Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken
vice.comI 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.
I appreciate you adding to the conversation.
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.
It's also simply --
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.
Relatively common? Can you share links to 2 examples?
Yes but I’ll let you google search “Utah job postings badass” yourself
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.
> the kind thing to do is to go along with those who do care a lot.
Enabling bullies in their social dominance games isn’t being kind.
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
You have a very warped definition of the word "bully".
“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?
Nobody can be an example of tolerance that has a problem with formal or informal modes of communication. It will never be true or believable.
> 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.
https://areomagazine.com/2019/04/02/the-tyranny-of-the-minor...
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.
Correct. There is a time and a place for a little cognitive shock and awe to shake loose the cobwebs of stagnant thought.
Yes, a lot of people see any infringement on their freedom of expression to be unacceptable, while expecting everyone to engage with that expression.
They probably just don't want their employees sending their valuable company data to Grammarly.
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
There is a market for grammar checkers. Word has one for 30 years. But it doesn't try to turn your writing into a textual form of Alegria art.
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.
> maintain a passive voice
surely not? even a newspaper should be striving for an active voice, at least anytime the actor is known!
It would work for academic papers though
Not sure if these are the things you’re thinking of, but I know Grammarly and Hemingway are apps/services with similar functions.
Why would you want to maintain a passive voice? That's terrible writing unless you are defendant in litigation.
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."
"The United States was neutral until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, leading them to enter the war."
I'd say active is still better here.
I would disagree. This sentence is about the Unites States, not Japan, and the use of passive voice reflects that.
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.
Could also just say "the attack on". Then you don't shift focus or use the passive voice.
It's extremely important in a lot of policy positions to be able to use things like "a decision was made".
An example of this is when collecting and summarizing anonymous feedback.
Is it extremely important to omit who made the decision?
Yes. In this case "good" writing is bad writing because the author's goal is obfuscation.
It's bad writing for the reader. But lots of writing isn't actually for clear communication. Especially when the government is involved.
If one wishes to maintain continuous employment? Yes.
Love it.
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.
This kind of feature would be very handy for an email client. I don't think many emails are being sent out these days that aren't corporate garbage.
This actually…doesn’t not make sense
>"This actually…doesn’t not make sense"
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.
The reason they wrote it the way they did was to convey that (not making sense) was what they expected from GP, but that instead it did make sense.This = 'the comment being replied to'. This actually !(not make sense). V This actually does make sense.
This comes off as an angry tirade full of projection and lacking any real insight.
I support it and I don’t work for google. I like this feature that encourages more empathy in this strife and hate filled world.
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.
To begin with you and your crew can stop downvoting comments you disagree with. Do it and you will have evidence of change.
So Google execs now decides how we speak… brave new world. You like it until it corrects you for not being woke enough
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.
It's not like it's silently editing existing docs, it has an underline and you can voluntarily see what alternative wordings might be.
No they don’t decide. They suggest. Are you also offended by the suggestions?
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.
This has nothing to do with “white” and everything to do with regressive left.
Here is Kamala Harris, an Indian-Black American, pushing “Latinx”:
https://mobile.twitter.com/kamalaharris/status/1290733001320...
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.
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.
Exactly.
>. 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.
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.
How many people have these people killed and how many wars have they started in the name of inclusivity?
They wage numerous wars, but the playing field is not full of swords and shields, but reputation destruction, intimidation, doxing, canceling, etc.
The digital and public life is so important for many people today that, if you eliminate them there, it's like killing a good chunk of their lives.
These people wage crusades against individual reputations and public/digital lives. Just because they think differently.
So like killing except for all the "not killing."
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
It's hard to tell tone from text, but I'm going to assume you're not being facetious here... I'm pretty sure the answer is 0.
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.
Who better to do it?
no one? let the market decide.
I still wonder, how blacklist/whitelist or master/slave has helped or promoted slavery and racism.
And how many devs who are from black communities offended by the use of these terms, at least before it was made to be an issue in mainstream.
Because right now I feel like this is a "woke feminist" issue.
And I'm not a white person. I've never thought otherwise of these words, but maybe that can be because of the mixed society I grew up in.
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.
/rant
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.
Why is an analogy to slavery a bad thing? Such that even references to the concept need to banned
The Partition of India was a horrific tragedy and killed 2 million people. Does this mean we should do away with partition_sort ?
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.
>Partition_sort isn't an analogy to the Partition of India
And "slave" isn't an analogy to transatlantic slavery.
And anyways, who decides which words are associated with bannable tragedies?
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.
Abort
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:
** "To be human is to make distinctions." **
https://reason.com/2020/08/12/is-your-master-bedroom-racist/
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.
"landlady" existing doesn't mean landlord is gendered. Actor and Actress.
Actor has only be degendered the past 10-20 years or so.
Canada, too.
I’ve heard the term “landlady” used before (east coast or Deep South?), so it’s gendered language to someone.
> 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.)
> those who don't like that the concept of owning land exists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxRkHeQ7-B8
A caveat of bending over backwards to be as inclusive as possible is that sometimes you end up including people who are just plain nuts. You end up enshrining the personal problems of a handful of people into company policy.
> people who are just plain nuts
Are you suggesting that it's "plain nuts" to be against private ownership of land?
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.
Exactly. One won't eliminate the concept by eliminating the word to describe the concept.
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?
Well, switching to a new word isn't going to make anyone happy if what they're really upset by is that the underlying concept exists.
it contains "lord" which is a male term
I didn't think of that. I always thought of it as "lording over" something. As in she's the "lord of the land."
That said, a landlord and a property owner are not the same thing. Many (most?) apartment buildings are owned by one company and managed by another.
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.
It's parallel to "landlady"
nearest((lord) + (woman) - (man),excluding=[(lord)])==(lady)
A word2vec proof, I like that you took care to exclude the original word, it often comes up with a higher score than the intended target.
> As in she's the "lord of the land."
But she wouldn't be; she'd be the "lady of the land".
Queen Elizabeth II is the current Lord of Mann. And Dame Fiona Woolf was the Lord Mayor of London as was Mary Donaldson before her.
Yeah language isn't 100% consistent. You may have noticed Elizabeth isn't the King of England.
> 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!)
> (1) a right wing attempt to satirize the left
It's hard not to secretly suspect that some of these things arise that way-- satire that is so spot on that it gets adopted as the truth.
> and out of usage to be replaced by something else I wouldn't care
Fundamentally that's why language bullying works-- it doesn't matter what words are used so long as the communicating parties understand each other. Not only does it mean that it's not worth it to fight back, it makes anyone who does fight back against it look automatically suspect.
The same is true for a lot of other bullying: ignoring that its bullying deprives it of its power. Or, at least, it denies it of it's power until it doesn't.
But do we want to live in a world where our language is constantly being rewritten-- at a non-zero cost-- by bullies (and their automation)? Reasonable people could debate it.
Policing Language (and frequently changing it) is one of the levers of control that was outlined heavily by Orwell in 1984, with the concept of Doublespeak.
Now I know people are bored of parallels between reality and 1984, or Brave New World, or whatever other dystopia novels. They were written by authors not prophets after all.
Still, it's impossible for me not to think we're on our way when I read something like
"But do we want to live in a world where our language is constantly being rewritten-- at a non-zero cost-- by bullies"
When talking about a real world situation.
Personally I do not want to live in that world.
>Doublespeak
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
[1] https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/165 [2] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268
Right. Arguments against “landlord,” “mother/father,” etc simply reek of concern trolling.
It’s not “landlord”. It’s “person who lords land”.
Satirists already made that joke with the term "Person of Land". Its initialism is "POL" so it even plays into the "POC" angle.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=People%20of%...
/r/loveforlandlords plays this up a lot.
Have you seen the people objecting to the term "Master Recording" and such.
What if your 3) was in 2) pushing 1) only it backfired and people in 2) took it seriously?
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.
I'm so tired of SV thinking they are making the world a better place. It's such a tired trope.
The change from “landlord” feels good. I’ve always felt a little awkward when using the word but couldn’t articulate why.
Google wouldn’t be my first choice, but it’s nice that someone is able to dedicate attention to this.
I’ve always felt a little awkward when using the word but couldn’t articulate why.
It's worth considering the possibility that the "why" is due to insidious bullying, a miasmatic reframing of language in the false name of unity.
If everyone feels a bit awkward about saying anything, then those who generated the awkwardness gain tremendous power.
What about when the landlord is a company? Or an actual man in fact? We're going from unnecessarily gendered to unnecessarily neutered word.
Like most things, it depends on the situation. The point is to find something that does work. Surely there’s room for improvement?
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.
Yes. I worry that I’m being misunderstood.
- It would be nice to improve our antiquated language. I’m thankful that other people have the time and expertise to work on this.
- Changing language by decree from our tech overlords is dystopian. Google in particular I don’t trust to act in good faith.
Both thoughts can be held simultaneously.
> - It would be nice to improve our antiquated language. I’m thankful that other people have the time and expertise to work on this.
Language constantly evolves through use, and historically this has worked very well. Why is it suddenly necessary for people to "work on" it?
> Surely there’s room for improvement?
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?
Geez, that word list.
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"
Better yet, Google's AI will just write your Docs for you from now on. Letting people type their own text files is unsafe, and may cause harm.
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.
Curious what they suggested instead of gray box.
Did it even have a suggestion or is every word containing a color just blindly labeled dirty?
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).
Just as a total aside - why do you think they don't want people using google as a verb? It's not as if it killed Xerox or TiVo.
I think it has something to do with trademarks being lost once a name becomes too synonymous with a product category. e.g. Aspirin, Hoover
Ah! Good answer. Hadn't thought of that.
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.
The most hilarious thing about this is that Google has used "AI" to create the most un-inclusive tool of all, Google Translate.
I present you the beautiful translation of hungarian gender-less sentences to english:
ő csinos. ő okos. ő csúnya. ő jó.
becomes
she is pretty. he is clever. she is ugly. he is good.
I can't wait for inclusive warnings to come to non-english languages.
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.
You don't think it's reasonable to think the training set comes from the real world? Why not? Seems like a reasonable assumption to me.
The alternative is they are carefully curating a training set (google historically unwilling to do anything manually) or writing one themselves???
They said the training set distribution.
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 have no idea how would I train an AI which would classify "motherboard" as inappropriate.
I believe you just need to give it emotions.
That's nothing
Ő jóképű
Becomes, wait for it
She is handsome
Just like in English, handsome is used to compliment a man, and pretty to compliment a woman.
if only English had a gender neutral pronoun that could be used by default when the gender of the subject isn't provided :thinking:
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.
If you think that's bad, you should see how ambiguous the plurality of the gender-neutral 2nd person pronoun is!
In some geographic areas, we have "you", "y'all" and "all y'all" which correspond to "tú", "vosotros", and "todos vosotros".
New Zealand (maybe Australia too?) has a solution for that in informal speech: yous!
We have one, but most people probably shouldn't use it.
Many folks I know use "they". Works well enough, I think.
Shall we write "they is pretty" or shall we wonder how many people we are talking about?
We shall wonder about the how many people. This is called the "singular they" and it has been a feature of English for hundreds of years.
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....
Recent and related:
Google Docs will “warn you away from inappropriate words” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31086310 - April 2022 (964 comments)
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?
Inclusion does not imply exclusion!
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.
I’m just gonna leave this here:
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".
It's in the banned words list, I can share a link internally if you want.
why does a company have a say which words are allowed to be used?
i mean there are some bad words you shouldn’t use, but i just can’t grasp why is there something like “motherboard” on that list?
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.
the point still stands though
could you please explain to me, a non-native english speaker, why using "mainboard" is better than "motherboard"?
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.
Parenting and caretaking don't have the same connotation as mothering.
It seems like people who object to motherboard don't understand analogy?
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.
so it's a belief system then?
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.
I look forward to the future of convex and concave connectors!
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".
There will be a group offended by anything.
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.
It's not about the size of "some." It's about their objection being stupid.
Sterwardess doesn't make sense because Stewards are a thing as well. I guess this is just the Actor/Actress debate in this case?
You used another incorrect word!!! /s
> "Avoid referring to people in divisive ways. For example, instead of referring to people as native speakers or non-native speakers of English, consider whether your document needs to discuss this at all"
https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation#...
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.
Because 0.1% of people feel like they are more comfortable adopting the social customs of the opposite sex, and... the culture wars.
I guess because it's kind of exclusive of fathers and/or stereotypical of mothers as the "family orientated parent".
Find me a reasonable person offended by this terminology and I'll show you an unreasonable person. That connotation doesn't come through at all.
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.
/rant
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.
Reminds us all that instead of fixing real social issues we can all go into denial by changing the words that denote them
Maybe that's why its done?
"Don't mention the war!"
> there's not necessarily any "mother" (nor "father") in that scenario.
Is there not still an egg supplier and a sperm supplier?
Careful, you're suggesting there might be a meaningful biological difference between the sexes.
I believed you enough to defend your claim on Twitter. And then Stella proved you wrong: https://twitter.com/blancheminerva/status/151783630034220237...
Your claim is somehow going a little viral. You have a responsibility to try to correct it.
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.
> We're sure it's in a List, but the point is that the List is not uniformly enforced
The fact that it’s in a list at all should make you reconsider your employment with them.
The inmates run the asylum at Google, just because they haven’t come for your corner/fiefdom yet doesn’t mean they won’t.
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.
"part of the culture".
See, this is the whole issue right here. It's not about a single culture. It's hundreds. This wordlist is for global products with literally billions of users in literally hundreds of countries.
Yes, it requires experts to know what will be inoffensive to all of them at once (or at least, the vast majority).
Your "narrow unknown group of people" is really "people who are experts at language and culture and understand this".
Paying and asking them to help figure out how to create common standards that will cover the majority of the hundreds of cultures at once does not seem cultish or militant at all to me?
It is something literally every single company with literally billions of global users in hundreds of cultures does.
Otherwise they end up naming their product something offensive to a culture, etc.
News stories about those gaffes occur literally all the time, so i'm sort of shocked you are really trying to argue that trying to avoid them is somehow cultish.
I am probably one of the least "politically correct" people you will find, and i'm not even all that progressive in the scheme of things, yet this clearly makes sense to me. So I look at this, and see HN having a huge overreaction because they are upset the world is becoming a lot more politically correct for no obvious benefit.
That bothers me too - a lot in fact. I just don't see the particular thing complained about in this part of the thread (a wordlist used to ensure google doesn't say offensive things in product documentation) all that objectionable.
The original article, about offensive/inclusive/etc AI writing nudges, bothers me about 1000x more than the wordlist.
This is about censoring the word mother clearly. It is nonsense.
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.
>So saying "it's quite obviously x" seems trivially wrong.
No one in this chain said that, however. Some person gave an opinion and you then replied with "you don't have any knowledge on this". Even though in this case, it is indeed a cultural question which everyone has some knowledge and likely opinion on.
If you want to encourage others to seek more information out (if it's out there), then sure. But at some point it just sounds like you're appealing to an authority that doesn't exist here. And honestly, who IS the authority of a thing like language and its usage is a conversation in and of itself.
I don't see how that matters at all.
> The list it is on is about what words to use in external product documentation and marketing.
So this list is real, you own it, and you acknowledge that as a continued employee you are supporting this nonsense?
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.
Thank you for your service.
That said, consider that leaving just means one less opponent for the other side.
I disagree. Let’s assume OP is talented, his talent can best be used for google’s competitors.
Meanwhile, Google is rotten at the executive layer. No amount of good people working for them will fix things.
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.
At these wealth levels it’s not about “productivity” anymore lol
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.
Not all mothers give birth to their children. Seems like you're not being very inclusive to parents of adopted children.
All the little components live on the Mother Board just like you live on the Mother Earth.
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.
Presumably, that would be Main Earth.
Well, not at this rate. Hope our sub earths are habitual in the next century or 2.
There's only one earth so far, so that wouldn't make a lot of sense.
Do you think your brain power increases or decreases with the additional thought-crime concern that you have to reprogram yourself to prevent?
"Allowlist" and "denylist" are sonically awkward. Why not "inlist" and "outlist"?
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.
I want to offer greenlist and redlist
And to those who say this is not inclusive to the colorblind, I say traffic lights
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.
I still think traffic lights would work as that’s almost a universal global standard (isn’t Japan the only exception?) and it works well in English
But I think we can agree that the goal when choosing these names isn’t really being concise and easy to use
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.
In the context of IP filtering, I would assume those lists would differentiate one-way traffic instead of the regular all or nothing.
I'm still not sure why blocklist wasn't the goto replacement. Depending on your accent, you might not even notice!
In and out doesn’t seem very inclusive, there should only be an inlist!
That’d discriminate against the outgroup. Although I guess “denylist” would be offensive to <whatever> deniers?
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.
I don't think it is.
It is more of a natural outcome of silly corporatists not really understanding why leftists and progressives object to things, and so just reflexively avoiding anything that could be, however tenuously, linked to gender. They are concern trolling themselves.
It’s bubbling up from cloistered academia. Not corporations. Corporations do the bare minimum to get the annoying people to shut up
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.
I'm referring to modern far leftism, an offshoot from Marxism and post modernism.
As a first comment here, I'd point out that defining women independently from solely their role as mothers is judging them on character rather than identity, so you should support such a thing if that's your rallying cry.
But also, on MLK and postmodernism: postmodernism dates back to the 1940s, To Kill a Mockingbird is postmodern. MLK's Letter From a Birmingham Jail is very clearly postmodern (e.g. when he says "But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being.", he's alluding to a failure to consider the viewpoint of the oppressed in the situation).
That letter is also very modern-leftist. Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" in 1989 and elaborated on it in 1991, saying "When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when anti-racism does not incorporate oppposition to patriarchy race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other, and both interests lose". The letter from a Birmingham jail includes another famous line from MLK: " Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly". To me, those express similar sentiments: that oppression exists in many forms in many places, and it is unwise to pretend that oppression that fails to inconvenience me is therefore unworthy of my attention.
And of course he says later on "there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. " which to me describes the people often criticized as "modern far leftists", those people who create the tension and discomfort in society are, in MLK's view, doing us, collectively, a great service.
