. I'm not sure that's the way to fight discrimination. I'm not sure silencing people or forcing them to alter their speech is the best method for solving problems that go much deeper than speech.”
― George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
> The number of complainants can often be quite small. For centuries, theorists have worried about the potential of unrestrained democracy to lead to a tyranny of the majority, in which majority groups ride roughshod over the rights of minorities. What we often see today is instead a kind of tyranny of the minority: a system in which a particularly extreme and motivated fraction of the populace can wield outsized power in the face of a majority which is either too indifferent or too scared to oppose it.
I don't think there's actually any substantial pushback on the word "motherboard" either. That's not a real thing people are mad about. It seems like Google's AI is just not very good at judging what is considered inclusive or not.
Whitelist/blacklist was a hilarious one since it derives from the light/dark day/night separation found in pretty much every culture on the planet.
It's like, of _course_ early peoples created concepts from "day, when it's light" and "night, when it's dark". It has nothing to do with skin colour or ethnicity at all.
That is just enabling some pretty bad actors in my opinion who don't even care about minorities. People that do care tend to be very flexible about language use.
Not being tolerant here is a pretty clear sign of close mindedness in reality or just a hint of lacking life experience.
If you don't use "fuck" in corporate communication, you're not doing it right. Use swears very sparingly (not in every email or presentation, for sure) and only deliberately for emphasis when you need a little shock. Especially effective when the leadup is really dry.
If it weren't for the "shadows of woke gestapo" as you call them, these things would never make it to prod because someone would "this ain't right" and when every PM is getting some amount of that feedback it would be heard. The fact that everyone working at Google is on the easy money train and doesn't want to upset that probably has a lot to do with people not speaking up as well.
There's a market for 'help you write english better' tools that spot things like grammar errors.
For example, if my english-as-a-second-language eastern European subordinates feel self-conscious about their english, they might find an automated tool helpful - where a professional journalist would be better served by their own judgement.
The 'inclusive language' thing is just weird though.
Just like Google is not an actual search engine but a "recommendation" engine that prods users into getting recommended just what Google needs to recommend ("did you mean...?") this is not an actual writing assistant but a "write (and think) the Google way" mould
Actually I've seen an English linter to help you maintain a passive voice for papers, remove waffle words and unnecessary fluff, etc. I'm not sure I can find the exact one I'm thinking of, but wasn't too bad overall, it spotted errors and made helpful suggestions. It was cool too, because it would read from stdin and integrated into vim pretty well with a few lines in my config.
I think it was made for publishing scientific research, and you could flag the options for what you wanted checked. If you were okay without the passive voice hints, you could still make whatever you were writing very direct and concise, or less wishy washy.
This is wrong. It's a good rule of thumb because passive voice can be a common indicator of weak writing, but it has plenty of good uses in strong writing. The best case to apply it is when the object of a sentence was previously a subject or other focus of prior sentences, and so is more familiar to the reader than the subject of the new sentence. For example:
"The United States had maintained neutrality until 1941. However, it was attacked at Pearl Harbor, and then chose to enter the war."
This is disingenuous. Removing the bad actor in this sentence removed part of the cause for the effect. Not an attack happened, a japanese attack happened.
I you feel that the actor is an important part of the sentence, you can include it in passive voice as well: “However, it was attacked at Pearl Harbor by Japan, and then chose to enter the war.”
How and why is that possibly better than saying "the Japanese attacked them at Pearl Harbor"? The passive voice is what enables the omission of the actor.
I do think there is more activism at play than you might. At a minimum it provides the fear mechanism that prevents employees from challenging the work, particularly if they aren't even on the project (why stick your neck out?).
However, the code format for prose analogy illuminates the writing quality angle brilliantly.
I'm sure I'm not alone in having distinct communication modes in work documents, each with their own reasons to be excluded from the ML dataset:
1. Keep it simple -- when achieved it is highly effective for communicating a work memo, but would be terribly dry if used in auto suggestions for an English major struggling through crafting moving prose.
2. Lazily verbose -- going long is more expedient than crafting a compact message. It's mostly unrefined garbage. (exhibit a this comment)
3. Everything is awesome (positivity inflation) -- a deluge of great, love, awesome, wonderful, perfect, etc. all applied to far too many things, far too often.
Imagine if an ML code formatter included psudeo code inputs, or was given a data set of every local file change
(pre-commit) instead of what is sitting in a main branch? My Docs are filled with things that I'd never commit much less pass a code review.
If Google Docs was only used in corporate settings, and we wanted to double down on our drab corporate communication styles, I guess the feature would make some sense.
IMHO OK if the feature would actually provide explainations and it would be based on some sort of rulebook rather some random decision of individuals. I also would be fine if there is a warning if I use the word 'property owner' because some random internet user says that is deeply capitalistic. In the end I could decide if I want to follow the argument. Just nudging people to get away with a warning is bad and will lead to no warning. I doubt even that it will lead to a more inclusive world because no reflection is involved.
The problem for me is particularly that the combination of monopolies combined with AI that will learn from data largely filtered by those monopolies will generate some questionable gradients. So, yes, this might ultimately change language very quickly without much of human discourse over it. This will lead to language with less variation and arguably to a world that does not encourage variation and will be in effect less inclusive.
I don't understand what you are referring to when you say "this"; what is "this"? Are you referring to a specific statement by the parent poster, or something described in the OP?
I also don't understand whether the double-negative is intentional (and meant to cancel itself out, and become a positive), or if it is a colloquialism.
While I don't doubt that an intent of this is to promote empathy, I would need to see some evidence before I could be open to the possibility that that is its effect. Anecdotally, these things seem to incense anger and hatred- I've never heard anyone say that being language-policed made them a better person, but I have seen people behave in a way that suggests the opposite. Personally, I become less empathic when someone assumes authority over what I say or write.
Where is the line drawn? MS Word suggests style corrections too, despite the meaning being totally understandable.
As an enterprise feature, enterprises would interested in this because they wouldn't want their employees communications to get them cancelled or put on woke twitter. Despite their writing style guide[1] being a bit too woke for my liking i'm sure some people find it a good reference, especially if they don't have capacity to create their own corporate guide.
Serious question: in what way do you feel that Google suggesting alterations to the specific language used in the article (words like motherboard or fierce) is helping people be more empathetic?
I'm putting aside intentionally and just curious about how this actually encourages empathy?
Systematic and well entrenched problem require the first step of acknowledgement. If you do not even acknowledge there is a problem of empathy across the board today in our society then you are not even in the first step.
Nothing about this is about empathy. Not using language that white people at Google deemed offensive does little to help the actual problems. You know what would help?
Not hiring union-busting consultants to convince employees to not join a union against their best interests.
Neither hate or empathy are in words being written but in the intention behind them. If anything, corporate writing is all about feigning empathy while having none. Or do you actually believe that corporations care deeply about your privacy or all the other things they claim to do.
It’s also inaccurate to call this language “inclusive.” In reality, you’re excluding most Americans who aren’t among the handful of mostly affluent, white, college educated people who talk like this. My Bangladeshi immigrant mom would have no idea what to do if a warning popped up telling her that she should use a different word than “mother.”
It isn't colleges that advertise this exclusively, it is also corporate consulting like McKinsey. Know them? Allegedly the Robin Hood of the poor and disenfranchised.
The author of the article still sees it as a necessity. They cannot leave people talking like they want to.
Hear hear. Latinx, Filipinx - how dare the whites invent terminology to refer to disadvantaged minorities, using incorrect grammatical constructions or letters not even in the language of the people you refer to.
This is white cultural imperialism, full stop. Right or left, I don't care where it comes from - I know it when I smell it.
There is a truth to what both of you are saying. Because from what I know Kamala is disliked among both Indian citizens and Inner-city black communities.
Hillary campaigned as Hillary (her slogan was "Hillary for America") as did Jeb, W., Pete, Bernie and others. Gilibrand and Warren campaigned with their last names.
It has to do with how candidates choose to brand themselves.
To the extent that this is true, it is not because they are women, but because they have uncommon names, at least uncommon among American public figures. If I say "Kamala is unpopular among inner-city communities", you're likely to know who I'm talking about. If I say the same about "Joe" you're much more likely to be confused.
Additionally, people often say "Trump", "Obama", "Biden". Saying "Clinton" is somewhat ambiguous (Hillary or Bill?). "Harris" could work, but it is definitely a more common name than Kamala.
Additionally there are other women in power who do get referred by their full names. People don't talk about "Marjorie", they use "Marjorie Taylor-Green". They don't talk about Ruth (Bader-Ginsburg) or Diane (Feinstein) or Janet (Yellen) or Margaret (Thatcher).
Bernie Sanders is an immediate and obvious counterexample to your assertion that people only do this for Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton. There's also Jeb Bush, Pete Buttigieg, Marco Rubio, and many others.
The exclusion of these fairly obvious counterexamples suggests that you are engaging in a form of confirmation bias.
There is reason to believe that people are sexist toward female politicians, but the first-name basis of Kamala and Hillary is not a strong piece of evidence, given that we do that for the aforementioned male politicians (and don't do it for a lot of other female politicians, such as Elizabeth Warren, Sarah Palin and AOC)
But interestingly, I call Jimmy Carter the full name, too. Can’t bring myself to use just “Carter”.
Though, why does the US culture so insist on taking the husband’s family name? It kinda feels like “Hilary” is the actual name of the person, and Clinton is imposed.
Watch the series about her; She didn't want to, but did in the end for her husband’s political ambitions which was hampered by having such a progressive woman as wife..!
You can’t overlook the role that white progressives play in selectively amplifying minority voices. I can’t get on CNN to give the “Bangladeshi guy take” on rising crime by saying stuff most Bangladeshi people agree with. I have to provide a Bangladeshi perspective that is appealing to the white progressives that make the decisions at CNN.
There’s a deep synergy here that exploits the fact that most Americans have limited insight into what minorities think, but generally want to be supportive. White progressives can amplify their apparent mandate by selectively platforming progressive minorities to speak on behalf of those groups. Those progressive minorities, meanwhile, can wield the outsize influence of progressive whites over the media and institutions against other members of their own group.
That’s how “Latinx” happens. Progressive Latinos by themselves have no power to influence what the general public calls Latinos. But if they get Elizabeth Warren to say it, they can turn it from a “progressive Latino” issue into a “Latino” issue and lots of well meaning people will go along to be supportive of Latinos.
Kamala Harris is a great example. She was polling in the single digits among Black people (https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/04/kamala-harris-black...). And I’ll tell you that most desis are closer to Tulsi Gabbard than Harris. Including the Russia stuff—given India’s long-standing affinity with Russia. She’s not Vice President because she’s the one people in those groups would pick. She’s Vice President because of all the white Act Blue donors I know who are thrilled to have a Black-Indian Vice President who just happens to think the way they do.
Desi here, like Tulsi more than Kamala. I'd say Kamala is more disliked than the average white person too, because she panders so incompetently. I have not heard great things about Pramila Jayapal either.
What tickled me is that the same white people who played up Harris’s south Asian background—the only ones to do so—in the 2020 primary attacked Gabbard specifically for views she shared with lots of other Indians: being a bit socially conservative, opposing US intervention in Syria, and having a soft attitude toward Russia. It was almost as if they knew nothing about desis.
Because Modi is a Hindu nationalist and a majority of people from India are Hindu. His wide support has a lot more to do with the fact that he appeals to the majority with his supremacist rhetoric.
Calling Modi a hindu nationalist wipes out centuries of nuance from the Indian political conversation.
Hinduism has been the only religion over multiple millenia to shelter a plurality of other religions relatively peacefully despite being a demographic majority. India has accepted & protected related religions like Buddhists, Jains & Sikhs to Christians, Muslims, Jews, Zoroastrians and even Atheists. If anything, quite a few of these communities were able to become disproportionately wealthy and successful without any outright opposition from the Hindu majority. Practised Hinduism itself isn't well defined and would be construed as a different religion from house to house.
Just because an insecure protestant priest translated Hitler's hooked-cross mimicking his local austrian church as a swastika, doesn't mean that an entire civilization can be cast into the modern nazi/ethnic-supremacist framing of all communal relationships. Western commenters can't get their heads out of the western image of the world and consistently misread community relationships, beliefs and tensions in the non-Christian world. If the west had to cast India into their shallow oppressor vs oppressed narrative, history would reveal that the demographics that would occupy each bucket would be in direct contrast to their expectations.
Modi is no saint, but he is pretty conventional for an Indian politician. The Indian political divide has never followed western conventions. The questions of French secularism vs Nehruvian secularism has always been an open debate with good points on each side. The questions of whether India has a disproportionate responsibility to provide refuge to persecuted hindus in other nations is a valid question that other secular nations grappled with too. Similarly, ideas of formal voter ids and the ability of a majority government being able to pass bills with said majority are issues where Modi gets grilled for following the 'secular wests' footsteps.
There is a reason that despite western declarations of genocide every week, (traditionally western-liberal) Urban Indians keep voting for Modi YoY. A 100% of us might be hindu-nationalists cheering on a genocide, or western-media might be lying/misrepresenting the facts.
>. I can’t get on CNN to give the “Bangladeshi guy take” on rising crime by saying stuff most Bangladeshi people agree with. I have to provide a Bangladeshi perspective that is appealing to the white progressives that make the decisions at CNN.
Well you have to appeal to your audience. If you speak as a Bangladeshi how much would the average American member of the audience understand? If the Bangladeshi take is similar to the average Indian take I'm used to, rising crime rates would probably be explained by something like "all these people are corrupt. That's what Indians do instead of doing it the right way they just try to find a shortcut and take from others. Badmaasha do this and ruin the country".
Of course they don't mean that literally the whole country is corrupt and all Indians are awful, but people not from there wouldn't understand that it's an exaggeration. They just don't have the cultural context to understand how to interpret that. The American way of communicating is not so on the nose, in fact it minimizes negatives and tries to avoid generalizing at all. So again, i don't think they would understand it would just sounds vaguely racist to the average American. So I'm not sure what Bangladeshi view you're talking about is but context really matters.
And most of the desis I know support Harris over Gabard. Surprise surprise-- you cannot easily generalize the views of large groups, especially based on anecdotal evidence. Being Desi has little to do with it.
> Well you have to appeal to your audience. If you speak as a Bangladeshi how much would the average American member of the audience understand?
That's why I don't like the whole business of identity politics. It creates this situation where the minorities you see on TV speaking for minority groups are the ones who are saying the things white people want to hear.
> And most of the desis I know support Harris over Gabard.
I'm not talking about overall support, but instead the particular attacks white Democrats aimed at Gabbard in the 2020 primary (pre-Fox News appearances). It was over things where Gabbard was taking a position that was different from white Democrats, but typical of desis.
I think it’s fair to say that Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi Democrats are typically more socially conservative than white Democrats. Likewise, Indians and Bangladeshis often have an affinity for Russia arising from those countries' alignment with the Soviet Union. E.g.: https://www.telegraphindia.com/culture/books/bengalis-and-th....
I found it weird for white people to be talking so much about south asian identity on one hand, while attacking a south Asian woman in a nasty way for having opinions that a lot of south Asian women have.
> And I’ll tell you that most desis are closer to Tulsi Gabbard than Harris. Including the Russia stuff—given India’s long-standing affinity with Russia.
No surprise there: Modi is a conservative populist who could make Trump blush, and is very popular (and polarizing) in India. I’m not sure how the translates to Indian Americans, Indian politics isn’t very portable.
I’m talking about Indians in America. They represent an elite slice of Indians. :9 most aren’t fans of Modi, and most aren’t populists.
But at least with respect to pre-Fox News Gabbard, the areas where she departed from white progressives were recognizably desi to me. You don’t celebrate your abortion or make your sexuality part of your identity in Indian American communities. Likewise, there tends to be a strong impulse towards realism in foreign policy that accepts brutal dictators like Assad as necessary in some cases to avoid a breakdown in order. and there is a strong Russian affinity, since India was aligned with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Meanwhile, Harris quite closely tracked white progressive orthodoxy.
So, progressive groups support minorities, and then promote minorities with progressive opinions, and you don't like that because you're a minority with non-progressive views and feel underrepresented?
I'm not sure I see the problem here? If there is a problem isn't it because minority groups that support regressive politics (say like the 'log cabin Republicans') don't get promoted by their fellow regressives as much? Shouldn't Republicans be amplifying the voice of African-American homophobes, and Gay racists more so that everyone can see that not all minorities are progressive and some want to work together to hold back minority groups they aren't part of?
The problem lies in the question of whether one can truly "support minorities" if you generally disregard their views and culture and only elevate their voices insofar as they agree with your politics. With conservatives do this, they're accused of tokenism and pandering.
