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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

Quick story.

As I understand it, the UI folks at Nintendo who were working on the Wii controller did user testing, of course. In one test, they would hand a new user a controller wand with instructions to "Just draw stuff on the screen" using a simple drawing program.

The metric Nintendo came up with was called TTP, or the how long in minutes and seconds -- sometimes, only seconds -- before the user drew the inevitable male genitals. "Time To P-n-s". Averaged something like two or three minutes.

Every new vista humankind opens will be so decorated. And so, World of Text: QED. :-)

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It's ok to write out penis, we're all adults here.

Unless he meant PUNKS, and people have been drawing dudes rocking out with spikes and mohawks?

It should also be okay to write words in a censored form if the writer wishes.

Is it really censorship, though? You insist on conveying the meaning of the word, which is what is offensive if anything. By omitting a couple of letters you've only saved us from its exact spelling.

For example, "fuck you" is offensive because it's rude, vulgar and expresses contempt, not because of how exactly "fuck" is spelled. "F-ck you" is still rude and vulgar because it conveys the exact same meaning. The only difference to the recipient of such a request is that it's slightly more annoying to read, an annoyance that is surely dwarfed by the offense taken to the rude and vulgar meaning, and its intent as an expression of contempt.

It's better described as the exact opposite, a sort of a censorship circumvention; you can omit or replace a few letters to get past dumb word filters or comply with poorly worded courtesy policies and still convey the meaning to humans. Where no such filters and policies are in place, it's pointless.

A scary thought is that we may be so conditioned by machines and machine-like policies that our means to circumvent them now occur to us naturally even in contexts where they don't make a difference.

This sort of censorship has been going on for a long time. For example 'oh fiddlesticks'. They are still swearing. But some sort of odd self censorship happened.

It is an interesting exercise for me. Try not to swear. No substitutes allowed. It is oddly difficult for me.

I would like to upvote this comment for it's clarity of thinking.

It seems odd to write "genitals" but not write "penis".

H-w f-- -an we t-k- wr--i-g -ord- in a -ens--r-d f-rm?

I think we should be discouraging that kind of self-censorship for all but the worst words. Not only do people start to use it for ridiculous political posturing (e.g. "wmen" or "gmers") but it just makes what you're write ever so slightly harder to understand. And for what benefit?

How is the original comment harder to understand?

If there is one freedom people have is to control their language, wether to avoid certain words or to utter words that other find silly.

Censored words are much more likely to be ambiguous. I wasn't referring to that specific example but now you mention it, p_n_s does take a fraction longer to understand than penis.

And no-one is talking about taking away people's freedom. You can write all your emails in all caps if you want, but we can discourage people from doing that.

In a previous sentence they mentioned TTP, then they mentioned P-n-s. I thought this was another acronym of sorts. Like "Posts not sexy" or whatever. I spent a couple seconds to figure out what it meant, failed, and just moved on.

Figured out what it was supposed to mean from the replies.

They are welcome to avoid certain words, and I am welcome to criticize it.

GP didn't imply it wasn't!

Only by a strictly-literal, context-free reading.

Not if it prevents the point from being made. Which in this case it has. And then detracts from the post altogether. Which it also has.

I took the comment that ‘Time to PNS’ was a kind of code name for the metric at Nintendo. Honestly, I think that’s hilarious.

Edit: TTP is the metric name. Sorry, it’s early.

Could also have been TTPP

If my children are remotely average (sometimes I wonder) then kids know about penises as well.

heck, around half of them even have one!

I'm honestly surprised the first astronauts on the moon didn't draw one with their finger in the dust.

Maybes there's a patch of the moon dust that they all agreed to never photograph, where they drew all the boobs and dicks.

Imagine: aliens get the Arecibo message but don't quite know what to make of it, until they see the boobs and dicks drawn on the moon and they correlate it with their own crass fascination with reproductive organs, and only then do they recognize humanity as a self-aware species.

That, or they just smudged it out after doing it.

How do you know they didn’t?

Did they only test it on men, or do women draw penises too?

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