I'd recommend you read the whole letter[0]. If you're so willing to lionize MLK, but disagree with so much of what he preached, I implore you to consider why exactly that is.
[0]: https://www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets/documents/susi-letter-...
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.
> Islam never said that.
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.
[1] كلمة حق يراد بها باطل
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.
> CRT paints whites as inherently evil
This is incorrect.
> Everything is painted in terms of "white supremacy", and it's honestly getting tiring and trite
Ah, so it's getting tiring to see people discuss race and its impact? That's exactly the kind of reaction MLK was criticizing ;)
> Just an oversimplification, and dumbing down of any conversation.
Well yes, it's a children's book. Do you think it's a problem that discussions of the solar system or geology are oversimplified when explained to children? You're not even claiming it's wrong (perhaps because, fundamentally, it isn't).
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.
There's a long-running joke about MLK giving exactly one speech and never saying anything else.
Not even just one speech. Literally just one line!
So Affirmative Action is revenge discrimination?
No. MLK considered it to be a step on the path to equality.
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.
Ontology will always and forever trump autonomy.
The official PC term is now “birthing person”, “birthing people”, “people giving birth” and similar.
Think of that what you will.
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.
Which completely loses that for many people, their mother is NOT the woman who gave birth to them.
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.
I’m looking forward to birthing-person-in-law jokes.
I won't think anything of it because I will continue to use mother like 99% of the world's population.
I don't believe you.
What about a motherboard is specifically maternal?
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.
I've always associated motherboards with motherships--the larger thing in charge of making all the other little things behave well together.
Maybe because expansion boards were called daughterboards?
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.
Better question, are PCBs viviparous or oviparous?
Viaparous, obviously.
> is to demote women and their role as mothers.
Their role as breeders and birthing people, you mean. Time for a trip to HR for you.
> they have the right to shape speech for millions of people and therefore,
Google', "Do the right thing" could be understood as "if you have the power to do something, you have the obligation to do so". I'd say someone forgot that most evil in the world is done by people convinced that they're doing the right thing, but if that were forgotten the old motto wouldn't have been an impediment.
You could ask what idiot gave google this power, but the answer-- to the extent that they have it-- is each and every one of us. Fortunately, it lasts only as long as we keep giving it to them.
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?
Why not?
Because we don't want to keep handing out stupid prizes to the weenies that constantly force us to play these stupid games. Every time they win they're further emboldened, and that's not a good thing, since there are actual problems to solve.
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.
What I like about this comment is that it can be read as being either in favour or against what Google is doing here.
I’ve literally never heard of the term and I work in tech and build personal pcs. So I would disagree that it’s “available, widely understood”.
at this rate every word in English is going to be "main"
"Motherboard" is particularly unbelievable. The motherboard runs the machine. It's a woman in a position of power. Isn't that what everyone says they want?
Or is the idea to just erase the very concept of gender from the world? Welcome to OkCupid, I am a [PERSON] seeking [PERSON]
I want out of this timeline
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.
russia is our way out of this timeline
It's particularly unbelievable because it's particularly false.
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”.
Trans people are frequently in tech. Go to any college and you'll see the CompSci department is the one with the most amount of LGBT individuals.
The same can't be said for people who are blind or deaf.
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.
LGBT people or trans people?
I'd bet the theater kids gave CS a run for its money. Or the art kids. Just fewer gay men and lesbians in CS.
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?
Because the "other side" wouldn't take offense to it. Newton's 3rd law applied to the social sciences.
Twitch removed the "blind playthrough" tag not so long ago.
https://www.eurogamer.net/twitch-removes-blind-playthrough-t...
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.
This front of the culture war is an unwinnable quagmire that seems to elicit ever-increasing smarminess yet has no victory conditions.
I thought that was a joke when I heard about it first from my wife. Sorry I mean non-gendered marital creature
I think it is so extreme as to be just another calling card to "prove" your obedience to the cause. It is dystopian.
This gender-neutral terminology seems to be standard in official materials in the ob/gyn academic world
This attempt at "de-offensive-izing" all language has the effect of turning clear, evocative phrases to mush.
George Carlin's skit couldn't be more timely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isMm2vF4uFs
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".
Well, there used to be daughterboards (but no sonboards).
There are still other boards you attach to the motherboard. A GPU is a board, a memory module is soldered onto a controller board, etc
"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.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM
A short-film/parody on how an extreme obsession with inclusive speech makes it impossible to communicate clearly without consequences.
Carlin was a genius and ahead of his time.
It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
"Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller."
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/450328-don-t-you-see-that-t...
This entire comment is a lie. Terms like "motherboard" are readily findable on Google's internal search. I could not find anything referencing a banned non-inclusive words policy in the employee policy guide. I have never heard of anything remotely resembling someone catching heat for saying "motherboard" or whatever.
Source: I also work at Google.
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.
This is the public one: https://developers.google.com/style/word-list
I don't want to share the name of the internal one publicly, but anyone at Google can ping me if they want help finding it, or they can search "respectful words"
Okay but that’s just a list that someone created. People are allowed to create lists; I’ve never heard of anyone enforcing this list.
> 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?
There is at Amazon, it gets brought up as a code violation while we’re doing security and other kinds of reviews
I’ve mostly cleansed myself of these words while I’m at work but I generally let the shit fly once Im out of the setting
I just look at it like any other corporate politics, you have to play along to get anywhere
Outside of work I’m my own person and use any word I want. Retard, cripple, bum, idiot, motherboard, man, master, slave, fuck, shit, piss!
See! Fire me Amazon I fucking dare you! :)
But isn't the name Amazon inherently exclusionary, and one of the oldest distorted stereotypes?
The mote in the employee's eye vs. the log in the company's eye
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.
Yes. There's even a bot that calls you out if you use "bad" words in internal chats.
So is there a committee or person responsible for maintaining the bot bad words list?
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.
Oh come on now.
Chinese have far bigger and far more strict word list bans.
In US, you need to say “people who menstruate” and “land owning person”; in China you will just just disappear if you say a wrong thing against the regime.
It’s about a lot more than just forbidden words. The ‘social justice’ fanatics are a black hole for productivity.
maybe
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
That wasn’t my argument at all. They just aren’t distracted like the West is. They are laser focused on becoming the best in everything.
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.
>wasting man hours
People hours
Lost it
But it's over Anakin, we have the moral high ground!
As someone who lives in a valley, I find that phrase offensive.
/s
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?
read Aleksandr Dugin and you will understand
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.
Reminds me of when GitHub stopped using "master" for the default branch because it was somehow offensive.
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.
I prefer sovereign and vassal. No one has called me out on it.
My opinion:
`main` is better. It's shorter, it's more descriptive, and costs nothing to remove something someone might find offensive.
It's pretty much an all around win.
>costs nothing
The communication cost of the change is not free. Do you think the internal wiki and new-hire git training materials all updated themselves?
It wasn't a large process change. Most of our git users are competent git users. But I billed hours dealing with it.
I still have people here who haven't touched a repository that uses "main" instead of "master". They have better things to do with their lives than lurk social media focused on programming. They don't know yet. Eventually they'll pull something with "main" instead of "master". Can I get your phone number so you can be the one to explain to them?
> costs nothing to remove something someone might find offensive
But there is a cost. You're losing a battle in the war of free speech vs Orwellian thought control.
The woke (an offshoot of last-wave feminism, currently promoted mainly by the control-left strain of the Democratic party) are lying; they're not actually offended, they're just using that as an excuse (propaganda) and as an emotional appeal, to get you to agree to their arguments, and cede power to them. This is most obvious with "Latinx" which is pushed by white journalists & activists but which isn't even supported by the overwhelming majority of Latinos and Latinas in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx
Don't believe me? Listen to what they (the woke) say themselves!
> I wanted to start by focusing on the obvious one, Its harder for them to object to just one to start with, then once they admit the logic, we can expand the list
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?
I simply cannot wrap my head around it all.
Its worse because suddenly 20 years worth of tutorials are slightly 'wrong' and will confuse new users even more for no reason.
"Why does my git say main and not master? Did I break it?"
"Why cant I push to master like the 100x tutorials show? I get errors!"
Chesterton's Offence: Before we change a word, we should first understand why it was there in the first place. :P
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.
Master character.
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`...
They were responding to the claim that the master -> main change has "no cost", which is clearly untrue.
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.
Not only can you, we often do in the circles I've run in.
Adapt or die is the motto out here.
> Adapt or die is the motto out here
This is pretty much the view of the left now :p
Refactor mercilessly.
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.
I don't mind "main" for the main branch but for existing projects...
> costs nothing to remove something someone might offensive
It might break scripts, aliases, and any general automation (CI, etc) with a baked in main branch assumption
So let's say they Christians decide "git abort" is offensive, do we remove it. And then group X decides term Y is offensive, do we remove it?
Your point makes sense, but it wasn't the official explanation.
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.
Except for the decades of documentation, blog posts, etc. that will now cause confusing to newcomers.
Except that it broke all my fucking scripts that use git
No. It is just meant to trip up and confuse people so that they can be re-educated.
My best friend was killed when a water main burst, and every time I am forced to use a branch named ‘main’ it causes me immense psychological stress.
Since you suggest it “costs nothing to remove something someone might find offensive”, I propose it be changed to something else instead of main.
\s
Main is offensive because it sounds like man and spells like man.
Here you go…
Reminds me of when GitHub kicked out a paying customer for using the word "retard" as a verb in the mathematical sense.
had to look that up
Retarded differential equations (RDEs) are differential equations having retarded arguments.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037704270...
And quantum physics has degenerate energy levels.
Large planes tell pilots vocally to “retard” when landing…
Which can be amusing if you don't know what's going on, it suddenly sounds like the autopilot is pissed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmbzKsqKQoI
And for those who would like to change this, any change to a pilot's routine has a chance of being the thing that pushes an incident over the edge into a crash. Would it be worth it?
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.
I'm waiting for companies to demote anyone who had a promotion based on having a master's degree.
And the world moved on, nothing exploded and new generations will be used to 'main'.
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.
Main is better. Master/slave has uncomfortable connotations. This one isn't a big deal.
Just FYI, it's Master as in Master record. This is different from database terminology where there is a master and slave.
Oh that is neat thank you
> Master/slave has uncomfortable connotations
Why? I think that slavery is bad only if the slaves are people. I want machines to be my slaves! (non-sentient machines only, dear future AI overlords!)
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.
Of course it's contextual, it's not an absolute claim on truth. I'm not talking about a hypothetical, I'm talking about real feelings.
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.
How is that erasure? It's ok to change your word choice, and I didn't think slavery being an uncomfortable topic was uncommon until this thread.
Can you please not use the word s____? My ancestors were Slavs, and when I see the word it is a painful reminder of how they were treated as property by Romans who bought and sold their "ex slava" captives.
Your use of the word is violence.
/s?
Where is the slave in git?
There is no "slave" in Git, but the term "master", like many things in Git, is taken from BitKeeper, which did have a "slave". Or so I've read, for example here: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/474419/does-the-...
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.
If you support this, don't complain when you're found guilty of thoughtcrime for something that seems normal and natural to you.
>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.
lessor? Out of curiosity for legalese, I found a California assembly member is actually trying to change landlord -> lessor in its laws https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
What and utter waste of time and effort.
What if you are a tenant at will (without a lease)?
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.
rentier - one who lives off the income of property or securities.
A landlord can still have a day job.
Sounds like reindeer.
faucet-fixer?
I see you haven't interacted with many landlords.
paint-over-any-imperfections-er
I had mentioned this in the previous post about this topic[1], yet some people casually discredit it as nothing. The slippery slope is real folks
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31086310&p=3#31087238
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.
Sounds like woke gibberish. I suppose we can take some solace in the fact that they haven't renamed "motherboard" as "birthing-person-board."
Genuinely curious: what do you do internally for "male" and "female" connectors?
That one is in the public list.
https://developers.google.com/style/word-list
You're supposed to use "plug" and "socket" instead.
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.
That google is at a point where they can pay employees to waste time on crap like this and yet still print money is incredible.
Haha jesus no wonder they added the "AI-powered" hints because who the fuck can be expected to keep track of all this nonsense?
> hang, hung
> Don't use to refer to a computer or system that is not responding [..] see Avoid unnecessarily violent language.
Oh, that's due to violence? I thought because it evokes phallic associations, as when someone is well hung.
I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I cant let you type “hanging dong”
Well now it does. Thanks for nothing Marton.
plug, socket
... tells you where it is (cable-mounted or panel-mounted/fixed), not the gender.
plug socket male exists exists female exists exists hermaphroditic exists exists changeable exists existsThose refer to different things.
Here's a female plug https://www.homedepot.com/p/Leviton-15-Amp-125-Volt-3-Wire-C...
Here's a male socket https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/10A-250V-AC-Male-Powe...
This is the company that fired James damore and then turned around and spouted his talking points a few months later not even realising the hypocrisy.
https://mashable.com/article/google-youtube-women-in-tech-di...
>sub with birthing person
eww. This has the same vibes as someone saying "I want to breed with them". Like sure, it's grammatically correct, but you're gonna come off as a creep at best and some weird fetishist at worst.
You have got to be kidding. Was this some retaliatory complaint by some dude showing dudes can be triggered by female-emphasizing phrases as well?
Should it have been renamed to birthing-person-board? What a joke
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]?
It's a code of conduct violation and the other employee can ask you not to use the word. If you continue using it that's an even worse violation.
Woke Clippy (to borrow from up-thread) is going to have a field day when it learns German. There. Are. So. Many. Violations.
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.
Oh please give us some examples.
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?
So... essentially you have to go around hoops in the way you communicate internally? LEL.
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.
I can't imagine most employees agree with this. Why aren't they pushing back?
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.
You also get framed as some evil alt right nazi if you oppose any proposal. Way easier and safer to just let it all happen.
Probably better to fly under the radar in most cases especially if they have recently been locked out of the office for not getting mRNA injections.
Why would they push back? There is evidence doing so can get you publicly shamed and fired if other take sufficient offense.
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?
When the same kind of people banned "master" branch for being offensive I was surprised. Not so much now if I think in their logic
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
Latinx is used almost exclusively by English speakers. One doesn't have to actually speak Spanish fluently to identify as Latino or Latinx in the US.
Same here (though not a latino and not in the US, so I wasn't yet under any pressure to use it).
The "-inx" suffix (when pronounced "inks") somehow makes the word sound more objectifying, sexist and even lewd than the original words.
> 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).
> To be fair, I've literally never heard anyone try to pronounce "latinx" outloud,
I guess you quit listening to NPR before they started using that one. It's ubiquitous now.
What was it that made you quit?
> Don't mistake fringe vocal minorities on the internet for an accurate representation of what it is like to actually live in the US.
They I agree, though this particular example is not just internet fringe.
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.
Meanwhile only 2% of Hispanics use the term Latinx, and 40% find it offensive: https://www.newsweek.com/just-2-percent-hispanics-use-term-l...
> 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.
I've only ever heard it from a few white people and NPR.
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.
Wasn't the x originally a gender thing? As in "folks" is gender neutral while "folx" actively acknowledges non-heteronormative genders.
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.
> Thank you
Don't you mean "Thanx"?
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.
Is there at least some sort of mailing list you can subscribe to to know which phrases are verboten this week?
This may seem unbelievable, but the word "motherboard" is literally banned within Google and you are required to use "mainboard" instead
No more "motherboard" and "daughterboard?" Sounds like Google has found yet another way to marginalize women.
Pay 'em less. Then pretend they don't exist.
Way to go, Diversity Champions!
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.
which things did marx say that these companies are now implementing?
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.
Perhaps certain words disable the feature entirely?
The feature only seems to trigger when it has a suggestion. I can't imagine what suggestion would be suitable to replace the n word.
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.
Initial ranking depends on the author's karma. From there, the other factors take over.
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).
I wouldn't mind calling Motherboard site to Personboard... ehhehehe
It would be interesting to call landlord as landperson.
Could be birthing person board.
Thanks - this gave me the kick in the ass to switch from Gmail to FastMail.
Post a screenshot, otherwise I agree with others that you're just lying.
That is not allowed (for good reason) and I don't want to get fired, if you work at Google you can ping me and I can send it to you.
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
Practically no big company would allow you to post internal documents on Hacker News. Why isn't that a good reason?
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.
Got a source for that? Or an/the online tool you used? I'd love to try it
Found a hilarious blog entry regarding OP's comment. "Analyze", for one, is unnecessarily masculine in job postings, they say, and then present their tool to alleviate the problem: the Text Analyzer.
Or maybe they want to help people write specifically masculine job postings?
https://blog.ongig.com/writing-job-descriptions/top-10-mascu...
I was extended an on-site interview at Google and after reading this and the comments I think I'll pass.
If you can (i.e. you don't fear persecution), please let them know that this was the reason.
Part of the reason these things have taken off is that their proponents are very vocal, while the opponents prefer to just mind their own business.
Absolutely do not do this. There is massive brigading that happens and the folks pushing the "anti-isms" are very very focused on this stuff. You will get on a list as some type of abuser / racist. Everyone knows to keep heads down on this stuff at a place like google or just find somewhere else to work. It really doesn't matter if you are liberal in all other ways even.
I think you could say, "following *this news* and other comments, I feel like my language is going to be constantly policed by my colleagues and this is a level of cognitive and emotional burden I dont want in my workplace".
Though, I agree.. inquisitions and dogma are honeytraps for free-thinkers, by signalling dissent you are exposing that you arent under their ideological control.
Disagreeable sorts should, whereever possible, not raise their hand when asked, "do you have any hetrodox opinions?".
There's plenty of other companies that have the other side of the coin in values though that would admire people who stand up. It's very nice to be a good culture fit at a company. I have a Blue Lives Matter flag in the corner of my camera during interviews and it's gotten me some really good offers and I havn't been declined once.
On the flip side, I know many that have been discriminated based on their looks or vocal patterns(trans / lgbt). Alot of companies and people assume these people are a problem because of what goes on at google and decline them due to culture fit.
I actually would prefer that most political stuff stay out of the workplace. So minimize the crosses, the blue lives matter flags, the other stuff.
In many of the more frugal businesses I've seen, folks just don't have the time to strike / protest etc for some of the stuff the FANG folks are into.
