Comment by thu2111 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thu2111 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It's worse. It was written by technical people, who are immersed in a dysfunctional culture in which they:

1. Believe in the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis even though it was discredited decades ago.

2. Don't realise their beliefs about language creating or eliminating racism/sexism/etc are pseudo-scientific bunkum.

3. Or do know, but don't care, because controlling language feels like power, or worse, refusing to try and control language would mark them as an Enemy of the Ideology and they're afraid.

Many of these ideas are not merely dystopian but positively dangerous. For instance, "fat" being a banned word. Fat is considered to be a derogatory term because being obese is extremely unhealthy. Not only do fat people endanger their own health, but they drive up insurance premiums for everyone else. Lots of people work really hard to lose weight because there is such a thing as a healthy weight.

The idea that fatness is something fine or even to be celebrated is thus not merely dangerous, but deeply disrespectful to all the people who battled against their weight and made sacrifices of things they enjoyed to bring their weight down to a healthy level. Where I live some stupid clothes chain is currently running the wokest set of ads imaginable: photos and videos of absurdly obese "models" with slogans like "Diversity: here to stay". Those models need to lose weight or else they're gonna have heart problems, not to mention likely difficulty in finding a long term partner. Banning programmers from using the term "fat client" isn't going to change the basic physical reality in the world, just convince some low intelligence progressives that it's OK to ignore their own problems.

Really, Googlers should feel ashamed reading this list. It's Animal Farm, it's the USSR, it's King Canute's advisors. You cannot change reality by changing the language.

Actually, it's probably much, much simpler than that.

There is a demand right now for companies and industries to be seen addressing problems of systemic racism. You can look deep into your internal processes, identify how unconscious and conscious biases are undermining the acquisition or advancement of underprivileged minorities, and modify them to create more equitable outcomes. Or you can tweak some jargon to be more linguistically inclusive, a problem that (as far as I'm aware) no one has actually complained about.

In other words, it's an attempt to be inclusive by claiming very loudly that you're inclusive while doing absolutely nothing to actually help change that.

Well, there are threads like this one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/m78lk2/github_...

I am a googler and I am ashamed.

"Language makes thought possible. When the words disappear, so does our ability to think about the ideas the words represent. When they prevent you from saying the obvious, overtime it becomes impossible to see the obvious.... those who control your words control your mind."

Huh. This quote appears to come from Tucker Carlson, not who I expected at all. If even the American right believes this stuff, that might explain why it's become so prevalent in Valley culture. What's interesting is, although the idea is attractive and sounds superficially right, it's been investigated heavily in the past and is wrong. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis comes in two flavours:

- The "strong" version, that says effectively language controls thought and you cannot think things you cannot express in words.

- The "weak" version that says language influences thought.

It was realised that the strong version was wrong before World War 2. The weak version is probably also wrong, because viewed through modern eyes a lot of this research is exactly the sort of stuff that's unlikely to replicate. The claims that seem like they might replicate are about trivial and arbitrary differences e.g. Swedish speakers using "a long time" vs Spanish speakers saying "a lot of time".

For example: one major problem with Sapir-Whorf research is that a lot of it is based on anthropologist's claims about obscure languages, often the languages of isolated tribes. These are inherently difficult to replicate because often these tribes disappear or their language changes (supposedly) after contact with western civilization. Additionally the field is plagued with bad research that should have immediately raised suspicion, for example, the 1981 claim that Chinese people have difficulty reasoning about counterfactuals because of grammatical differences in their language, which turned out to be simply due to bad translations [1]. Many other studies are very weak conflations of correlation/causation, for example, this field is littered with claims of the form: speakers of languages with feature X go to college more often/are richer/are more or less confrontational. This sort of thing is ripe for all the classic ills of social science research, like P-hacking.

Outside of academia the most famous example of belief in strong Sapir-Whorf is surely communism and their insistence on calling each other "comrade". This ubiquitous term didn't make them behave in comradely ways as assassinations, executions and widespread corruption were all common in Soviet societies.

It's probably not a surprise that the left has difficulty letting go of Sapir-Whorf. This is partly because it's easy to mix up cause and effect with language control. Being in a position to severely punish people for something trivial, like use of a previously acceptable phrase, indicates to all observers that you have total power, that you can do whatever you like regardless of how unreasonable or extreme it is. Those observers may incorrectly conclude that language control is the actual source of those people's power, when in reality, it is the public punishment for arbitrary and harmless acts of disobedience that is the real source of power. Language is just a highly visible way to achieve that.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001002...

Perhaps this sentence comes from Jordan Peterson not Tucker Carlson

The only source I can find for those words is this article:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/08/23/tucker_ca...

ok, my fault, JP has a very similar sentence.

How much longer will we have to tolerate this culture that hates us?

I'm tired of thinking and thinking and thinking about these ideas that always terminate in foundational disagreement. I expect to encounter disagreement, and I'm fine coexisting with it, but I need the ability to isolate myself and those I care about from the effects of it.

Just ignore it. These people only know how to destroy things. The way to beat them is to continue building.

The first step is organize ourselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com