I've been genuinely surprised at how immune white progressives seem to be to polling on what minorities support, even on issues relating primarily to minorities.
> So, progressive groups support minorities, and then promote minorities with progressive opinions
Progressives promote minorities with progressive opinions and pass those progressive opinions off as representative of those minority groups. White progressives self-consciously wear that label; non-white progressives invoke their ethnic identity without the progressive qualifier.
Progressives in media, academia, and politics often use their institutional power to manipulate the public narrative surrounding minorities. As my dad once lamented, "CNN made Ilhan Omar into the face of American Muslims."
> you don't like that because you're a minority with non-progressive views and feel underrepresented?
I personally don't like it because I have fairly typical views for my minority group and I don't like being misrepresented. I'd like a more honest public discourse that acknowledges something like "brown people love Obamacare, but really don't want their young kids learning about sex."
More importantly, it disenfranchises the very minorities these progressives purport to speak for.
It enables white progressives to hijack the political power of minorities within the broader center and center left (Democrats and Democrat leaners). For a spell in 2020, progressives turned "Defund the Police" into the "Black" position on policing, and weaponized claims of "racism" against anyone who opposed violent protests and riots. They got the Op-Ed guy at the New York Times fired for publishing a piece by Tom Cotton about putting a stop to the riots. Lots of well-meaning white people care what Black people think about policing, and they are terrified of being called racist, so they put up BLM signs on their lawns and reposted quotes like "riots are the voice of the unheard."
Of course Black people didn't want to Defund the Police, and they don't like riots. When Larry Hogan sent in the Maryland National Guard to put a stop to the Freddie Gray riots, his approval rating in majority-Black Baltimore soared over 70%: https://www.baltimoresun.com/politics/bal-maryland-gov-larry.... Luckily this ended with respect to this specific issue because people like Eric Adams were in a position to call out the white progressives: https://www.businessinsider.com/eric-adams-defund-the-police... ("NYC mayoral candidate Eric Adams says 'young white affluent people' lead the 'defund the police' movement").
This happens on issue after issue: progressives claim the moral high ground by purporting to speak on behalf of minorities while advancing policies those minorities actually oppose. For example, you see all these moves toward race-conscious hiring driven by progressives on behalf of Black and Hispanic people. But most Black and Hispanic people oppose such policies: https://www.vox.com/2019/5/9/18538216/diversity-workplace-pe....
In some cases, this interferes with the ability of minority groups to advocate for their own personal safety. During the increase in crimes against Asian Americans in NYC and SF, CNN was full of Asian activists and academics who stressed the importance of non-white solidarity and not letting the violence derail efforts at criminal justice reform. The Asian American activists platformed by progressives care primarily about maintaining solidarity with other progressive groups, not about the unique interests of Asian Americans: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang?s=r.
But Asian American communities face fundamentally different trade-offs with respect to over-policing versus under-policing compared to other minorities. A white American is three times more likely to be shot by a cop as an Asian American. Asian American voters thus strongly supported Andrew Yang in NYC, and large numbers defected for Curtis Sliwa in the general election. Manipulation by white progressives impaired the ability for Asian Americans to advocate for their own interests.
Fundamentally, white progressives who participate in ethnic identity politics have a conflict of interest. They have tremendous incentives to use their larger numbers and institutional power to advance their own interests, not those of minority groups: https://contexts.org/blog/who-gets-to-define-whats-racist/ ("White elites —who play an outsized role in defining racism in academia, the media, and the broader culture — instead seem to define ‘racism’ in ways that are congenial to their own preferences and priorities.").
> so that everyone can see that not all minorities are progressive
Most minorities aren't progressives. Progressives are whiter on average than the population as a whole, and about as white as traditional conservatives: https://hiddentribes.us/profiles (80% white for progressives, 70% white for traditional conservatives). If you disaggregate say Asian Americans into finer groups than just "Democrat" and "Republican," you'd see that most are moderates, the next biggest chunk are moderate conservatives, and progressives make up a relatively small fraction.
The ones that are progressive (mostly Latinos) are much more likely to be Bernie-style economic progressives than to embrace the intersectional progressivism of Elizabeth Warren. In the 2020 Democratic Primary, Bernie won Latinos in California with 45%. Warren placed fourth with just 7%, lower than Mike Bloomberg. Among Black voters in Virginia, Biden won 63%, and Warren again placed fourth behind Mike Bloomberg, with just 7%.
In fact, Warren was actually never a viable candidate in a Democratic Party that relies on southwestern Latino and southern Black voters to win elections: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/elizabeth-warren-boo... (" In February 2020, New York Times reporter Astead Herndon detailed how Warren’s success with Black and Latino political activists had yielded barely any support among actual Black and Latino voters."). But we were subjected to months of white progressives in media treating her like a frontrunner because they thought that the ethnic minority activists she had on stage with her represented real support from ethnic minorities.
> and some want to work together to hold back minority groups they aren't part of?
Minorities have their own ideas of what policies are good for them, and for the most part they're different from what progressives believe. They should be able to advocate for those interests without white progressives using their institutional power and donor dollars to drown out their voices on issues that concern them.
This is an inherent feature of the emerging system where cultural norms flow top-down from college educated professionals (who are far whiter than the population as a whole). That’ll be true even on matters relating to minorities, because it’ll be college educated white people empowered to decide which non-white people get a platform.
> cultural norms flow top-down from college educated professionals
It doesn't flow anywhere except to other college educated professionals. These people attempt to tell rural, or the working-class, or immigrants what to say and how to behave, who then turn around and do something else like elect Trump.
Progressivism is a manifestation of cultural principles that are closely associated with, and disproportionately manifested among, people of white European descent. There are liberals in every country, but the emphasis on say and sexual self expression and self determination is pretty distinct to countries founded by white Europeans.
It’s similar, in that regard, to small government conservatism. There are conservatives everywhere. But the particular antagonism to government authority is uniquely a product of certain white European cultures.
These people remind me of crusaders a thousand years ago, fighting the "infidels" all over.
In fact, the whole body of thought governing them reminds me too much of the Latin Church. I have no words to express how I detest the kind of thinking behind them.
How dare you compare us progressives to the oppressors in the church who forced the natives into slave labor! We’re nothing like the imperialist Catholic inquisition. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some statues I need to go iconoclasm.
So not like killing at all. It is, however, a bit like building an orthodoxy. Which the group formerly in position to build orthodoxy is surprised to learn is an uncomfortable process.
My reading is the only thing preventing a considerable portion of them from killing is law enforcement, and the fact that most societies has evolved past supporting violence.
You have to observe that deadly violence was normalized in the past.
It was even entertainment in Rome. Hence, the Colloseum.
Externally, it's evolved, but internally the ideolog is quite similar.
Some of the similarities are:
- divides men and women
- interferes and intends to control families
- demonizes people that are useful to society and accumulate wealth
Well.. tbh some feminists supported the Afghanistan war based on "feminist grounds". Of course in reality the situation was only made much worse for women. No side is free of making bad choices
Why would you use the word filipinx when there’s already the gender neutral word Filipino? Also doesn’t filipinx exclude Filipinos outside of the American diaspora? Then what do you call Filipinos outside of that geographical area?
See, you’re digging your own semantic hole with all this political correctness.
I know "it's literally 1984" [1] is a meme but c'mon... This is ridiculous even for Google. The systematic deconstruction and sanitation of language so that it conforms to a particular group's ideological leanings is unacceptable, especially in the hand's of a mega corporation.
The biggest annoyance for me is that the word/woke policing throws out the most important thing: context.
We don’t punish people for crimes until we’ve had a look at the context and establish their specific intention (Strict liability withstanding) so why are we not doing the same with words and sentences?
Master/slave debacle is a prime example. Yes it can be used offensively. But for gods sake, look at the context! Annoys me that with all the injustice still prevalent in the world, they choose to fight this instead.
That seems like an odd example. The "specific intention" of the word "slave" in computing is unquestionably to draw an analogy to slavery, so if somebody objects to the word on the grounds that it references an actual atrocity, they're factually correct.
I think what you're trying to say is that people don't mean to be offensive when they reference slavery this way. And you're right about that. Similarly, if I ask someone how their mom is right after she died, I'm probably not trying to be hurtful. But not intending an outcome doesn't actually prevent you from getting that outcome. If somebody tells you their mom is dead, and you didn't mean to be hurtful, you won't keep asking after her, because now you're aware of the effect it has.
I mean it isn't killing people, but it is admittedly strange. How about if instead you use Dominatrix and Sub? Or Officer and Prisoner?
Would those not be inappropriate because it's just borrowing terminology?
There are only a few of these progressive changes I find really valid, but this is one I can understand. It's not that it's killing people, it's just if we can change it then why not. It is kind of weird to use, given the history of slavery in the majority of the world. Can't we just not have references to slavery in the BIOS of my computer?
It’s such a non issue but these are the same people that wanted to change the name of Rubocop because it makes reference to policing. Or motherboard, whiteboard or blackboard because they’re patriarchical white supremacist heteronormative neo colonial etc etc pomo fashionable nonsense. There’s really not an iota wrong with making reference to these terms. It’s really an insult to everyone’s intelligence.
Partition_sort isn't an analogy to the Partition of India (which isn't the traditionally understood meaning of the word 'partition').
In terms of analogies, we're much closer to if we'd decided to call a "delete all" function the "genocide" function. If computer programmers had widely used that terminology for the last three decades it might sound a bit less weird to us and the cohort of people shouting "that's such an inappropriate analogy" might be just a small group of liberals, but I'm not sure their argument about it being a poor word choice would be entirely baseless.
On this note, fun fact: 'slave' used to be the same word as 'Slav', as in literally a person of Slavic origin. The new meaning was acquired subsequently because Slavs were often enslaved in those times. So if etymologically traced further back the word itselft is pretty benign.
However, since Slav and slave evolved into distinct words and slavery is a larger phenomenon than the Partition, I'd say your point stands.
Master/slave replication is unambiguously an analogy to the practice of slavery in general (not one accurate enough to be useful, I agree). 'Partition' is a generic term for the subdivision of something, with the subdivision of India not even being a particularly prominent example.
Who decides if particular words are potentially inappropriate? People decide, including people working for corporations that make linting tools or industry bodies like the MPAA. Ironically the latter is an actual monopoly that literally does attempt to prevent people from watching films based on its word lists rather than simply suggesting alternative words, but the longstanding practice of people being fussy about certain words is apparently only terrifying or Orwellian when the potentially offended party is minorities.
Exactly, that's the big problem with so many of these ideas - they ignore common sense, making them look like tone-deaf measures created in bad faith. Which they probably are.
I feel you. This is my biggest critique of the so-called "woke" language. Perhaps their intentions are good, but I fail to see how hiding behind inclusive language does anything to change the reality of the lives of people they claim to be helping in the first place.
Calling a "landlord" a proprietor (example from the article) does nothing to change the actual dynamic between landlord and tenant. You have only changed the symbols you use without affecting any meaningful change in the world. Maybe a devil's advocate would say, "Symbols evoke feelings evoke action and thus we are affecting people's actions". That's the strongest counter-argument I can think of, and it's not very convincing either. Not sure how a landlord would suddenly change how they act because they are now proprietors.
Yep, I had struggled down these lines too but the always lucid John McWhorter cleared things up for me, and as a linguist it's right up his alley.
"On metaphor, master is a useful example. The basic concept of the master as a leader or person of authority has extended into a great many metaphorical usages. One of them was its use as a title on plantations worked by slaves...That makes sensible the elimination of certain other uses of the word, which parallel and summon the slavery one...in the 1970s, such schools had just begun a call to stop having male teachers called "master" and female teachers called "teacher," in favor of having all instructors called simply "teacher"...This meant that young subordinates had been calling white men in positions of authority "master," after all—including, by the 1970s, more than a few black students. And today's call to stop referring to technology parts as "master" versus "slave" attachments follows in the same vein, as it directly channels what was so offensive about the slavery usage...However, other extensions of the word master do not meaningfully resemble the plantation one, and only a kind of obsession could explain spraying for them now. Are we to consider it racist to refer simply to mastering a skill? To master tape as opposed to dupes...The plantation meaning of master was one tributary of a delta of extensions of the word; it should go, but we need not fill in the entire delta."
And for emphasis I'm pulling this one out of the main block:
Probably severe nepotism with industry consulting or someone has some idealistic child in colleague and their guilt about neglected parenting made them force the issue as it has been adopted in some parts of the industry. At least official, never seen anyone use different terms by now and I don't even know the substitute. It is always something like this. But yeah, they certainly are white as the snow, so much is sure.
I spent many years in the bluest corner of a very blue state. But still I can't imagine any objection to the word "landlord" outside of (1) a right wing attempt to satirize the left, (2) a Google product brainstorming meeting, or (3) a rare sincere outlier or concern troll. In any of those cases I don't think this is necessary.
That said, if the word "landlord" organically fell out of favor and out of usage to be replaced by something else I wouldn't care. Language is always evolving, and usually we don't make a big deal out of it. It's mundane and can often be helpful. It doesn't have to become a proxy for culture war arguments if we don't make it one.
But to have Google (or any AI) in charge of this... just... no. Admittedly that's a common stance for me but I think it's well justified here anyway.
Landlord gets hit from multiple sides; those who don't like that it contains "lord" which is a male term, those who don't like that landlords exist, and those who don't like that the concept of owning land exists.
Sure the origin is to do with Lords but landlord isn't male, anyone can be a landlord, pretending it's gendered is just lying to try and be offended. Presumably, such people think the word coward references bovines as it includes the word cow.
I don't like that landlords exist, but that's an inordinately stupid reason to try and get rid of a word. Surely noone believes that by sensoring a word you get rid of that which the word describes.
> pretending it's gendered is just lying to try and be offended.
Please don't assume this. In the southern US in the late 80s and early 90s, "landlady" was a term that was very commonly used for female "landlords". I'm not sure if it's specifically regional, though.
> word coward references bovines as it includes the word cow.
I once was scolded by a United Airlines flight agent at Denver when I expressed disappointment that my full-fair buisness class ticket was downgraded to coach because of an operational change. I said, perhaps a bit flippantly, "I didn't pay for a J ticket (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fare_basis_code#Booking_class) to sit in steerage."
She replied: "Sir! How dare you compare people flying coach to cattle!"
(Of course, the word "steerage" has nothing to do with cattle. We sent a Fed-Ex to United corporate telling them we didn't like being scolded and got an apology and a full refund for that flight. This was in 1998 or so. I doubt that would happen today.)
A caveat of bending over backwards to be as inclusive as possible is that sometimes you end up including people who are just plain nuts. You end up enshrining the personal problems of a handful of people into company policy.
As someone who somewhat supports public land ownership (of the Georgism variety), I think you'd have to be plain nuts to use that belief to justify discouraging others to use the word 'landlord'. Especially considering I hear the word more from people who oppose land ownership than from anyone else. I'm more inclined to believe that this is about gender.
And the new concept is property owner can be of any gender so change the word that points out to one particular gender. When did change become so difficult in this society? Ha!!
It’s just a modern word. “Landlord”. People know what it means. Stop anybody on the street and ask them what a landlord is? They will tell you. It’s an established word. What’s the point in changing it because a few people actively want to be offended?
Apartment buildings yes, but most single family homes (where people use the term landlord the most I suspect) are usually owned by an identifiable individual.
> those who don't like that landlords exist, and those who don't like that the concept of owning land exists.
I think these two groups would prefer "landlord" over "proprietor" because "landlord" has a much more negative connotation and probably inspires a visceral reaction in anyone who's had a bad landlord. Only the "male" thing makes any sort of sense from a left wing POV.
I would be extremely surprised if this came from the left: most people I know relish the negative connotation of being able to describe someone as a landlord.
I would believe the GP's second hypothesis; it's hard to imagine who else would even think to substitute "property owner" for "landlord" (it's not even accurate!)
It's hard not to secretly suspect that some of these things arise that way-- satire that is so spot on that it gets adopted as the truth.
> and out of usage to be replaced by something else I wouldn't care
Fundamentally that's why language bullying works-- it doesn't matter what words are used so long as the communicating parties understand each other. Not only does it mean that it's not worth it to fight back, it makes anyone who does fight back against it look automatically suspect.
The same is true for a lot of other bullying: ignoring that its bullying deprives it of its power. Or, at least, it denies it of it's power until it doesn't.
But do we want to live in a world where our language is constantly being rewritten-- at a non-zero cost-- by bullies (and their automation)? Reasonable people could debate it.
Policing Language (and frequently changing it) is one of the levers of control that was outlined heavily by Orwell in 1984, with the concept of Doublespeak.
Now I know people are bored of parallels between reality and 1984, or Brave New World, or whatever other dystopia novels. They were written by authors not prophets after all.