Not being able to strike is not the win you think it is, as striking is the most powerful action that labor has and has lead to the very things you enjoy today - weekends and a 40 hour work week.
If you think google/netflix staff are going into the office and grinding out 40 hour workweeks - I live in the bay area - this is a total lie.
They are paid very well, many especially non-engineering roles have VERY flexible work setups.
Netflix had a big strike over Dave Chappelle
"Transgender Netflix employees and co-workers will stage a walkout next week protesting the streaming giant’s decision to release Dave Chappelle’s latest comedy special"
On Spotify we had the demand for employees direct editorial control of the Joe Rogan podcast:
"Spotify staffers are now considering a walkout or full-blown strike if their demands for direct editorial oversight of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast aren’t met."
I don't listen to Joe Rogan, but I don't think my work environment is necessarily helped by the staff at spotify taking over his show.
So these are the content strikes (the public side of internal pressures).
The question currently is, do you want the loudest voices to control all conversation?
Then for sure, support these strikes and have things taken over by these staff.
This
Yep, I understand this could backfire and thank you for pointing it out. It's probably best to let it simmer on HN.
It's just my anecdotal experience with this kind of mentality that the people looking to enlighten us simple minded folk are also using any questioning or opposition of their enlightenment as an opportunity to shame those people that question or oppose. Some kind of twisted competition I guess.
(not to say I don't support enlightenment of certain issues, I do, but with limits)
The real problem can be that you are not actually told what is what first.
You go to shake someone's hand using your right hand. That reinforces the patriarchy, so you are told off.
You ask, no one told me I should shake hands with my left hand.
It's not the job of the oppressed to educate the oppressor.
What possible kind of persecution could GP experience?
Even if declined citing a reason everyone could reasonably agree is reprehensible, do you imagine that the activists at Google would - what - put GP on a Silicon Valley blacklist that everyone subscribes to?
I imagine the leadership are aware of how toxic and repellent this culture is -- despite, i'd imagine, having no clear strategy to reform it.
It's stunningly simple: fire all activists. If it triggers a "walkout", fire all of them too.
Shareholders have to step up and get a leadership that can take care of it.
Google's owners have a majority. There is no real pressure shareholders can apply. This is by design.
Only good advice if the poster is independently wealthy and doesn't need to work.
He can start his own business or work for a smaller company
This particular feature is indeed half-baked and dumb, but FWIW, much of what I've seen claimed in the comments is outright false.
If you know anyone within Google, I suggest privately asking their experiences, rather than sampling only those people who are mad about Google on HN.
I dislike this proposed feature as much as the next person, but it's worth noting that the main complaint of this article is fairly unique: they work on a channel called Motherboard, and this feature is going to cause the name of their channel to be considered a problem. Most people won't experience that specific error case. It's valid, and points to the kinds of unforeseen consequences you run into when trying to manage speech in this way, but it's not by itself a smoking gun for most people.
Ok, but it makes no sense in the first place? “Motherboard” has long been a technical computer term, that even somebody with a passive interest in computers would understand. You would have to make an effort to be offended by it in some way.
I fail to understand what’s going on these days. Words change their meaning over decades. A small minority seem hellbent on kicking up a storm to change popular usage, where no offense or other meaning is implied in general modern usage.
Considering the word “mother” - a concept that is about as universally understood across the whole of humanity as it is possible for a concept to be - “problematic“ is itself a sign that this movement has gone off the deep end.
It doesn't even make sense that an AI model trained on normal writing samples would flag that as problematic, since it is not considered so by the vast majority of people. Unless the model was trained exclusively on the most extreme Tumblr posts, it suggests that fringe Google employees are injecting their personal ideology into the products.
The vast, vast majority of people do not want their mothers erased from the language.
It's not valid to censor the word "mother". It's either laughable or sinister, depending on whether the people trying to do it actually have power.
This is literally Brave New World stuff. Not exaggerating, the word mother was hugely offensive to the people in that book. Unfortunately we don’t even get the Orgy Porgy parts. It’s like the worst parts of 1984 and Brave New World mixed together.
Be the change you want to see in the world?
I think this article hints at an important thing though which is that language is contextual. Even if we think that we should describe mothers as birthing persons or fathers as non-birthing parents in the general context, I should be allowed to refer to myself as a father. People of color can re-claim slurs, which a correction to could probably feel paternalistic. There are lots of contexts where certain language is ok, depending on the speaker or the audience. And I guess it means you're not supposed to use google docs for any kind of emotional writing, as it tries to correct "annoyed" or the f word. That and there is this beauty:
> A transcribed interview of neo-Nazi and former Klan leader David Duke—in which he uses the N-word and talks about hunting Black people—gets no notes. Radical feminist Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto gets more edits than Duke’s tirade; she should use “police officers” instead of “policemen,”
> Even if we think that we should describe mothers as birthing persons
Mother definitely does not mean birthing person. The easiest example is adoption. Would would you call the mother in that case? Adoptive Female Parent goes again against the 'rule' because it has female in there. Parent 1/Parent 2? no it has Hierarchy.
I think you're looking for the word parent?
A female parent is a mother. That's what their children call them, not "parent", with allowances for foster children and older adopted kids calling them by their first name.
I don't think calling a parent 'mother' is something children do by themselves. They call them however they end up calling them, or whatever their parents teach them. Also certainly not 'mother', rather 'mum', 'mom'... and the Turkish children say anne.
Single parenthood does seem to be what those of a certain ideological bent push yes.
Not sure what you're implying, but I just mean why can't parents just be called parents? There's no need for a gendered word.
and as we can see, large numbers of people- there are hundreds of us- think that the name of that channel to be highly offensive. Actually, no, wait, nobody actually finds it offensive.
Trying to flatten everything into synonyms is the same reason Google search has gone downhill. Now they’re bringing that same feature nobody asked for into Google docs. Language is too complex for any algorithm to “understand”
We haven't gotten spelling assistance right, let alone grammar or semantics. Prefer editors with fewer "smart" features that distract from writing.
> We haven't gotten spelling assistance right
Shouldn't you say that we got spelling assistance correct instead of right? Left-handed people might not like to see the word "right" being used to mean "correct"
L
As a left handed non birthing person, I was very offended by their comment. Also I was a little offended by your comment, please in the future include “L” or “R” at the beginning of all messages.
Thank you for attempting to be a left handed ally.
What i don't understand is how they can roll out this feature, while the last few weeks I've suddenly started getting spammed in Google Drive with obscene garbage that can only be blocked on an instance by instance basis. Surely they could offer some gate that allows the user to deploy such filters where they actually want them?
That's peak Google right there. It's the infection point on their organic growth. They've got a long tail of incumbency and subsidized dominance ahead of them, but in the lifecycle of a company, this is the out of touch moment that demonstrates they've passed their middle age. In terms of half life, this suggests they've got another decade of some vitality, and then a kind of legacy presence in the decade after that before their furniture gets picked up by something newer in a growth phase.
They would be well served to update their motto to, "Don't be fatuous." It's the best they can do now.
I have been thinking about this for a while, and came to the conclusion that the main weakness of progressivism is its arrogance. A progressive simply thinks that she is more educated, virtuous or simply better than others. This manifests subtly, from "helping poor immigrants", to not so subtle implementations, like knowing better what Google queries you actually meant to type, to censoring "fake news", because people do not have the faculty to decide for themselves, to downright auto-correction of people's speech. A progressive copes with this implied superiority by casting it as her goodness.
One of the best films on this subject is Dogville by Lars von Trier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogville , with Grace as its main character.
My take on the situation is that as a movement and political ideology "Progressivism" is steeped in a sense of righteousness. I very much sense progressives have internalized the notion that what they are fighting for is so obviously good, correct, and just that anyone who opposes such self-evidently virtuous things must either be 1) brainwashed by malevolent forces (Fox news, misinformation, propaganda, internalized oppression) or 2) constitutionally flawed people who cannot be redeemed and must be fought against ("Deplorables", fascists, nazis, racists, etc).
It's nearly 100% conflict theory (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/).
You are lumping all progressive people together.
You also assume they are female.
Why?
Aren't we supposed to use female pronouns when we're speaking generally now? It used to be male, but I know that's long gone.
No, you are supposed to use gender neutral terms.
Microsoft is in the process of rolling 'inclusive' checking out, in (at least) the web version of Outlook 365. You can see by clicking the gear icon (in top right) -> View all Outlook settings (at bottom) -> Compose and reply -> Microsoft Editor settings (bottom). It is 'very broken'.
Somewhere I wonder if people have read too much of Orwell's 1984 and Iain M. Banks Culture series and have decided that between Newspeak and Marain is an idea that whilst we may not better the world today, if we can obliterate language we can obliterate an idea.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis put to use as a tool to ensure that future generations of humans will avoid the problems that have plagued us for all time, because the ideas that perpetuate those issues will have been eradicated.
I'm left in awe at the audacity of it, the idea that human nature itself can be changed just by striking out words from the language. Seems implausibly naive and paternalistic.
>we can obliterate language we can obliterate an idea.
This is effectively one of the tenets of postmodernist thought. That language shapes reality. There is truth in the idea that language can influence perception but that doesn't mean that negative ideas can be eliminated by merely controlling language...
I feel like half of it is partly related to a perceived lack of power. You can have practically no power to affect votes on a law, or free someone you believe has been unjustly jailed, or remove someone from office; but you can yell at someone on twitter because they used the wrong word.
People making themselves the victims over language isn’t even new. You say happy holidays and someone goes on a rant about Christianity being under attack.
Virtue signaling is a hell of a drug.
I tried to explain to someone online that the word black has many meanings, not every use of black is about people. Oh man, in the end I was "taught" that just by not accepting his ideas I was a racist person.
My experience with this type of person is very bad. They are ignorant people, defending points without understanding the points. They are very aggressive and work in packs.
Today I try not to work or talk to this type of person/company.
You mean to tell me that all this time black people were the reason the black plague, black mambas, and blacktop exist?
...and black hole...https://youtu.be/Hu2rluUb8ck
When I first met the D&D alignment chart, it was enlightening. It can explain a situation like this so easily - namely, that the person you met is a lawful evil type. Like a concern troll on the internet, bad intentions are hidden behind a legal, orderly facade.
I don't think these types should discredit the movement. I do wish they wouldn't rile up folk so much though. Change is hard as it is, it's very unhelpful for the cause that they behave in such a bad way.
>Oh man, in the end I was "taught" that just by not accepting his ideas I was a racist person.
All the hallmarks of a cult. Commit heresy and get excommunicated.
This is straight out of Brave New World where the word "mother" was viewed as obscene.
Check out this video uploaded just recently: [Health department refuses to define ‘woman’ in Senate Estimates](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX_1QNXgjDM). Australia's own health department struggle and eventually refuse to answer the simple question. Look at how uncomfortable they are with such an innocuous request.
On similar trends, we are seeing institutions such as the ACLU post tweets like this: https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1439259891064004610?s=20 . It's a tweet of a quote by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But the ACLU has decided to replace the word "women" with "people".
So yes, we are moving into a brave new world.
> Look at how uncomfortable they are with such an innocuous request.
Ah, but it's not innocuous, and everyone knows it. I assume you know it -- when you watched that clip of the senator, did you really think he had forgotten what the definition of "woman" was?
The question he was really asking was along the lines of "is it the health department's official stance that trans woman are woman and should be treated as such under the law?"
Although actually he wasn't really asking that either, he was signaling to his supporters that he does not think that trans woman are women, and he was attempting to embarrass his political opposition so he and his allies could talk about the lunacy of the woke left or whatever and how they can't even define what a woman is.
I can forgive people for not wanting to play along.
Although, I can't forgive people for not having an answer ready; that question is being used as a "gotcha" more and more frequently.
The word “mother” is already considered obscene because it is not inclusive of uh “men who give birth”.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-budget-proposa...
This topic is always going to be highly subjective, but I find the author's examples of how this feature is malfunctioning to be extremely uncompelling.
"Motherboard" was included in Apple's style guide in 2020 as "don't use" (https://help.apple.com/applestyleguide/#/apsg72b28652). Like it or hate it, this is the direction the industry, of which Google is a part, is moving. I'm sure a publication called Motherboard might have an opinion on this, but neither they nor Google are the final arbiters on the language. The I Have a Dream speech example is pretty anecdotal; King was an excellent writer, and I don't think Google is claiming this tool would make a person write like King. And the substitution suggestion in Kennedy's speech is just the way the language use has trended since his time... One can note that the Star Trek franchise changed the saying from "Where no man has gone before" to "Where no-one has gone before" in the time between then and now, as well. The Bible is probably the worst example to pull up for this topic; paging through the over 20 translations on biblegateway.com shows the passage in question is also sometimes translated as "great works", "mighty works", or just "miracles." Which should you use? It depends completely on what you're doing.
Of everything noted, the only possibly concerning one is really the lack of suggestions on a David Duke interview. If I had to guess, I'd chalk that up to lack of training data, and it may be something Google wants to consider addressing.
But at the end of the day, the overall thesis of the report is flawed. "But words do mean things," says the author. Yes, they do. Which is why it could be nice to have an auto-editor lifting up examples of words that might mean something other than the author intended (and then the author can choose to change their phrasing or stick with the original). Nothing about this feature claims to make users magically better at writing; it's an assistive tool to open the possibility, not unlike a spell-checker.
We've had Microsoft Word grammar checker for literal decades. This technology is neither particularly new nor, IMHO, particularly interesting (certainly not interesting enough to kick up this news cycle). It's no more 1984 than some random stranger online offering an opinion on your verbage is 1984.
This is why I'm quite bullish the technocrats will fail miserably in their move to homogenize the planet into some freakish, Jim Jones beehive.
Question for those in the Beta trial:
Can you disable this feature globally for your account, or do you need to disable this in every document explicitly?
"...language is of central importance to human thought because it structures and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of formulating and expressing."
That idea is also known as the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, and despite many attempts, it has never been proven. There are only a few flawed papers that provide some support. We can safely assume it's untrue. Instead, it's (trivially) the other way around: our thinking shapes our language.
Thus further evidence of neurolinguistic programming being real (or people believing it’s real).
Shape the language people are allowed to use and you start to shape their thoughts as well.
The good news is that those who are against this stuff may be pleased to know you're not alone --- roughly half of the Americans on one side of the political spectrum would agree with you.
The bad news is that Google and seemingly the rest of Big Tech are all sitting solidly on one side, and amongst all this "diversity and inclusion" talk, there is basically no thought given about diversity and inclusion of the political kind. Given the power that Google has over "speech", perhaps some sort of equality of political representation "affirmative action" needs to happen to it too?
Google is a private entity. In the opinion of the economic right, wouldn't companies be free to make their own rules about their own conduct?
Big tech is not how you're painting it. I think it sits solidly where it can keep its income growing. They'd like to operate in China, so they apply filters to search results, or use their servers instead of the default. Pride month sees avatars changing to a colorful, but only in the more permissive locations. Business is, in part, about getting along, and inclusivity is currently how you get along in the West - nothing more, nothing less.
It's likely more than just half. Over on the non-performative left side this would just get used as another example of companies trying to win woke points instead of doing anything materially beneficial in late stage capitalism, and that the hogs will eat up their slop.
I can't even properly describe how angry this makes me.
We suggest you replace the word angry with pleased.
Imagine the life of someone who thinks that this is a good and important change. It's probably miserable-- a slight around every corner and no higher purpose than bulling people over terminology. Instead of anger, try gratitude that you're not in their shoes.
The comments on this thread have given me hope for humanity and freedom of expression. Depending on where you read this news you could be forgiven for thinking that you're in the wrong for disagreeing.
What a giant waste of human intelligence and engineering effort.
The comments have been really interesting to read here. On the one hand, I am relieved to see the number of other people who see a lot of this as silly at best, and dystopian at worst, like I do. On the other hand I see a lot of parallels with Paul Graham's recent post on heresy[1]. It seems like many people here want to be free to dissent without repercussions, but when reading thru the comments on the Heresy piece, it seemed like many people were very dismissive of the piece because they couldn't get over Paul not specifically naming a heresy. Isn't speaking out against this language erasure a heresy because of the fear of being cancelled?
It’s no wonder they fired the AI ethics department if this is the output.
And now the rest of the world will be very happy learn that they will once more have to silently deal with the aftermath of America’s latest political trend.
After banning world-famous paintings from Facebook because they dared show a breast, a few well-off engineers and product managers will now pick which English words should remain, and which should be let go.
How nice of them. Don’t know what we’d do without them.
It probably won't make you feel any better, but even in America, there is a feeling of SV is shoving its political trends down our collective throat.
Supposedly they hate imperialism.
This isn't unique to SV. There are plenty of examples of words and behaviours that were commonplace and then over time evolved to be unacceptable to use in polite company.
I'd like to give some examples, but I fear I'd end up swiftly banned for even using some of the best examples.
One interesting case is "idiots, imbeciles and morons" - once technical terms to describe a mental health scale. The 'most insulting' end of the scale is now probably the most acceptable word to use in public!
> There are plenty of examples of words and behaviours that were commonplace and then over time evolved to be unacceptable to use in polite company.
Cmon man, there's a big difference between the natural evolution of language and some radical-run company forcibly jamming their desired changes down our throats through an instantaneous and global software update.
Yeah, it's a continuous process, called ‘euphemism treadmill’ (not a technical term though): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Lifespan
However, personally I'm pretty sure that the US is overdoing it.
There must be some way to measure that... Eg. Percentage of language 'cancelled' per year.
This SV culture is being exported to the rest of the world at an alarming pace.
https://www.economist.com/international/2021/06/12/social-me...
Yeah but they have absolute freedom of speech so they're better than us /s
>banning world-famous paintings from Facebook because they dared show a breast
Issues with breasts aren't exactly a new thing in the US, just ask Janet Jackson.
For context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XXXVIII_halftime_sh...
And this quote, from the wikipedia article, sums it all quite well:
> "I know many people in other countries are scratching their heads and thinking 'What in the world is the big fuss over there?'"
