I wonder if this is an example of not knowing your audience (or rather assuming one's self represents a wider audience than it does).
The people vouching for this at Google are likely product marketing managers, public relations folks, social media managers, etc. All they do is write corporate garbage all day, and much like we have "nit"s in PR's for formatting, variable names, etc; they likely have similar reviews that get flagged for "non-inclusive language" or whatever this is. So they have brilliant idea: the Code people use auto linters/formatters that we enable by default (hey gofmt) and everyone loves it, how about we do the same for the Prose people!
Basically: "All I write is corporate garbage, and all the writing I consume is corporate garbage, and all my coworkers only write corporate garbage, therefore everyone would love a corporate garbage-ifyer!"
This explanation rings a lot more true to me than the rest of this thread. Everyone here seems to be looking into shadows for the woke gestapo, when I'd be willing to bet that this explanation is a lot closer to how this tool actually came to exist.
It's a little of both. There's enough woke influence over corporate communication to drive all employees to want to avoid non-inclusive words in docs. At that point, this becomes useful even for employees who don't agree with it—I'd rather just have the word flagged now and fix it instead of going back and forth later.
However, the net result is that words are driven out of the language even if everyone involved in the document wouldn't care.
If it weren't for the "shadows of woke gestapo" as you call them, these things would never make it to prod because someone would "this ain't right" and when every PM is getting some amount of that feedback it would be heard. The fact that everyone working at Google is on the easy money train and doesn't want to upset that probably has a lot to do with people not speaking up as well.
There's a market for 'help you write english better' tools that spot things like grammar errors.
For example, if my english-as-a-second-language eastern European subordinates feel self-conscious about their english, they might find an automated tool helpful - where a professional journalist would be better served by their own judgement.
The 'inclusive language' thing is just weird though.
Just like Google is not an actual search engine but a "recommendation" engine that prods users into getting recommended just what Google needs to recommend ("did you mean...?") this is not an actual writing assistant but a "write (and think) the Google way" mould
Actually I've seen an English linter to help you maintain a passive voice for papers, remove waffle words and unnecessary fluff, etc. I'm not sure I can find the exact one I'm thinking of, but wasn't too bad overall, it spotted errors and made helpful suggestions. It was cool too, because it would read from stdin and integrated into vim pretty well with a few lines in my config.
I do think there is more activism at play than you might. At a minimum it provides the fear mechanism that prevents employees from challenging the work, particularly if they aren't even on the project (why stick your neck out?).
However, the code format for prose analogy illuminates the writing quality angle brilliantly.
I'm sure I'm not alone in having distinct communication modes in work documents, each with their own reasons to be excluded from the ML dataset:
1. Keep it simple -- when achieved it is highly effective for communicating a work memo, but would be terribly dry if used in auto suggestions for an English major struggling through crafting moving prose.
2. Lazily verbose -- going long is more expedient than crafting a compact message. It's mostly unrefined garbage. (exhibit a this comment)
3. Everything is awesome (positivity inflation) -- a deluge of great, love, awesome, wonderful, perfect, etc. all applied to far too many things, far too often.
Imagine if an ML code formatter included psudeo code inputs, or was given a data set of every local file change
(pre-commit) instead of what is sitting in a main branch? My Docs are filled with things that I'd never commit much less pass a code review.
If Google Docs was only used in corporate settings, and we wanted to double down on our drab corporate communication styles, I guess the feature would make some sense.
IMHO OK if the feature would actually provide explainations and it would be based on some sort of rulebook rather some random decision of individuals. I also would be fine if there is a warning if I use the word 'property owner' because some random internet user says that is deeply capitalistic. In the end I could decide if I want to follow the argument. Just nudging people to get away with a warning is bad and will lead to no warning. I doubt even that it will lead to a more inclusive world because no reflection is involved.
