Hacker News Reader

Comment by glitcher | Hacker News Reader

I was hesitant to submit this article because it seems extremely insignificant in the broader context of current societal changes.

But then it made me ponder the wide extent to which current events are causing people of all walks of life to question and reevaluate even the smallest details of everything around us. Do I think that the proposed changes would make a noticeable difference to society? Probably not. Ultimately do I care if this specific effort succeeds or fails? Nope, don't really care either way.

However, I do think the broader discussion about questioning how we use language, and where certain colloquialisms originated, is important. But I do see opinions at both extreme ends of this topic which are not trying to have good faith discussions, and instead are focused on the absolute worst case scenarios. Maybe the reactions to this story are even more significant than the story itself.

View on HN

It's a good article. Thanks for submitting it! Perhaps reflexively, I tend to disagree with its conclusions, but it certainly makes me doubt myself. I was going to resubmit it if it didn't gain traction. I do think you should have gone with something closer to the original title, though. It doesn't quite fit exactly, but it does if you leave out a comma and one word: "Let’s dump master-slave terms: they’re vague and we’re better off without them". Maybe you still able to edit it?

> Maybe the reactions to this story are even more significant than the story itself.

That's the problem though - by focusing undue politicized attention onto an ultimately irrelevant piece of terminology opinion, we've detracted from the real problem at hand (regardless if think the real issue at hand is systemic racism oppressing minorities or "SJW"s destroying our institutions).

When you attach the emotional baggage of known hotbed political issues to trivial things asking for people's opinion,we know from the works of psychologists like Jon Haidt and stuff, that these opinions quickly enter into the realm of the sacred. This forces us to first have a visceral emotion reaction, then find all sorts of reasons to back-up our initial response without any regard for counterpoints.

In other words, invitations to bikeshed like this one can't lead to any meaningful or sensible debate because there was never at any substance to debate - just emotional baggage from a much more politicized topic that keeps everyone arguing

BTW, you can recognize this as a cognitive trap to bikeshed while missing the point by considering the hypothetical scenario if a developer one day decided to up and just publish some patch notes to the effect of "master records now renamed to release records to be more semantic", would anyone bat an eye?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com