Social media corporations make millions and billions by catering to manipulate - and often darn right evil - advertiser needs, spying and tracking users for them. And then they want to be all moral by playing identity politics and excising inappropriate language.
This sounds like an attempt to divert the public attention during the Corona + police violence crises the US is currently undergoing.
... and all of this is not to say what I think about the use of these terms. I'm of two minds about that actually.
Our team had someone who's an orphan. We try to avoid using the term because a joke became a pretty sad lunchtime when they revealed the fact afterwards.
Words have different impact to different people. It doesn't cost us anything to use "isolated" node rather than an "orphan" node, but it made the dev feel less excluded.
If I'm a muslim who doesn't drink alcohol, and people I'm working with keep talking about having a beer and "what? you really don't drink". Does that mean everyone should stop drinking alcohol?.
Yes different words have different meanings, but once you start tinkering with this, where do you draw a line in the sand?
When I read the tiltle the first thing I thought about was "Man in the middle" attacks which belongs to the security field. How do you rename this? "woman in the middle"? doesn't this sound sexist? wouldn't some guys use this to have sexist jokes with their female colleagues and make matters worse?
Exactly. Anything can trigger emotions. The difference is emotional management, or not. Letting bad emotions stifle you may reduce your outcomes, but we can't always expect others to save us.
Racism and discrimination is real, but we shouldn't conflate them with unfair powerstructures. We need to level the playing field and speak up against bullying.
I'm sorry that this happened to your colleague, I understand how it feels to be reminded of something you would rather not be reminded of.
Sufficed to say; as my mother used to tell me constantly: life is kind of unfair.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to make things fairer of course!
There are some things I generally agree with- I take an opposition position often because people should understand that changing the status quo should come with strong and valid reasons; there is a lot of institutional change that people ask for and it comes at some level of cost, so it's not something we should do with complete frivoloty.
Also, when it comes to certain terms (Allowlist/Denylist); these are sometimes simply better at conveying what things _do_ and terminology changes for those things can stand on those merits alone.
All that is to say: perceived offence, is a very poor reason to change.
Not because I'm arguing that people need to suck it up or even that there isn't some level of anguish, but because inherently it has no end. There is no line you can draw. I'm not even saying that "it's a slippery slope" I'm saying that the minute you draw a line you exclude people.
As an example of why you can't draw lines:
I grew up poor, I might get offended if someone referred to something as 'being in poor condition'; thus you may, on my behalf, want to remove that word.
Many people in the world do not have feet, and thus, the word 'football' might remind them of the trauma of losing their feet (or never having had feet).
I feel like it's worth mentioning here that 'bot' comes from 'robot' which has roots in the Czech language for "forced labour".
Not to mention master/slave are clear in terminology, one instructs, the other obeys, it is terminology that has existed for literally thousands of years (and yes, it is an atrocity when it happens to people). I would also caution strongly about suggesting that it has racial motivations as, of course, black people are not exclusively slaves- even today there are more slaves than at any point in history; and I can assure you, they're not all black.[0]
It would help immensely to quantify the impact of these kinds of changes, asking the affected community what they think/feel; that would kill a lot of the discontent around "virtue signalling white people" which is part of the current discussion.
I feel like it doesn't need to be said, but words are polyphasic, they have multiple meanings depending on context, altering terminology brings about the euphemism treadmill[1] -- generally speaking the hate in our hearts is the issue, not the words we speak; and restrictions on language do nothing to curb that hatred if it exists.
New words or phrases will be created to skirt the rules and then we're back at the same place, with less words in our vocabulary.
I can get onboard with master/slave when used in conjunction.
But the etymology of "blacklist" so far as I know and can Google is not to do with race and it's use and understood meaning is not to do with race. How then can it be racist?
I have heard others argue that it's the implication that black is bad - but it's not as simple as that. "Whiteknighting" can be used negatively. "Bad" can literally mean "good". Come on.
This especially goes for "grandfathered" - what on earth is wrong with this?