Still, it's impossible for me not to think we're on our way when I read something like
"But do we want to live in a world where our language is constantly being rewritten-- at a non-zero cost-- by bullies"
You mixed up newspeak, the constructed language the state was inventing, with doublethink, the practice of believing 2 contradictory statements that each support the state in opposing ways (having it both ways).
> It's hard not to secretly suspect that some of these things arise that way-- satire that is so spot on that it gets adopted as the truth.
There have been many PR/issues on github that were either very likely, or certainly submitted by trolls, that have been accepted.
[1] Although nowadays it's common to see master/slave being replaced, back in 2015 it was not common, this one one of the first things that dropped that terminology. The fact that the user is called pcbro and has a picture of PC Principal from South Park, makes it somewhat likely that it was a troll.
[2] I think based on the language used is almost 100% certainly a troll
As possible a reason for #2 going wrong as any other. But #2 thinking they know what's best for humanity is an established enough pattern that I imagine it happens organically as well.
A nudging system like this better have a much higher signal to noise ratio otherwise it really amps up the clippy-like annoyance. Keep in mind this isn't something you have to go turn on in a menu for "help me write inclusively", it's enabled by default for all; and while I might personally appreciate the reminders when they do work, I'm not sure as many users of the software think playing word police should be a priority.
A significant number of people, perhaps even a heavy majority, think there's nothing wrong with "landlord" that needs improvement. Change for change's sake isn't a great justification.
This link in the article is insanely, crazily, madly, insultingly sickening to anyone who's not a slave. As I read it I felt like it was some kind of parody of Orwell. Disgusting to tell someone what verbiage they use sincerely and in technical terms is now verboten because it's harmful. To whom? Crazy people?
Here’s an idea. American Big Tech should form a Uniban Consortium to streamline the process of adding and banning new harmful words of the month. Then your OS update could come with support for, say, Unicode 20.0 and Uniban 6.0: five new emojis and fifty new words banned!
Btw, the word main should probably be put on a future batch; too similar to “man” to be comfortable.
Yeah, the emoji manipulation of this is much more subversive and also continuously going on. Forbidding emojis which get converted to suggestiveness. We're left with eggplant and water droplets, which they know they can't remove, but they also are on guard against adding anything new that would allow more expressiveness in that area.
If they could they'd ban the letter X to prevent people typing "sex"
This guide is interesting in how it lists allegedly immoral language use, alongside with clear PR/legal/trademark directives which I don't give a fuck about, such as "don't use google as a verb". I'll google whatever I want, google PR, go suck an egg.
Also quite annoying how they simply tell us what to do, without justifying things. A lot of these would be quite hard to truly argue - i.e. "blind people... can't see things. why exactly is that metaphor inappropriate to talk about visibility?" So they just assume an authoritarian tone and just instruct us in how we should behave.
"Avoid using gray-box, graybox, or gray box to describe testing."
"grayed-out, greyed-out, gray out, grey out
Don't use. Instead, use unavailable."
WTF are these people on about.
Oh it's because they hate certain color words such as "black" and "white", words used by humans to indicate certain reflectivity properties of light; since it would be weird to only prohibit words which contain white or black, they just extend the prohibition to nearby related words.
It’s not a race thing, it’s a disability thing — “greyed out” is only something that makes sense to someone who can see, it’s confusing the actual concept with the visual indicator of the concept.
It’s the same with “the box is checked” to mean “selected” or “redlining a contract” to mean “negotiating.”
The point of inclusive language isn’t some weird political points contest. It’s writing in a manner that’s clear to people of lots of different backgrounds and doesn’t rely on just having to know English idioms or have common shared experiences. Why is blacklist the one that excludes and whitelist the one that includes — you just have to know, English right? But you can avoid the need for that entirely by allowlist and denylist.
>> The point of inclusive language isn’t some weird political points contest. It’s writing in a manner that’s clear to people of lots of different backgrounds and doesn’t rely on just having to know English idioms or have common shared experiences.
I don't think efficiency and universal comprehension is the point at all. Deaf people understand the phrase "loud and clear" just as well as hearing people. Blind people understand "redlining" as well as sighted people do.
Policing every bit of language to cater to every potential group robs the language of its color, which is something I suppose you couldn't say anymore. Robs it of its beauty. Robs it of its poetry. Destroys its capacity for nuance. In the name of what?
Can you possibly be serious? Is your idea of perfect communication something that omits every daily experience of every person who can see, hear, read, and walk? Should these concepts never be mentioned?
How is it "violence" to someone in a wheelchair to talk about walking to the store? They know they're in a wheelchair. They know other people can walk. You think preaching "avoiding the need" for idioms that refer to walking is somehow fixing inequality? It's daft and ludicrous virtue signaling, and worse, it's insulting to everyone you think you're protecting.
[Edit] The worst is, it's a power play. Google should not nudge or dictate the language you use in any document, let alone a private text document! Words are our tools, human tools, to use as we wish to express what we want, the way we want, and you and Google have no right to police them.
You are assuming so much about what I said. Writing inclusively is not for everyone all of the time, it’s when you’re writing to the broadest possible audience and clarity, ease of understanding, and accessibility are paramount.
> Is your idea of perfect communication something that omits every daily experience…
No, what? It’s about avoiding terms where the context for understanding them are experiences not everyone has — “temba his arms wide” only makes sense to the Darmok.
> How is it "violence" to someone in a wheelchair to talk about walking to the store.
It’s not what are you even taking about? You should not presume that your reader can walk by saying things like “when you are out walking to the store” but there’s literally nothing wrong with mentioning walking.
> Policing every bit of language to cater to every potential group robs the language of its color
So this isn’t true, nobody is trying to force this on all language. But you have to take a step back and reflect on this. Given a hypothetical world where the choice was language color and including groups different from your own experience you really picked the former?
>> Given a hypothetical world where the choice was language color and including groups different from your own experience you really picked the former?
The real choice being presented is between a world where language has many colors as used by many groups when talking within and between groups, and one where everything is supposed to be "inclusive"... an idea based on the feelings or hypothetical feelings of some person, somewhere. You think we should all adjust our language and it's worth removing any color to accommodate that hypothetical person's feelings, and I think that's not only insane, it's an attempt to use phoney virtue to dictate to and feel power over others.
You may as well ask whether I'd choose a world where everyone spoke English rather than one which excluded people by some groups speaking their own language. There are, in fact, linguistic supremacists who think like this, and can frame it as an argument for "inclusivity"... e.g. the Chinese government. What it really amounts to is cultural imperialism.
Yeah, I appreciate the sentiment and I don't think most of it is out of ill-will. I just think it's ineffective. I'd rather just accept the need to educate every generation of its own responsibility for treating people fairly - rather than pretend that fixing words would make a difference.
There are also cases like "white-glove" where the phrase doesn't just represent the stereotypical "white = good & black = bad" - there is real meaning here, since white is a color which makes dust more visible.
I completely agree, although in my own writing I would probably avoid white-glove not because of any race association but again because it’s an idiom that you have to have existing context to know. If your upbringing didn’t make you associate white gloves with fastidious butlers then you will probably be confused. You might instead associate cleanliness with the yellow gloves worn by many cleaning staff.
Or people could learn something by, for example, encountering the phrase and looking up the historical context.
The extension of your logic is that all writing should be geared to people with no knowledge, no historical reference, no firm understanding of the language, no visual or auditory cues (how do you talk about music without harming someone? Seriously, I ask this as a former music columnist). That is not language. [Edit: It's at best a graphic, except even that would be prohibited]. That is the conveyance of minimal information, like, 'don't stand here (in the place formerly known as being in front of a door).' It's completely absurd. It's inhuman. It's bent and wicked.
Yeah nah, old mate over here putting in the hard yakka and ignoring the place of code-switching. There's a middle ground between "souless corpo speak" and speaking colloquially. You need to give everyone a fair shake of the stick and assuming everyone comes from the big smoke doesn't.
Words are a tool used to convey meaning mate. Cracking the shits because you've gotta make concessions means you're not seeing a hammer as a hammer
Look, if I wasn't a big fan of Paul Hogan and had to look up what you meant, I'd still put in the time to wiki all of it. And sometimes that's the whole point of using words in a certain way (as you did): to get people to reflect on the subtler shades of meaning. And that should be perfectly fine, because you're choosing the audience you want to address and how you want to address them. I don't understand half of Ulysses without reading the footnotes, but I don't expect I was supposed to. If you want people to ponder what you're saying or hear it in a certain poetic way, that's absolutely your prerogative, whether you're writing documents for an app or addressing Parliament. It's not as if Google is suggesting that dropping colloquialisms is a clearer way of communicating to more people for the sake of efficiency. They're essentially demanding uniform corpo-speak and trying to stop you from even using your own words in your own private docs. It's tyranny.
If the entire point of using words in a certain way is to get people to reflect on subtle shades of meaning, admire your poetry or reach for a thesaurus, you're entitled to ignore the suggestions. Probably you'll want to ignore grammar suggestions which have been in word processors for decades without hundred comment whingefests and spurious Orwell comparisons too. Maybe even spellcheck if using yer own werrds in yer own pryvate documents is really iMpoRtAnT to yoo[1]. Most people aren't using Google docs to write Ulysses or Riddley Walker though, they're using it to draft documentation and letters to a customer base.
(And elsewhere it's being asserted with equal fury that master/slave replication and assumptions that people are exclusively male shouldn't be flagged because the choice of words doesn't have any deeper meaning...)
Honestly, can you not see how staggeringly self-centred it is to insist that if readers have to Google your idioms that's the beauty of language (even for documents where clarity is more important than linguistic flourishes) but removable squiggly line suggestions are far too much of an imposition on native speakers (who are of course both incapable of making a word choice in error and too vulnerable not to unthinkingly accept Google's suggested alternative in their private documents).
Honestly, the word privilege is overused, but I can't think of anything more apt to describe a cohort of people so far removed from any real threat that the most tyrannical thing they can think of is a clunky grammar check feature.
[1]Ironically, my phone actually insisted on overwriting my pryvate werrds with alternative spellings. Tyranny, I tell you.
>> can you not see how staggeringly self-centred it is to insist that if readers have to Google your idioms that's the beauty of language
You know what's self-centered? Telling the whole world that they're writing the right or wrong way. Believing everyone reads the way you do. Believing you know what words they should use and what their aims are in addressing a reader.
>> Honestly, the word privilege is overused, but I can't think of anything more apt to describe a cohort of people so far removed from any real threat that the most tyrannical thing they can think of is a clunky grammar check feature.
The grammar check feature is the thin end of a wedge. Who's more privileged than someone worried one of the world's largest companies is setting policies that restrict or nudge private language in billions of documents? I guess "more privileged" would be the people who have no understanding of the history of political suppression of language and think that using the word "landlord" is a form of "harm" or "violence" which entitles a company to involve itself in the content of people's letters (and here, any comparison to spell checking is totally disingenuous). Anyone who believes language is "violence" and supports policing it is either a totalitarian or so privileged themselves as to have never seen violence.
It's not a question of being able to turn the feature off: It's the sheer monomaniacal hubris of people who think they have a right to be the voice in someone's ear or on someone's text document, trying to dissuade them from using words you arbitrarily don't like in a bid to control their behavior. That is exactly the nature of tyranny and totalitarianism. Only people with such extreme privilege as to have grown up far away from those things can pretend it's simply promoting "inclusivity".
BTW bro, have you looked at that photo of yourself at Machu Pichu on your website? You're the poster child for privileged people misusing "privilege".
>> whingefests
This also betrays your kind. "Quit whining" is a favorite line of most bullies. You're the kind of bully who gets their hands on a leftist idea instead of a fascist/racist idea, but show precisely the same lack of thought. They do try to make these virtue signaling behaviors and speech patterns easier for frat boys these days - makes you guys easier to switch off whenever they feel like turning accusations of "privilege" against you.
Nope, I'm going to stick with the view that it's self-centred to not only think even inadvertently confusing idioms are invariably more important than clarity, but also to insist that even if some people want pointers on avoiding gendered terms or words which have obscure controversies associated with them, corporations must restrict their grammar checking features to stuff which doesn't trigger you.
And no, it absolutely isn't disingenuous to suggest that a feature which suggests some words might inadvertently assume the reader is male or has negative connotations isn't somehow qualitatively different to one that tells you your Flesch Kincaid score could be higher, advises you to avoid the passive voice or starting sentences with "but", and even spellchecks have a subjective component (as I'm reminded whenever I decline a tool's suggestion to substitute Noah Webster's spellings for the ones I was taught). All style guide stuff involves judgements by humans based on what they think is better for other humans to read and none involves any behaviour control (at least not unless the style guide checker is your boss).
You can't have it both ways, if word choices are incapable of alienating people it makes bugger all difference to have a software feature with some words suggesting using some different words. If the beaty of words matters deeply to you, maybe their etymology or gender implications matter to some people who are not you too. Personally I'd say people thinking that landlord is a pretty worrisome term are a bit over the top, but they're not half as over the top as people insisting there's something akin to the suppression of political speech about suggesting "proprietor" as an alternative and anyone who doesn't agree with them is a bully.
BTW bro, thanks for checking out my website. Not sure why you think that old pic gives you great insight into my background, but let's just say I haven't lead such a sheltered existence I feel bullied by a user configurable linting tool and people not agreeing with my opinion on linting tools.
My original comment was about Google's style guide for developers, which is not an optional set of suggestions. But as far as the linting tool, it is not something people are installing themselves who want to correct their grammar. It's a default-on layer over private writing in one of the most widely used pieces of writing software in the world. Its purpose is not to correct grammar or even to suggest stylistic improvements, but rather to nag people to make politically charged and slanted word choices, explicitly telling them that words like "mother" are politically incorrect.
A decade of social media has shown that small changes to UIs, news feeds, opt-out features and suggestion algorithms have radically changed human behavior. This is a dark pattern attempt to change human behavior. A neutral tool for typing documents has no business making this an opt-out feature. The aim of it is not to improve people's writing but to literally make people think twice about using certain words because someone, somewhere might be offended by them. The trouble is that when this becomes foremost in one's mind while writing, it absolutely warps the ability to speak honestly. It politicizes everything.
And these are not suggestions made by humans. They are being made by an opaque AI. If that AI decides that a word is politically incorrect, a nudge like this can effectively dampen the usage of that word in practice, without any sort of wider debate.
Consider how this will play out when China and Russia require Docs and other word processors to include "nudges" like this, for example about the Ukraine war, or Tibet. Of course, you can still type what you want to, but the chilling effect of seeing a warning pop up about a word you've just written is enough in many places to make you delete it. Just because it's being done first in the name of inclusivity or social justice and 'who could argue with that?' doesn't make it OK. It's a blatant attempt to control human behavior.
There's no "honesty" in calling a database a "slave" or assuming your user base is male. If Googlers compiling are wrong that calling a database a "slave" actually normalises slavery then nobody is actually hurt and no meaning lost by the trivial move to rename it something else, and if they're right... well you're free to make a case that the normalisation of slavery is an inherently wonderful thing under threat, I guess, but is a niche position (and people edit in response to the prompt precisely because most developers using the term have absolutely no intention of normalising slavery)
Consider how this already played out when the words in question were profanity. People cracked jokes about the clunkiness of a feature that censored the town of Scunthorpe but nobody old enough to get into cinemas came up with absurd comparisons to the Great Firewall of China or talked about it as mind control or bullying. No slippery slope was fallen down, and despite swear filters being pervasive in style guides and on user generated content tools, self-proclaimed free speech advocates ignored them to the extent they're actually insisting the social justice people did content filters first. I guess it's easier to be indifferent when you don't despise the cause behind it...
I'm not a proponent of slavery, nor was I one 20 years ago the first time I set up a slave server. You don't think it's the least bit wrong to artificially call people names just because you decided to change the language in a completely ridiculous way and they didn't want to play-act along with you that you were doing a great thing for the world?
The "honesty" is inherent in calling a thing what it is. Red and green still exist, whether or not there are blind people who can't see them. Asking people to avoid the word "red", as in "redlining", is asking people to agree that 2+2=5. Some will do so out of fear. Some will do so because they're browbeaten with retarded arguments like the ones you're giving.
2+2=4. The people who thought the Great Firewall was a good idea for Chinese nationalism are just like you. They believed in doing the best thing for the most people, at the expense of anyone who disagreed with them. And like you, their real reason was not in fact to help anyone; it was showing that they had power to push their agenda.
>> I guess it's easier to be indifferent when you don't despise the cause behind it...
This is the real nut of it. If you find yourself indifferent to something because you're in favor if the cause behind it, but you would be outraged if you were against the cause behind it, then you had better speak out against it - because it will come for you eventually.
