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Comment by zyxley | Hacker News Reader

"Mention of rape" and "discussion of rape in enough detail to cause discomfort" are not the same thing.

I'm sure we can find someone who is uncomfortable at the mere mention of the word. Not that we should necessarily accommodate such extremes, but how do you decide where to draw the line?

You work together to find a reasonable balance between accommodating the most common and severe trauma triggers without shutting down general discussion.

For example, there are people who were raped by a man with a deep voice and are triggered by men with deep voices. That's a really shitty situation to be in, but it's unreasonably onerous to expect deep-voiced men to warn everyone in the vicinity (perhaps with a sign) before speaking, especially since there are very few people with that particular trigger. Asking people to give a warning before they intend to discuss rape in detail is not onerous, and it helps a rather larger number of people.

Edit: I'd really like to know why this is getting downvoted.

I actually know someone who just shuts down and freezes for a few minutes at the mere mention of the word "rape". This person has made their discomfort known to their friends and requested the word be avoided in conversation, which is an easy enough request to comply with out of courtesy.

Note that this is a group of people drawn from 4chan and adjacent communities whose primary socialization is voip and online games, all areas known for a "challenging" discussion environment. The line seems to be, in this case, that one can reasonably expect to carve out a "safe space" among family and friends, but not total strangers.

If we try to have a culture that considers trigger warnings a courtesy worth extending, rather than having a policy saying yes/no, then the question of where the line should be drawn can be answered by each instructor as they see fit.

It's likely that a few obviously triggering things can be labelled as such and good can be derived from that even if we can't or shouldn't label everything.

You guess and invite people to correct you if you're wrong? How is anything that requires judgement decided? Eventually there will be an accepted norm but at the beginning there never is.

That's a nice solution if everything is more or less working properly. The problem is, "What do you do when they tell you you're wrong about everything?"

One of the links in the article was to an article by a law professor talking about the difficulty of teaching rape and sexual assault law. The point being made there was that the entire subject has become off-limits -- literally, a large number of her colleagues had simply elected not to teach it anymore.

If your complaint is that, today, students are demanding an abuse of the notion of trigger warnings and safe spaces to effectively prevent exposure to potentially upsetting discussions, and that we are harming the long-term development of students by doing so, then by definition, you believe the corrections you'd get would essentially take the form "bring back all the trigger warnings we had when you started this process".

That might be true, but there are a variety of cases where we've decided to stop using a word in general in order to avoid causing undue distress; "slave" (i/r/t "master" and "slave") in a computing context is now generally always phrased in another way, for example.

That's mostly self-contained on Github. Where busybodies have little else to do but open issues on projects in the name of social justice without ever contributing to the project itself in a meaningful manner. See: /r/gitinaction

The word "master" was also under fire not too long ago. They replaced it with "head". I'm honestly surprised a certain political group haven't jumped at the opportunity to get "head" replaced due to being too phalic.

[0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3464182/Harvard-Univ...

> "slave" (i/r/t "master" and "slave") in a computing context is now generally always phrased in another way, for example

I need to educate myself. What do people use instead of "slave device" in computing?

Databases have been using master/replica lately, which, fortuitously is (usually) actually slightly more precise anyway, and so is strictly better in every way

The projects I've seen have gone with "leader/follower" https://github.com/django/django/commit/8a95b4fca793eeb8adce...

So, the solution is to literally use Führer instead of Master?

That’s a great choice, not only reprinting tons of literature, changing tons of code, but also choosing a Nazi analogy instead!

Every word triggers someone, society can’t be expected to adapt to anyone.

And I’ll continue to use Master/Slave, and continue to support the Sinter Klaas and Zwarte Piet tradition in the Netherlands.

No, it's literally to use 'leader'. Not a German word that has a rather specific meaning when used in languages outside of German (although I suppose it's at least somewhat loaded in Germany too).

It’s severely loaded in German, and how’d you teach students about "leader/follower" without translating that part?

There’s something like other languages, which you translate to for documentation or teaching purposes, which means the German material will either have only this one in english (which leads to everyone immediately realizing why), or just using Führer.

That’s not in any way solving the issue.

For every word, there is a context in which it is offensive. Just stop caring about that, instead of trying to do the impossible for no benefit.

I can't remember which, but I saw one project change to "primary/secondary".

"Servant". I prefer "slave".

That just gives me an intense urge to use master/slave all over the place.

I've went the opposite direction. I now describe the organization of a typical plantation in mid-19th century America as being run by a white leader with black followers doing the work.

That's the kind of absurd oversensitivity that opponents of trigger warnings are against.

Very much not generally nor always.

Source: I am a professional high-volume database guy doing this stuff since the mid 1990's and still deeply embedded with it now.

There are projects that have chosen other nouns, and they have ridden the wave of publicity around this, but by my estimation* more than 90% of database-related projects still use master/slave.

*as in I haven't done any formal record-keeping, nor will I.

Citation? I remember someone going around with PRs to change things and being roundly laughed out.

At least in the world of electrical engineering, you are quite incorrect. There are masters and slaves all over the place around here.

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