"Grandfathered" comes from
from laws passed in the late 1800s and early 1900s to disenfranchise black people. States created new restrictions on voting but exempted descendants of people who had been allowed to vote before black people were allowed to vote. You could vote if your grandfather could, in other words. The exemptions came to be called grandfather clauses.
I used to think stuff like this was ridiculous. It's just a database, who even cares?
However, now I'm all for it.
What has changed? Over working in tech for a while, I noticed some patterns in my coworkers' behavior. I noticed that the same people who didn't switch over to saying "primary" and "replica" back in 2015-ish, and when it started becoming more common, and in fact, actively ridiculed it (just like I did) were the same people who would casually say things like “Oh those Indians screwed it up” while talking about problems with an overseas helpdesk. They didn't even consider that I, as someone of Indian descent who was apparently "all right" in their view would be offended by this (Note: when the screwup was, say, due to people from our TX helpdesk, they would never say “Oh, those Texans screwed it up”). Oh, and I never heard this kind of stuff from the few women or PoC in our office.
Now I can easily see how at least one black coworker would be offended by these people animatedly discussing how the "slave" is not correctly following the "master", and how it might affect their work day, week, or month in a really bad way.
In general I have seen that people who think more about the language they use and how it might affect others seem to make better, nicer coworkers. That's really the primary reason I support these changes now.
> Note: when the screwup was, say, due to people from our TX helpdesk, they would never say “Oh, those Texans screwed it up”
I can't speak for everyone everywhere, obviously - all teams are different and have their own attitudes - but I did some work in India with a tech support team and the phrase "the American's screwed it up" was used a reasonable amount in the cases we looked at.
For whatever it's worth - which, again, isn't much other than to say that any individual (you, me, etc.) experience isn't a set rule, at least one my U.S. team the women (including PoC) complained about the India team's work significantly more often than the men, though I think this was because some of the men happened to interact more with the India team and so got to know them a bit better (there were exceptions in all directions, but I'm just saying majorities here).
I think it has much less to do on both ends with any kind of actual bias and more with the ease to blame the team "over there" as opposed to people next to you - people blamed teams in other parts of their own building (U.S. and India alike) just as quickly/often as ones overseas.
I'm not at all opposing complaining about another team's work. If it's not up to scratch, complain by all means! I have lots to complain about regarding our accounting department, for instance.
> at least one my U.S. team the women (including PoC) complained about the India team's work significantly more often than the men,
Yep, I don't see a direct contradiction here? Complaining is fine, using race/nationality-specific language is not.
Perhaps I should make it emphasize that the thing I disliked was using generally reductive term “Indians” which is much wider than the subset they are referring to, which is the specific set of people employed by their company who are working out of India. It could have included you, for instance! (even though my guess is that you're not Indian).
Your observation is curious to me, perhaps it was worded confusingly.
"I noticed that the same people who ... actively ridiculed it (just like I did) were the same people who would casually say things like “Oh those Indians screwed it up”..."
So you are saying that you noticed that if someone actively ridiculed these things before, that they were casually racist. I assume that you were not casually racist when you actively ridiculed these things.
So this means 3 or 4 things to me:
Initially, my first thought is that you admit that you yourself were part of the first group but deny the label you assigned to the second group to yourself.
In other words, it seems to me that you are making a generalisation of people's characters which is inaccurate as you yourself admit that it's inaccurate.
Or perhaps its okay to generalise if most of the people you observed had this pattern of behaviour, because it doesn't mean that the exceptions (including you) prove it false?
Or... is it that you were part of both groups 5 years ago and you and most people in the first group have changed over time to both accept these new terms and stopped using casual racist talk?
> Or... is it that you were part of both groups 5 years ago and you and most people in the first group have changed over time to both accept these new terms and stopped using casual racist talk.
Yep, this. I agree that me arguing for the use of "master" and "slave" in 2014 was likely racist, and would have made a black coworker uncomfortable.
IMO I think it's important and useful to acknowledge when your language has been racist in the past. I think this acknowledgement is what most people shy away from, instead preferring to retreat into ever more complicated arguments about why they are right or the “I never meant...” defense.
Why does that offend anyone?