It always comes back and bites you. I'm a grandchild of holocaust survivors. No one spoke up for us. You are creating the conditions by which everyone is afraid to speak their mind.
I hope your own people do come for you first, and I'm confident they will find something in your Facebook or Twitter history to kick you out of society as language changes in the next few years and you find yourself left behind. My advice to you then is: Remember that you didn't speak up for anyone else you disagreed with.
This'll be the end of this; I'm done wasting my time on someone who can't understand the basic principles at work here. I hope the best for you and people like you when the fascists take over and tell you which words aren't inclusive of their idea of equity.
Sincere question: since idioms and metaphors are rooted in history and shared experience, isn't dropping extremely common usages kicking the can (if you will) in the other direction?
In other words, by trying to be inclusive about allowlist aren't you taking away opportunity to include ESL folks in that rich history?
Anyone will have to ask/learn about able/denylist behavior anyways on their first encounter, and learning "whitelist" would have a multiplier effect that increases comprehension of the numerous similar usages they will inevitably encounter. That seems like active inclusivity to me, but I wouldn't be surprised if I'm missing something (I hadn't ever thought down this line until I read your comment).
Note: I'm specifically asking about otherwise neutral terms and have come around on avoiding any terms that are still used in the same way as their offensive history (e.g. no master/slave but yes master debater).
I don't think it's the worst thing to encourage people too be thoughtful about their word choice. Is it really "crazy", or are you selling an emotional reaction by personifying your topic as a mentally deranged person? I actually think steering clear of this language is helpful in defusing the outrage culture that is so harmful to our online discourse.
I chose my wording carefully to illustrate that the conveyance of emotion, even through jarring phrases, is an important part of language. You can absolutely disagree with the rhetorical style, but the point is there's a vast difference between your rebuttal to it and an ML mechanism built into your writing program that dissuades you from writing certain types of prose, or persuades you to use language that an opaque AI decided is less triggering.
We don't have to all be helpful, logical or anodyne all the time, either. Repressing what you want to say is unhealthy and also leads to dishonest debate. We don't need to be coddled and protected from some speech by algorithms. What we need to do is learn to
see the rhetorical flaws and rebut them - as you just have (although, as I said, those flaws were there on purpose, as a layer of meta-meaning in sarcastic word choice that would fly over the head of an algorithm).
I got it, and I think my point still stands. Some of the problem here is Poe's Law:
> every parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied
I could tell you were being sarcastic, but the fact remains your said what you said. Sarcasm is great for tearing bad things down, but useless for building anything to replace it.
I am not a fan of this Clippy shit either, but I can see value in things I don't like. The world needs more nuance, not less. And the world needs people to be willing to explain the nuance, not serve it as an inside joke for those who already get it.
But I just explained it, if not to you then to someone who didn't get it. I'm absolutely willing to delve into the machinery of anything to explain it. I'm not, however, willing to live in a world where everyone is encouraged to tailor their expressions to the lowest common denominator. The truth is that speaking to the LCD is pointless unless you're a populist who needs their vote, or otherwise need to manipulate them somehow. If as someone suggested (who said no one's using it to write Ulysses) the main use of Google Docs is to write promotional garbage for big corporations, then great. The popups can be called "be more anodyne and over-explain for idiots", instead of "inclusivity warning". I would support that.
It's just ironic that you explained it to me, who already got it, because I asked you to clarify it for other people, who didn't ask. It's exactly my point.
I also don't want an anodyne and bland world, but I believe some communication should be that way. In fact, I believe the world would be a better place if the populist messaging were more lower common denominator, and our personal communications more dynamic. Not because it legally has to be, but because it helps preserve the status quo (which I selfishly like).
I think there are other reasons to care about the "lowest common denominator" (which really means, people who don't think like me) besides to manipulate or gain something from them. I believe everyone has value as human beings, and we'll build a better society if everyone understands the conversation.
I don't think these guys are trying to encourage people to be thoughtful, despite what they may claim - it feels more like one tribe using the power of google to try and control another tribe.
Giving these dummies what they want won't defuse anything. Thus far, doing so has not retarded the progress of this sort of language policing, but has led to increasingly insane demands. It's like handing your lunch money over to a bully in the hopes she will stop bullying you.
I think the way to stop outrage culture is to stop incentivising 'outrage' by refusing to indulge these lunatics.
What you wrote is much more emotionally powerful than what I wrote because of your strong language and metaphor (dummies, lunatics, control, insane, bullying). I think many people would prefer that arguments stand on their substance instead of catering to people's lizard brains.
While it's hilarious, it's understandable IMHO - just basic statistics, she is more often used in front of pretty/ugly. It's showing a glitch in our society more than a glitch in Google AI.
This on the other hand looks like a hand-crafted blacklist of words that they want to remove from the language, I have no idea how would I train an AI which would classify "motherboard" as inappropriate.
> While it's hilarious, it's understandable IMHO - just basic statistics, she is more often used in front of pretty/ugly. It's showing a glitch in our society more than a glitch in Google AI.
Well, this doesn't necessarily show you facts about society because there's no particular reason to think the training set distribution is the same as anything in the real world.
It's frankly impossible that they have a training set without any biases, though I'm sure they worked to eliminate the ones they could think of (which itself would have bias).
You can make the distribution different by eg duplicating some of the data a lot, which you might want to do to improve the actual purpose of the model (translation). Any other purposes (having opinions on gender) is just a coincidence and not being optimized for/regression tested.
I still unironically want a singular variant to rise in popularity, don't particularly care what. There are so many times when "they" comes up and I have no clue if we're talking about a person or a group. There's already enough pronoun ambiguity when talking about single subjects without intoducing a dimension of plurality ambiguity.
Yes, I'm sure almost everyone reading this was already aware. This doesn't mean that "they are pretty. they are clever. they are ugly. they are good." is a good localization of "ő csinos. ő okos. ő csúnya. ő jó."
It's computer-brain solution to a problem that is crying out for a human. Humans "don't scale". Therefore paying 5 bi-lingual experts to teach the machine is "infeasible", but spending millions upon millions of dollars on hardware and software development, then exposing it the unwashed mess of the internet isn't....
The older I get, the more I fail to understand how the vocal minority is able to completely control the narrative on everything.
While we’re at it, let’s just gut the English language of anything remotely related to gender, race, or color. Then we can go after Latin-based languages that use gender at the core of their grammar.
Weird. The older I get the more understandable it becomes to me. None of this crap matters. At most it matters because it enables bullying, but bullies are always going to find something to bully over.
"Good job, you won, you made me stop using a perfectly fine word that was uniformly well understood, and replace it with another perfectly fine word that is also uniformly well understood. Nothing changed, but now at least you get to take credit for it. Good for you."
Eventually the bullies bully themselves and then no one is safe.
I especially find the term “birthing person” particularly cringey and offensive and I imagine women do as well. Humanity was perfectly fine with the word “woman” (in whatever language you choose) for as long as we invented language, but then some elitist academic comes along and thinks they can simply erase that because…reasons?
Irrelevant nitpick: "gender" in linguistics means "category". Objects in grammatically gendered languages are rarely/never categorized as "manly" or "effeminate"; they're, for example, categorized as "animate" or "inanimate". [1]
Reciprocal nitpick: That explanation of category is pretty weak and cannot be applied universally anyway. In many cases, gender assignment is completely arbitrary, and the article pretty much admits that. For example, in Croatian, table (stol) is masculine, while chair (stolica) is feminine, which is completely arbitrary, and both are inanimate. There is no rule in Croatian (or other Slavic languages that I am aware of) that categorizes gendered nouns for any reason.
In the article they use the example of "Motherboard" and "Landlord" and seem to suggest that these are areas where the Google AI is making mistakes or being overly strict.
As a Google employee expressing my own opinion and observations of company culture, I can say that these are 100% not mistakes. Many Google employees are just so out of touch with the real world that they believe it is the duty of Google Docs to change the English language to exclude the words "landlord", "motherboard", and even "mother" in most contexts (sub with birthing person).
This may seem unbelievable, but the word "motherboard" is literally banned within Google and you are required to use "mainboard" instead. You are not allowed to use this word in documentation or code, and you're also not allowed to say it privately in chats or emails.
As someone who also works at Google, I agree that there is a vocal minority who want Google to be a promoter of progressive values, but: I think you nay be exaggerating things here.
I've never even heard of any controversy over the word "motherboard". I just did some internal searches. It seems to be a well-used word, both in code and in documentation. (I did a code search for both "motherboard" and "mainboard" and they seem to be used by similar amounts, fwiw.)
In fairness, I will say that I do watch my language more closely than I think is really needed:
The terms "whitelist" and "blacklist" are built into my thought-vocabulary. I do find myself switching to "allowlist" and "denylist" as I translate my thoughts in discussions. Not that anyone has ever "called me out" if I slipped up with "whitelist".
The banned words list they are referring to is about what words should be used in external product documentation and marketing :)
Not about what you are allowed to say inside google, or anything like that.
Some languages have gendered words as a fundamental grammatical aspect of the language (though since this language aspect evolved out of earlier grammatical distinctions that had nothing to do with “gender”, frequently the gendering of words is kinda random). English doesn’t have grammatical gender, and it has a relatively small set of words in its vocabulary that are specifically gendered. The argument goes that the use of some of this vocabulary is harmful, and that it’s easier to try to move away from using the whole class of gender-specific vocabulary words outside of actually gender-specific scenarios than it is to try to define and keep track of which gendered vocabulary words should be discouraged. Words like “motherboard” are collateral damage of this broader effort to discourage use of terms like “mothering”, which can be used in English to mean both “being mother to”, but also in a metaphorical generic sense as “being responsible for and looking after”, even of things that are not children, and is discouraged in favor of “parenting” or “caretaking”, which have the same implications but without the gendered aspect.
If the objection were to parenthood, which is to say if nurtureboard or parentboard were similarly offensive, then I agree this would have been a stupid stupid choice.
The problem is that you had a motherboard and daughter boards, those were the accepted terms, and never fatherboard or son boards, never parentboard or child boards. Why were they gendered female in the first place?
Because they had “female connections,” which is to say their use is in plugging pins into their sockets.
Obviously that is a sexual analogy that did not age particularly well, this idea that a motherboard is the motherboard because you shove stuff into it. So people started replacing with mainboard because it makes more sense...
>Why were they gendered female in the first place?
well, for this context, it's called a "motherboard" because "mainboard" was already a thing. Motherboard was to distinguish at the time how this new board can be expanded upon by plugging in ports. There was no real malice here, it was just fancy marketing term that stuck.
Ultimately, we're humans and we try to anthropize all kinds of things in life to make them "feel relatable", be it animals, boats, hurricanes, or yes, computer. so that extends to our language as well. Especially in marketing where the goal is to make customers feel good and close the sale. There may be a conversation on WHY we do this, but starting that conversation on the foot of "well people just want to be sexist" won't get us anywhere.
It's more likely that it's a similar naming to mother lode, i.e. the motherboard is the central source of the computer and everything connected to it is a child that hangs off of it.
It is the same logic as why we switched from "fireman" to "firefighter" or "stewardess" to "fight attendant" decades ago. Because some people find the old word offensive. The only real debate is the size of the "some" and whether that "some" is small enough to ethically ignore.
The thing is, those substitutions are logical because "fireman" doesn't refer to female firefighters. But "motherboard" is different, because "board" doesn't refer to a person.
Exactly. Mainship instead of mothership? I guess male and female plugs/sockets are off limits now too.
I'm tired of this sort of shallow, performative, language policing. I'm (I believe) a socially progressive, inclusive person, but this shit makes me tired. Just fucking leave it alone and spend our collective fucks to give on something that actually matters.
Perhaps, but this is your opinion. Maybe you are in the "some" for certain words and not others. I am not in the "some" for "motherboard" so I can't tell you exactly why people are offended, but I know they are. Whether the rest of us think someone taking offense is logical doesn't stop them from being offended.
I very much doubt anyone is actually offended by the word "motherboard". More likely it's a dumb inductive argument. "Some people are offended by some gendered words => every gendered word might offend someone => every gendered word must be eliminated as a precaution".
The exact same pattern was leveraged against blacklist - a word that has absolutely no connection with the skin color usage. It has been removed by notable projects and people were up in arms talking about it being necessary due to "people being offended".
Motherboard. It took me a few moments to guess as to why this is a "problem".
Obviously due to the word mother. Let me roll my eyes.
Frankly it is completely absurd to be offended about a word that is part of a process that keeps our very species existing. Sadly I would not be surprised at all if there are google employees who are offended on behalf of "people being offended".
This is basically a semantic debate, but I guess this all is anyway. I don't disagree with the pattern you are describing, but I would describe it a slightly different way. There are people getting offended on the behalf of other people who potentially might get offended. Even if this second group never materializes or doesn't even exist, that first group is still getting offended on their behalf.
Basically I don't believe that "precaution" you mention is an apathetic but cautious person. These changes are more often motivated by someone who thinks "this might offend someone so I will take offense to it too".
People are wild. You can find small groups of people who do and think insane things. We as a society should not try to cater to every possible sensibility. That's a recipe for disaster.
> "Avoid referring to people in divisive ways. For example, instead of referring to people as native speakers or non-native speakers of English, consider whether your document needs to discuss this at all"
mainboard does not even communicate the same concept. A main board might be one of several disconnected boards where it performs the primary function, not necessarily the singular substrate on which all other components are hosted.
Imagine a future where babies can be incubated in an external enclosure, rather than a womb.
This doesn't seem too unlikely. I've been hoping tech would go this way -- We're doing IVF in June, and it's still hit-or-miss whether it'll work.
In that future, if someone identifies as nonbinary but still wishes to have a child, neither "mother" nor "father" would accurately describe them. And since a womb isn't required for a baby, there's not necessarily any "mother" (nor "father") in that scenario.
That said, I think the argument is "mainboard is better than motherboard for the same reason that denylist is better than blacklist -- the whole point is so that people don't have to be reminded of social issues whenever the word comes up in discussion."
As an african american, I never particularly liked the whole black and white argument (literally in this case) because those words and concepts go beyond western culture and even civilization. "black" in this case isn't referring to me anymore than a black mage is referring to me in DnD (I don't play magical classes). It's from a much more fundamental concept that humans are diurnal creatures that can't see well at night. Or rather, the "black of night". the unknown is scary, night is full of the unknown. This is why every culture has some concept of "black is scary", because we all have this natural fear or discomfort of what we can't see (our strongest sense).
If nothing else, maybe we should revisit the language as a whole and its obsession with overloaded homonyms.
Perversely though, when I see someone say "denylist", it stands out as an odd word, and it makes me more reminded of social issues than if they had just said blacklist.
Unfortunately most of the people pushing hardest for unionization in tech are exactly the same people pushing the woke craziness. In fact, one of the main reasons they want unions so badly is to use them to make more and more insane social justice-ey demands and add the illusion that there is broad worker support for them.
They do this with the knowledge that most people won't stand up against them out of fear, even though they don't agree with them - the sociopathic Google walkout organizers leveraged this to great effect when they collected signatures and then changed the text of what people had already signed to be a psychotic list of unreasonable demands, knowing that it'd be career suicide for any of us to complain publicly about it (there wasn't much public noise but a lot of us were really pissed about that privately). Surprise, surprise, the overlap between that group and the group later pushing for unionization was nearly 100%.
With the rise of social media. The modern "cancelling" could not exist without the viral phenomena that social media enables. Of course, you could always be fired for saying unaceptable things in the past, but now it actually ruins your entire life, you can't escape it.
Started kicking off in universities around 2014-2015, really accelerated on social media (and by extension legacy media) through the Trump years, and has been solidly established across the corporate world as the college students of 2015 entered the workforce.
In the United States the fundamentalists have been doing it for much longer then that as well as people such as the members of the Parents Music Resource Center who controlled a considerable amount of political power.
This idea that it is a recent invention isn't really supported by the reality on the ground. Things like the satanic panic, Dungeons & Dragons / Metal being satanic, Rock being evil, and a host of other things have long been used to remove "undesirable" people for a long time before 2014 on both the local and national level.
The extremes have always used shunning and economic warfare tactics to shut up those who disagree with them.
The majority imposing language norms on the minority is fundamentally different than a minority using their influence over media, corporations and institutions to impose language norms on the majority.
Uhhh ok yeah all those people who lost jobs and couldn't find employment because they listened to rock music/played DnD. Sure.
The DnD panic was about kids. It was about kids. I find it absurd to go after DnD like that but I don't recall ever reading about people being shunned, losing there jobs etc as happens these days.
Having lived it yes people got shunned and people got fired for it. Same thing for daring to say that LGBTQ deserved equal rights or to use the term from that time gay people. Much the same happened to some who said that black people deserved equal rights.