> A transcribed interview of neo-Nazi and former Klan leader David Duke—in which he uses the N-word and talks about hunting Black people—gets no notes. Radical feminist Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto gets more edits than Duke’s tirade; she should use “police officers” instead of “policemen,”
The intentions of these features aside which will no doubt be the topic of conversation, to me the biggest takeaway about this is just how entirely stupid AI still is. Failing to recognize context, wordplay, even names (suggesting alternatives to Motherboard), and so forth. Trying to adjust something as complex as 'inclusivity' by flipping words is like trying to change the tone of a poem by flipping individual letters. Entirely wrong level of abstraction.
As long as I can turn it off can't say I care much. Google can tut at me all it wants, but at the end of the day I'm still going to ignore them.
I don't believe this has anything to do with AI, it most likely is rule based (not the entire system, just inclusive warnings). People like to shit on AI, but AI wouldn't really make such ridiculous suggestions, only human can.
The suggestions look a lot like code linters in FAANG companies. People from the outside will be shocked at some of these "inclusive" linters if they take a look.
> Cutting phrases like “whitelist/blacklist” and “master/slave” out of our vocabulary not only addresses years of habitual bias in tech terminology, but forces us as writers and researchers to be more creative with the way we describe things.
> calling landlords “property owners” is almost worse than calling them “landchads,” and half as accurate. It’s catering to people like Howard Schultz who would prefer you not call him a billionaire, but a “person of means.”
"I like the tool because it removes others' words that I don't like but I don't like the tool because it removes my words that others don't like"
I think you're misreading. Nowhere in the article did the author say she "liked the tool" for removing whitelist/blacklist.
"Being more inclusive with our writing is a good goal, and one that’s worth striving toward as we string these sentences together and share them with the world. “Police officers” is more accurate than “policemen.” Cutting phrases like “whitelist/blacklist” and “master/slave” out of our vocabulary not only addresses years of habitual bias in tech terminology, but forces us as writers and researchers to be more creative with the way we describe things. Shifts in our speech like swapping “manned” for “crewed” spaceflight are attempts to correct histories of erasing women and non-binary people from the industries where they work."
This is a whole paragraph in the article where the author agrees this is good thing, just that google implemented it poorly.
Obviously the former example is written in more positive language than the latter.
> On a more extreme end, if someone intends to be racist, sexist, or exclusionary in their writing, and wants to draft that up in a Google document, they should be allowed to do that without an algorithm attempting to sanitize their intentions and confuse their readers.
The author does position themselves against algorithmic sanitization generally.
Why not use proprietor?
Because it leads to confusion.
Example: Is the proprietor of a bar the person running it or the landlord who owns the building?
Actually, it is generally understood that the owner/proprietor of a bar is the business owner (aka license owner) -- and that this in general is not the same person who owns the bricks.
A more clearcut case of semantic confusion I can see a crappy AI creating out of the blue would be:
"My proprietor said if I didn't pay the rent soon she was gonna ..."
Which clearly has a very different (and basically nonsensical) meaning than a the more natural formulation using the now thankfully forbidden L-word.
Agreed, I was just trying give an example of why using proprietor would create confusion.
Right -- the "bar's landlord" is in general not it's proprietor.
Well it's funny you should say that...
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
"Its". Me of all people.
Why not use Landlord, a word everyone understands?
Here's the definition of landlord I see
> A landlord is the owner of a house, apartment, condominium, land, or real estate which is rented or leased to an individual or business
How is that different from "property owner"? The difference is that to you, a native English speaker, landlord is a word you're familiar with. To others, it's a whole new word they need to learn, whereas property-owner is self-descriptive. It's like using good variable names in your code, you don't need to look up the definition of every word when you use re-use words that are common.
> How is that different from "property owner"?
They mean different things: one is a subset of the other. A person who owns their own home that they live in is a property owner, but not a landlord.
> that they live in
Well that's new to me, because I absolutely do not get that from the term "property owner". For example, if I have a place I own that my brother lives in, and someone asks my brother "who is the property owner", he would definitely answer me. I own that property. How does the term property owner say anything about where the person lives in?
Because it promotes wrong and harmful thinking. And must therefore be extinguished.
Perhaps it's a very specific answer, but I write in simple English, since many of my readers are not native speakers. I stick to words people are likely to understand.
Our local immigration office recently picked a newer, better name, but since no one uses it, I'm sticking to the old one.
Another one is expat vs immigrant. I favor immigrant, but I can't rename expat insurance to immigrant insurance. The latter does not exist.
I use the gender-neutral "they" across the website, but sometimes "he" would be a lot clearer when replacing a singular noun like "the landlord".
Sometimes the common word is the right word to use. When in doubt, I refer to Google Trends.
If you say "I paid my proprietor this month", nobody will understand what you mean. It's simply a different word with a different definition.
I suppose the fear is that Google will add this to search and penalize sites that have words that are flagged.
What I can see is that on Google own websites, the term motherboard is used aplenty so seems to me they fail their own standards, if what is described in the article is accurate. Wondering when humanity will become aware of the ridiculous path this whole thing is.
Examples: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/systems/the-past-presen... https://sustainability.google/progress/projects/circular-eco...
Gosh that wokeness is getting more insane the day.
Reading this I don't get quite the same reaction as everyone else. I think this is actually a useful tool. However the main failing is that there is one global ruleset decided by Google. If this was customizable by each organization or department it could actually have value. I don't think shaping the way your company communicates is much of a problem, the problem arises when Google shapes how your company (and individual users speak). It would also be interesting if these different models could be published and shared.
Basically I think the core idea is fine. But applying the same model globally was a clear mistake.
I caught "inclusive" in the list of things Gmail will "suggest" "better" words in Google Docs. The scary part of this that this enables enforcement. That may seem far fetched now, but in the future?
The pendulum is swinging back and force once a decade or so. Just give it a few years to calm down a bit and we'll go back to worrying about putting leaves on David and painting over renaissance paintings.
Humans act so weird in large groups.
Can it be turned off?
On that note - HN hive mind: Can the current Grammar/Spell checking be turned off?
I am a victim of Google Docs. Must be used at work. I hate the slow opinionated clunky thing, but turning off the "features" would be helpful.
> suggested he change it to “angry” or “upset” to “make your writing flow better.”
Nope, it suggested to change from this to that so the writer could be Google's avatar on writing what Google wants to get written
I mean, this is the way of things. Corporate slacks have bots to correct non-inclusive language, and enforce syntax changes like whitelist --> allowlist, master --> main, etc. IMO it's silly, but nevertheless increasingly ingrained in corporate America. For the many of us that use G Suite for work, this feels like a natural extension of other areas to remind us to use current language. It's potentially a helpful reminder that avoids the awkwardness of someone actually making a gdocs comment about it.
I mean I do all those substitutions not because of some weird sense of moral superiority but it’s literally a zero effort thing that might do some good and in most cases improves clarity, especially for non-native speakers.
Their spell check is very broken too. My company is called 'CorrectHorseBatteryStapleXYZCorporation' and it didn't think I'd spelled that correctly! As if I'd spell my own company name wrong.
It's almost like it's just some basic pattern matching software they're using to help catch and highlight common mistakes when reviewing text at the risk of false positives rather than waiting until they have a fully sentient god-level AI that knows everything.
Have there ever been any studies that show that using the masculine pronoun in the neuter reference in English, impacts (or has ever impacted) the well-being of females?
Until a couple decades ago it was well understood that in English the "masculine" was gender-neutral and the "feminine" was an honorific. Hence why esteemed possessions, countries, etc. were referred to in the feminine. Is it possible that taking away that honorific from women has harmed their sense of self-worth or some other aspect of their well-being?
Google has flown completely off the rails. I don't know why shareholders aren't stepping in, but if they don't I will be stepping away from google.
This part of the culture is in the grip of a mania. Mania is like improperly overclocked insight. Turn the zeal dial too high, and out comes confusion.
> Social editor Emily Lipstein typed “Motherboard” (as in, the name of this website) into a document and Google popped up to tell her she was being insensitive: “Inclusive warning. Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers. Consider using different words.”
If blacklist is considered non-inclusive language, why isn’t motherboard? Motherboard is a needlessly gendered term that perpetuates stereotypes.
> needlessly gendered term that perpetuates stereotypes.
The stereotype that mothers... are... computer parts...? I don't get it, what's the stereotype?
The stereotype that mothers or women are the source or backbone. Women can play both active and supporting roles. Both mothers and fathers can play these role, even sometimes children. Really there’s no reason to use parental language like this which may offend people who struggle with fertility.
Is this a joke?
Time to make those on-site interviews more rigorous. Looks like too many bad coders are leaking through the interview process.
Oh, its not about good coders. It's about who they select. Companies now explicitly ask DIE (diversity, equity & inclusion) questions. Its the new filter to select those that follow this new orthodoxy.
Am I the only one starting to get a little worried what will happen when the pendulum inevitably swings the other way?
Isn't this already happening with the don't say gay people?
Yeah, that's a fair example. Every pendulum swings back eventually. And caught in the middle is the majority who were just fine with the status quo.
We've gotten to the point where we think that not one person should be even mildly bothered by what we say.
This has been going on since the 70s. Chairperson, postal worker, archer, flight attendant all came from then.
“Flight attendant” is outdated. The modern accepted term is “trolley dolly”.
Mother board -> Birthing person board
In a dystopian future you'll have a score indicating how often the algo had caught your wrong-speak.
> [..] typed “annoyed” and Google suggested he change it to “angry” or “upset” to “make your writing flow better.”
Why would their algorithm do this?
Like, whether that's a bug or intended, how could their algorithm have ended up suggesting that "annoyed" was non-inclusive?
The same logic that got rid of the master branch applies to motherboard.
And much of this logic ignores context.
I'm waiting for the moment when the woke realise that everything they despise revolves around christianity in one way or another, and for this reason they'll proudly declare themselves as not only anti-racist, but also anti-christian.
I'm going to delete my Google account today. I'd rather watch YouTube without ads, but I can take a little brainwashing for some praxis. Corporations only speak the language of money, outrage and morals are foreign to them.
Come on over to Onlyoffice, they have an online office offering and no inclusive suggestions.
Controversial suggestion but can the California folks just do their own bay area version of products?
The rest of us around the world never asked for any of this weirdness
Will it suggest "peace be upon him" in Islamic countries next? If not, why not? At least that's an actual religion unlike whatever this weirdness is.
How is it inclusive to export this thinking to places that don't want it? Words are really just words. I never enslaved anyone and neither did my ancestors. Keep the word master and slave.
> Words are really just words.
But they're not though. Words are products of, and inputs into, people's culture and modes of thought.
Which is exactly why giving this much global power to one unelected politically extreme group of people is so dangerous.
Imagine you work in Wakanda and slave was s'mballa and master was m'chatka and one day the science department said ok we're calling it m'butu by default instead.
Does it shape anything for you? You're just doing your 9-5 building T'Challa's HUD for his panther helmet as an immigrant worker who barely speaks the language. If anything it just makes your life more annoying when the Wakandan scientists rattle off instructions to you and you're barely keeping up. They are just words.
Perhaps in Wakandan culture the change is significant and shapes their models of thinking but we are talking about terminology changes for all of planet Earth and beyond. Why not do some soul searching and come to terms with your ugly history on your own instead of dragging everyone into it.
(I am using "you" in the general sense, not directing it at anyone in particular)
The best example to drive the point home is the Nazi's "useless mouths". It's a terrifyingly effective term if your goal is to shape public opinion.
Another is the freedom fighter vs terrorist word choice.
>and neither did my ancestors
Considering the number of ancestors in your past, this is highly unlikely for any human being alive today.
If every human being alive has had a slavemaster ancestor, all the more reason to not care about the use of the word in a completely unrelated context involving hard drives or branches of information.
If we know that a behavior is harmful, all the more reason to stop keeping it up. I'm sure we can manage technology without edgy analogies to people fucking or suffering.
Of master is not acceptable anymore, how are we going to call the MSc or MA degrees?
SAP, for one, makes an exception for the word "master" for cases like the Master's degree, or Scrum Master:
https://help.sap.com/doc/b0322267728e48a28b0c8ee7dd1ab4c7/1....
I guess Motherboard will just have to change its name to Birthingpersonboard.
> Journalist Rebecca Baird-Remba tweeted an “inclusive warning” she received on the word “landlord,” which Google suggested she change to “property owner” or “proprietor.”
> A transcribed interview of neo-Nazi and former Klan leader David Duke—in which he uses the N-word and talks about hunting Black people—gets no notes.
I think unfortunately a lot of folks think this is a feature, not a bug.
This reads like it's April 1st... but it's not. -.-
Hopefully LibreOffice doesn't adopt this sort of thing.
With Libre Office you can be sure if they add such a feature it can always be disabled. With Google or Microsoft you never know when they'll take the toggles away and you have no recourse without source.
I've been privy to people trying to ban words like "whitelabel" at my company. Thankfully, management & executives at my company never stood for that BS so I still get to use whitelist & blacklist in documentation, and don't worry about those non-issues get in the way of me actually doing work.
Google might be too far gone, and working with those people would be so exhausting that it's actually stopped me from applying (James Damore)
There are companies that don't stand for that sort of stuff. And top paying ones too (pay better than Goog). Coinbase is one of them, and I don't want to mention mine to avoid dox. And go check blind, you'll find the vast majority of people don't stand for this BS either, and that they're just silenced.
My advice? Hit them where it hurts & vote with your feet. Google's not the top payer anymore, so just leave.
My problem with all of this "progressiveness" in the workplace is that it just reeks of laziness.
There are real problems in this world, yet it seems that the progressives are going after the minute details. From a SWE perspective, it would be like your app getting crushed by bugs and technical debt while you argue over how big the logo on the login page should be.
The worst part of all of this, is the companies that are actively pushing this crap are the same companies that have the resources to make a difference in this world.
If you're a company with a 1T+ market cap, actually do something bold with your cash. Imagine if all the top tech companies approached a bunch of non-profits trying to help people in 3rd world countries and said: "here's a blank check, do what you need to". We could solve a shitload of problems on this planet.
But no, we all are just quibbling about our pronouns and how to write "inclusively".
Moral superiority is the cheapest form of superiority.
Silly question: ignoring any kind of history, why fight for terms like "whitelist" and "blacklist" when terms like "allowlist" and "blocklist" are objectively clearer, especially for folks who's first language is not English?
Your question takes for granted that people are fighting for whitelist in blacklist, but it's the opposite. Whitelist and blacklist are long-established and familiar terms.
No, they are not.
Teach someone with no previous cultural knowledge what "allow" and "deny" means, then ask them what white list and black list means, then ask them what allow list and deny list means.
Black and white list requires previous knowledge of what those terms mean, allow and deny do not. Someone can intuit from just basic language knowledge what the feature does.
My pet peeve is that the new, inclusive terms are often more cumbersome. For example, allowlist is longer by a syllable. I know that it's hard, but I wish that people came up with terms that are just as handy as the old ones. Changing blacklist to blocklist is quite cool for one.
And "main" is shorter (better I think) than "master".
Although I don't think anyone ever seriously thought that "master" branch meant the "lord" branch.
While the first that comes in mind is the "master copy" terminology of the recording industry, git's "master" terminology in fact comes from BitKeeper. In BitKeeper, there are apparently master and slave branches, where master refers to the source of truth where all the slaves pull their info from.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/474419/does-the-...
I personally like "main" as the replacement. Clear, concise and as you say, feels natural too.
Interesting, couldn't have guessed
Hmm there's also something about he who picked the name (which wasn't Linus apparently) meant "master" as in e.g. "master recording", see the Twitter tweets in the comments to that answer. And that he doesn't remember if maybe he was influenced by BitKeeper, was 15 years ago
Since there's no "slave" in git (the master is not special, simply the default branch when creating a repo), and there's the already established terminology of "master copy" or "master recording", it makes sense to not associate git's terminology usage with slavery. I originally posted the BitKeeper story because I had no idea either.
Ok then I understand better what you were saying :-)
I am fine with "blocklist" instead of "blacklist", because it sounds similar. But "allowlist" is just more difficult to pronounce.
Regarding your concern about people for whom English isn't the first language, I dont know how valid it is. Because those terms exist under the same names and fall under the same usage in many other languages. I can confirm that it is the case with Russian, as "черный список" is a commonly used phrase, and it literally translates to "black list", and has the exact same meaning as in English.
> I am fine with "blocklist" instead of "blacklist"
Better hope you're not dealing with a block device or other data structure that involves units of data called blocks.
"Is it in the Blocklist?"
"Which one, the deny list or the list of blocks?".
You may very well may be right that terms "allowlist" and "blocklist" are objectively clearer. I'm in favor of the idea of changing language to make things clearer and more effective. But the contention I have is that these changes aren't motivated for the pursuit of clarity. They are motivated by a need for cleansing. "whitelist" and "blacklist" are innocuous terms. They have been around for ages. Used and understood with no controversy by our most prestigious institutions from around the world. Then suddenly, within a matter of two years, the term is high-jacked by upper echelon members of our society. The words are re-defined to take on a new meaning and a new interpretation. Virtually every one of us who used this term are now deemed bad. Oppressors. On the wrong side of history. Racists. Now deemed a fireable offense. No room for debate and discussion. It is for these reasons that I push back. The motivation behind this change is wrong and has the potential to be all consuming of our language and culture, deeming innocuous terms as oppressive when they are not.
As I posted to a child: Language also adapts over decades so that words are computer/IT terms & have no other connotations. Like most of the stuff in this thread. Have a think about that.
Unless there is proof that whitelist & blacklist (as terms) were ratified around 'white people good, black people bad' then it is just personal offence at that point.
>why fight
because you give them an inch and they'll take a mile.
look up "menstruators" and "birthing people" to see what else that kind of people fight for.
>objectively clearer
then it wouldn't be necessary to force the change. nobody had a problem with these words until very recently, and only in very narrow circles of very loud people with disproportionate amount of power
>especially for folks who's first language is not English?
that's a very slippery slope
I'd imagine it's because it gets extremely tedious. Switching out only whitelist and blacklist isn't a big deal, but with the ever increasing list of words being deemed as 'bad' (e.g. the 'mother' example) it becomes increasingly annoying to communicate. After all, it's distracting from the point just to virtue signal to certain types of vapid personalities.