Its just a terminology to describe behaviour of two components.
It doesn't endorse or propagate slavery. I have never heard of an argument that HDDs have masters and slaves so people should too.
If I kill a child thread, does it mean I am 'pro choice' now?
Does creating white-list or black-list makes me become racist?
Those are just word, meaningless and powerless. What really matters is context and intentions, a social nuance that it seems like was thrown out with bath water long time ago.
Names change all the time. Leader / follower and primary / secondary are better for a lot of things, anyway. Even ignoring the social issue, master and slave are not great terms for how they are used. Frankly, I find it disturbing that so many developers are so attached to the master and slave terminology. It’s like the tech industry’s version of the confederate flag.
It is not an attachment to the words themselves it is a reaction to the idea that words have some kind of implied sinister meaning outside of the context in which they are used.
And yes, I use the word "sinister" deliberately - why aren't we banning the use of this word on behalf of left-handed people?
Words get their meaning from common understanding, common usage and most importantly context.
Agreed. Further, in most instances master/slave terminology is quite misleading with the master and slave doing similar work and commonly the master doing even more work. Leader/follower and primary/replica are much better terminology from a purely technical perspective. Its a plus that we also get to remove these two awful words.
> Frankly, I find it disturbing how attached so many developers are so attached to the master and slave terminology.
I was about to write that too. I'm not quite sure if I find the change necessary - but who am I to raise my word against it. I'm a white guy, it is obvious why master/slave has negative connotations and that's enough for me to let them decide.
I just listened to a podcast about "whiteness studies" maybe that enforced my opinion on this - but why would I - a white guy - would want to criticize this discussion. Be open, be welcome, accept diversity is a main rule in many projects. Why would I not want to change something that others consider harmful(especially something as simple as wording)
So you're not entitled to an opinion? That's the sort of self-deprecation that the far left wants you to have, and I say this as a non-White myself.
Read up on world history, not just American history, and you'll see that slavery spanned not just Blacks, but all sorts of races, including whites.
> but why would I - a white guy - would want to criticize this discussion
Because it's past the point where it became absurd, nothing to do with you being white or otherwise. I'm all for treating people properly and with respect and dignity, but at the same time lets not lose our minds here.
> it is obvious why master/slave has negative connotations
how? it only represents a kind of relationship (a terrible one, yes) between people. But it's only a historic terminology.
Killer is a word that, following that logic, has negative connotations and it is used when people say "that's a killer feature". Stopping using those terms won't make past events to disappear. At worst, they'll be forgotten, making it possible for history to repeat itself.
I find your deeply uncharitable assumption of why people use and prefer to use certain words unnecessarily hostile, and worth fighting. You want to only look at the context for people who oppose these words, and not at all for the people who want to keep them or their utility. I repudiate your goals, whatever euphemism you try to couch it in, e.g. "disturbed".
Why are people failing to grasp that languages have context? Twitter, GitHub and others are clearly lacking some "mastery" of language semantics, such as homonyms.
Perhaps we should be lobbying for better English education? Nah screw that, let's adopt a simplified version of the English language that removes any emotion or chance of ambiguity... I'm sure an author came up with a candidate language in the late 40s
Readit News
This sounds like an attempt to divert the public attention during the Corona + police violence crises the US is currently undergoing.
... and all of this is not to say what I think about the use of these terms. I'm of two minds about that actually.
Words have different impact to different people. It doesn't cost us anything to use "isolated" node rather than an "orphan" node, but it made the dev feel less excluded.
If I'm a muslim who doesn't drink alcohol, and people I'm working with keep talking about having a beer and "what? you really don't drink". Does that mean everyone should stop drinking alcohol?.
Yes different words have different meanings, but once you start tinkering with this, where do you draw a line in the sand?
When I read the tiltle the first thing I thought about was "Man in the middle" attacks which belongs to the security field. How do you rename this? "woman in the middle"? doesn't this sound sexist? wouldn't some guys use this to have sexist jokes with their female colleagues and make matters worse?
I'm genuinly thinking out loud here.