People have, for many many centuries use various shunning tactics to enforce their will upon others.
Lol, come-on, do you really believe this? The first victim of what people call "modern cancel culture" were the Dixie Chicks (now The Chicks) when they made an incredibly mild criticism of president Bush a few days before the invasion of Iraq during a concert in The UK. It costed them their position as one of the top country acts in the country.
We're sure it's in a List, but the point is that the List is not uniformly enforced, and "motherboard->mainboard" definitely seems like one to go to bat against because it Doesn't Make Sense to get rid of it.
The list it is on is about what words to use in external product documentation and marketing.
Not some "if you use these words internally the word police are going to come after you" list.
I'm going to be charitable and suggest this person is just accidentally leaving out context, rather than deliberately trying to rile people up because they disagree with something :)
I mean, I'm still pretty shocked to hear 'motherboard' isn't allowed in external product documentation. I don't think it matters if it's internal or external.
"Mainboard" is arguably a bit more literally descriptive: it is the main board of the device.
The figurative part of "motherboard" is pretty vague: it's just larger than the "daughterboards" and in charge of them--it doesn't birth or nurture them or do anything that's stereotypically maternal.
Often power is transmitted from the motherboard to be daughterboards, and the two are connected via a conduit like a fetus in the womb. It's not a completely arbitrary metaphor.
As for whether it's the main board or not, surely that's a matter of opinion. An AI researcher would be much more interested in what the GPU board is doing than on what the motherboard is doing.
It's certainly more central to the device itself. You can run a computer without a GPU, NIC, sound card, etc, but regardless of the peripherals you want, you're gonna need some kind of motherboard/mainboard to tie everything together.
I've heard claims that it's a motherboard because it has female connectors (i.e., sockets), but that's sort hard to square with the contemporary coinage of "daughterboards."
Motherboard isn't offensive. It shouldn't be offensive. If someone is offended by it, that is a problem of theirs.
The idea that a large, influential organization plays along with the idea that "motherboard" should in any way be filtered is as absurd as filtering the words "table" or "stereo".
Sorry, but i'm going to trust the folks who think hard about what should and should not be in documentation that ends up in literally hundreds of different countries more than an an absoluteist HN statement that "it's not offensive" from a random person.
But in typical HN fashion, i'm sure you know better. Just like the people who say that X or Y should take 2 people over a weekend.
Remind me again what your experience is here to say they are wrong? Are you a culture expert of some sort? It's really not obvious from your HN profile or comment exactly why you think your expertise should overrule theirs.
Otherwise, i'd say it sure is fun to get upset and pretend it's the reactionary woke police, rather than a group of people carefully thinking something through.
I "trust the experts" on a number of things, but the spectrum shifts a little with cultural discussions, and it's precisely because Google is so incredibly influential that I am suspicious of actions taken that seem to be the modus operandi of a portion of so-called socially-progressive people who try to "nudge" society through the intentional shifting of language.
I would be interested to see the rationale for the change, if it is so clearly benign and not part of any secret-sauce or competitive advantage - similar to the AP Stylebook.
This isn't a debate about cloud security, or strongly-typed languages, or the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and its impact on the Earth. It's a cultural discussion, and I believe citizens should be encouraged to form an opinion, rather than insulted and berated for having one.
You actually didn't defend your position in any way on the topic, you only berated me for not having faith in closed-door internal Google processes to alter the use of the English language.
From another comment:
>you have precisely zero knowledge of either the decision making process, or how it is used, etc.
Isn't that the issue being brought up? Let's be charitable: Could it be that "mainboard" is the English term used by ESL speakers across the world, and "motherboard" is only used in the US/UK? Perhaps. I know you work at Google, but I am surprised at your surprise that people would be skeptical of that company's motivation.
I'd be interested in your opinion on the first-order topic, and also why you're so angry in the second place.
As an ESL speaker I can confidently tell you that in French the correct term, approved by the "Office québécois de la langue française" (Québec's office of the French language), for mainboard and motherboard is "carte mère" (carte<->board and mère<->mother).
Even google translate mainboard to "carte mère" !!!
I’m a “go along to get along” Asian but even I think this level of obsequiousness remarkable.
These departments have an expertise, sure. But part of being an intelligent, critically thinking person is knowing when people are speaking within the scope of their expertise and when they aren’t. You and I both know that this wouldn’t hold up under Daubert. This isn’t like telling you not to name your car the “Nova” in Spanish-speaking countries. It’s like trying to make “LatinX” happen.
Saying that something is or isn't offensive doesn't require being and expert in cultural studies. You just know it by the virtue of being part of the culture and observing what the trends of the majority are.
I think your militant stance on the subject is more problematic than someone else's view that the word motherboard is not offensive.
Also, advocating for some narrow unknown group of people to have exclusive right to define language gives off a little cultish vibes.
See, this is the whole issue right here.
It's not about a single culture. It's hundreds.
This wordlist is for global products with literally billions of users in literally hundreds of countries.
Yes, it requires experts to know what will be inoffensive to all of them at once (or at least, the vast majority).
Your "narrow unknown group of people" is really "people who are experts at language and culture and understand this".
Paying and asking them to help figure out how to create common standards that will cover the majority of the hundreds of cultures at once does not seem cultish or militant at all to me?
It is something literally every single company with literally billions of global users in hundreds of cultures does.
Otherwise they end up naming their product something offensive to a culture, etc.
News stories about those gaffes occur literally all the time, so i'm sort of shocked you are really trying to argue that trying to avoid them is somehow cultish.
I am probably one of the least "politically correct" people you will find, and i'm not even all that progressive in the scheme of things, yet this clearly makes sense to me.
So I look at this, and see HN having a huge overreaction because they are upset the world is becoming a lot more politically correct for no obvious benefit.
That bothers me too - a lot in fact. I just don't see the particular thing complained about in this part of the thread (a wordlist used to ensure google doesn't say offensive things in product documentation) all that objectionable.
The original article, about offensive/inclusive/etc AI writing nudges, bothers me about 1000x more than the wordlist.
Again, you literally know nothing about how or why the decision is made, but are 100% sure about what happened and why. Yet they are the problem and not you?
I would urge you to actually seek facts first, rather than make them up yourself just because you are sure you are right.
It's not a particularly helpful approach.
I represent a culture of 100+ million people in my country, 300+ million in total speaking my (non-English) language natively. Motherboard is the word every single hardware repair shop or seller is going to use when talking about motherboards. It might be hard to imagine from a certain perspective, but the vast crushing majority of humans worldwide is entirely unbothered that some words are feminized.
Trust the experts? Really? To people on HN, most of whom have been using the term motherboard their whole lives without incident and who are, in fact, computer experts?
It's quite obviously not a carefully thought through decision, it's more or less random machine-gunning of random words that happen to have the word mother in them because ... well ... because they think motherhood is offensive? Presumably? It's impossible to discern any logic here. This supposedly expert decision is already leading to near universal derision towards Google, a once universally respected name. That derision is now also coming from left-wing media outlets that you'd expect to be fully supportive, like VICE. That's because it's quite obviously insane. Nobody is looking at this and thinking "about time", they're thinking "wtf is that?!".
I'm talking solely about the internal wordlist the grandparent is whining about, not the AI writing thingy.
I don't have a real formed opinion yet on the latter.
For the former, it's none of the things you say, and AFAICT, you have precisely zero knowledge of either the decision making process, or how it is used, etc.
So saying "it's quite obviously x" seems trivially wrong.
No one in this chain said that, however. Some person gave an opinion and you then replied with "you don't have any knowledge on this". Even though in this case, it is indeed a cultural question which everyone has some knowledge and likely opinion on.
If you want to encourage others to seek more information out (if it's out there), then sure. But at some point it just sounds like you're appealing to an authority that doesn't exist here. And honestly, who IS the authority of a thing like language and its usage is a conversation in and of itself.
yes, I left google because of stupid shit like this.
More importantly: when I was there, I actively fought against this kind of shit, but it was clear at some point that the content moderation team had enough sway with execs that they were going to continue this sort of idiocy untrammelled.
From a purely linguistic point of view, doesn’t ‘content moderation’ imply a work slowdown? I would think any company would be against using anti-productivity language.
I think all companies realize they have a large amount of "sway" in the actual work that gets done, and things like TPS reports and content moderation get in even if they're a net productivity loss.
Once you stop thinking of companies as single entities and instead as large kingdoms containing many fiefdoms it starts making more sense.
You can see it even in this thread, there exist Lists and tools that can be used as weapons against other groups, even if sometimes they're not currently being used because they're not currently at war.
Does "motherboard" even make sense as a term? It's not like a motherboard gives birth to little baby boards that eventually grow up to be mother and father boards of their own. It's just one of those weird words we accept because it's been part of a shared vocabulary for so long. I don't particularly see any harm in assigning a gender role to a hardware device, but I don't see anything is particularly gained either. "Mainboard" is fine.
I'm fairly sure that "motherboard" came about as a term specifically for computer logic boards with slots that other cards -- "daughterboards" -- plugged into. It's very much from the 1970s era when we referred to "microcomputers", "minicomputers" and "mainframes". Granted, I'm a Mac user -- the last time I bought a "motherboard", I think it was a Pentium 4 -- and we tend to use the phrase "logic board" over here in Apple land, probably because, other than debatably the Mac Pro, we haven't had motherboards using the canonical definition for a very long time.
At any rate, while I wouldn't go out of my way to squelch the word, I wouldn't go out of my way to insist on it, either. "Logic board" and "mainboard" both work and get the point across.
Directional terms like that would be confusing in a lot of infrastructure discussions. An outbound firewall rule's "outlist" is the list of things that don't go out.
Greenlist and redlist would fail in a global company. Plenty of cultures use red as a color that promotes positivity rather than a negative color. Japan has blue rather than green for their "Go" color. And so on.
Well yes, traffic lights are a problem, I’m red-green color blind myself. But the brain is smart enough to supply the right „color“ because it knows that red is on top and green is below.
Wait a second, is that offensive towards the color green? ;-)
I've always wondered how you handle those lights at night, if you can't see the enclosure; and how you handle the occasional horizontal traffic light, which my town has one of.
If we're going to play this game, I think dissuading people from using "mother" in the example of "motherboard" is offensive. Mothers are the source of human life on earth, and in that capacity are revered and honored. When we say motherboard, we're making an analogy that suggests the board's significance and universal connection to everything.
To discourage the term as an analogy for things that are a universal source is to demote women and their role as mothers.
I'd like to know who at Google puts these lists together and what judge decreed their viewpoint on this more valid than mine or anyone else's, since apparently Google feels that from this judgement they have the right to shape speech for millions of people and therefore, by extension, our culture.
It's the natural outcome of far leftist ideologies. People need to wake up and start rejecting this destructive ideology where a person is evaluated only based on their identity. I think MLK had something to say about that.
It is more of a natural outcome of silly corporatists not really understanding why leftists and progressives object to things, and so just reflexively avoiding anything that could be, however tenuously, linked to gender. They are concern trolling themselves.
MLK was a leftist - and arguably a "far leftist" for his time. If you're going to use him as an example, you may have to concede that this is not a "natural outcome" of leftist ideologies in general, but rather the outcome of some other selection pressure that rewards diversion from initiatives that actually affect peoples' material conditions.
As a first comment here, I'd point out that defining women independently from solely their role as mothers is judging them on character rather than identity, so you should support such a thing if that's your rallying cry.
But also, on MLK and postmodernism: postmodernism dates back to the 1940s, To Kill a Mockingbird is postmodern. MLK's Letter From a Birmingham Jail is very clearly postmodern (e.g. when he says "But I am sorry that your statement did not express
a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being.", he's alluding to a failure to consider the viewpoint of the oppressed in the situation).
That letter is also very modern-leftist. Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" in 1989 and elaborated on it in 1991, saying "When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when anti-racism does not incorporate oppposition to patriarchy race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other, and both interests lose". The letter from a Birmingham jail includes another famous line from MLK: " Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly". To me, those express similar sentiments: that oppression exists in many forms in many places, and it is unwise to pretend that oppression that fails to inconvenience me is therefore unworthy of my attention.
And of course he says later on "there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism
to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. " which to me describes the people often criticized as "modern far leftists", those people who create the tension and discomfort in society are, in MLK's view, doing us, collectively, a great service.
I'd recommend you read the whole letter[0]. If you're so willing to lionize MLK, but disagree with so much of what he preached, I implore you to consider why exactly that is.
I only used MLK because he's a Western figure that stood up to racism. For us as Muslims, Islam set the guidelines on these issues a long long time ago. All people are equal under God, skin color does not matter. The only thing that matters at the end when we stand in front of Him is who comes with the most piety and good deeds, as those will determine where you end up.
This doesn't conflict with CRT or modern leftism though. If God's accounting of our deeds is perfect (or if God doesn't exist) should have no impact on our actions. It would be sinful to let injustice persist solely because God will even things out in the end. God doesn't give us an excuse to abdicate our responsibility.
This doesn't contradict what I wrote. Islam explicitly rejects racism, and makes it sinful. Because we're equal in front of God, this means that anyone treating someone else differently because of their skin color, race, etc. is going to be accountable in front of God for this sin.
It seems you're engaging in a straw man fallacy saying that we don't need to do anything because we're all eventually accountable in front of God. Islam never said that. Several texts and accounts explicitly call out racism as a sin.
CRT is a fringe offshoot that swings the pendulum so far out, it goes back to being racist, ironically enough. It is not the beacon of equality that its supporters claim it is.
I agree, I never claimed Islam said that. I claim you said that, which misrepresents Islam!
> CRT is a fringe offshoot that swings the pendulum so far out, it goes back to being racist, ironically enough.
What about CRT does this? The core idea of CRT (as you use it) is, I think the recognition that inequality exists, that some people mistreat others and that we should recognize that when it happens. What about that is racist?
> I claim you said that, which misrepresents Islam!
Where did I say that?
> What about that is racist?
CRT, and many other far leftist ideologies conform to what we say in Arabic: "A word (claim) of truth by which falsehood is intended"[1]. We see the same with movements like BLM (with self proclaimed Marxist founders), etc. They're crafted in such a way that if you argue against their actual behavior or criticize their actual behavior, they are able to retort with their canned response: ah so you're against justice/equality/are racist/etc.
These approaches are trite and people are waking up to them. We've known for millenia that inequality exists or the people are prone to mistreating others. CRT/latest fad of the day is not telling us anything new with that regard, but behind the scenes they're power grab movements.
I'll note that you didn't actually describe the particular things that CRT is that are problematic, only that it is in some vague way false. You haven't provided an argument, only a claim that they are in some way bad. Give the argument!
> CRT/latest fad of the day is not telling us anything new
I disagree. The CRT (again, insofar as it is a cultural thing that people argue against) functionally says that people who have power should account for the mistreatment and inequality when making decisions. This is problematic to some people.
CRT paints whites as inherently evil, and coins such ridiculous terms as "white adjacent". Everything is painted in terms of "white supremacy", and it's honestly getting tiring and trite, even for non whites. Everyone is starting to see through the drama and the bullying.
Apparently, this is what's being taught now: https://i.redd.it/vwuw7529iws81.jpg. Just an oversimplification, and dumbing down of any conversation. It's no wonder those people have built a reputation for being impulsive and not being able to take any criticism, retorting to crying and making fusses when they can't defend their positions.
> Everything is painted in terms of "white supremacy", and it's honestly getting tiring and trite
Ah, so it's getting tiring to see people discuss race and its impact? That's exactly the kind of reaction MLK was criticizing ;)
> Just an oversimplification, and dumbing down of any conversation.
Well yes, it's a children's book. Do you think it's a problem that discussions of the solar system or geology are oversimplified when explained to children? You're not even claiming it's wrong (perhaps because, fundamentally, it isn't).
MLK explicitly supported affirmative action and other programs designed explicitly to benefit black people in order to make up for past discrimination. I suspect he would be tired of being used as a justification for absolute colorblindness.
What he stood for changed over time, but at one point he said he hoped the decisions people made about his children would be made based on his children's character and not the color of their skin.
Yes he did say that one line in one speech. But if you review the totality of his writing, it is very clear that total colorblindness in the face of inequality was not his goal. The "I Have A Dream" does not represent some shift away from an earlier opinion. It simply doesn't represent the opinion that a lot of reactionaries think it does.
But that's implying that only mothers give birth, and erases those who don't identify as mothers who give birth.
That's how I understand their thinking, at least.
I agree with you and think anyone who is offended by motherboard is silly. I'm sure it was never even anyone that was actually offended, but a group of people sitting down and looking at any and every word that has any type of gender connotation and saying that's a bad thing.
