Scientists move to strip offensive names from journals, prizes, and more

>“Noosing” is a long-standing term used by herpetologists for catching lizards. But for McGee, a Black scientist, the term is unnerving, calling to mind horrific lynchings of Black people by white people in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. [...] McGee has urged her colleagues to change the parlance to “lassoing,” which she says also more accurately describes how herpetologists catch lizards with lengths of thread.

So I found a video[1] on what exactly it is, and sure enough, it's literally catching a lizard by tying a noose around its head. If someone is going to be set off by the word "noosing", aren't they going to be set off by the actual act of noosing?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkcOpPRfeug

A lot of words changed their meaning in time, or have problematic etymology. For example, 'slave' comes from Slav (which comes from 'słowo' a Slavic word for... 'word'). Yet, we know the difference.

In Polish: the word 'kobieta' (woman) comes from 'kobyła' ('mare') and until the 19th century was derogatory (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kobieta.). Conversely, the word 'dziwka' (whore) comes from 'dziewka' (an archaic variant of the maid).

Moreover, in many cases, etymology is less known. How should we decide which name to 'rectify'?

...

For names based on scientist surnames, it is tricker. If we give a prize "in honor of X" is controversial if X held view that now we consider abhorrent. (Side note: virtually all people who died more than 100 years ago had such views, to various extent.)

Not a hill I am going to die on, but I really don't support this movement of politicizing science, nor to take these scientists out of their time context and measure them and their legacy according to recent insights and sensibilities. And how long do we wait? Do we ban Galileo after the Church found him guilty of blasphemy? Or wait a 100 years to see if he was ultimately right?

I fear it is not going to stop at removing their names from prizes and buildings. I think their data sets or scientific contributions are next. As the philosopher of science states: "consider the man and his data set, too.".

We are removing words (blacklist/whitelist, master/slave) and changing names of conferences (NIPS), not because these words are directly sexual or racist, but because some may take them out of context, and they indirectly offend their sensibilities.

From the problematic Pearson article on The Problem of Alien Immigration Into Great Britain, Illustrated by an Examination of Russian and Polish Jewish Children:

> The purport of this memoir is to discuss whether it is desirable in an already crowded country like Great Britain to permit indiscriminate immigration, or, if the conclusion be that it is not, on what grounds discrimination should be based. If there is to be discrimination it may be based on purely quantitative considerations-such as largely rule at present admission of immigrants into the United States, where percentages of each racial element only are admitted per month; or it may be based solely on qualitative considerations-all immigrants up to a certain level of mentality, physique or health may be admitted.

> Here again the question of standard for admission is a very important one. It may be fixed so high that practically few are admitted, but the few may be those who are so much above the average intelligence of a nation, that they are a national gain. Or a community map admit individuals of special craft capacity, as, for example, the Huguenot silk-weavers, German clockmakers, Italian tunnel-workers, or Dutch engravers.

> We cannot disregard the advantages which in the past such immigrants have brought not only to our handicrafts, but to our arts. The argument for the admission of such immigrants has, we fear, been misused in the past in order to obtain a supply of cheap labour, because the foreign immigrants have not been subjected to any rigid entrance tests.

Do we want to forbid, downgrade, or demonize such a speech now?

I’m unsure how to feel about this. On the one hand, I can most definitely sympathize with feelings that a name, no matter how inoffensive to some groups, might be deeply offensive to others. However, in my mind there’s the question of standardization to be considered. Science (unlike the software world) can’t change every few years (at least it shouldn’t). Some of these definitions have become so ingrained in existing literature and cultural knowledge over the decades that you have to ask what happens if you suddenly decide to change something; you have to wonder what effects it can have on a field if something is suddenly and forcefully renamed (students can get confused, older but sill quite valuable reference texts can be made confusing to read).

I also had issue with how the article decided to present its opening argument, by saying that an African American felt disturbed when they went to “noose” lizards in a group of white people. While I absolutely agree that this would be in bad taste if they were at all implying doing this same thing to people, the context I got is that it was a purely academic term derived from the shape of the tool they’re using, and NOT at all oriented towards the act itself or the specific things they’re trying to catch. To me that sounds very similar to someone saying that programmers referring to “killing the child” is offensive, when everyone knows the act is not related at all to the death of actual children and is not trying to make light of situations where that happens. It’s a historical and technically functional reference, nothing more.

To be clear, I don’t feel that all of these causes are wrong. I’m just worried that in our haste to make symbolic changes, we’re pushing towards alterations that only have an effect years later when everyone that would be able to explain the changes is dead. I’m also worried that these very symbolic changes will be used as a band-aid and aren’t addressing the deeper issues at play here, and that they might even distract from what actually needs to be done.

May seem slightly off the subject, but is related IMHO.

I have gradually started to discriminate against people who are very active in social media in work and personal life. I'm relatively infrequently involved in hiring process, but when I'm going to work with someone I'm really strict about their mental hygiene.

First thing I look is how active they are in the social media, how much influencing and self promotion they are doing. If it's above the average, I think it's negative and weighs against their good qualities. People who are caught in social media are more like than others to lose their common sense. Moving lightening fast fads and internet BS into the real life is not OK.

