Edinburgh’s computer scientists banned from using Alice and Bob as too Western
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
I entirely agree with your point though, that people in power to make that kind of decision could do a lot more to challenge the balance of power in the world. If every well-thinking liberal on this planet organized to start a revolution and entirely do away with oppression in all forms, we'd be living in a free and egalitarian society by now.
Sigh...
Tell me who is it the position of power to enforce nomenclature of 'Alice and Bob'? An Alice and Bob alliance? Write your own paper with whatever names or none names you want and nobody will care. Did you even know that this came out of a -> b but to make it clearer a and b got names?
People from outside given field are coming over and start making demands, be it CS or any other field. Last year we went though the 'defeated' of oppressive master branch in git, also black/white lists and such. To what end? NOBODY is CS ever connected term 'master branch' in git as something to do with slavery and nobody used it as some propaganda tool.
There was a terminology of slave and master used for tasks or old HDDs, but it was organically phased out. Because it felt odd/unsavory using that terminology and people just moved on with different analogies.
Do I find it plausible that a group of activists at the Russell Group bureaucracy level have written this bit of silliness into a set of guidelines? Sure.
Do I think that "Edinburgh’s computer scientists banned" is an accurate reflection of the current situation? It's certainly a possibility, but not one I'd give much weight to without rather more definitive information than this.
I’m having trouble finding any indication of an entity called the “Russell Group School of Informatics”; individual universities in the Group seem to have such schools, but it sounds like there are major errors in the attribution reporting or, even worse, basic fact-checking of the documents.
No. There are major errors in your and GP's reading comprehension. The article is absolutely clear it is talking about Edinburgh's school of informatics.
Immediately after spelling out the university's full name in the preceding sentence, the article says "The top-flight Russell Group university’s school of informatics claims there are 'problematic issues related to computing terminology'"
That is the only mention of the Russell Group.
Reasonable people may disagree, I suppose, as to whether the University of Edinburgh deserves an epithet like "the top-flight Russell Group university," but no reasonable person can disagree that that is exactly what the authors did.
My reading comprehension is just fine. So is my clipboard.
It is, in fact, possible to be anti-wokescold and also care about criticising one's opponents precisely.
I wish more people on the same side of the argument as me would remember that.
I would even go as far as to claim you are devaluing your work by making your examples more confusing to the reader.
Why not call A and B, 漢 and الْحُرُو
That would surely be better
From the Mount Royal University website:
>this is a beginning effort at describing the use of lower case on the website of the office of indigenization and decolonization.
[...]
>we resist acknowledging the power structures that oppress and join the movement that does not capitalize.
("Indigenous" is intentionally capitalized by the author.)
I am so, so bored of people falling for this obvious manipulation.
In general, i would say so. A great deal of wars and suffering would be avoided if people were slightly more flexible and not so much into ethnocentric interpretations of the world.
> invent new ones every time we try to communicate something?
When explaining other concepts than cryptography, do you systematically borrow the same names? I guess not. Why would cryptography be any different?
Isn't that precisely what you're advocating for with angles and the greek alphabet? I don't know about you, but i personally had to learn about greek letters in math classes, and that's something i could have done without, especially when there's other standard means of designating an angle.
There is no thought police coming for you if you disagree with a rather-insignificant change. But of course feeling threatened by better representation of different cultures in education is weird.
That kind of argument is directly rehearsed from the neofascist international movement (Generation Identitaire & friends) and their "great replacement" / "clash of cultures" theory. I'm not saying you belong to that movement or that you're a despicable human being in any regard (i've never met you and barely interacted with you), but i would recommend to question that kind of racist narrative pushed by mainstream media in the last decade or so (especially since the start of the so-called "migrant crisis").
Second, there's an advantage to everyone using the same names again and again. When I see the names, I know it's going to be a protocol discussion. If someone inserts, say, a Chinese name in the proper unicode with a slavic name in cyrilic, I've got to think and try to figure out what is going on. Eventually I'll catch on, but it slows down comprehension.
Where was it suggested that Alice and Bob names be banned altogether? Having one class/university use different names is far from erasure.
> replaces the cultural hegemony of one group with another
What new group would that be dominating the narrative? Is "all other cultures than anglo-saxon" a unified cultural group? Is this hypothetical group exerting power over others in what can be called "cultural hegemony" (cultural domination)?
From my perspective as a white French person, who was taught in schools/media that colonization was a virtuous enterprise to civilize lesser cultures, power is still vastly in the hands of racist misogynist people who control the entirety of the State apparatus and 95% of european economy. Having a few pockets of resistance challenge that status quo is barely a threat to the establishment.
> If someone inserts, say, a Chinese name in the proper unicode with a slavic name in cyrilic, I've got to think and try to figure out what is going on.
Of course. Just like a person learning cryptography in Russian/Chinese language can have a harder time to decipher what "Alice" and "Bob" are. But in this case, lessons are given in English using the latin alphabet: the suggestion was to use more diverse names, which does not require using a different alphabet.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qalb_(programming_language)
With the advent of unicode, cyrillic or mandarin programming languages can flourish.
That's called Chinese characters in English. In its entirety, that writing system is based on logograms, hence, a programming language uses logograms, too, not only ideograms. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22216125
That's absurd.
Suggesting other names than Alice and Bob is part of a drive to use more diverse examples. Security is not just for Alice and Bob, but also for Anita and Bilal, and many others.
Far from a new question, see also: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/09/replacing_ali...
> in the latest decolonisation drive
This is a comment by the narrator and not a political argument presented by the activists. Arguments on the "pro" side have apparently been quoted from a university communique, while the "contras" have been individually interviewed for arguments.
It is common in journalism (i would say ethical, but i'm not familiar with that domain's standards) when interviewing people criticizing "something", to also interview people who agree with "something" (or are responsible for it) and ask them about those critiques.
> Removing X from does not make something less Yish unless X is inherently Yish.
Noone suggested calling two characters "Alice" and "Bob" was "inerhently" colonialist. It is suggested that always naming them that way, and not leaving room for other personas, hinders the capability of people from a different cultural background to identify with the characters (though it does not nullify it).
Being more flexible about names in scenarios is a drive for diversity, which is correlated with a drive for decolonization. Decolonization does entail making the global north more aware that other civilizations/cultures have existed and continue to exist on this planet, which can be helped by using more diverse characters.
That does not mean that naming your characters Alice and Bob is inherently colonialist, or that naming them Abdel and Barbara is inherently anti-colonialist. Human and political context matters.
It's just like if your cafeteria served apple pie every day for the past 50 years for desert. Would a policy to "avoid apple pie" mean the death of apple pie across society? Or even on that specific campus?
Maybe I just generally read the actual contents of article(s) rather than just the titles, but again this article from the Telegraph is proving the point of the one from the Economist.
They aren't claiming it's racist, nor could it be interpreted as such in the least favourable interpretation. Their 'problem' is that it's 'too Western', i.e. too White. Decolonization appears to just be the removal of White people... I don't know how I can frame that as anything other than cultural genocide.
Is there seriously any ethnic minority people who see Western names used in a security example context and honestly believe they are being oppressed by it? I can't imagine anybody doing so in good faith.
There is also the wider issue of restricted and compelled speech on University campuses - the exact places we expect to have the most intellectual freedom to explore modern issues. In the UK lecturers are forced to do "systematic bias" tests where they are given a split second to make some association, and 100% of the time the test concludes you are discriminating against a group (even if you shut your eyes and complete it randomly).
How on earth can we expect academics to come to good conclusions if we restrict their words, thoughts and ideas?