I think this completely falls apart because most of the women who give birth identify as mothers, and would be very offended if you told them they couldn't.
I wish there was more pushback against this insanity. I've also seen people want to erase the word "blindspot" from the dictionary... Even though I'm sure no blind person was ever offended by it, because that word typically is used to refer to the limits of people who aren't blind.
English has such a rich array of word choices for many parental situations, with many subtle variations conveying tone and meaning. MW has roughly 83 synonyms including both noun and verb forms, just for mother. I don't see how choosing any one of them for my particular situation will detract from anyone else's identity or journey: they are free to chose as well. Unless your tool bans 82 of them.
That can't possibly be true. If nothing else, it's erasure of adoptive parents, or mothers who didn't give birth, among which gay married couples are overrepresented. I realize there is infighting and factionalism even within minority communities, but come on, this stuff doesn't ring true. I've never heard someone called a birthing person outside of a joke.
For what it's worth, in support of the original comment's claim, I just dug around the Pixelbook documentation all over the place and I can't find any mention of the motherboard. But it doesn't seem they renamed it to "mainboard" or "birthing person board." They just dropped it from the specification completely and don't tell you anything about what kind of motherboard you're getting.
In French we say "carte mere" which is the literal translation of motherboard (carte = board and mere = mother).
The thing is, all nouns in French are gendered, and carte (board) happens to be female. So it can only be a mother, and not a father board. And the reason is that it carries smaller boards, like a mom would carry her babies (in most mammal species, as far as I know, the mom is carrying babies even after birth).
A disque (disk) is male. But a floppy disk translate to "disquette" (small disk) which is female : le disque, la disquette. Don't ask me why, but that's who the language works.
This would drive Silicon Valley wokes completely nuts. The table is female, the cloud is male (note that, in Italian, clouds are female). The TV is female, the glass is male, the door is female, the handle is female, the window is female, the roof is male, the wall is male.
Sure. The OED even lists them as contemporary coinages:
[1965 Wireless World July 49/2 (advt.) Contact tail variations..include..tails for direct mounting to a ‘mother’ printed circuit board.]
1965 Electronics 6 Sept. 36/1 Nine daughterboards, each carrying 30 circuit packages, go on each side of a motherboard.
However, that's just an analogy: it doesn't actually tell you anything about what the motherboard does or why. In that sense, I think mainboard is actually a bit more descriptive: it's the principal interconnect between all of the device's parts.
Why not just… the “board”? It’s the only board. There are no other boards, as the things they used to call daughterboards are now “cards”. You plug cards into the board. Board goes into case.
Their role as breeders and birthing people, you mean. Time for a trip to HR for you.
> they have the right to shape speech for millions of people and therefore,
Google', "Do the right thing" could be understood as "if you have the power to do something, you have the obligation to do so". I'd say someone forgot that most evil in the world is done by people convinced that they're doing the right thing, but if that were forgotten the old motto wouldn't have been an impediment.
You could ask what idiot gave google this power, but the answer-- to the extent that they have it-- is each and every one of us. Fortunately, it lasts only as long as we keep giving it to them.
I know we all see this as a slippery slope, but let's remember what's at the other end of the slope.
Anyhow, you might find it awkward, but the general assumption that "parent" is synonymous with "mother" to the exclusion of all other kinds of parents does real damage to inclusiveness, and the term "motherboard" flows from that.
I know your tongue is in cheek, but the mainboard may be considered a parent of the components, but it is not giving birth to them. "Parent" fits better than "mother". So your absurdist counter-argument doesn't really fit here.
We're programmers. We refactor mercilessly. Why shouldn't language be refactored mercilessly too? The term "mainboard" is available, widely understood, and well-adopted, so why not use that?
Because we don't want to keep handing out stupid prizes to the weenies that constantly force us to play these stupid games. Every time they win they're further emboldened, and that's not a good thing, since there are actual problems to solve.
You can refactor a piece of software you wrote, or a piece of your employer's software with his permission. But language doesn't belong to anyone, it's a collective consensus on how to say things. If you believe you have authority to ignore this consensus and force your opinion on others, you must have an incredibly inflated ego.
"Motherboard" is particularly unbelievable. The motherboard runs the machine. It's a woman in a position of power. Isn't that what everyone says they want?
Or is the idea to just erase the very concept of gender from the world? Welcome to OkCupid, I am a [PERSON] seeking [PERSON]
If your job is to come up with banned words and they've stopped using the banned words, you've got to keep looking for more if you want to keep your job. I don't think anyone's real job at Google is to come up with the banned words, but some people see it as their big impact and have been commended for it in the past (by leaders looking to bolster their DEI cred in the fakest, easiest ways) so they keep going even when the words seem less and less ban-worthy.
> It's a woman in a position of power. Isn't that what everyone says they want?
Wouldn't it be equally problematic if they banned are male words and allowed all female words? If you're going for it, removing gender (from computer terminology) seems consistent. No one is saying to remove it from the world, but mainboard is just as if not more descriptive (to someone who isn't familiar with the word to start with), and things like allowlist/blocklist are much more self-descriptive than whitelist/blacklist.
They'd do a lot better if it was pitched as giving people the freedom to dress and act as they desired as long as they weren't hurting anyone else, rather than trying to act like biology wasn't a thing.
I have zero problems with people dressing however they like, having whatever affectations they want and having sex with whoever is willing. I might not always find it tasteful, but that cuts both ways I'm sure so we can agree to be civil. The buck stops when you try to shame me for not calling a man a woman. Using pronouns should be a kindness like holding the door open for a disabled person, not something that sends emotional children into a socially supported temper tantrum when absent.
It's contradictory, there was already a movement (feminism) that promoted "gender is a social construct" which was to say, no one should be pressured into acting inline with gender stereotypes. Women can be masculine, men can be feminine, let bygones be bygones - the way you act and dress should ideally have no relationship to your sex.
The "men with gender identity issues" referred to by parent have this up-side-down, instead thinking that "social transitioning" aka "living as a woman" is a step towards being a woman, this is not destroying notions of gender, this is elevating gender over sex
I’d that were true, people wouldn’t lose their jobs over not using peoples preferred pronouns. It’s actually the opposite of what you say: increasing the number of genders and bullying people into accepting all of them as distinct
That would be nice, but you have it backwards. In most cases the an attempt to make gender more central and essential, rather than less, by decoupling it from biology.
Which is why in some parts of the country children are sometimes being told that if they like boy sterotyped activities like tree climbing or boy stereotyped attire that you are a boy, rather than saying any activity or attire is available to anyone.
Rather than erasing gender it's power as a tool for enforced conformity is amplified by eliminating any requirement for agreement with a person's biological properties.
To exaggerate in order to make the point, it's as if we've gone from: "It's a womans' job to do the dishes" to "Anyone can do the dishes." to "The person doing the dishes is a woman, by definition."-- and the middle state's inclusiveness is increasingly seen as hateful because it denies people the ability to identify as a gender other than the one suggested by their biology through the performance of stereotyped behavior.
Erasure of "mothers" seems contrary to the trend at first blush, but it's made more clear when you see the suggested replacements like "birthing person" or "breeder"-- in this world view "mother" is a biological function, so it must be decoupled from gender so that the strongest possible gender sterotypes can be imposed on people regardless of their biological abilities.
You've written a very long comment about what you think other people believe (or intend), but it's not really clear to me that any of it is true.
For example, I don't think that anybody actually holds the sentence "The person doing the dishes is a woman, by definition" as true in their heads. That's simply not a thing people believe, anywhere along the political (or any other) spectrum.
If you actually talk to trans people, you'll find that most of them fall into the "nonconforming" bucket rather than some gender essentialist one. A lot of them are non-binary or otherwise have gender/sex identities that don't cleanly map onto maleness or femaleness. Given that state of affairs, it's a remarkable stretch to think that these people themselves would see neutral language as "hateful." And, in fact, they don't.
Perhaps I'll reach out to you for assistance the next time someone suggests to myself or a family member that they're trans simply because they engaged in an activity that broke gendered stereotypes. Maybe we'll both learn something!
I don't understand the relevance of someone offering you unsolicited opinions about your gender. The fact that they may or may not be wrong about both you and what it means to be trans doesn't have any particular bearing on whether transgenderedness itself is fundamentally "essentialist" in its performance of gender. Which it isn't.
The most tragic part of the endgame of transgender ideology is the erasure of gender.
We'll promise them they can be a boy. They do all the things boys can: can play on the boys sports teams, use the boys lockers and bathrooms... And all the meanwhile we're banishing gendered extracurricular programs and making the bathrooms unisex.
We promise them we'll help them find their identity in gender, and destroy gender in the process.
Nature is full of males and females (with some species being exceptions); the concept of gender is baked in nature and will remain so for a very long time.
About the cultural aspect of gender: this video opened my eyes about what most people think it means to do things 'like a girl', and what it actually is supposed to mean.
I am incredulous at the "mother" to "birthing person" requirement. I have seen one or two people with such prescriptive views on language but the vast majority of people I know consider it ridiculous. And I am in an incredibly "woke" social bubble.
Encountering this aspect of the culture war always makes me wonder why are tech companies so focused on these gender minorities and not, say, on the disabled groups. There are more blind, deaf, mute (etc, etc) people in the US than transgender people who will bear a child. It would be equally incoherent to attempt to replace all usages of “see”, “hear” with “perceive”.
But wouldn't an underrepresentation of disabled people be cause for concern in the industry? There are more legally blind people in the USA than there are Native Americans yet at the political stage there is very little interest in coming up for those people.
Several impressive videos on social media have shown that programming without using vision or even hands is perfectly possible, there are very few good reasons why such underrepresentation shouldn't be corrected for. In fact, I believe for many disabilities a job in fields like data science or programming would be much easier to adjust for disabilities than many other sectors where interactivity is key.
> Go to any college and you'll see the CompSci department is the one with the most amount of LGBT individuals.
Do you have any data on that? It does not coincide with my anecdotal experience. I'm in a Math/CompSci department and there's zero trans people here (that I know of), while there are some in other departments. Anyhow, trans people are a tiny percentage of the total population, so it would be hard to have somewhat solid statistics on them.
Interesting. I don't have data, but it heavily correlates with my school and what I had heard from others. There was like a big cadre of trans people in the CompSci department, then a few in the Math department.
There was a smattering in other afaik. I was on the board of the LGBT club so I knew at least the ones who were out / came frequently.
FWIW, they do. There's constant efforts to ensure apps are accessible if you use a screen reader and to not exclusively rely on sound for notifications. Additionally there's care to not assume people are using keyboards and mice when interacting with something ("tap" vs "click" vs "select" vs "pick", etc.). At least with the teams I've worked with there's a considerable amount of effort done in these areas.
Oh, I have OPINIONS about why this might be, as someone who was one of the teenagers on LJ back when this weird ideology (the bastardization of intersectionality/identity politics that's taken over all non-right discussions) started. I'm a disabled lesbian, so I get a front row seat to how some forms of discrimination 'matter' more than others.
It boils down to a few things:
1.) A lot of this identity politics is coming from upper-middle class people of color OR white queer people, who are using it to make money and boost their careers. The disabled are, in America at least, far less likely to have careers to boost. This is why the type of disability activism you see in identity politics is usually limited to mental illnesses.
2.) The disabled, to some degree, disprove some of the ideological underpinnings of modern identity politics. Modern identity politics is based on the idea that if we change society/fix discrimination, then everybody (all groups) will have the same rates of success. But even if social discrimination didn't exist, those of us who are disabled literally can't do things able-bodied people can do. There's an undercurrent of 'discrimination is bad BECAUSE all these groups can be normal/productive/participate in capitalism' and the disabled make people confront that they don't actually believe all people are equal. They believe all PRODUCTIVE people are equal, but they can't say that, because then they sound like those 'horrible' right wingers.
3.) Fighting on behalf of the disabled doesn't make people feel like they're 'on the right side of history'. I've experienced a shit ton of sexism and homophobia from right-wingers, but most conservatives would be horrified at insulting me for having MS and agree that I should get help if I need it. They just disagree on how it should be done. That's harder to fight about, which means it's harder for the media to turn into a frenzy, and that's where people on both sides get their 'marching orders'.
>This is why the type of disability activism you see in identity politics is usually limited to mental illnesses
You are using the term "mental illness" in a way that seems to exclude people for whom it is obviously a disability. These people are characterized by:
1. One or more hospitalizations that are not voluntary.
2. Diagnosis by medical professionals, not psychologists or oneself.
3. Having to take medications forever, at least in order to be employable or generally take care of themselves, that cause substantial long term effects including diabetes, brain damage, disfiguring tics and involuntary movements, recurring tumors, sudden death, and other problems.
The people you are thinking of, who act like it is possible to normalize and be open about mental illness, are, let's say "type A", while I have defined above what I'll call "type B".
I just want to call your attention to the fact that "type B" people are erased as much or more by "type A" as the visibly disabled that you acknowledge. You are inadvertently promoting that erasure.
"Type B" people bridge both worlds but can't talk about it normally. I do recognize the emotions regarding "type A". I recognize why they do what they do, and I see you embracing their compulsive erasure from existence of "type B".
The issue of productivity is difficult, if you think there is a right answer. If someone can work, at incredible cost, should they not take pride? Yeah, it's luck that I, or anyone, can work, but you wouldn't sneer at someone with an intellectual disability that was bagging groceries, would you?
I meant it in the way it's typically used in disabled spaces, where it's a contrast to physical disability because the two experiences are different. Mental illnesses are/ can be disabilities, I wouldn't disagree, but there are differences that make mental illness advocacy well-suited to an intersectional framework in ways that physical/intellectual disabilities aren't. (Since you mention them, intellectual disabilities are their own third, distinct category).
Mental disabilities are frequently easier to hide (much like being bi is easier to hide than being homosexual), which means that people with mental illnesses/disabilities are more likely to know how people treat them before and after finding out they're disabled (as opposed to someone whose disability is physical or intellectual who are more likely to always be seen as disabled and not see that on-off switch to ableism). People with mental illnesses are also more likely to have difficulties stemming from stigma and erasure vs. physical limits (I'm not saying any difficulties are worse than the others; they're just different) and intersectionality/identity politics has a lot of focus on correcting or changing behavior and thoughts to improve society.
Intersectionality/identity politics, in 2022, don't really do a great job at changing physical reality, which tends to be more necessary for physical and intellectual disability activism.
There are also historical reasons for the intertwining of mental illness advocacy and intersectionality (the rise of intersectionality/id politics in the upper-middle class coinciding with the rise of psychiatry/therapy/ the move to destigmatize mental illness, for example, whereas the sensory and physically disabled communities had their own activist movements/organizations for decades/centuries beforehand which made them more likely to have disagreements).
> Yeah, it's luck that I, or anyone, can work, but you wouldn't sneer at someone with an intellectual disability that was bagging groceries, would you?
Of course not, but I'm not a capitalist (or a communist, for that matter). The point is more that a lot of people into intersectional activism claim to also be anti-capitalist, but their embrace of diversity often depends on diverse people being able to work and if they advocated for the disabled, they'd have to confront that they can't use 'disabled people can do anything able bodied people can do' as a reason, which means they'd have to articulate some reason diversity matters other than to let marginalized people/ their pet companies make $$$.
I just think if said grocery bagger had to stop bagging groceries that they don't lose value as a human. Of course everyone should be proud of what they can contribute to society and their communities.
>Mental disabilities are frequently easier to hide (much like being bi is easier to hide than being homosexual), which means that people with mental illnesses/disabilities are more likely to know how people treat them before and after finding out they're disabled
I understand where you're coming from, but the implication that someone with a mental disability has control over how they're perceived, or even accurate knowledge is wrong.
If they share information, there's no going back, and it can have devastating consequences.
If they don't intentionally share information, it may leak out anyway. Everybody knows what "crazy eyes" are, and gets uncomfortable if someone rambles on too much or shows excessive emotion.
If I look normal, but I have difficulty walking, and sometimes limp a bit, nobody is going to kick my leg when they notice, to prove that I'm not dangerous and they're not ill but I am. And if I share that I have a club foot, or that my lungs are damaged so I don't get enough oxygen, it's not likely to destroy relationships or seem relevant to share with everyone.
On the other hand, the slightest hint that someone might be mentally unstable leads to immediate concern - is this person a threat? Everybody knows this, and every crazy person feels exactly the same way around someone else that might be crazy. They feel it from both sides, but you have felt it from at least one.
So the way you prove someone isn't a threat is by testing whether they are vulnerable, and if they react incorrectly to that test. You prod them, you try some BS to see if they get upset or respond "normally". It's like being out on a tree limb and hearing a crack. You hold on to something and wiggle it a little to see if it's about to break. Everybody knows this from life experience.