We can spend ~decades rooting out every potential English synonym that could potentially offend someone, or we could just start over with a 'clean', 'pure' language with none of that pesky baggage.

In my opinion, this entire exercise leads to the wholesale rejection of the English language by the self-appointed 'elite'. Get ahead of the curve now, learn to speak Lojban today. It even has 'ban' right in the title!

Computer science also has this problem. People talk about slaves and masters without any consideration of what that may mean to others, which makes it clear that is a science done from the point of view of white groups. It should not be a big effort to abolish such unnecessary language from our papers.

I'm a degreed chemist, and I say this movement is bullshit. Laputa called and wants it back.

Having read the article, and done a bit more reading, I think a lot of the changes described here are good.

Marion Sims’s accomplishments are utterly tainted by the absolutely nightmarish ways he conducted his research. Anything that pretends he’s some sort of hero - including naming buildings after him - can go away and I won’t be too upset.

Likewise, Fisher’s accomplishments were great, but he was employed by eugenics organizations, actively pursued legislation to forcibly sterilize 10% of the population, and wrote essays supporting Nazi eugenics programs during and after WW2. Personally, I wouldn’t be too fond of walking past a mural every day of the guy who thinks that I, and anybody else who shares my line, should be “removed” from the breeding stock by whatever means necessary. We’re not striking him from history or anything - just removing the monuments glorifying him.

I also don’t think it’s the end of the world if we remove a slur from the rarely used scientific names of some obscure species.

Sure, there will always be people who try to take things too far. For example, I’m not sold that ‘noosing’ needs to go - but it doesn’t sound like that one actually has much support. But the changes that the article describes as actually having sufficient support to pass seem reasonable, at least to me.

> At the University of South Carolina, officials on 19 June moved to remove the name of physician J. Marion Sims from a women’s dormitory. He is known for inventing the Sims vaginal speculum.

Honestly, unless it’s a pure coincidence that they chose the women’s dormitory for the obstetrics doctor, that seems somewhat offensive to begin with. You’re not being clever.

If we don't stop naming things after people we're going to have the same problem every century as our rules about acceptable beliefs change and the beliefs of dead people don't.

Ahh yes, this is exactly what the BLM protestors asked for.

what does this actually accomplish? it reminds of twitter removing terms like 'blacklist', 'slave' and 'master' from their repo or whatever, as if renaming things will solve racism somehow.

it's all so tiresome

As long as we have the Roman alphabet and English language, a vast cloud of guilt will overhang humanity.

A related anecdote: I have a family member with granulomatosis with polyangiitis, abbreviated GPA, but usually called Wegner’s after the scientist that did most of the research on the disease.

Several years ago, someone pointed out that not only was Wegner a Nazi, a lot of his research was conducted on captive Jews. There was a push to start calling the disease GPA exclusively, but to this day most physicians call it Wegner’s. The inertia of the existing name and the fact that most of the world benefited from his research while only the Jews were harmed seems to be enough to keep his name in use.

Similarly, while established terms like “noosing” a lizard may be tangentially related to racism, I don’t think there’s enough will among scientists to change the term. Just because one person is offended doesn’t mean the term is bad. If the way you catch a lizard is by slipping a loop of string around its neck then it’s noosing. If you throw the loop of string and catch the lizard at a distance then it should be called lassoing. But don’t use less correct terms just because of a perceived (but non-existent) slight.

My own field of statistics has struggled with this, as noted in the article. The general way of thinking is to accept that there were some great statisticians in the past that had wacky ideas. My own dissertation rests on work that Ronald Fisher did. I’m fine with taking down a stained glass window of Fisher but I am also comfortable talking about Fisher’s information matrix.

Where do we draw the line? https://www.history.com/.amp/news/albertin-einstein-racist-x...

Whether some word 'evokes' a 'racist past' is really up to the person hearing it. Unfortunately we've created a system where power flows to those who express the most psychic pain. Well, if you reward something you get more of it - pain included.

Also

'scientists' -> 'activists'

'offensive names' -> 'names called offensive by some'

Hey dang, have y’all ever analyzed the voting patterns of newly-registered accounts? Sometimes when rage-bait like this pops immediately to the top of the front page it frankly reeks of coordinated inauthentic activity.

Unspoken in all of this is that one would think that history started in 1777 and didn't happen anywhere but America.

The world has a long and difficult history, and we could do this ad nauseum.

Everyone has a right to feel unsettled, but that doesn't mean that everyone else doesn't have a right to use common language.

Slavery has existed for thousands of years in every form, in every place on the planet, and it's touched everyone in one way or another.

Confederate statues are one thing, common language is another.

" The names, she says, “make visible the values and priorities and beliefs of an institution.”"

This is Orwellian: "He who controls the present, controls the past, he who controls the past controls the future."

Abraham Lincoln, by any reasonable definition, was a White Supremacist, and so was George Washington. Good look fighting over that.

This is not a 'dangling thread', it's the entire sweater - and it will be used by totalitarian advocates to shape the future in their own image.