The problem for me is particularly that the combination of monopolies combined with AI that will learn from data largely filtered by those monopolies will generate some questionable gradients. So, yes, this might ultimately change language very quickly without much of human discourse over it. This will lead to language with less variation and arguably to a world that does not encourage variation and will be in effect less inclusive.
I don't understand what you are referring to when you say "this"; what is "this"? Are you referring to a specific statement by the parent poster, or something described in the OP?
I also don't understand whether the double-negative is intentional (and meant to cancel itself out, and become a positive), or if it is a colloquialism.
While I don't doubt that an intent of this is to promote empathy, I would need to see some evidence before I could be open to the possibility that that is its effect. Anecdotally, these things seem to incense anger and hatred- I've never heard anyone say that being language-policed made them a better person, but I have seen people behave in a way that suggests the opposite. Personally, I become less empathic when someone assumes authority over what I say or write.
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?
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 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.
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.
Why would you use the word filipinx when there’s already the gender neutral word Filipino? Also doesn’t filipinx exclude Filipinos outside of the American diaspora? Then what do you call Filipinos outside of that geographical area?
See, you’re digging your own semantic hole with all this political correctness.
I know "it's literally 1984" [1] is a meme but c'mon... This is ridiculous even for Google. The systematic deconstruction and sanitation of language so that it conforms to a particular group's ideological leanings is unacceptable, especially in the hand's of a mega corporation.
The biggest annoyance for me is that the word/woke policing throws out the most important thing: context.
We don’t punish people for crimes until we’ve had a look at the context and establish their specific intention (Strict liability withstanding) so why are we not doing the same with words and sentences?
Master/slave debacle is a prime example. Yes it can be used offensively. But for gods sake, look at the context! Annoys me that with all the injustice still prevalent in the world, they choose to fight this instead.
That seems like an odd example. The "specific intention" of the word "slave" in computing is unquestionably to draw an analogy to slavery, so if somebody objects to the word on the grounds that it references an actual atrocity, they're factually correct.
I think what you're trying to say is that people don't mean to be offensive when they reference slavery this way. And you're right about that. Similarly, if I ask someone how their mom is right after she died, I'm probably not trying to be hurtful. But not intending an outcome doesn't actually prevent you from getting that outcome. If somebody tells you their mom is dead, and you didn't mean to be hurtful, you won't keep asking after her, because now you're aware of the effect it has.
Exactly, that's the big problem with so many of these ideas - they ignore common sense, making them look like tone-deaf measures created in bad faith. Which they probably are.
I feel you. This is my biggest critique of the so-called "woke" language. Perhaps their intentions are good, but I fail to see how hiding behind inclusive language does anything to change the reality of the lives of people they claim to be helping in the first place.
Calling a "landlord" a proprietor (example from the article) does nothing to change the actual dynamic between landlord and tenant. You have only changed the symbols you use without affecting any meaningful change in the world. Maybe a devil's advocate would say, "Symbols evoke feelings evoke action and thus we are affecting people's actions". That's the strongest counter-argument I can think of, and it's not very convincing either. Not sure how a landlord would suddenly change how they act because they are now proprietors.
Yep, I had struggled down these lines too but the always lucid John McWhorter cleared things up for me, and as a linguist it's right up his alley.
"On metaphor, master is a useful example. The basic concept of the master as a leader or person of authority has extended into a great many metaphorical usages. One of them was its use as a title on plantations worked by slaves...That makes sensible the elimination of certain other uses of the word, which parallel and summon the slavery one...in the 1970s, such schools had just begun a call to stop having male teachers called "master" and female teachers called "teacher," in favor of having all instructors called simply "teacher"...This meant that young subordinates had been calling white men in positions of authority "master," after all—including, by the 1970s, more than a few black students. And today's call to stop referring to technology parts as "master" versus "slave" attachments follows in the same vein, as it directly channels what was so offensive about the slavery usage...However, other extensions of the word master do not meaningfully resemble the plantation one, and only a kind of obsession could explain spraying for them now. Are we to consider it racist to refer simply to mastering a skill? To master tape as opposed to dupes...The plantation meaning of master was one tributary of a delta of extensions of the word; it should go, but we need not fill in the entire delta."