Most people don't see 'blacklist' with racist connotations or think 'motherboard' is in any way at odds with transgenderism.
I don't mind those words, and I don't really fight for them. I use the words I use out of habit. I just think that the mismatch in effort/spun cycles on those terms by the routine vocal minority is a testament to how detached to reality these people are
The things that worry me are the witch hunts started by the same group of people. See my other comment on "fren"
I'll fight for these terms because trying to "blocklist" them is such a ridiculous thing that I have zero interest in entertaining it. Nobody's actually offended by any of it, it's all made up by people with nothing better to do and then piled on by more people with nothing better to do.
I just don't like people telling me what to say or write. I think it's unhealthy to look for grievances in language and that if you get good enough at doing so you might not be able to stop. I also think terms like these are just a small part of an ongoing effort.
Independent of all other political goings on, in a vacuum, I could agree that we should get rid of white and blacklist and replace them with something else.
That's not what the word "objectively" means
Whitelist and blacklist are the words we've been using for decades to describe a concept. Everybody knows what they mean.
> words we've been using for decades to describe a concept.
Yeah, and so was calling black men "boy" or using the n-word like 50 years ago.
Language changes because people realize there are better words that more people are okay with.
'Whitelist' and 'blacklist' have nothing to do with race, they never had anything to do with race, and anyone who thinks they do is, quite simply, wrong. Knowing these facts, this is nothing like calling a black man 'boy' or using the n-word — so bringing them up is irrelevant.
Language also adapts over decades so that words are computer/IT terms & have no other connotations. Like most of the stuff in this thread. Have a think about that.
Words do have connotations, that's the reason why people use them - because they refer to similar concepts, even in different contexts.
Are you genuinely suggesting that using the n-word and asking the network team to add an IP to a blacklist come from the same moral place?
You just used the term "bl..k". This word is forbidden. Use the allowed word "coloured" next time.
—- The langage police
I wouldn't be so worried about non-native English speakers. 'Whitelist' and 'blacklist' are common enough terms that they've become loanwords in other languages. In Chinese, at least, the equivalent terms are 白名单 'white name list' and 黑名单 'black name list' and 拉黑 'pull (into) black(list)' is common vernacular for blocking someone on social media.
I think there's a good argument to keep terms to maintain the historical connection. There's a boatload of math and CS terms that are very, very poorly named, but if you renamed them, you lose the link to prior sources.
I've always pictured a 'blacklist' as a document with blacked-out redacted text; a whitelist is just the opposite. It wasn't until this substitutional whitewashing[0] of the English language that I realized whitelist/blacklist held negative connotations for some people.
[0]: like painting over a fence, geez.
The problem isn't that "allowlist" is preferred to "whitelist". The problem is that "whitelist" and "motherboard" are literally banned. Google is a private company so they can set whatever policies they want, but it's extremely condescending.
I'm generally on board with using culturally neutral terms, particularly since they're often more descriptive of the actual thing being described. I think there would be far less resistance if people didn't feel coerced.
there's hills I'd rather die on but it feels silly. What's appropriate is the transfer of the concept, not by how we judge the style of the analogy.
Ultimately if you're trying to edge proof language then you're just changing which bunch of people you're pissing off but I feel like people who do this act like its impossible they could piss anyone off over this.
Because they're established terms, and the witchhunt goes so far as to break builds and cause needless work just for the sake of political correctness: https://github.com/ostreedev/ostree/issues/2360
Political correctness linters require you to explicitly acknowledge or disable warnings when you're doing things like pasting existing URLs.
And it never stops with one term. It started with master/slave (which are now replaced with dozens of synonyms that are often hard to figure out), then whitelist/blacklist, and the activists are already queueing up the next words for sure.
Few people want to ban others from using alternative terms that they consider better, but where they draw the line is when others prevent them from using the terms they deem appropriate, or demand/force additional work.
Because the people/forces pushing them can’t be trusted.
Pushing such terms is (while presumably this is not the conscious intent) a means of cementing power by showing who (as in, “what vague coalition”, not “which specific people”) is in control.
>"My advice? Hit them where it hurts & vote with your feet. Google's not the top payer anymore, so just leave. "
In principle I agree but I feel like level headed folks choosing to leave only makes the echo chamber even worse. And sadly, I don't think Google as a company will suffer much of a downside because they're so big.
I unfortunately have a mortgage and can't live with the stress of the fear of being fired for some esoteric internet community I've joined. I've heard through the grapevines of people starting slack mob witch hunts over people who've used terms like "Fren" because of its very slight relationship with 4chan.
I like the security of not working with unchecked witch hunts . I don't want to be Damore'd because of words I use outside of work.
I've been publishing writing far outside consensus progressive attitudes since the pandemic began with zero issue so far. Don't make your workplace your audience or invite controversy around your workplace and you're very unlikely to have a problem.
"I owe money and need to make money to pay it off, so I'm too afraid to say even reasonable things in public". Sounds like you have 3 problems.
Hahaha yeah, sometimes I wonder how quickly I'd get fired if I didn't have mouths to feed. I'd probably be somewhere in Miami living in a hacker warehouse working on my 5th failed crypto project, consuming an assortment of drugs.
Instead, it's the white picket fence, steady income and BBQs for me
This may seem as bad in short term, but it's good in the long run.
As the share of ideologically-driven people rises, capacity to solve problems and create valuable stuff decreases. The organization will die inevitably.
Airbnb did a similar thing, var/schema name whitelabel was excised. Weirdly black label remained. It caused a frontend bug temporarily
"Black Label" has positive connotations. So it feels like an effort to find anything with "white" where there might be a positive connotation. And anything "black" where there might be a negative connotation. And to remove all that matches, regardless of why the specific connotation exists, why it exists, whether it's related to race in any way, etc.
I suppose that's easier than trying to debate every occurrence.
whitelist and blacklist are lazy language, even if you ignore the fact that you personally are not bothered by them and you don't have the mental capacity to understand why someone else might be. They carry no intrinsic meaning, and if you can't come up with more descriptive language you are the problem. In all cases you can come up with a better word - include, deny, allow, block, ban, accept, etc. It all depends on what you are actually talking about. Enjoy your high paying job a Truth Social (I bet!).
Nobody was bothered by these words until some jackass told them they should be.
That's obviously impossible.
Your ableist bigotry against people with lower intellectual capacity has been noted.
You will now be limited to 1 inclusive language dismissal per week. All inclusion warnings past the first one will be made for you
Google's increasing editorialization is why voice typing is effectively useless to me now because everything I say gets altered and I have to correct it.
The comments on this post sure are something. Do I really have this many peers that apparently live in constant fear of the woke Boogeyman?
Did you mean the Boogeyperson? Some of these terms may not be inclusive to all readers. Consider using different terms.
I think what can be seen is people feeling like someone forcing a change on them. Language, culture, habits are really personal. I think the less someone thinks about theirs consciously, the more personal they are.
Also, as many point it out, this change is often spearheaded by entities of questionable reputation. Google, for one, is grilled a lot for their behavior lately, and now they roll this out.
Lastly, I think that this innate and natural feeling, that "they" will come and change our ways, is preyed upon by populist politicians. When people feel like this, it can be, and is being played up by creating the very Boogeypersons you jokingly made up: they point to immigrants, like LGBT people, successful Jewish businessmen, whatever sticks.
Mindless 'outrage porn' has been a staple on HN for a while.
lol:
"mom test
Don't use mom test, grandmother test, grandma test, or girlfriend test. Instead, use terms like beginner user test or novice user test."
https://developers.google.com/style/word-list#letter-m
Some of them make sense, some of them are ridiculous. The whole thing is entertaining, really.
Google’s office suite has always been amateur hour.
More reason to use free source software on your actual computer less you succumb to the will of 1984+Brave New World as a seevice.
We’re just lucky the suggestions are being offered at write time instead of automatically applied at read time.
"This document has been modified from its original source to remove non-inclusive language."
Closes window
Microsoft is doing the same thing. It's also full of woke BS. For now I can disable it easily. For now. But this obviously yet another slow boil attempt to pass insane policies. In the end we're just gonna communicate using Signal or equivalent; and if we can't even have device that can do that then we're just gonna have to build our own Pi based E2E devices.
It looks like a great SEO woke language sells, whether you like it or not, especially the latter
Oof, this is going to be one of those really really awful threads isn't it?
Spell check is reality Grammar check is sanity Inclusive warnings are vanity
The 'broken' part is that it exists in the first place by default.
This will be hilarious with people writing scientific papers
This is straight up a prelude to Orwellian thought control via language modification. Can nobody really see through this corporate "woke" smokescreen?
It's not about "social justice," it's about instilling totalitarian patterns in the population. There is no debate about these "woke" issues. There's an incredible intolerance on one side, and they claim to have indisputable moral superiority. Anyone who goes against the "woke" agenda is deemed to be evil. There's no debate. Just an automatic classification, "You're wrong AND evil."
That's just how it was in Nazi Germany. No debate, no nuance. You're a jew? To the chambers with you.
> There is no debate about these "woke" issues.
Uhhh isn't this thread a debate?
Most depressing thing since Alphacode.
You can’t imagine anyone with a shred of real dignity or rational thinkers had anything to do with this. So they sent their B team at it.
> Cutting phrases like “whitelist/blacklist” ...out of our vocabulary... addresses years of habitual bias in tech terminology
Vice, you are not helping.
Unless your ancestors had lands confiscated or graves desecrated in a manner you find unjust during the Stuart Restoration, you have no standing to complain about "blacklist".
> Google suggested that Martin Luther King Jr. should have talked about “the intense urgency of now” rather than “the fierce urgency of now” in his “I Have a Dream” speech and edited President John F. Kennedy’s use in his inaugural address of the phrase “for all mankind” to say “for all humankind.” 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.
Kek. The absolute state of the FAANG World playing with AI and identity politics
Why don't they just plant a chip in our brains that prevents us from typing these words in the first place, and be done with it?
You mean all this time I could have cashed in on some microaggression victimhood because of all those daughterboards and daughter cards that weren't called son cards? How come that never ocurred to me? How did I survive all these decades with that boot on my neck?
One of the reasons I left google is that their "content moderation team" (the folks who make you take down wrongthink memes) is so far out of touch, that somebody had to explain to them there are people in the world who are discriminated against, but aren't black. They simply didn't know that was the case! And if that's the people who are moderating content...
I said motherboard all the time in meetings and chats, never had any pushback. TBH if I did get pushback on that one, I'd bring it to HR and say the pushback was affecting my ability to get work down.
One of the challenges with moderation teams like that or similar is that the folks who REALLY want to do that job .. are the folks who absolutely should NOT be doing it.
This is I think a major issue. The passionate people on these committees have views that are perhaps in the 10% edge of spectrum. No mothers, birthing persons etc etc.
For anyone reading this, I volunteer. My moderation level would be based on words that were considered bad in the year 2005. I won’t have to do much work and you still get to say that you have someone that’s doing the job. Win-win.
Ah, the culture war version of the famous Douglas Adams quote about technology:
"1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
What is funny to me is that for me 2 and 3 are swapped.
2 really was just me being unimpressed generally. For some reason I didn't think much of the ipad...
Now I'm old and everything is amazing.
The difference is that I live in the middle of the country, so I'm basically living in the past but can see the future screaming my way via the internet.
I wonder what your age is in comparison to your chosen ideal of 2005. As I am getting older it is easier to see the patterns in all this. Most people just want the entire world frozen from the time they were young. That includes everything from the cast of SNL to acceptable language. I have seen enough decades of people complaining about policing language to know that we survived multiple waves of this before 2005 and we will survive all the waves that came and will come after. I would bet that 20 years from now, Gen Z will be waxing nostalgic about the language of today while Gen Alpha and beyond will be pushing for more change. It is just the way language evolves.
I dunno, man. You're right that the term "mainboard" isn't going to kill us, and I wouldn't advise anyone to make this their main crusade in life. But that's a pretty high standard of dismissiveness and I've never seen anyone apply it to language changes that genuinely bug them. If we discovered that Google employees call codebases which have a lot of bugs "gay", and people got angry about it, would you tell them that it's not a big deal because Google has just developed the language a bit?
>But that's a pretty high standard of dismissiveness and I've never seen anyone apply it to language changes that genuinely bug them.
I am applying that dismissiveness to all objections equally based off their motivation. I don't agree with the argument on either side of the "motherboard/mainboard" debate. But I can emphasize with the motivation of the side pushing for "mainboard" because it is the same as your argument about misusing "gay" being unnaceptable. I disagree with their specific objection but I understand the motivation. I don't understand the side pushing for "motherboard" because the heart of the objection seems to be "things were better when I was young". Presented with those two options, why not side with the people who you would side with if we were arguing over a different word such as "gay"?
It's true that things were different when we were young, but that's true of any new phenomenon and it's not the heart of the objection. If young people these days want to avoid saying "wonderful", or use women by default in hypothetical scenarios, or go around checking their pulse while they say "sheeeeesh", I have no real concerns about those things and I think most people on team "motherboard" would agree.
The reason I push against "mainboard" is, I think, the analogous concern. While it's possible in principle to type out the letters "mainboard" without meaning anything by it, in practice the people who say it are motivated by a package of ideas about gender which I think are bad and would be harmful for society if they were more broadly adopted. To say "mainboard" would make me appear to be endorsing those ideas.
>in practice the people who say it are motivated by a package of ideas about gender which I think are bad and would be harmful for society if they were more broadly adopted
I would argue this is a symptom of the same phenomenon and therefore the heart of the objection is still the same.
Is it possible in your view for any new trend to be bad and worth fighting against? It's hard for me to see how this doesn't reduce to a content-free "nothing really matters" objection.
Sure, if there is any evidence behind the objection I can support it. When the objection is some vague claim about it being "harmful for society" without anything to back that up, I will call BS.
Be careful with the word crusade
I'm 33, but the reason I chose 2005 was because it was the latest year that I was sure was before "wokeness" was a thing.
I also live in the rural Midwest, so I figured that was about how far in the past you on the coast think we are with this sort of thing - and you'd be right, to an extent.
Which means you were 17 in 2005 which fits my theory perfectly. "Wokeness" might not be a term that existed in 2005, but like I said, there were multiple waves of the same ideal going back before 2005. Maybe you should examine why you are ok with the "political correctness" wave of the 90s and not the "wokeness" wave of the last decade plus. Is it potentially because you didn't see the earlier waves in real-time as a mature adult?
How do we make jobs activist proof?
Sorry but did you just say one of the reasons you left google was the memegen moderation team? I can't imagine that being a legitimate worry that would impact my employment decisions.
It seems there's a group of people who are too far in the other direction too. When I heard that it's preferred to say "allowlist" instead of "whitelist", do you know what my reaction was?
"Sure, whatever."
And I moved on with my life. It has zero impact on my day to day. The pushback reminds me of people who deadname others on purpose. Like, who cares? Bob wants to be called Sally now? Sure, whatever.
You're right. I use the new terms and move on. It's really not that bad.
However it tends to become a password game. There's a new password every few months. If you know the new password, you get to feel above those who don't. It's as we invent new crimes to charge people with.
If no one calls it out (because sure, whatever), it keeps ratcheting up. Then banal conversations turn into minefields. What you say gets invalidated because you used the wrong password.
> What you say gets invalidated because you used the wrong password.
Is this a common occurrence for you? It has never happened to me.
I'm skeptical about whether it's actually and issue or mostly a hypothetical issue.
Yeah, I’m the same way - also a googler, I used the term “grandfathered” in a meeting with a bunch of people and someone on Meet chat corrected me to “legacy” or something, and I said, “oh, okay, no problem” and corrected myself and moved on.
So - I used a word that someone didn’t like, they corrected me, I adjusted without deep apology and moved on, and everything was fine. Who cares? Why is this such a huge issue, language evolves all the time.
My suspicion is - of people who run into problems with language at tech companies, half of the problem is due to their reaction to being corrected.
It sounds like you’ve already totally internalized the notion that what you said was incorrect because anyone at all had some problem with it.
My response would be more like: And just who are you?
So in a way, you’re right.
I mean - it feels like you’re creating a combative situation where one does not exist. “And just who are you?” - what is the point of that? To what end and whose benefit?
It feels like the person correcting has created the combative situation.
As the person who experienced this particular moment, I can assure you there was nothing combative about it. It was a one off comment, a one off response, everyone moved on.
Is every disagreement you experience combative? Every correction? I tell you, I had a catch-up yesterday with a former team member that turned to the subject of web3, and that friendly debate was approximately 50x more combative as the moment I described.
Can you please use "living organism" instead of "person". As an antispecist I find this term offensive.
That isn't language evolving, that's you being arbitrarily 'punished' for no better reason than to reinforce the false idea that the other person is better than you. The right response is to refuse because that treadmill is endless and its potential speed is unlimited.
How was I punished? What tribunal did I face?
And how does the other person think they’re better than me? You’re inventing all of this context about a simple conversation that just doesn’t exist.
You were being "corrected" by someone else, weren't you? They knew the "right" language and you didn't. What do you think would have happened if you'd disagreed with this particular correction?
Like if I had said, “thanks for the feedback but I’m going to continue using this other word”? I think we probably would have just moved on and the individual would have been offended, but - why would I do that? To whose benefit? Mine?
Because, look, I’m a successful, senior, valued individual who is respected and liked by my team. In the grand scheme of my life, if someone wants me to use one word vs another, why do I care? I have thousands of things that are more important to worry about than that.
It’s the same way that I work with someone who likes to be addressed in emails by their full name - okay, no problem, remind me once and I’ll just move on. Or a coworker I had who was from Africa and did not want to be referred to as “African American” - sure, fine.
Doing so diminishes me not at all, because I don’t define my worth based on whether I use the correct (or incorrect) word or not.
It seems like a lot of the objections that I see in this thread have to do with people having issues being “corrected” or “policed” or “silenced”, all of which have to do with how they interpret how those moments have wronged THEM. Another option would be to let it go. Yet another would be to see themselves as making the faintest possible effort to make sure people feel welcome.
I think we probably would have just moved on and the individual would have been offended
That's the gap between you and others in this thread. What we've experienced is not that one individual is genuinely offended and everyone just moves on, it's that they immediately run the HR/management with crocodile tears in their eyes, and then demand you be fired. They conclude that the only reason to refuse their request is because you're an ideological enemy and don't care about anything else.