I guess what I'm saying is that the uncertainty and ambiguity around mental illness is its own horror show of catch-22s, not a kind of privilege.
Someone with serious mental illness has to be tranquilized more than just enough to function normally, but enough to suppress normal reactions to provocation.
And once that is accomplished, they cannot share information about their condition indiscriminately because they are totally vulnerable. They can't casually ramble on about their thought process, because it will sound paranoid, no matter how controlled their actions are. Even to other mentally ill people because everybody thinks the same way, because it's logical but awful.
The choices that someone with an invisible condition other than mental illness, have, do not exist for someone with it. Every case where it is suspected, entails the threat of being outside the basic social contract.
>I just think if said grocery bagger had to stop bagging groceries that they don't lose value as a human
Sure, what I meant is that if their job is an immense source of pride and purpose in life, then aren't they in effect promoting the work-based ethic that bothers you? How can you have values without devaluing people who have different values?
The point is previous things you thought were ridiculous were normalized, in a very deliberate process. So to it will go with "mother", if the past is any indication. However, it may not be, because people are (ironically) waking up to this.
I've been incredulous to this stuff for 15 years, but violating rules I was incredulous about 5 years ago would be fired and black listed from my industry now.
Maybe the pendulum will stop or swing back, but "that's not going to catch on" has been wrong for nearly two decades.
Because saying this stuff is akin to vowing your allegiance to the party in authoritarian regimes.
Or repeating the cult dogma in a cult.
This isn’t about rationality or what is ridiculous. It is about proving that you are part of a group. And to prove that people have done insane things for thousands of years. Much worse than calling a mother a birthing parent tbh, but it shows you what direction we are headed.
And interestingly this seems to apply to corporations too. They too (probably because of management), want to demonstrate they are part of a group/cult.
Putting myself in the shoes of a kid learning about computers, I find some of these phrases to be more clear, not less clear.
Two examples:
Allowlist and denylist are much clearer to a kid learning about computers than whitelist or blacklist. If you've never heard of whitelist before, it's sounds like a list of things that are white. If you've never of allowlist, it's pretty obvious what it means - a list of things that are allowed.
Similarly, mainboard is clearer than motherboard. Mainboard implies there's one main board. Motherboard could be more ambiguous to someone who's never seen the inside of a computer. Are there two boards, mother and father? Do boards somehow inherit from one another? Is there a grandmother board that's even bigger? Obvious to us, but not obvious to a kid learning computers for the first time.
Not saying these terms are better (there's a huge switching cost and the terms are less colorful), but do want to point out there are dimensions to consider beyond inclusivity. One benefit is better language precision.
> Mainboard implies there's one main board. Motherboard could be more ambiguous to someone who's never seen the inside of a computer. Are there two boards, mother and father?
Am I crazy or does mainboard strongly imply there's more than one -- eg main, supporting / secondary, etc? Stories have a main character which is almost by definition not the only character in the narrative.
Good point. A similar lack of clarity also tripped me up when some documentation switched from "master key" to "main key" because there actually was an additional concept called a "standard key" which seems to have a lot of potential conceptual overlap with "main key".
"Parentboard" is probably better than "mainboard", but given the choice between "motherboard" and "mainboard", which are the two currently-accepted terms for that particular component, I'm going to go with mainboard.
Edit: isn't the videocard technically a "non-main-board"? I mean nobody called it a "daughterboard" but it kind of technically is one isn't it? And so if "mainboard" implies the existence of "non-main-boards"... that accurately describes its relationship with the video card, which is a baord.
It appreciate the idea to make language more precise where possible.
However, terms like motherboard and whitelisting are just a few in the universe of complicated (yet gender neutral) terms like GPU, CPU, DDR, parity, firewall, IP6, etc.
Of course, that is not a reason to not improve the language where one can, but I don't know if it will help that much in CS.
In reality these types of changes often just make learning more difficult, because now you have to learn that it's called both "motherboard" and "mainboard". At least for a generation or two.
This entire comment is a lie. Terms like "motherboard" are readily findable on Google's internal search. I could not find anything referencing a banned non-inclusive words policy in the employee policy guide. I have never heard of anything remotely resembling someone catching heat for saying "motherboard" or whatever.
You're welcome to ping me internally. It's in the banned words list (happy to share a link internally) and I double checked policy before posting this comment to make sure I was accurately representing the rules that are applied to me as an employee.
based on dannybee's comments elsewhere, the list you're referring to is actually for external product comms, not internal googler comms.... could you elaborate on your position further?
That's not true, there are a few internal-only lists that have different contents (lots of overlap but not 100%). Different PAs have adopted different lists.
I don't want to share the name of the internal one publicly, but anyone at Google can ping me if they want help finding it, or they can search "respectful words"
> Terms like "motherboard" are readily findable on Google's internal search.
This is meaningless. I work at a large organization that has banned terms like "master/slave" and "whitelist/blacklist", and I can also readily find these terms through internal search, simply because it's taking a while for the requirements to be implemented and enforced.
> I could not find anything referencing a banned non-inclusive words policy in the employee policy guide.
This also doesn't mean a lot, unless you've comprehensively searched through every possible location for the relevant policy, as almost every organization in existence has terrible knowledge management.
Go talk directly to someone in HR and tell me if they tell you that those words aren't restricted.
Since you work at Google, maybe you can answer this: does internal tooling exist to flag occurrences of "bad" words in say, code reviews or shared documents?
Former Googler (until a couple of months ago). I've never seen anything like it, but maybe I just didn't use "bad" words in code? There were presubmit checks for typos and such. Also, IIRC I asked people in code/design reviews to rename white/black lists to allow/deny lists, but it might have just been in docs.
I did get an angry code review response from a fellow engineer once, after writing in a commit description (not the actual code) something like "this is a stupid fix but it stops the linter from bitching about so and so" - for using both the words "stupid" and "bitch". I guess the second one was on point but referring to my own work as "stupid" is pretty okay in my book. I would never ever describe anyone else's work as such.
> I would never ever describe anyone else's work as such.
But someone reading your commit message doesn't know that. Someone new to the company might see your change and think "That looks reasonable to me", but see that you called it "stupid", and start to doubt themselves.
Although it makes technology more boring, I think there is some value in using precise words over emotive words. Perhaps using the word "pedantic" instead, or "no-op", would have conveyed more information, without disparaging the amount of intelligence that went into making it (or into the design/configuration of the linter).
> "I asked people in code/design reviews to rename white/black lists to allow/deny lists"
Odd thing to do. "Black" is synonymous with darkness, hidden, off, empty space, and things of that nature. For this reason "blacklist" works. There is no clash with people, or any disrespect.
Politically correct OCD invents problems. Then dictate to others how they should solve those problems. Add penalties for those who don't follow the prescribed solutions to invented problems, and we find ourselves in 2022 looking at Google's efforts to solve the invented problems.
The author of the Vice article states that by removing master/slave and black/whitelist, it "addresses years of habitual bias in tech terminology".
Accusations of bias are just accusations. We can't "find" bias on the grounds of matching words in technical contexts to the same words in other contexts.
In the S&M world, the context is not actual master and slave, it's a new context that encompasses consent and good times. Likewise, the technical context is not one that involves people, but machines communicating under specific rules which "master/slave" adequately describes.
This is why I’m pessimistic about the West winning the second cold war. While Chinese engineers are working hard on world dominating AI models and other hard tech, Western engineers are wasting man hours on crap like this.
Chinese have far bigger and far more strict word list bans.
In US, you need to say “people who menstruate” and “land owning person”; in China you will just just disappear if you say a wrong thing against the regime.
but the argument “I wish I was in China and I didn’t have to be careful what I say in public!” is so laughable if you have actually been in China or interacted with mainland Chinese
What are you basing this on? Have you had any substantial interaction with Chinese engineers? I'm asking because I worked for a well known Chinese behemoth for nearly 6 years and my experience doesn't match your assertion.
Interesting comment. Putin is continually making "west is degenerate"-ish remarks as a kind of justification for his invasion of Ukraine, and yet his words fall flat. It's obvious he's being disengenius.
It's like, yes, we know some over paid highly educated technologists are biased against but that doesn't equal the end of liberalism and democracy itself. His words are not at all going to sway any of the HN readers who may agree with him on cultural issues about the west, that Russia are the good guys!
Perhaps his words are meant to developing nations who are uniformly culturally conservative?
The west will win the second cold war because the communist party will not be able to release its iron grip on its populace. The Chinese people only accept that iron grip now because it's carrying them up from a low place, but once that stops the constriction will become suffocating, leading to civil unrest and diaspora of the upper tier of Chinese society.
There's a saying - "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent".
Even if there was some natural physical law that guaranteed that oppressive nations would eventually be overthrown/atrophy, there's definitely nothing that puts a bound on how long that will take.
And, as we've seen with Ukraine, war can break out more quickly than any of us think.
(also, if the social justice warriors in the West have their way, the US government itself would be overthrown and replaced with its own, authoritarian, but ineffective regime, long before a conflict with China would occur)
>if the social justice warriors in the West have their way, the US government itself would be overthrown and replaced with its own, authoritarian, but ineffective regime
The summer of 2020 was a great preview of what this dictatorship will look like once the USD collapses in value another 30-40%. Burning buildings and more statues of "heroes" like George Floyd, who stood up to White Supremacy. Remember, removing "master" from git repos was done because of the legacy of slavery in the United States.
I can believe this. Around the time I left people were patting backs for fighting racism by getting rid of terms blacklist/whitelist.
Not something I feel super strongly about, but the fact that it's so scary to go against these stupid ideas is annoying. It's pure politics, there's nobody benefiting from this except the people claiming impact for antiracist work in their perf.
When I built a distributed system, I wanted to avoid the terms "master and slave" for the "coordinator and worker", so instead I chose something I thought was relatively less controversial- daimyo, honcho, and peasant. Only later did I realize I had merely recapitulated the power structure of feudal japan.
The communication cost of the change is not free. Do you think the internal wiki and new-hire git training materials all updated themselves?
It wasn't a large process change. Most of our git users are competent git users. But I billed hours dealing with it.
I still have people here who haven't touched a repository that uses "main" instead of "master". They have better things to do with their lives than lurk social media focused on programming. They don't know yet. Eventually they'll pull something with "main" instead of "master". Can I get your phone number so you can be the one to explain to them?
> costs nothing to remove something someone might find offensive
But there is a cost. You're losing a battle in the war of free speech vs Orwellian thought control.
The woke (an offshoot of last-wave feminism, currently promoted mainly by the control-left strain of the Democratic party) are lying; they're not actually offended, they're just using that as an excuse (propaganda) and as an emotional appeal, to get you to agree to their arguments, and cede power to them. This is most obvious with "Latinx" which is pushed by white journalists & activists but which isn't even supported by the overwhelming majority of Latinos and Latinas in the US.
Don't believe me? Listen to what they (the woke) say themselves!
> I wanted to start by focusing on the obvious one, Its harder for them to object to just one to start with, then once they admit the logic, we can expand the list
I don't think Latinx is a good example. The GP mentions there's no functional cost to `main`, and this is true. Latinx has a functional cost in that the Spanish language literally does not support the phonetics of Latinx.
That phrase is going to die soon and it never picked up in Latin America. Most likely the queer community in Latin America will come up with more effective slang. It took the US queer community decades, a century? To reclaim and come up with effective phrases -- I think the main issue here is lack of patience and a somewhat condescending attitude from American liberals that we, the actual hispanic diaspora, need our hands held.
There is also what I've argued is a hierarchy of needs issue at play with LatinX. The problems facing the queer community in Latin America are more severe than those facing the US community, because it is a younger community in a more conservative atmosphere. Therefore, the effort is better spent advocating for table stakes, like marriage equality in some countries and reduced violence towards queer people -- there is no time to be wasted, right now, on the exact, precise terminology to use. And LatinX is not a way to win hearts and minds in this process.
Edit: this is NOT support for Google's product, which clearly broken and not useful. This is an explanation of why LatinX specifically is not a good counter-example to `main` versus `master`. I hope this pre-empts someone coming in and calling me all 'woke' or whatever is the cool phrase for dismissing people these days.
"Latinx" isn't meant as a counterexample to "master/main", it's meant to demonstrate that the woke don't care about preventing offence, but instead about power, even if it means enforcing non-sensical policies; the fact that Spanish has no "x" further reinforces my point.
On a data driven platform of all places, we should be able to mutually acknowledge that one Tweet does not a pattern or movement make. I, too, can raise anecdata that I've never seen someone justify LatinX as a move to gain power.
The fact the term is dying further reinforces my point: it failed. No power gained. Does optionally calling master 'main' give people power? Do you really believe that? As far as I can tell, the 'wokes' you are so afraid of seem to be failing pretty often recently. If I believed in the existence of the 'woke' monster under my bed, and they had this track record, I would simply ignore them.
Did 'wokeism' stop Disney from losing its special tax status in Florida? No.
Did 'wokeism' stop Texas from passing laws restricting transgender students and their families? No.
Did 'wokeism' stop the abortion bounty laws from passing in Texas? No.
Has 'wokeism' prevented the recent book bannings across the US; for example, the recent banning of math books in Florida? No.
Was 'wokeism', the root of this Orwellian system you propose will engulf us, the reason why state government in Florida censored the phrase 'climate change' in state congress? I would be very surprised.
Who exactly is gaining or losing power here? And why are you so adamant that the culture war will somehow involve GitHub?
This is when Ministry of Truth comes into play. The main character's job in 1984 was literally this: rewriting history when it came into conflict with the updated "truth". Orwell didn't foresee that in a world of computers, such updates are trivially made: no need to reprint newspapers and books, since all of them are virtual.
This is tech. 20 years of tutorials are always becoming slightly wrong.
Don't tell me you're still using bare pointers, `new` and `delete` in your C++ classes instead of using smart_ptr fields, or explicitly declaring local variable types instead of using `auto`...
It's an amortized zero cost because training material is continuously out of date and churning anyway. Amortized in the sense that the cost would be paid one way or the other, because people would still be updating their documentation.
You can make the same argument about breaking changes. Code is constantly changing and needs to be updated, so breaking backwards compatibility is zero-cost?
In reality each change that requires updates to documentation (or code) is of course not actually zero cost.
Does this mean we should never make progress or change anything?
Also if your tutorials are using a base repository to work from, then you can still have the branch "master" it's just not default. So your existing repos should still work. And if you changed your repo then you should be responsible for updating your documentation to reflect that. It's just good practice.
I fail to see how changing the names from "master" and "slave" makes any "progress" at all. What is the most concise way to express the idea that one entity is totally subordinate to another, and must comply with every request the other sends?
I struggle to come up with any two terms that make this more clear than "master" and "slave". Just because we've abolished chattel slavery, doesn't mean we should avoid the very words themselves when they are appropriate. Destruction of meaning is far worse than some abstract offense that doesn't seem reasonable to take on behalf of a computer process.
What about giving master a new meaning? Actively banning it conservers its original meaning. Probably nobody today thinks about woman sitting in a room doing calculations when we speak about computers.
The mental model of how you use a certain branch could indeed be best expressed by the word "main", so no one can say the word isn't the best one for you to use.
But a master copy or version of something like a master recording or gold master for pressing records is different from merely "main".
Applied to software they are similar but not identical concepts, and neither is in any way wrong or harmful to anyone.
It's a small enough issue that it's not worth fighting very hard over, but, the rationale for the change, and especially for anyone trying to tell anyone else they have to do that change, is still invalid and the word master actually applies better if that's how you're using that branch. It has nothing to do with slave bosses.
But main also might be offensive because it's implying one thing is more important than another and some marginalized people who have not been the main group of people may not feel great about that. Really we should use one and two. But we should also be careful and should convene a working group with broad representation to come up with a more inclusive term for this.
See how this works? It is also definitely not without cost. It is not free to change all of your documentation and you will inevitably have to be exposed to it anyway because not everyone will have changed it, so it's ultimately not doing anything anyway.
> `main` is better. It's shorter, it's more descriptive, and costs nothing to remove something someone might find offensive.
All of these are true! I agree, "main" is a better name.
However, as to the larger point, the individuals and groups advocating for these changes also don't advocate for similar changes (that is, things that have good benefits but come with a very high cost to implement due to breaking backwards compatibility) around technologies/terms that they don't consider to be "problematic".
That strongly suggests that the driver isn't to improve technology, it's to shape language, with occasional incidental technological benefits - and the ignored technological regressions (it's harder to say "allowlist" than "whitelist", for instance, or to write applications that have a field to place in the user's preferred pronouns than just not address the user using pronouns at all).
> However, as to the larger point, the individuals and groups advocating for these changes also don't advocate for similar changes (that is, things that have good benefits but come with a very high cost to implement due to breaking backwards compatibility) around technologies/terms that they don't consider to be "problematic".