And for emphasis I'm pulling this one out of the main block:
Probably severe nepotism with industry consulting or someone has some idealistic child in colleague and their guilt about neglected parenting made them force the issue as it has been adopted in some parts of the industry. At least official, never seen anyone use different terms by now and I don't even know the substitute. It is always something like this. But yeah, they certainly are white as the snow, so much is sure.
I spent many years in the bluest corner of a very blue state. But still I can't imagine any objection to the word "landlord" outside of (1) a right wing attempt to satirize the left, (2) a Google product brainstorming meeting, or (3) a rare sincere outlier or concern troll. In any of those cases I don't think this is necessary.
That said, if the word "landlord" organically fell out of favor and out of usage to be replaced by something else I wouldn't care. Language is always evolving, and usually we don't make a big deal out of it. It's mundane and can often be helpful. It doesn't have to become a proxy for culture war arguments if we don't make it one.
But to have Google (or any AI) in charge of this... just... no. Admittedly that's a common stance for me but I think it's well justified here anyway.
Landlord gets hit from multiple sides; those who don't like that it contains "lord" which is a male term, those who don't like that landlords exist, and those who don't like that the concept of owning land exists.
Sure the origin is to do with Lords but landlord isn't male, anyone can be a landlord, pretending it's gendered is just lying to try and be offended. Presumably, such people think the word coward references bovines as it includes the word cow.
I don't like that landlords exist, but that's an inordinately stupid reason to try and get rid of a word. Surely noone believes that by sensoring a word you get rid of that which the word describes.
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.
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?
> those who don't like that landlords exist, and those who don't like that the concept of owning land exists.
I think these two groups would prefer "landlord" over "proprietor" because "landlord" has a much more negative connotation and probably inspires a visceral reaction in anyone who's had a bad landlord. Only the "male" thing makes any sort of sense from a left wing POV.
I would be extremely surprised if this came from the left: most people I know relish the negative connotation of being able to describe someone as a landlord.
I would believe the GP's second hypothesis; it's hard to imagine who else would even think to substitute "property owner" for "landlord" (it's not even accurate!)
It's hard not to secretly suspect that some of these things arise that way-- satire that is so spot on that it gets adopted as the truth.
> and out of usage to be replaced by something else I wouldn't care
Fundamentally that's why language bullying works-- it doesn't matter what words are used so long as the communicating parties understand each other. Not only does it mean that it's not worth it to fight back, it makes anyone who does fight back against it look automatically suspect.
The same is true for a lot of other bullying: ignoring that its bullying deprives it of its power. Or, at least, it denies it of it's power until it doesn't.
But do we want to live in a world where our language is constantly being rewritten-- at a non-zero cost-- by bullies (and their automation)? Reasonable people could debate it.
Policing Language (and frequently changing it) is one of the levers of control that was outlined heavily by Orwell in 1984, with the concept of Doublespeak.
Now I know people are bored of parallels between reality and 1984, or Brave New World, or whatever other dystopia novels. They were written by authors not prophets after all.
Still, it's impossible for me not to think we're on our way when I read something like
"But do we want to live in a world where our language is constantly being rewritten-- at a non-zero cost-- by bullies"
> It's hard not to secretly suspect that some of these things arise that way-- satire that is so spot on that it gets adopted as the truth.
There have been many PR/issues on github that were either very likely, or certainly submitted by trolls, that have been accepted.
[1] Although nowadays it's common to see master/slave being replaced, back in 2015 it was not common, this one one of the first things that dropped that terminology. The fact that the user is called pcbro and has a picture of PC Principal from South Park, makes it somewhat likely that it was a troll.