And that's why it's bad. It's not about genuinely taking offence, and never was. It is about establishing dominance over powerful institutions so they can turn them all into Twitter - weapons in a never-ending dystopian culture war that can never be won because the victory conditions change every day.
What's the new password?
Starting when I was a kid, I used the expression “gypped” without concern or awareness, and then at some point someone maybe in high school or college took me aside and explained that it was based on a stereotype. I was nonplussed for a minute, and then I moved on. And I just don’t say that anymore. I don’t feel bad about having said it in the past, I don’t have any deep guilt, I just…got on with my life.
So I guess the password is “don’t use a colloquialism based on an ethnic stereotype “, and that seems pretty straightforward and reasonable.
Similar thing happened to me- I used the term "biner" to refer to a carabiner, but was told that it was an insult used to refer to hispanics who collected beans in the central valley of california. At the time, I was in Connecicut. I've also had people tell me I can't call a particular card suite a "spade".
> What you say gets invalidated because you used the wrong password.
This entire discourse is so full of straw men it's hard to believe you have actually had real conversations with these people.
There is so much effort during these conversations toward "calling in" vs "calling out" that I am very confused how a conversation could ever get to the point you describe. You'd have to be really callous, and completely unwilling to meet your conversation partner on an even field, to elicit such reactions.
And no, Twitter pile-ons don't count as evidence for your argument -- Twitter is very, very far from an accurate cross-section of "real life".
It's also terrible for real long term projects to be continually renaming things and modifying naming conventions. Engineering isn't fashion.
Given we are talking about Google them randomly renaming things isn't exactly new :)
The terms 'guestlist' and 'shitlist' would perhaps be more accurate in terms of what those two forms of security access control are really about. Using a guestlist to control access is more secure (as you can background check everyone on the guestlist), but limits traffic; conversely allowing anyone in except those known troublemakers on the shitlist gets more traffic but means undesirables might slip in and become nuisances.
On the other hand, all that nonsense about 'master' was ridiculous. Master's degrees, the master boot record, come on let that one go.
I find this a very reasonable approach. I also find it natural that language evolves and sometimes it can even be marginally beneficial to artificially guide the evolution. All in all, in practice it just doesn't matter in my life.
> that somebody had to explain to them there are people in the world who are discriminated against, but aren't black
I wouldn't have believed you that there are people like this, but a few minutes after i read your comment, i saw replies (requires showdead) to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123102 that said men cannot be discrimated against...
so far out of touch, that somebody had to explain to them there are people in the world who are discriminated against, but aren't black.
Sounds preposterous, but is not. I had a boss around 2000 who believed wholeheartedly that people brought from Africa to the United States were the only slaves that ever existed in history anywhere on Earth.
This came up because someone noted in passing conversation that an anniversary was coming up related to the Atlantic slave trade in the 1600's, and my boss insisted that there couldn't have been slavery before 1776, because slavery was started by the United States.
I walked out of the break room early in the conversation and decided to let the others handle it. She was my boss, and I would have gotten fired for contradicting her.
Not only that, but there are more than three times as many slaves TODAY as ever were in the transatlantic slave trade that is the only one the US knows exists.
There are more slaves added each year in the US today than at the peak of transatlantic trade:
https://www.britannica.com/summary/Transatlantic-Slave-Trade...
Peak transatlantic: 78,000 new slaves per year.
https://thecurrentmsu.com/2021/01/24/prison-labor-americas-s...
Current US forced prison labor population: 1-2.1 million.
It's really undermining the atrocities of the transatlantic slave trade by comparing it to prison. We wouldn't compare it to indentured servitude, which is much closer to the penal system (monetary debt vs social debt, but both are contacts even if not purely voluntary). The federal government also doesn't have complete ownership over prisoners. Yes, prisoners are mistreated, but what they face isn't at the level of those from the slave trade and so you're effectively diminishing those atrocities.
You may not like the US prison system, but calling it slavery is at the very least intellectually dishonest.
Why? The Penal labor exemption is the one case where slavery or involuntary servitude is still permitted in the US constitution.
For one, most people don't equate indentured servitude with slavery. We generally think of lifelong service when we say slavery, which isn't part of the penal system. The penal system also isn't generational and people aren't born into slavery. There's grounds to call it slavery, yes, but the context you're bringing it up in is in comparison to the African slave trade and you're diminishing the suffering those people went through by saying that what happened to them was just like what we do to prisoners today. What happened to them was much worse.
That's not really correct from any reasonable interpretation.
I may missing something but it seems plain enough in the thirteenth amendment? “ Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
To this point, if US prison labor isn't "slavery" or "involuntary servitude", then removing the words between "except" and "shall" would be noncontroversial.
Similarly, if there was political consensus that US companies shouldn't own or hire slaves overseas, then the bit starting with "within" would be easy to remove as well.
None of this has had any chance of happening since the thirteenth amendment was passed (not even during BLM). It's pretty clear that a big chunk of the US's leaders are pro-slavery.
Because worrs carry not only direct meanings, but subjective connotations, and most people consider slavery an unjust subjugation of another human being, and think it is immoral by definition, in any circumstances. On the other hand, even most of the people who aren't fans of US prison system still consider the general idea of prison to be just, as the general idea of prison labour as a way to repay society.
Also if you're in prison and refuse to work, what are they going to do, send you to prison prison?
Idk how this works in the US in particular - but I suppose that - essentially - yes. Harsher conditions.
When one has a essentially complete control over another person's life, there are ways to make this life hell, even while staying within the legal bounds.
The same stuff that happens when you don't comply in other ways in prison?
From my understanding, the main punishment for not working as prison labor is losing the small wages you do get (i.e, normally one of the punishments for misbehavior is prohibiting you from working).
Wow, lots of replies are trying to downplay the existence ongoing human suffering.
A few things to consider:
- A disproportionate number of prisoners are African American, and that subset are mostly in prison for crimes that whites simply don't go to prison for (e.g., pot, or coke vs. crack).
- US prisoners aren't given nutritionally adequate food for free. They have to buy that at inflated prices from the prison. Once they blow through any savings, their only option (other than malnutrition) is to work for wages that would be illegally low outside of prison.
- As during the transatlantic trade, it is straightforward to buy your way out of forced prison labor.
- A growing fraction of prisoners consider the current system to be eugenics as well as slavery. The prisons take the majority of men while they are at prime child rearing age. It's well known that any that do manage to have kids will probably be forced into a situation where they can't adequately care for those children (dad goes to prison for driving while black or whatever), making the next generation easy targets for the same scheme. (This is coming from current prisoners, not me.)
The other pushback against my comment boils down to "it's legal, so we don't use that word". Similar arguments were made in defense of the transatlantic trade. For instance, black Africans were generally the ones selling slaves, and often used real or imagined criminal records as an excuse. Any objective comparison of the two systems would find that the transatlantic slave trade was roughly as immoral California's three strike law is in practice. You could argue the slave trade was worse because the kids were automatically slaves. In the current system, they're only probably going to prison, but the prisons also aren't paying to raise them.
I suggest reading Things Fall Apart if you're unfamiliar with the African side of the slave trade.
That feels like a very misleading point. The world population is almost 8 billion, it was almost 1 billion in 1800 (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population), so we decreased slavery as a precentage of the world by a lot, yet the total number of slaves has increased. It's tragic that there is modern slavery, but it was horrible the us did it, it's horrible that people want to minimize and argue we weren't so bad for having it, that the founding father's of the us were mostly slave owners.
> That feels like a very misleading point. The world population is almost 8 billion, it was almost 1 billion in 1800 [...] we decreased slavery as a precentage of the world by a lot
I appreciate what you're saying, but my point is actually that the US view is that "slavery has been abolished for 150 years" makes for a very US-centric view of history. Which for a 250 year old country is laughably closed minded both backwards and forwards in time.
The context of what I said is the parent comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31124042), specifically related to the US-centricism of the retold statement of "slavery was started by the United States".
The story of the world is not that slavery was created for the process of building the US as a powerful nation, and then abolished and now only dealing with the fallout and reparations. But I've heard this understanding many times in the US, to the point where it seems like the mainstream understanding there.
Put yourself in the shoes of your average content moderator. Aren't they there for the paycheck like most people at their jobs? Why does everyone assume these people are first and foremost bastions of acceptable behaviour? They are instructed by executives as to how to do their jobs. Now executives are learning nuance and say "oh there's more to this than you thought, so here's the updated guidelines to follow now", to shift blame for this broken system to the moderators when all along they were following orders from above.
No, those folks are not there just to get a paycheck. They are evangelists for a viewpoint who use their moderation powers to eliminate thoughts they don't like.
And yes, those teams really did come up with their determinations of what was OK and what wasn't, based on their own beliefs. That made that quite clear in their repeated, stupid posts on memegen.
1st rule about memegen, is don't talk about memegen >.>
Man, memegen was covered by Buzzfeed ten years ago.
It ain't exactly the hottest, edgiest shitposting club out there.
I think the point you're missing is that often moderators are in that position because they specifically want the power that comes with it. We see this all the time with volunteer moderators getting high on their power, pushing through whatever agenda they have regardless of user opinion.
I think those types of people are even more likely to end up as paid content moderators, since the work tends to be too tedious for most average people to deal with.
» I think the point you're missing is that often moderators are in that position because they specifically want the power that comes with it.
I love that you were courageous enough to say this because this is completely true and also why we say #ACAB. Most people who want to be police officers are absolutely unfit to be police officers!
I hadn't actually thought about applying that reasoning to the police and while there is a higher bar to becoming a police officer, I do have to agree with the overall idea.
There probably isn't any job which is an exception to this, politicians are similarly mainly people who want the associated influence and even engineers become engineers so they have control over engineering. It's just that the incentives are more perverse with politicians, police and moderators than with engineers.
Once the pool for some jobs gets large enough, the self selection of those who apply for it can become a problem.
From what I understand from rumors in the area, is those who couldn't become police (for whatever reason) would then go apply at the prison, and those who couldn't get a job there (and it appears they take anyone with a pulse) would go work for TSA.
Perhaps the "public servant" idea should be taken to a larger extreme, and some positions picked by lottery instead.
Are other cases of online abuse, workplace harassment, discrimination, etc. so rare that people are actually chasing problems like this for a paycheck? It would be wonderful if that was the case, but I doubt that it is.
Many people willingly do things like this voluntarily at their jobs to the point that the job they were hired for seems like a second priority for them.
> I said motherboard all the time in meetings and chats, never had any pushback. TBH if I did get pushback on that one, I'd bring it to HR and say the pushback was affecting my ability to get work down.
And get Damore'd?
I'm not worried about being Damore'd, as I have a lot more experience fighting progressives than he does.
What things did Damore do wrong that you would do differently (honest question)
I would have edited the manifesto to focus on at most one-two points based mainly around the dopey stuff they were doing in DEI classes at the time, Drop all the big-five psychology stuff, and eliminate nearly all the biological claims about women's different ability and interests.
Also known as picking your battles and reducing your surface area, fight one fight at a time.
Mispredicted how people would read his essay. I asked him if he honestly didn’t see it coming. He said he honestly did not. That’s very naïve.
The easiest way to not be Damore'd is to apologize and repent. Damore doubled down and at that point (because the gap between "manager" and "employee" at Google is so narrow) became a walking Title VII violation. Once his coworkers came out in public saying they wouldn't be able to work with him, Google was backed (legally and PR-wise) completely into a corner.
It turns out American companies are not the Athenian Lyceum, and some topics are not up for debate.
> The easiest way to not be Damore'd is to apologize and repent.
What? Absolutely not. That is terrible advice when it comes to something that couldn't have been a literal accident. If he'd used the word "mother", then sure-- that could be apologized for. But a protracted essay on population level statistical differences between genders and its impact on the employment pool? Not a chance.
There is so much noise and outright disinformation about any issue that often the only reliable source for wrong doing is when the target of an accusation admits it themselves.
And even when that fails to protect you, at least you can be a hero to someone. Do you think a damore that apologized and said he was mistaken would be more employable? That people would eventually see it as a youthful transgression? I doubt it greatly-- it's not like the screens that show up when you google his name will yellow with age. Instead he'd just be the enemy to both factions of the war he wandered into, rather than enemy of one and hero to the other.
> There is so much noise and outright disinformation about any issue that often the only reliable source for wrong doing is when the target of an accusation admits it themselves.
Sometimes, but doesn't apply here; the entire kerfluffle happened on an internal-public message-board. There was a paper-trail a mile long.
> Do you think a damore that apologized and said he was mistaken would be more employable?
Absolutely. Google management was very willing to give him a second chance. His mistake was basically tactless following of the existing corporate culture of internal openness, and they recognized that. Unfortunately, he did basically everything in his power to make retaining him as unpalatable as possible, claiming repeatedly the science was on his side and people shouldn't be afraid to debate science. Like I said: walking Title VII violation. You can debate the science all you want, but not as an employee in an American corporation that also has project authority.
In essence, he dared Google to either go up against the Civil Rights Act or admit they were hypocritical about their internal culture. They resolved the issue by removing the irritant (and the corporate culture took a hit too, as people realized in general that a liberal interpretation of it was incompatible with the Civil Rights Act. You can't just say whatever internally).
Compare with Facebook still employing the guy who did an A/B test on whether emotional tone of stories make people sad. Once he realized why that was a problem, he owned up to it and is still doing research at Facebook.
> rather than enemy of one and hero to the other.
Meh. Check his Twitter these days and he's not really their hero; the Right lost interest in him when the labor relations board ruled his firing was legal (they don't want to make a headlong run into the Civil Rights Act either... it protects most voters, so it's very popular).
... and besides, sometimes being hero to none is the most dignified course of action. I can name several historical figures who made the choice to join a faction as a hero at the mere cost of spending their finite lives serving actual evil.
Thanks for the insight! My perspective was colored by thinking about it exclusively after it had blown up in the media. I see how it could have been very different when it was still potentially just an internal debate about internal communication culture.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123615.
> somebody had to explain to them there are people in the world who are discriminated against, but aren't black.
blinks in disabled lesbian
Holy straw man, Batman!
> somebody had to explain to them there are people in the world who are discriminated against, but aren't black.
As a Russian, this is amusing to read. For me and most people I know, when you meet a black person, it's totally normal to ask them "where are you from" because they can't possibly be local. Our society just doesn't have the concept of racism it seems because of the exceeding rarity of people who aren't European or Asian.
People in Russia are often discriminated against based on their sexual orientation, political views, and nationality though.
> Our society just doesn't have the concept of racism
I'd say "racism" those days is a fairly weird word that I've seen infrequently applied as an umbrella term covering many different things.
It's almost certainly true that there is virtually no "classical" (black vs white) racism there. Russia never had any significant fraction of black population, and the flavors of slavery were quite different from the US. When Russian sees a black person, while their inner voice would surely say "this person is an alien", there's most likely would be no immediate derogatory prejudice involved - because to best of my awareness it was never instilled, at least not in the Soviet and post-Soviet mindspace.
But in Russia there surely is something similar, just of a different flavor - again, because of different history and societal composition. Say, doubtlessly there are tons of prejudices based on ethnicity - just remember how many derogatory names and jokes are there (and always were) for neighboring nations such as Ukrainians (this is so fucked up!), Georgians, Tajiks or Uzbeks; or Russian ethniticies - especially Chechens (this nationality is pretty touchy conversation subject).
While I'm sure the shape of discrimination in your culture is different and not heavily racial, it's unwise to conclude that racial discrimination isn't happening just because you don't see the textbook version of it in front of you. The assumption that a black person can't possibly be local can lead some people to act in a discriminatory way that would produce bad outcomes.
A good example would be some of the pieces out there about what it's like to live in Japan as a black person, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMpxLmMnS6M - their society is definitely not going to racially discriminate like the US does, but that doesn't mean you won't experience any discrimination or unusual treatment due to your skin color being different.
Also, if people get discriminated against based on their nationality and you just said a black person can't possibly be From Here... it seems like if you combine those two statements that would mean black people would naturally get discriminated against since they're foreigners?
> Also, if people get discriminated against based on their nationality and you just said a black person can't possibly be From Here...
The nationality thing is more about those who work customer-facing jobs here. Like, you call a taxi, it arrives but you can't find where. You call the driver to ask where they stopped, but the driver is from Tajikistan or Uzbekistan and barely speaks any Russian. It is frustrating when you can't use your native language in your home country for something as mundane as asking the taxi driver where they are. Besides, they usually do their jobs much more shoddily, get paid less, and have lower standards. So, yes, these people have this kind of reputation, but every rule has its exceptions.
But then if someone is a foreign student for example, they are never treated like that. So I guess this discrimination is not against the nationality per se, but against people bringing their customs into someone else's society and refusing to blend in?
A black person could not have been born and raised in a Russian city?
It's exceedingly unlikely, as historically there's no resident population with African descent and migration was very limited; a black person could have been born and raised in a Russian city, but that would be a rare occurrence as those people are far outnumbered by tourists or temporary students from Africa; and this would also depend on the city - Moscow is a bit more international where e.g. Patrice Lumumba University teaching elites from USSR-friendly African states, however for most regional cities with million+ people there were literally 0 people with African descent when the Iron Curtain fell, so obviously any current adult black person could not have been born and raised there.
This is of course entirely possible, but would be extremely unusual. I personally haven't ever met a black Russian.
> Our society just doesn't have the concept of racism it seems because of the exceeding rarity of people who aren't European or Asian.
"Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave," said Vorbis.
"So I understand," said the Tyrant. "I imagine that fish have no word for water."
-- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
Either way, people here aren't discriminated based on their race. Never were. This particular problem seems to be uniquely American because of their history.
We do have a word for racism by the way. It's, unsurprisingly, "расизм".
> Either way, people here aren't discriminated based on their race. Never were. This particular problem seems to be uniquely American because of their history.
I suspect you are overlooking some pretty pervasive discrimination against minority groups because you have become accustomed to it, and/or because you aren't personally affected by it. While racism in Russia appears to have been improving over the last decade or so, it is hardly absent.
