ESR: Slaves to speech suppression are masters of nothing | Hacker News Reader

ESR: Slaves to speech suppression are masters of nothing

esr.ibiblio.org

18 pointsarto12 comments

Was in a debugging scenario related to hierarchical nodes of data we identified as 'parents' and 'children'. Something was happening in a business process that left behind 'children' without 'parents'. I called them 'orphans'.

Out of left field: a teammate who was adopted raised such a stink about inclusiveness in our naming conventions that the whole project suffered. I'm shaking my head even recalling this.

I no longer use anthropomorphism in unfamiliar company.

On the contrary, claiming that using words like "diversity" or "inclusiveness" is tantamount to "meaning to do 'you' harm" is itself harmful.

If a population is truly diverse then it must include both those who intend harm and those who do not. To not have both sides would be a monoculture.

I dig the sentiment. But why not use "leader" and "follower" instead? Multi-tiered hierarchies might use military ranks (private, sergeant, etc.) or titles of nobility (king, earl, duke, etc. which would probably confuse a lot of people)

I guess it would be different if this had happened more organically - like somebody started using "leader" & "follower" (which, incidentally, could just as easily be construed as offensive by somebody who was looking hard enough), and then somebody else followed suit until it became ubiquitous and everybody else adopted the terminology. It's the heavy-handed, "you must do as we say" that bothers us.

The thing that bothers me the most about it is that the changes are almost always proposed by someone who isn't actually part of the offended group, but wants to make it seem like they are fighting widespread oppression. For example, there used to be a site called genie.sexy that was a 3rd party fan page for the genie text editor. I saw a male on another site complain that the term "sexy" might be offensive to women, so they started bugging the genie maintainers about it until the site was taken down, even though the site had no affiliation at all with the project. Sometimes the requests are also just rediculous, like a project that changed "blacklist" and "whitelist" because they believe that it associates "black" with bad, thus causing a bias against black people.

One challenge is that there is so much distressing input for black people (and immigrants etc.) that, if you get started, where would you stop? "Don't get me started" is a real thing. A second challenge is that, as a black person, it feels like you're only just barely succeeding at passing in the Tech world. If you highly your blackness, you risk disrupting your success at getting people to see you as a coder first.

> f you highly your blackness, you risk disrupting your success at getting people to see you as a coder first.

Really interested to hear more of your thoughts/experiences on this point.

The same ideological mindset that agitates for the current change also has issues with many sorts of ingrained hierarchies in general. They're probably find titles of nobility gendered and thus 'problematic'. Euphemism treadmills never stop.

OP: "the demand for suppression of 'politically' offensive terms is ... a desire to make speech and thought malleable to political control." But OP feels that using speech to make thought comfortable with owning slaves and thereby supporting the political support for slave-holding is OK. Noobs routinely ask, "The term is WHAT? But slavery is bad." The answer is, "Not in this case. This is a case where slavery is OK." After years of living with this language, this (admittedly small) support for slavery no longer disturbs the experienced programmer. The programmer will even say that, on this side, there is no thought control in the language, but on that side, there is.

Is there any evidence for your claim? Do programmers who view the word "slave" and "master" in a programming context poll higher on support for slavery? Should we expect that the ones pushing for changes, because they see the words "slave" and "master" more often than normal on their own computer screens (because they're in the habit of agitating for changes surrounding them), are secret would-be slave-owners because the words are infecting their brains?

Slave slave slave slave slave. Master master master master master.

By how many fractions of a percentage point have I increased your propensity for oppression now that you've viewed that?

All this language control is an attempt to cargo-cult one's way to an imagined utopia. There's this idea that a perfect tolerant society, created ex nihilo, would obviously not have words for slave and master, so in order to get our own society towards it we should expunge those words. It's no different from a cargo cult in that it thinks that the outward effects can be summoned to bring about their typical cause.

If there is no effect, then what is the OP's problem?

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