[2] I think based on the language used is almost 100% certainly a troll
As possible a reason for #2 going wrong as any other. But #2 thinking they know what's best for humanity is an established enough pattern that I imagine it happens organically as well.
This link in the article is insanely, crazily, madly, insultingly sickening to anyone who's not a slave. As I read it I felt like it was some kind of parody of Orwell. Disgusting to tell someone what verbiage they use sincerely and in technical terms is now verboten because it's harmful. To whom? Crazy people?
Here’s an idea. American Big Tech should form a Uniban Consortium to streamline the process of adding and banning new harmful words of the month. Then your OS update could come with support for, say, Unicode 20.0 and Uniban 6.0: five new emojis and fifty new words banned!
Btw, the word main should probably be put on a future batch; too similar to “man” to be comfortable.
Yeah, the emoji manipulation of this is much more subversive and also continuously going on. Forbidding emojis which get converted to suggestiveness. We're left with eggplant and water droplets, which they know they can't remove, but they also are on guard against adding anything new that would allow more expressiveness in that area.
If they could they'd ban the letter X to prevent people typing "sex"
This guide is interesting in how it lists allegedly immoral language use, alongside with clear PR/legal/trademark directives which I don't give a fuck about, such as "don't use google as a verb". I'll google whatever I want, google PR, go suck an egg.
Also quite annoying how they simply tell us what to do, without justifying things. A lot of these would be quite hard to truly argue - i.e. "blind people... can't see things. why exactly is that metaphor inappropriate to talk about visibility?" So they just assume an authoritarian tone and just instruct us in how we should behave.
"Avoid using gray-box, graybox, or gray box to describe testing."
"grayed-out, greyed-out, gray out, grey out
Don't use. Instead, use unavailable."
WTF are these people on about.
Oh it's because they hate certain color words such as "black" and "white", words used by humans to indicate certain reflectivity properties of light; since it would be weird to only prohibit words which contain white or black, they just extend the prohibition to nearby related words.
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 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.
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.
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.
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....
Readit News
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!"
I appreciate you adding to the conversation.
However, the net result is that words are driven out of the language even if everyone involved in the document wouldn't care.
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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.
surely not? even a newspaper should be striving for an active voice, at least anytime the actor is known!
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.
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.
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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.
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I'm putting aside intentionally and just curious about how this actually encourages empathy?
Not hiring union-busting consultants to convince employees to not join a union against their best interests.
The author of the article still sees it as a necessity. They cannot leave people talking like they want 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.
Here is Kamala Harris, an Indian-Black American, pushing “Latinx”:
https://mobile.twitter.com/kamalaharris/status/1290733001320...
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.
See, you’re digging your own semantic hole with all this political correctness.
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[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
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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.
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
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.
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.
"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/
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 believe the GP's second hypothesis; it's hard to imagine who else would even think to substitute "property owner" for "landlord" (it's not even accurate!)
It's hard not to secretly suspect that some of these things arise that way-- satire that is so spot on that it gets adopted as the truth.
> and out of usage to be replaced by something else I wouldn't care
Fundamentally that's why language bullying works-- it doesn't matter what words are used so long as the communicating parties understand each other. Not only does it mean that it's not worth it to fight back, it makes anyone who does fight back against it look automatically suspect.
The same is true for a lot of other bullying: ignoring that its bullying deprives it of its power. Or, at least, it denies it of it's power until it doesn't.
But do we want to live in a world where our language is constantly being rewritten-- at a non-zero cost-- by bullies (and their automation)? Reasonable people could debate it.
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.
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
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=People%20of%...
Google wouldn’t be my first choice, but it’s nice that someone is able to dedicate attention to this.
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.
https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation
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.
If they could they'd ban the letter X to prevent people typing "sex"
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.
"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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I believe you just need to give it emotions.
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.
Google Docs will “warn you away from inappropriate words” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31086310 - April 2022 (964 comments)