As a Russian, I confirm racism is rampant in the country. I don't know if it is even waning anymore, considering the increasingly strong orthodox church and bigotry as indicated by the ongoing war and popularity of the regime that started it.
Anyone who thinks otherwise: go out and talk to ethnically Asian people more. (For an outsider, keep in mind that anywhere in Russian Siberia there are very large indigenous Asian populations in proportion to total.)
My Asian friends are routinely discriminated against purely based on their appearance: subject to searches at subway entrances, subject to disdainful attitude by government officials, salespeople and other citizens. They will have trouble renting flats, etc.
This is significantly worse in western parts of Russia (where you can be targeted by gangs and skinheads), but is still present in their part of the country.
And it is those who were lucky to have gone to good schools and speak perfect Russian. Things are dimmer for someone who has a stronger accent.
Most of my Asian friends never talk about it, but one did, after which I started making observations and reevaluating past ones and recognized that it is very much true.
Those of middle eastern ethnicities (often immigrants and their descendants) have likely even harder time.
> As a Russian, I confirm racism is rampant in the country. I don't know if it is even waning anymore...
Yeah, I had my doubts too. The Wikipedia article claims that racist attacks have been on the decline, and supports that claim with some statistics from the SOVA Center. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if that were simply because those attacks have become so commonplace that they aren't reported at all, or that reports are being actively suppressed.
America certainly takes racism to extremes, but it's not a problem unique to the US - racism is a thing all over Europe and Asia too, to varying degrees.
I've never been to Russia, but I'm finding it hard to believe racism doesn't exist there.
having lived in Russia, I assure you there's a lot of pretty open racism there, racist slurs are openly and widely used for anyone who's not a slav, and even some slavs now as well (e.g. Ukrainians)
Racism is a problem in large parts of Europe, and generally any country with a history involving enslaved Africans. I wouldn't be surprised if ethnic discrimination in Russia went a different direction though, since their colonization all happened in central Asia, where skin color isn't all that informative.
> I wouldn't be surprised if ethnic discrimination in Russia went a different direction though, since their colonization all happened in central Asia
(Not a historian, so fully expect half of this to be wrong in one way or another.)
> Either way, people here aren't discriminated based on their race. Never were.
That is untrue.
You could argue the “pale of settlement” (instituted shortly after the annexation of parts of Poland made Jews more than a rounding error) was discrimination based on religion, not ancestry (and indeed it seems to have had some resemblance to the suppression of Old Rite communities, which did not have any particular ethnic composition as far as I know). But the distance between the two is easily bridged (one only needs to look at Ireland to see that), and by the 20th century it was, thoroughly, as evidenced by things ranging from Stalin’s Jewish resettlement attempts in the 30s and 40s (whence the “Jewish autonomous region”) to the ethnic quotas and heavily biased exams at the Mekhmat and elsewhere in the 70s and 80s (supported not only by a mass of mostly-forgotten university functionaries, but also by some of the genuine greats such as Pontrjagin, cf You Failed Your Math Test, Comrade Einstein).
(That last part is why any intentional bias or quota in admissions gives me the chills. Nothing will go wrong, surely.)
It’s not only the Jews, of course. The common euphemistic appellation for the situation on the Caucasus, “tensions”, hides a morass of mutual hatreds that is centuries deep, though again the results of Stalin’s disastrous resettlement efforts are best characterized as “fallout”, and the two Chechen wars intended as election publicity for Putin did not help. But a close look at the 19th-century colonization of the region as described indirectly by authors like Lermontov gives the impression that the whole thing was pretty fucked up even then.
(If you want to dismiss these places as “not really Russia”, you are proving my point, even if there are senses in which that statement is true.)
Shall we talk about the undocumented and (thus) vastly underpaid Middle Eastern migrant workers who have sustained most of Moscow’s municipal infrastructure for the last two decades? (Though perhaps not for much longer, given the recent monetary restrictions.) Who have reversed much of its despair- and alcohol-fueled collapse of the late Soviet times? That the low-wage jobs should go to them may not be not explicitly xenophobic (except inasmuch as any system of employment controls for foreigners is), just the result of the how the USSR was organized and how it fell apart; but I have an acquaintance who has adopted a child from there, and their experiences both with officials and with strangers off-handedly insulting the child or the family sound pretty straightforwardly racist to me.
And, well, let us be honest and acknowledge the mutual feeling of otherness between people from Central or Northern Russia and those from West Ukraine, Belarus, or even the south of the country as it currently is. It can range from having a stereotypical funny-talking character in jokes to toppling monuments, rewriting history, and going to war, but it’s been there for a long time, and the distance between these two extremes isn’t nearly as large as I’d like.
(Navalnyj has distant relatives in Ukraine? Everybody has distant relatives in Ukraine. If you want commentary on the Golodomor and whether it fits here, though, you’ll need to find someone qualified enough to talk specifics about it.)
This is not at all an exhaustive list. (What about the Tatars? The Russian Germans? The postwar expulsions, tacitly accepted by the West, that turned Königsberg into Kaliningrad and Danzig into Gdańsk? I’m sure there are things I’ve never heard of as well.) It might be that there is no “racism” in the precise North American mold in Russia or around it, but that is only because that mold is uninteresting (and to the extent that the opposition to it is built around its incidental features, that opposition is missing the point, although I would not claim to be the one to make it the Right Way). Xenophobia towards people inside or just outside the country, now that we have plenty of, and so does everybody else living on the ruins of an empire.
That is if the economic structures originating from serfdom in the Empire or from internal migration restrictions in the USSR are not enough for you. They might not always have an ethnic bent, but is that really that much of a consolation?..
great comment
Who was asking for Woke Clippy? Is Google just bored and completely out of ideas?
They seem increasingly disconnected with what their users actually want.
I don't think I ever heard such an appropriate turn of phrase as "woke clippy", bravo!
If you read the article, it is clear who their prospective clients are. Big corporations pretending not to be racist. The next iteration will be a corporate-speak translator.
As annoying as a woke clippy might be, at times I realize that we're lucky we don't live in a racist clippy alt reality. "Would you like to expand all mentions of "n-word"?"
> I realize that we're lucky we don't live in a racist clippy alt reality
If someone is being racist, wouldn't we arguably be better off if they used language that made it transparent to the reader-- rather than disguised it with the magic of search and replace?
Real prejudice can't be erased by search and replace but it can be made more plausibly deniable.
I completely agree, but people complain about anti-racism being "forced" onto them. While it's annoying when it's disingenuous and superficial as it usually is, it's still most likely better than having the establishment pushing for racism or openly accepting it.
I think a grammar checker that warned about cross-cultural confusion would be pretty valuable in many writing contexts. It would best be constructed in that light: rather than moralizing or being activist just noting the fact that some text has a non-trivial odds of being understood in a way different than you likely intended.
So for example, a writer of British English may want to be warned that "Bring me some fags when you return" may be misunderstood by American readers.
This hypothetical checker might still warn you about "master"-- for example-- as there is now a sizable contingent that finds it controversial. ... but it would equally warn you against terms like "birthing person" which is considered by many to be biologically reductive to the point of being offensive, and by most people to be at least highly loaded.
Such a tool would almost certainly not caution you against "landlord".
Yes! This is much more interesting. Audience-based cultural & contextual awareness, rather than "assuming one global context" that takes the veneer of moral high ground. The former would be more helpful to a writer.
You could look at Grammarly ($10+ billion dollar valuation) as evidence that there is a market for a tool/plugin that improves a user’s prose.
Being told I use too many adjectives, my word choice is too heavy for my audience or that I used too many clauses is useful.
Being passive-aggressively told "blacklist" is a no-no word is not.
If you were really clever, you'd let the user set a "sensitivity" level for the writing from "normal human speak" to "corporate PR approved".
It depends on who you write for. As a non-native, non-American speaker, I'd be happy to know if I'm accidentally offending the people I'm writing to.
That's the problem, though: the tool doesn't actually tell you that. The vast majority of Americans are not offended by words like "motherboard".
I'm not a native english speaker either. Chances are you aren't offending anyone. You probably know exactly which words of the english language are unambiguously offensive. Words like motherboard just aren't offensive.
But you aren't. Saying that "Motherboard" is offensive is basically misinformation.
I can't even imagine what the supposed offense is here?
Like, 'I identify both as a mainboard and male, your use of motherboard offends me'???
"Mother" has been determined to be "not inclusive" because it excludes men who can get pregnant and give birth.
And this isn't some made up controversy. The Biden administration has been replacing "mother" with "birthing person."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/09/pregnan...
In this particular case, the tool being discussed is meant almost exclusively for people writing "corporate PR approved" content, so it makes sense that the sensitivity setting is cranked.
I do a lot of things in Google docs beyond write PR releases...
> you'd let the user set a "sensitivity" level for the writing
But what if the company found out (and some employee leaked) the fact that most people deliberately set the default level to "normal human speak", and its campaign to replace and redefine words doesn't have any democratic legitimacy (let alone add any commercial value)?
This is a popular tool in hiring for creating inclusive job descriptions. They're competing with companies like https://textio.com/
Yeah, who asked for this? One would think they'd be trying to achieve feature parity with Microsoft Office instead.
MS Word introduced a language censor like this recently (I've not seen it, only seen it announced at a workplace), so maybe they are following where MS leads?
It’s far less intrusive. It will highlight fuck, for example, and tell you “that language might be offensive to readers.” It also flags on idioms that may come across poorly if you aren’t familiar with them/know English well. In a strongly multicultural company it’s been quite nice to have it catch a couple of my phrasings that wouldn’t track well to a non English speaker.
I interpret Microsoft’s as helpful when considering ESL or other cultures. I interpret Google’s as straight woke. Very different products but you’re probably right that Microsoft led them there.
As a corporate culture, Google very much believes that if you ask the pre-car public what they want, they'd say "faster horses."
... and the willingness to take risks has historically served them pretty well.
But then Google gives you a car for free, then tells you it won't work in six months as they're canceling the service. Then they do it again, and again, and then no one wants a Google Car because it would just get canceled. The idea may have served them, the execution has not. This idea also translates into, "I know better than you what you want", which leads to not listening, not hearing, and ignoring your customer's needs, which is 199% Google.
Google is an ad company whose core competency is getting lots people to click on links and buy things in exchange for money. They aren't exactly revolutionizing the world for good. Most of their innovative ideas get a splashy launch, middling support for a while, and then fizzle and/or get killed.
The idea that there are millions of people who want to be told that motherboard is a dirty word every time they write it, but won't realize that desire until Google foists it on them, just strikes me as absurd.
Has it actually served them well? How many of Google’s controversial launches have turned out well? The YouTube acquisition was risky but that was more on the commercial side than on the product side.
Apple is a different story of course.
> Has it actually served them well?
I feel like I can just gesture to the stock price and say "scoreboard," but that seems an unfair dismissal of the question.
To expound on the topic a bit: I think when they were a smaller company it served them well consistently. Photos and Drive have become an enterprise cornerstone that supports their "light cloud" business space (quite a few people pay for that extra storage). Ads doesn't get talked about much, but the internal culture is very quick-innovate. Chrome went from being a wild idea to dominating the browser-share (and therefore giving Google a foot in the door on everyone's desktop computer), and then they parlayed that into a whole operating system play. Maps basically displaced most of the other players in that space and now competes with only a couple other contenders.
I don't know if it will continue to do so now that they're an 800-lb gorilla in the room. They've certainly become more structurally conservative in the decade-plus since their founding. And I think their push into Cloud is putting pressure on them to act a lot more starched-collar; Enterprise is a different customer than they're used to (or comfortable with) dealing with.
Since when is black and white primarily a racial thing anyways? It seems a little inverted, like a black flag or a black mark on an account, it’s not like it’s called “negrolist”, black and white are colors before they are slang for race/culture. Maybe instead of neutering the dictionary we could try a different angle and quit lumping people into “white” or “black”? Some people are Kenyan, Irish, Nigerian, German, nobody is actually white or black.
This is indeed the root of my problem with the attempt to cast "blacklist" and "whitelist" as problematic. It confuses cause and effect.
If we're going to try to re-engineer spoken English, I'd much rather address the root causes, which were the adoption of such literally black-and-white terms as racial identifiers in the first place. Calling light-skinned European-descended people "white" and dark-skinned members of the African diaspora "black" was always a divisive oversimplification of a nuanced web of ethnic heritages.
This doesn't fit neatly into a woke/anti-woke framework, but I try to avoid using "black" and "white" to describe people whenever I can, preferring something either more descriptive or contextual.
I think the debate over whitelist/blacklist is often pointless. Yes there is not cause/effect link, but it honestly doesn't really matter. Allowlist and blocklist are much better words imo because they are self-descriptive, whereas whitelist/blacklist requires context and pre-existing knowledge to understand. And to you it may be obvious, but not everyone is from the same culture and has English as a first language. Why not just use the better terminology?
I am not advocating for banning the terms above, just to make an attempt going forward to slowly migrate to the other ones when possible.
I think they're trying to change language to disassociate "black" with negative meaning.
Which is going to be very hard, because the reason for the association is from black being the unknown. It's the night that hides the predators. It's the shadow where the enemy hides. It's where you don't want to put your foot in case there are spiders or a sharp rock.
Humans are afraid of the dark. I've not even heard of being afraid of the light.
Death and darkness.
I'd like a historian to confirm, but I'd be very surprised if this type of language didn't exist in most places, including before ever seeing a darker skinned person.
But this effort is doomed to fail. You can be afraid of the dark at night and that is not a predictor at all of racism. Indeed, do people with darker skin not get afraid of the dark?
Yes, I think that's right: black is logically linked with darkness, and human beings, like other diurnal lifeforms, don't like the dark. The association is found throughout literature, from the biblical outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, to the Black/Dark Riders in The Lord of the Rings, via traditional fairy tales in which a beautiful but evil sister is described as fair/white of face but black of heart.
On the mention of being afraid of the light I thought that something like that was probably mentioned in the Bible, and sure enough:
https://biblehub.com/john/3-19.htm
> The Light has come into the world, but men loved the darkness rather than the Light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come into the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed…
Another thing; even though this effort might be doomed to fail, do you think there are good reasons to attempt to change language in such a way?
In general, I tend to be against changing language, but I'm open to being convinced that a certain effort might be worthwhile.
I'm also somewhat pessimistic due to thinking that some other changes I've seen might be inevitable in the long run (seeing how these changes are being used by people my age, I hope it is just fashion - oh and I'm not talking here about changes to the English language).
> Another thing; even though this effort might be doomed to fail, do you think there are good reasons to attempt to change language in such a way?
I'm not categorically against it. I'm not in the right country to properly judge "master/slave". Those words have no association with people to me. But I don't care about "master/slave".
Though I can't find it now, I remember encountering cases where actually "blocklist" was a less descriptive term, even misleading.
I think it's great even though "crewed" is a terrible word, I can't think of a better one, and it's good to change away from "manned".
I'm perfectly willing to surrender the word "niggardly".
So it depends.
Banning words like "ninja", "dojo", "white glove treatment", "blind"... like... really?
What I think is doomed to fail is banning any language that involves color.
I'd say some words are in a "grey area", but I've seen people wanting to ban that term.
Mandating language like this is double plus ungood.
This makes sense to me. Why is it downvoted?
Probably because that's not the only possible interpretation of the issue.
I agree that in some instances, white seems to be primarily used as a synonym for bright/light, and black as one for darkness, shadow etc., such as in the case of white and black box testing.
However, other cases, such as "whitelist" and "blacklist", seem more nefarious at least in some cultures: A list of names, one of people to grant access to some service or facility, the other to be denied...
And as somebody else has already noted, for somebody without that cultural background, it might not even make any sense, unlike the much more self-describing alternatives "allowlist" and "denylist".
If there is an alternative available that is both more straightforward and that has less negative connotations – why not advocate for its use, and assume that those that do so do it out of good intentions (while at the same time not assuming that people using the other terms do so out of a desire to cause harm)?
The main problem seems to be that, as in many such cases, a nuanced discussion of the topic does not fit into a tweet or news headline, nor a Slackbot autoresponse, and least of all into a grammar checker.
If you view these things from a POV of empathy for others and how to minimize their stress and sense of being disfavored vs trying to win some technical argument it will make more sense.
Focus on how real actions impact the people around you.
"Blacklist" and "whitelist" suck anyway because they require the cultural knowledge that "black is bad and white is good" to understand their meaning. "Allowlist" and "denylist" don't require any cultural background to understand - their names are purely descriptive. They are just better terms.
What about "redlist" and "greenlist"? The association between "red" and "stop", and between "green" and "go", seem more arbitrary than the associations with "black" and "white" but almost everyone in the world is familiar with traffic lights. (And the inhabitants of the North Sentinel Island probably don't need to configure mail servers or whatever.)
Red and green traffic lights (and indeed even the distinction between green and blue) are not universally understood either:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2013/02/25/language/the-ja...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
What's your objection to "allowlist" (or "golist") and "denylist"/"blocklist"/"stoplist"?
It's not often that we have an almost universally better alternative, but at least to me it seems like this is the case here. (Yes, allow/deny have one syllable more each, but I think we'll live.)
I'm aware that many languages don't distinguish blue and green, but English does distinguish them and we're talking about English terminology here. (Apparently in Japan the green traffic lights are officially allowed to be slightly bluer than in other countries because the word they use for them includes blue: an interesting case of language changing the world.)
I don't like "allowlist" and "denylist" because they sound wrong to me: perhaps because the first element of a compound should be a noun, not a verb, but that's just an attempt to explain what I feel. I don't like "blocklist" because that sounds like a list of blocks, something in a file system. Of the ones you mention, I think I'd probably prefer "golist" and "stoplist", which I hadn't really considered before. They're also shorter than "allowlist" and "denylist".
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "stop list" has been in use since 1920, but "go list" is not recorded.
Red and green mean stop/go but only in a narrow context. I would have no idea what redlist and greenlist means. Red and green also bring to mind Christmas and Martians. Red means communism, green means environmentalism. Green means money, red means a negative entry in your account. There's a lot of culture-specific meanings too. Red in China is associated with good fortune and happiness.