Racism and discrimination is real, but we shouldn't conflate them with unfair powerstructures. We need to level the playing field and speak up against bullying.
Sufficed to say; as my mother used to tell me constantly: life is kind of unfair.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to make things fairer of course!
There are some things I generally agree with- I take an opposition position often because people should understand that changing the status quo should come with strong and valid reasons; there is a lot of institutional change that people ask for and it comes at some level of cost, so it's not something we should do with complete frivoloty.
Also, when it comes to certain terms (Allowlist/Denylist); these are sometimes simply better at conveying what things _do_ and terminology changes for those things can stand on those merits alone.
All that is to say: perceived offence, is a very poor reason to change.
Not because I'm arguing that people need to suck it up or even that there isn't some level of anguish, but because inherently it has no end. There is no line you can draw. I'm not even saying that "it's a slippery slope" I'm saying that the minute you draw a line you exclude people.
As an example of why you can't draw lines:
I grew up poor, I might get offended if someone referred to something as 'being in poor condition'; thus you may, on my behalf, want to remove that word.
Many people in the world do not have feet, and thus, the word 'football' might remind them of the trauma of losing their feet (or never having had feet).
I feel like it's worth mentioning here that 'bot' comes from 'robot' which has roots in the Czech language for "forced labour".
Not to mention master/slave are clear in terminology, one instructs, the other obeys, it is terminology that has existed for literally thousands of years (and yes, it is an atrocity when it happens to people). I would also caution strongly about suggesting that it has racial motivations as, of course, black people are not exclusively slaves- even today there are more slaves than at any point in history; and I can assure you, they're not all black.[0]
It would help immensely to quantify the impact of these kinds of changes, asking the affected community what they think/feel; that would kill a lot of the discontent around "virtue signalling white people" which is part of the current discussion.
I feel like it doesn't need to be said, but words are polyphasic, they have multiple meanings depending on context, altering terminology brings about the euphemism treadmill[1] -- generally speaking the hate in our hearts is the issue, not the words we speak; and restrictions on language do nothing to curb that hatred if it exists.
New words or phrases will be created to skirt the rules and then we're back at the same place, with less words in our vocabulary.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/25/modern-slavery-...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Evolution
But the etymology of "blacklist" so far as I know and can Google is not to do with race and it's use and understood meaning is not to do with race. How then can it be racist?
I have heard others argue that it's the implication that black is bad - but it's not as simple as that. "Whiteknighting" can be used negatively. "Bad" can literally mean "good". Come on.
This especially goes for "grandfathered" - what on earth is wrong with this?
However, now I'm all for it.
What has changed? Over working in tech for a while, I noticed some patterns in my coworkers' behavior. I noticed that the same people who didn't switch over to saying "primary" and "replica" back in 2015-ish, and when it started becoming more common, and in fact, actively ridiculed it (just like I did) were the same people who would casually say things like “Oh those Indians screwed it up” while talking about problems with an overseas helpdesk. They didn't even consider that I, as someone of Indian descent who was apparently "all right" in their view would be offended by this (Note: when the screwup was, say, due to people from our TX helpdesk, they would never say “Oh, those Texans screwed it up”). Oh, and I never heard this kind of stuff from the few women or PoC in our office.
Now I can easily see how at least one black coworker would be offended by these people animatedly discussing how the "slave" is not correctly following the "master", and how it might affect their work day, week, or month in a really bad way.
In general I have seen that people who think more about the language they use and how it might affect others seem to make better, nicer coworkers. That's really the primary reason I support these changes now.
I can't speak for everyone everywhere, obviously - all teams are different and have their own attitudes - but I did some work in India with a tech support team and the phrase "the American's screwed it up" was used a reasonable amount in the cases we looked at.
For whatever it's worth - which, again, isn't much other than to say that any individual (you, me, etc.) experience isn't a set rule, at least one my U.S. team the women (including PoC) complained about the India team's work significantly more often than the men, though I think this was because some of the men happened to interact more with the India team and so got to know them a bit better (there were exceptions in all directions, but I'm just saying majorities here).