I actually know a social-justice oriented trans woman online who strongly advocates for the use of Tau instead of Pi because it is simpler and easier to learn. So sample of 1 there.
Tau vs Pi is a perfect microcosm of this debate with the social justice arguments removed. See also metric vs imperial.
The benefits are small but non-zero and localized to a handful of people, the new terminology is substantially simpler and cleaner, and the costs are primarily related to inertia and the comfort of people experienced with The Old Way.
I had a script that broke because someone changed master into main, put in an equation the 100 people that got satisfaction from this change and the tousands of people getting frustrated because of it.
Someone somewhere will be concerned by the literal words you speak, or the way you say it, or what you actually meant, intended or unintended. They will do it with good intentions or not, and no meaningful discussion will occur because it would be shorter, cost nothing, and offend no-one if you just let them win.
And for those who would like to change this, any change to a pilot's routine has a chance of being the thing that pushes an incident over the edge into a crash. Would it be worth it?
I would predict that the same people who say we should defund the police (the ones that mean it literally), and say that "being on time", "work before play", and "be polite" is part of the white oppressive culture[1], and needs to be dismantled, would also argue that flying, and the methodology of the NTSB (and foreign equivalents) that has reduced airline accidents of the decades, is also part of the structural racism of white dominant culture.
I'm not saying this is a large set of people. But it looks like some of them have power at github.
I guess if you're doing software for the airline industry you cannot use github.
Well, honestly I wouldn't use github for anything if money depended on it, because of their record of "firing" customers who don't toe the line on their exact politics.
[1] I'm quoting training material that even passed HR review in corporate education DEI here. It's not hyperbole.
Actually quite a lot of things exploded. You just don't care about the people who had to pick up the pieces. Moreover, lots of git repos still use master so "new generations" will just have to do deal with pointless divergence and breakage for nothing. The change wasn't progress. It wasn't useful. It didn't stop anyone being offended. It was and still is pure make-work for absolutely no purpose beyond the demonstration of power over irrelevant things.
Why? I think that slavery is bad only if the slaves are people. I want machines to be my slaves! (non-sentient machines only, dear future AI overlords!)
This counterargument is cute, but realistically if ever comes the day that slave feels like an appropriate term to use for my machines, I think I’ll still be a bit queasy.
Because the idea of a slave has immediate connotations of people being enslaved. I'm not talking in some broad philosophical sense of rightness, I mean it brings to mind, for me, thoughts about human slavery that are uncomfortable.
So what? Are we going to find a new word for "driver" because it brings to mind being driven to do something, without autonomy, perhaps against your will too?
Are we going to remove "duplicate" because we can somehow imagine that genetically identical twins are offended by this?
Are we going to remove "admittance" (inverse of impedance) because people will be uncomfortable when reminded that they weren't admitted to their first choice institution?
These are all equally ridiculous to the master/slave debacle.
Those are all ridiculous examples because they are purely hypothetical, but you're missing the point; if enough people felt strongly about those then yeah, we'd probably change the way we talk.
I agree that "main" is better, purely because it's a more intuitive word for that role.
As far as "uncomfortable connotations", would you agree that that's a subjective claim?
I don't like that forced slavery is a thing, but I'm capable of handling context-specific word meanings, and of not getting emotional due to alternative meanings.
Slavery was horrible and should not be forgotten. Erasing all related words so that we can all comfortably forget it ever happened seems … wrong? That’s another way of looking at it, anyway.
Can you please not use the word s____? My ancestors were Slavs, and when I see the word it is a painful reminder of how they were treated as property by Romans who bought and sold their "ex slava" captives.
There isn't, but if you are going to learn about computers then you're going to hear a lot about master/slave relationships. If you don't get exposed to that kind of jargon then it wouldn't surprise me if you don't have that connotation as strongly and instead only thought of master as in "mastery" or the degree after a bachelors.
>Many Google employees are just so out of touch with the real world that they believe it is the duty of Google Docs to change the English language to exclude the words "landlord", "motherboard", and even "mother" in most contexts (sub with birthing person).
It's frantic activity to avoid looking in the mirror. Making themselves busy fixing something massive and intractable to avoid having to think about the actionable items closer to home.
A worse one is to me is that they aren't allowed to say "Quantum Supremacy", because it reminds some people of "White Supremacy"? Nevermind that you actually give that concept more power when you make it so that even discussing it or inadvertently bring it up is stigmatized. Things are starting to get kind of Orwellian.
On landlord I can’t think of a proper synonym. Property owner and proprietor are broader categories of what a landlord is. They don’t mean the person you’re paying rent to for your housing.
To play along with this game, one can say that replacing "landlord" with "property owner" is offensive to those with ancestors who were deemed property.
It ought to be offensive to women because it suggests they can't be landlords-- a word which is already perfectly gender neutral in American English as far as I can tell.
People like turning a blind eye to what they feel uncomfortable accepting. That the world we live in is being increasingly influenced by just a few profit-maximizing entities.
> This may seem unbelievable, but the word "motherboard" is literally banned within Google and you are required to use "mainboard" instead. You are not allowed to use this word in documentation or code, and you're also not allowed to say it privately in chats or emails.
Is this really true? I always thought I might eventually apply to work at Google someday, but I hadn't heard there was such aggressive internal thought policing.
To be fair, the male/female nomenclature for connectors has been a mess for decades.
One old convention, mostly originating with radio-frequency connectors, is that the gender of the connector is the gender of its innermost contact. Thus, the plug of the common 2.5" and 2.1" connector of power supplies is technically female because the inner contact is a hole. The socket on the appliance has a pin in the middle and is technically male. When you try to buy one, half the time the part is labelled as male and the other half it is labelled as female.
But there is no problem bad enough that cannot be made worse by government. Years ago some US regulator didn't like the fact that people were plugging big radio antennas into wifi equipment, so they invented the "reverse-polarity" connector. What used to be a "SMA male" connector with a pin in the middle now is a "RP SMA male" connector with a hole in the middle. Here is a random link with a picture: http://cablesondemandblog.com/wordpress1/2014/05/05/reverse_... If you order this kind of connectors, now you have a 25% chance of getting what you need. One RP SMA male and a SMA female will mate together but not propagate any signals.
eww. This has the same vibes as someone saying "I want to breed with them". Like sure, it's grammatically correct, but you're gonna come off as a creep at best and some weird fetishist at worst.
Not trying to troll here...but are there people advocating that we replace "Mother's Day" with "Birthing Person's Day"? If a person gave birth who no longer identifies as a woman is it not inclusive to gender the holiday as we do?
> you're also not allowed to say it privately in chats or emails
In this context, what does it mean? For the other stuff, it is easily envisioned that it means official documents need to be scanned for prohibited terms. Ultimately, the term "motherboard" has to at least appear in an official document of banned words. In private chats, do they rely on the other party to turn you in? Is it automatically detected? Are you prevented from actually typing it? Can you post this link [1]?
A brilliant term, and it brings me back to what annoys me the most about all of this: Clippy was shite and got in the way of productivity, and now I'm going to have another "helper" in a tool that I use every day, and it is going to get in my way without even achieving its apparent goals because this stuff just does not work.
To push the Clippy thing further, Bill Gates once gave us "content is king". Google's Woke Clippy needs to learn that "context is king" - but it can't ever do that with language; well, not without a general AI.
Can someone reasonably explain to me why mother or motherboard is offensive...at all?
I try to be somewhat reasonable. I can stretch my mind enough to see the complaint with blacklist at least. But mother being offensive...my mind isn't able to stretch that far unless I'm missing something.
Okay, for a moment, forget about your position or feelings about the issue. Would you say that these restrictions or changes actually changed anything for better or worse? Is there some kind of evaluation going on to track the results of these policies?
Sure if you believe it. We also don't speak to each other to cater to people who are deaf, and we don't use sign language to cater to people who are blind.
Pushing back against this type of policy is generally a bad idea... There is a very vocal minority who will make life hard for you. This is a case where the vast majority know it's best to keep their thoughts to themselves.
> the vast majority know it's best to keep their thoughts to themselves.
If it's really the case that the vast majority of employees are feeling stifled by the company policy, isn't that a situation where forming a trade union could help?
The irony of workers rising up against oppressive supposedly left-wing rule is not lost on me, especially if it were to occur in Google's office in Poland.
Because the amount of effort required to fight people who are passionate about an ideology when you don't particularly care is far greater than just going along and changing a few words. Sure this can result in catastrophic outcomes sometimes (e.g. Nazism) but most people just want to get their paychecks and go home or do whatever job they have without going into politics.
How about "motherboard/fatherboard"? If we just use that everywhere they'll all be happy. No fatherboards will feel left out. Mother-of-pearl can just be nacre, and I don't know what you'll have to call mother-of-vinegar. Maybe just say it's something special and not to think too much about how fermentation works - especially if it causes you to have evil, non-inclusive thoughts.
If I'm writing about a ship and refer to it as a "she", does that set off the autoinquisitor?
As someone fairly familiar with the SJWs in a variety of FANGs, motherboard/mainboard doesn't even offend me any more. I kind of get it, even though it is lame logic.
I'm waiting until they start marking "Latino" as non-inclusive, and start forcing "Latinx".
I mentally cannot process "Latinx" to be pronounced as anything but "Lah-tinks". I am prepared to be fully shafted if I ever have to say that word outloud at work, because people seem to visibly cringe when they hear it pronounced this way.
I find “Latinx” to be so unbelievably stupid because the English “x” sound doesn’t exist in Spanish. Rather than using the gender neutral form “latine”, some moron decided we should start injecting Anglo idioms into the Spanish language
> though not a latino and not in the US, so I wasn't yet under any pressure to use it
To be fair, I've literally never heard anyone try to pronounce "latinx" outloud. And I live in one of the most stereotypical liberal/left-wing cities in the US (Seattle). The usage of that term seems to be mostly confined to a vocal twitter/internet minority and written form (whether online or in promotional materials for certain things).
Even here, this term is extremely fringe irl. And I don't think I've ever felt pressured to use it either, given I've never heard it in use (despite my friend group having a couple of people who are very left-leaning and are vocal about it).
I guess tl;dr, don't mistake a fringe vocal minority on the internet for an accurate representation of what it is like to actually live in the US (even when it comes to certain most heavily stereotyped big cities).
Nothing made me quit NPR, i just prefer to consume it in the same form as most of my news-related stuff, in written form. Nothing against listening or watching it, i just find it easier to process things like that by reading.
With that in mind, i guess i mostly meant "people you actually talk to or hear talking not in public news media" when i said that i dont ever hear it said outloud.
Yeah, fair point. Unless your social circles include ultratwittered people and/or media personalities you'll likely never hear it in meatspace-- even living in the bay area.
I mean, media has enormous influence. If a term is constantly present in every newscast, movie or newspaper around you, people will probably start using it at some point.
> people will probably start using it at some point.
I am not disagreeing with you, and sure, your future prediction is not out of the realm of possibilities. I am just saying that I am yet to see it happen as of today. And I don't really care to be outraged about something that isn't a thing yet.
It isn't global warming or some other thing that is difficult to reverse or has some life/death stakes. Language has been perpetually changing, and still is. Really fast, and really wildly. So making a trouble out of "this one word might become used in future in real life at some point, so you should worry about it now" is not something I am really into wasting energy on.
> motherboard/mainboard doesn't even offend me any more. I kind of get it, even though it is lame logic.
Same as "master branch"/"main branch". If there is an equivalent, less fancy and less controversial technical term, by all means let's use that instead. As long as you don't start with "childbearing person board" or "privileged branch" or whatever.
LatinX is complicated. If (white person) corrects someone of hispanic origin that using the word latino is offensive and they should use latinx - I've gotten some pushback. It may be best to just let the folks who care about getting to Latinx hash it out themselves. I've started seeing folx as well instead of folks. Was curious about the offensiveness of folks?
Folx is just a way to signal that you are woke. Since they have pushed folks for everything and co-called "normies" are using it now, they need to go a step further to make sure you know they are part of the special group.
Thank you, very interesting. I'd always taken gender neutral to include non-heteronormative genders. But I started seeing things like folx - confusing because I hadn't understood the word to be gendered or only gender normative.
I think it's a bit unique to folkx because instead of using gendered language (hey guys) folks have moved to hey folks. So I've only seen it on things like that (gender neutral references to other people).
This sounds entirely fabricated. I've been in the hardware department for more than 10 years. Maybe you put a word in a list. I've never even heard of someone considering this.
That's part of Marxist long march through institutions. They achieve these goals through bullying and accusations. Nobody at work wants to be (unfoundedly) accused of racism so they silently accept these new rules. I mean it's a small inconvenience that is probably worth the salary they are getting.
But the truth is people in these organisations are afraid of speaking their minds in case they say something that is deemed wrong by woke police. I noticed that people have become less open and many limits conversations strictly to the tasks at hand.
It's kind of how corporate goals meet with Marxism - they believe people no longer engage in "pointless" socialising that affects the bottom line and if they want to engage, they have a minefield to navigate.
Many of my (former) friends who worked at these big corporations have become zombies - it's not possible to have a conversation with them about day to day life, events etc.
It's really fascinating and worrying.
Out of couriosity: Why then didn't flag it the actual n-word of all things?
> A transcribed interview of neo-Nazi and former Klan leader David Duke—in which he uses the N-word and talks about hunting Black people—gets no notes.
Edit: Also interesting that this comment is dropping like a stone in HN's comment ranking, even though currently the comment score is at 1. If I accidentally triggered some anti-flame or anti-profanity filter, I'm sorry.
We need Clippy back, with webcam functionality. That way he can suggest ending the word in an “a” if you’re black. If you’re not he’ll report you to HR.
Good point. maybe even Google didn't want to be seen as "hey, here are some suggestions how you can make your speech about murdering Black people more inclusive..."
> Edit: Also interesting that this comment is dropping like a stone in HN's comment ranking, even though currently the comment score is at 1. If I accidentally triggered some anti-flame or anti-profanity filter, I'm sorry.
Comment order is a function of both score and age. As far as anybody (except those who actually have access to the source), there's no other "hidden" mechanic.
Because it's not a list of "banned words". It's a list of words or phrases that might accidentally cause offense (apparently similar to some of the entries on the public style guide: https://developers.google.com/style/word-list).
For that role, there's no need to include the n-word, because nobody is going to accidentally put that in a press release.
(Of course, the lists were apparently compiled by total dorks who put in things like "terminate", "dummy variable", and "native". But the list being dumb is a separate issue from it from what you raise).
What is that good reason? The only thing I can come up with is "don't release internal documents", which is a blanket reason and not what I'd consider compelling, but I suspect I'm having a failure of imagination
Because it isn't compelling? It's purely to avoid admitting to something illegal. I presume that this person has a reason that is more nuanced than that, which intrigues me.
Google is a large corporation. Large corporations will often enact arcane rulesets to give HR ways to manipulate their labor costs. This really sounds a lot like why this type of approach would be supported.
> Many Google employees are just so out of touch with the real world
This isn't remotely limited to Google. My company does this too. I've heard of others making similar changes.
Are these kinds of arbitrary changes to language usage silly and pointless? Maybe. But tough love here: languages change in arbitrary and pointless ways constantly. They always have. They always will. Your own common usages and idioms would seem outrageously weird to your grandparents. People had these same fights in the 60's, also 80's, and 50's... The 40's too now that I think of it...
To wit: we aren't getting oppressed here, we're just getting old. And the attempt to turn it into a political fight (on both sides) is largely just a reaction to the friction. It's not the cause.
I mean, really. Is "mainboard" such a hardship? It's not even a new word, it's two bytes and one syllable shorter. Must this be a fight?
If Google had shipped a feature that autocorrects my grandparents' slang to "dank" and "yeet", I'd be equally concerned! There's a huge difference between using fun new terms yourself and going around asking everyone to stop using the old ones.
So much of this technology perpetuates the biases they're intended to fix.
We put some of our job postings through one of these, and it flagged too many 'masculine' words, like 'analyze', 'leadership', and 'data'. Sorry women, time get back in the kitchen and nurture.
The people vouching for this at Google are likely product marketing managers, public relations folks, social media managers, etc. All they do is write corporate garbage all day, and much like we have "nit"s in PR's for formatting, variable names, etc; they likely have similar reviews that get flagged for "non-inclusive language" or whatever this is. So they have brilliant idea: the Code people use auto linters/formatters that we enable by default (hey gofmt) and everyone loves it, how about we do the same for the Prose people!
Basically: "All I write is corporate garbage, and all the writing I consume is corporate garbage, and all my coworkers only write corporate garbage, therefore everyone would love a corporate garbage-ifyer!"