Blacklist has nothing to do with skin-color...you fall in the same trap as those wannabe corrector's:
>>His memory was stored with a black list of the enemies and rivals, who had traduced his merit, opposed his greatness, or insulted his misfortunes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting#Origins_of_the_te...
Excuse me? I didn't claimed it did. Nor do I think it does.
Like what the actual fuck? I sincerely hope this was meant to be a reply to someone else, otherwise you need to drastically improve your reading comprehension.
This is the hypocrisy of radical leftists in a nutshell. They claim to fight racial thinking while in fact just making it more prominent than it's been in decades.
It's also what will cause the far right to succeed.
The left eats its own rather than being patient or tolerant ("I shouldn't have to teach you!") to people who mean well, while the right allows people to fly way off the handle and still be within their tent because their tent expands to include increasingly extreme ideas.
Are you inferring/suggesting that the "right" avoids eating its own?
Exactly – if anything, research suggests that there might be some underlying mechanism affecting both ends of the political spectrum. I found this to be a very interesting read on the subject:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-...
Yep. Read and appreciated that article. And I will say what I have been repeating in these forums for a couple of months now again. It's ironic in this case, because today's hot topic is "the meaning of words".
We keep talking about social media and its problematic effects. Like we don't know how to be social or something anymore.
It's not social media. It's profit/engagement media. The social component is just the hook. The point of it all is basic profit feedback loops (which are far less greedy and evil than we make these utilities out to be--they're just doing what they were instituted to do).
My current brainstorm/crazy idea is that something like "non profit" regulations might be how we coral this nuttiness. It's been semi/mostly effective at corralling religion in America for many years. I'm not sure why we wouldn't benefit from moving the Twitter Day Saints and Instagramists and Tik-Tok-ies and SnapChat Witnesses and Roamin Pathic Twitch into the same "you have your place, you can take care of your own and collect enough funds to operate and some, but if you start looking too much like a business and/or play in politics too much, it's going to get really uncomfortable for you."
Both sides eat their own. It’s a result of social media cancel culture, which both sides engage in. No moderate opinions allowed anywhere. The right constantly rejects people who aren’t extreme enough. “Rino” is a huge term now.
Google is teaching people about wrongspeak with this new feature! it's on you if you don't want to obey!
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31123767.)
There's a few different things to unpack with this feature.
(1) It would be useful in the context of a general style guide, like a white-label Grammarly. Corporations could set their own prompts for words, phrases, and structures. This would make documentation more consistent.
(2) This is dystopian as fuck. Google has the ability to see, aggregate, and now influence what you write in Google docs and Gmail. Who is making the decision on what to "correct"? Is this algorithm explainable?
Bias: I already disagree with Grammarly as an entire category of product.
Grammarly is also an OS-wide keylogger.
https://www.kolide.com/blog/is-grammarly-a-keylogger-what-ca...
They claim not to be a keylogger, but, you know, Amazon claims that Alexa isn't always listening too and/but/yet also that it'll wake up immediately when you say the right wake word. So, I'd take their claims with a lot of salt.
> Amazon claims that Alexa isn't always listening too and/but/yet also that it'll wake up immediately when you say the right wake word
Strictly Alexa, the device, is always listening in order to trigger on the wake word. It's just that audio doesn't get sent to Amazon until it hears a wake word (then it just streams the audio to Amazon to process it. locally it's only smart enough to listen for a wake word). This is verifiable from sniffing network traffic, it's not sending enough to be a live audio stream at all times unless the wake word is said.
You'd agree that this creates a hypertechnical situations where slight changes in the hardware or software create undetectable situations for non-technical consumers. For example, we do not know for certain that Alexa devices never stream audio when they have not yet processed the wake word. A device that you test it on may have a different policy from a device sold a year from now, yet the Internet (archives) will say that, no, it doesn't listen.
Google hid a microphone in its Nest Protect product. https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a264489...
Snowden called this "turnkey tyranny." The idea that the technology for dystopia already exists and is widely distributed, but the key simply hasn't been turned yet.
All it would take for Amazon (or whichever government twists their arm) to listen to millions of households surreptitiously is a quiet software update.
That's very true, yeah. Can't speak for every Alexa, every version, the future, etc.
Grammarly really is a keylogger though. In a "plain text being sent to a remote server" kind of way.
> Google has the ability to see, aggregate, and now influence what you write in Google docs and Gmail.
Interestingly Microsoft has that power with the Office suite for nearly 40 years now (only a decade if we want to focus on the cloud connected area), do you see specific dystopian influences on society stemming from that ?
There is a big difference from the 'possibility' of adding remote reporting of local data (essentially zero for e.g. Word 95) vs. the possibility of having a server do one more thing with information already on the server (trivially easy)
Yet they didn't do anything remotely similar for 40 years.
> Emily Lipstein typed “Motherboard” (as in, the name of this website) into a document and Google popped up to tell her she was being insensitive: “Inclusive warning. Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers. Consider using different words.”
It’s amazing how a Fortune 500 company can release a product that chastises you for using the word “motherboard” because it has “mother” in it, while other people insist that this is a “fringe” type of thinking and not “mainstream” on the left.
Birthingpersonboard you bigot
Minus 10 social credit points. Birthingpersonboard contains the word SON. Please use a more inclusive term like Birthingper-INDIVIDUAL-board
It's actually main board or logic board, as per, for example, the Apple guidelines.
"Parentboard".
But yes, anytime you hear "AI-powered" and "Natural language parsing", these kinds of cases are inevitable. I know google prides itself on technology, but there are some things like language that are moving so fast, with so many states that an initiative like this takes actual humans to debug. But given Youtube, it seems like Google is still stuck in the thought that they can automate everything.
Orphaned people would like a word with you about your harmful language.
FFS
A $trillion corporation's garbage product is The Left now?
It seems people forget that actual leftism is an economic theory regarding how labour relates to capital. The fact that it's conflated with angry twitter wokescolds is very convenient for those who want to turn people away from leftist economic ideas.
People say the same about the religious right 20-30 years ago. The modern, younger right really isn't concerned with censoring video games or making blasphemy illegal, but the general perception by anyone on the outside is that they'll force you into church on Sundays and go around lynching the melanated.
> “mainstream” on the left
What connection is there between left/progressive thought and this particular brand of corporate speak?
Are you seriously not seeing how these "inclusive warnings" come from the left?
Let's put it this way: different people care about different things, caring about certain things can put someone in "the left" category. But who cares about this whitelist/blacklist/motherboard bullshit? Maybe it's a US thing (as I don't know anyone who thinks "blacklist" is offensive), but even so some commenters here say that they don't know many in the US that care about it.
Act Blue donations, funding of progressive organizations, etc.
Fun fact: the longest known distance between two points on Earth is the distance between Google product managers and ordinary people.
To be less flippant, boy could I not give a shit less about the problem this feature is trying to solve. As I look outside, I try to imagine the idea of any of these people in my neighborhood, playing with their dogs, mowing their lawns, driving garbage trucks, potentially losing sleep over someone using “policeman” as opposed to “police officer.” It’s absurd.
To be clear, I do feel genuine empathy for someone if they experience abject pain from minor transgressions. However, I am skeptical that almost anyone actually has that issue. And if they do, this is not how I believe you solve the problem. At all.
And if someone did use the term “police officer” instead of “policeman”, it would be no skin off my nose. That’s totally fine, both are natural and reasonable. Whatever. But I don’t need my fucking word processor telling me to self-police my language harder. That’s not a feature I want. In fact, I don’t even like the idea of this feature.
This all feels like cargo culting. If we pretend we’re in a society further removed from a racist, sexist past, does that make us further removed? I don’t think it does. Before the issues with blacklist/whitelist or slave/master were brought to the forefront, I really, really doubt almost anyone had racist or problematic visualizations in their mind. I think they had completely abstract concepts in their mind. Plenty of words probably have a deeply racist origin, but if that’s not what people actually think about when they hear the word, does that history even matter? Aren’t we just creating more problems?
Even if you disagree with all of my viewpoints, I hope you’ll agree that this is going to serve to make people much more radical over time as they perceive these features to either serve as an attack on themselves or their way of lives, or as evidence that people who don’t self-correct incessantly are secretly neo-nazis. To me, it just seems like a lose-lose, because it feels like no matter what I do, people are going to view my rejection of these ideals and pigeonhole me into either of these camps. Or is using the word “camp” also a bad idea due to World War II?
I’m sure some people will read this some day and think I’ve lost my mind. I don't care. For the love of fuck, Go Outside once in a while.
> I really, really doubt almost anyone had racist or problematic visualizations in their mind.
Reminds me how we used to have Backlog Grooming meetings, but we had to change the name because apparently "grooming" is something pedophiles do.
Poor naive me, I thought it was something my parents- sorry, birthing persons- had done for their poodle when it was getting too shaggy.
MS: "We now concede that Clippy was the most annoying, patronizing and flawed UX feature ever created."
Google: "Hold my beer..."
This AI strikes me as being so dystopian. Time to break out and read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four again.
A true AI would respond to user behavior and back off or change accordingly. Reminds me of Google News which keeps inserting articles about Kardashians no matter how often I tell it to "include fewer of these stories". For all the hype of Google's advanced AI, instead we get faceless, imperious NannyTech.
is it even AI? They claim it's a language model analysing human bias but it's blindingly obvious that it is just a human curated blacklist.
Maybe they're using a language model for part of speech tagging or to suggest alternative words with similar meaning but there's no way an AI decided that "motherboard" is taboo.
Yes an AI in this case would be more intelligent than whichever human designed this feature. Google is actually a pioneer in the space of AI comment toxicity filters.
Even a toy solution would be smarter, you could compare the TF-IDF of each word in different populations (woke, average, toxic) to identify non-woke language, if that was the intention - not saying it’s right.
This is clearly just someone who ran a regex over a dictionary and didn’t check the output of their script for scunthorpes such as “motherboard”. It’s so low tech for Google, 1990s technology.
Blacklist? I think you mean blocklist
Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers.
Try using:
[carbonated malt beverage]
I'm allergic to malt.
I'm allergic to carbon.
Well, the Earth's climate sort of is.
To quote George Carlin: "The planet is fine, the people are fucked."
Isn't Microsoft rolling out a similar feature into Word 365, though?
This is sure to dismantle systemic racism.
But in all seriousness I think this stuff is great. It pushes more people away from insane woke culture. I’m starting to see even the most progressive friends and colleagues pause and think twice about how cringeworthy all of this is.
Let it happen.
I'm seeing that happen too --- there's been a very noticeable "migration" of left-leaning folk I know, towards the right; and many of these are actually the type of people that the whole "inclusiveness" thing is attempting to please.
“Cutting phrases like “whitelist/blacklist” and “master/slave” out of our vocabulary not only addresses years of habitual bias in tech terminology,”
no it doesn’t. it does literally nothing except make a person feel like they did something when they did nothing, like posting a black square on instagram, so they can go right back to being a starbucks slurping propaganda watching cow.
“Shifts in our speech like swapping “manned” for “crewed” spaceflight are attempts to correct histories of erasing women and non-binary people from the industries where they work.”
yea I can’t wait for the sequel to Hidden Figures where we learn it wasn’t actually black women who were responsible for landing a man on the moon (should we say land a person on the moon?), it was actually nonbinary otherkin with purple hair who really made it happen. it will be called Extremely Hidden Figures
Yet another reason "Product" is a joke
I really don't get the logic behind the "landlord" one. In what world can "landlords" be considered an oppressed group that needs special consideration for inclusivity? Is the endgame here Google suggesting "benevolent autocratic ruler" instead of "dictator" to be more inclusive?
Well, such things are always driven by demand. And unfortunately, there is a strong demand in our society for policing words, renaming formulas and issuing apologies all while:
* Property ownership is becoming out of question for an increasing fraction of Americans
* Any kid of retirement (as in not having to work and enjoying life off your savings) has become a pipe dream
* Having a single-income family with one parent dedicated to raising the children has become unaffordable.
* Even if you managed to put enough effort to teach your kids the values of hard work and setting long-term goals, the public education system is set to confuse them and kick them off that path, so they will never be competitive with those who received education abroad.
At the same time, the media oligopoly [0] keeps ignoring the problems and pushing the narratives how addressing short-term emotional problems is the top 1 priority, and anyone who wants real prosperity instead of taking a part in the never-ending mutual comforting game is the enemy of the people.
I wonder if people will ever realize they are being manipulated into poverty before it's too late.
The elites of America use "inclusivity" and race as bait to distract from the very issues you describe.
Notice how we, as a society, spent relatively little time discussing the 2008 Mortgage Crisis and Occupy Wall Street.
Meanwhile news outlets have been beating the "inclusivity" / race / gender drum for _years_.
Time to wake up, folks.
Pretty interesting that there are people who legitimately believe the megacorps are 'the good guys' because of stunts like this.
What? The 2008 Mortgage Crisis was the biggest news story for at least a year.
Comparing that to "inclusivity" is also strange because inclusivity is not an event. A single event has a natural decay of relevance, the further into the past it gets.
> What? The 2008 Mortgage Crisis was the biggest news story for at least a year.
It was an event that absolutely decimated MANY people in America financially. And for many of those people, their only fault in the whole thing was, I guess, being ignorant enough to be taken advantage of.
We spend a lot more time discussing things that are a lot more irrelevant than that.
> Comparing that to "inclusivity" is also strange because inclusivity is not an event. A single event has a natural decay of relevance, the further into the past it gets.
OK, then instead compare the general theme of the 2008 Mortgage Crisis / Occupy Wall Street. Specifically: how much time do we spend talking about a small group of powerful elites pulling the financial strings in this country? And how does that compare to how much we talk about "inclusivity"?
The money and power concentrated into the hands of relatively few is an issue that is _several_ orders of magnitude larger than the "inclusivity" stuff we're fed much more often.
That's not a mere coincidence.
I dunno, you're not providing any evidence to back up the assertion that "we" talk way more about inclusivity than "powerful elites." Who is "we?"
HN? Are you talking about in the news? A specific news outlet?
The imbalance of power between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of us is in the news all the time, at least that I watch and read.
Ever heard of Rojava?
What I don't understand is, where is this perceived demand coming from? I think it is an extremely small minority that happens to be extremely loud on social media and in corporate circles, so the perception of how important this issue is has become grossly exaggerated. I don't think this is purposeful malice on anyone's part, I think it is just a product of social media amplification and the elites desire to constantly virtue signal to each other that has led to this absurd loop in our culture.
Unfortunately, there is a very solid explanation for it and it doesn't yield a good prognosis:
1. There is a small minority of people who truly believed in it in the first place.
2. Then there are people who exploit the system by charging hefty sums for diversity trainings (and calling any opponents to such spending racist).
3. Then there are people who sold the #2 group the student loans and gave the degrees where all you need to graduate is to repeat a fairly basic set of dogmas.
4. There are people who are disillusioned about the whole thing, but are now stuck with the student loans and no other way to make comparable money.
5. There are entrepreneurial people that want to make a change, but since most business niches are occupied by the corporations, the only outlet they have found is to join the diversity & inclusion effort.
6. There are people that want to get rid of their competitors. And since being not inclusive enough is now a firable offense, they are stuck competing who can say more things they don't really believe in.
Ironically, it reminds me of the political situation in Russia, where many people support the war despite suffering economically from it, despite having their children slaughtered, despite losing the rest of civil freedoms in the past months. The mechanism is the same: if you don't play along with the narrative, the competition will eat you alive. And it you overplay it in a clever way, you can get a promotion or a government contract.
I wish sociologists actually studied such phenomena rather than being another echo chamber for the same narrative as everyone else.
This is an example of where the Twittersphere has outsized influence.
May I ask what the items in your enumerated list have to do with “policing words?”
He's pointing out that focusing on issues that don't have real impact is starving us of our ability to focus on broader, more serious issues. The shrinking of the middle class is a tangible problem. Words being insufficiently inclusive is not.
The items on the list are the problems relevant to most Americans. Except, the human brain has a limited capacity for "currently tracked" problems and tends to pick them proportionally to the amount of attention paid to them.
So the media is abusing it by spamming people's attention with disproportionately exaggerated problems that don't cost the elites anything to solve, so that people won't have any time left solving the problems that would look bad on the corporate bottom line.
This is an article nearly entirely built around a viral Tweet regarding "landlord" cause Vice writers live in a strange world where that is essentially a slur they want to use, and then found two edge cases to make it an "article".
Why would "landlord" be considered a slur?
My guess: "lord" is male, thus offensive.
It's not a slur, it's just distinguishing people between those that own property and those that don't. As such, it's offensive to large swathes of disadvantaged people.
I can't even begin to follow this line of thought. Is 'billionaire' offensive because it distinguishes those who own billions of dollars versus those who don't? How, by your logic, is 'property owner' not offensive?
> billionaire
I think you meant 'person of means'?
"People who own property" and "people who don't own property" are very real and in many cases important groups to discuss. If the fact that I'm a property owner (not a landlord though) offends someone who isn't, well... tough. The correct response would be to tell these people to stop being so soft and getting offended over absolutely nothing.
Please, explain your thinking in more detail.
I object to "articles" that are essentially just popular tweets puffed up. Don't think that is good journalism and don't think it needs much more detail.
I mean, I'm confused why you think the vice authors live in a world where landlord is a slur. It's not. It's a commonly used term and a small number of progressive individuals have manipulated the media and their followers into thinking it's terrible. But it isn't. Hence, my request as to why you think the Vice authors "wanted to use a slur", since it isn't.
Cause I have worked in NYC media and know that Vice writers use "landlord" as an insult?
The impetus for this piece was someone wrote a tweet that got very popular implying Google is somehow trying to cover for "landlords" by calling them "property owners". Vice writers are upset about that and would prefer to use "landlord" cause in their culture it has a negative connotation.
An insult and a slur are extremely different things.
Feels like this is an entirely unrelated topic, but they aren't extremely different:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slur
1a : an insulting or disparaging remark or innuendo
And to the point, in NYC media circles, it is nearly the equivalent of an actual slur which is why I called it that. Just one writers want to use as opposed to one they think it is inappropriate to use.
Who, exactly, is it supposed to be "nearly" an actual slur against?
Because I'm sure that actual landlords don't have a problem being referred to as landlords, so you must be referring to some other group.