I think it has much less to do on both ends with any kind of actual bias and more with the ease to blame the team "over there" as opposed to people next to you - people blamed teams in other parts of their own building (U.S. and India alike) just as quickly/often as ones overseas.
> at least one my U.S. team the women (including PoC) complained about the India team's work significantly more often than the men,
Yep, I don't see a direct contradiction here? Complaining is fine, using race/nationality-specific language is not.
Perhaps I should make it emphasize that the thing I disliked was using generally reductive term “Indians” which is much wider than the subset they are referring to, which is the specific set of people employed by their company who are working out of India. It could have included you, for instance! (even though my guess is that you're not Indian).
"I noticed that the same people who ... actively ridiculed it (just like I did) were the same people who would casually say things like “Oh those Indians screwed it up”..."
So you are saying that you noticed that if someone actively ridiculed these things before, that they were casually racist. I assume that you were not casually racist when you actively ridiculed these things.
So this means 3 or 4 things to me:
Initially, my first thought is that you admit that you yourself were part of the first group but deny the label you assigned to the second group to yourself.
In other words, it seems to me that you are making a generalisation of people's characters which is inaccurate as you yourself admit that it's inaccurate.
Or perhaps its okay to generalise if most of the people you observed had this pattern of behaviour, because it doesn't mean that the exceptions (including you) prove it false?
Or... is it that you were part of both groups 5 years ago and you and most people in the first group have changed over time to both accept these new terms and stopped using casual racist talk?
Yep, this. I agree that me arguing for the use of "master" and "slave" in 2014 was likely racist, and would have made a black coworker uncomfortable.
IMO I think it's important and useful to acknowledge when your language has been racist in the past. I think this acknowledgement is what most people shy away from, instead preferring to retreat into ever more complicated arguments about why they are right or the “I never meant...” defense.
Deleted Comment
It doesn't endorse or propagate slavery. I have never heard of an argument that HDDs have masters and slaves so people should too.
If I kill a child thread, does it mean I am 'pro choice' now?
Does creating white-list or black-list makes me become racist?
Those are just word, meaningless and powerless. What really matters is context and intentions, a social nuance that it seems like was thrown out with bath water long time ago.
I looked at article and taking offense at some of the words for which changes have been proposed by Twitter is really far-fetched. Some examples:
- Grandfathered -> legacy status
- Sanity check -> quick check, confidence check, coherence check
- Dummy value -> placeholder value, sample value
Is there really a plausible case for somebody to be offended by the phrase "sanity check"?
Dead Comment
And yes, I use the word "sinister" deliberately - why aren't we banning the use of this word on behalf of left-handed people?
Words get their meaning from common understanding, common usage and most importantly context.
In context these words are fine.
Deleted Comment
I was about to write that too. I'm not quite sure if I find the change necessary - but who am I to raise my word against it. I'm a white guy, it is obvious why master/slave has negative connotations and that's enough for me to let them decide.
I just listened to a podcast about "whiteness studies" maybe that enforced my opinion on this - but why would I - a white guy - would want to criticize this discussion. Be open, be welcome, accept diversity is a main rule in many projects. Why would I not want to change something that others consider harmful(especially something as simple as wording)
So you're not entitled to an opinion? That's the sort of self-deprecation that the far left wants you to have, and I say this as a non-White myself.
Read up on world history, not just American history, and you'll see that slavery spanned not just Blacks, but all sorts of races, including whites.
> but why would I - a white guy - would want to criticize this discussion
Because it's past the point where it became absurd, nothing to do with you being white or otherwise. I'm all for treating people properly and with respect and dignity, but at the same time lets not lose our minds here.
how? it only represents a kind of relationship (a terrible one, yes) between people. But it's only a historic terminology.
Killer is a word that, following that logic, has negative connotations and it is used when people say "that's a killer feature". Stopping using those terms won't make past events to disappear. At worst, they'll be forgotten, making it possible for history to repeat itself.
Perhaps we should be lobbying for better English education? Nah screw that, let's adopt a simplified version of the English language that removes any emotion or chance of ambiguity... I'm sure an author came up with a candidate language in the late 40s