Google bans terms like ‘senior citizen,’ ‘dummy variable,’ and ‘black box’
wsj.com
wsj.com
1. The Orwellian sense of constraining thought. Personally I think this gives the people making these rules too much credit.
2. "Virtue signaling" or whatever you want to call it. There is a self-reinforcing desire to show everyone how progressive (or devout generally) one is and it spirals out of control
3. The origin of a lot of this stuff is essentially agitators who want to cause trouble and find things to get unhappy about generally. Another way of looking at it is that it's just a bunch of trolls. I think it starts with trolling, and then terrified, risk averse administrators end up at my point 2 above because they don't want to risk standing up to the trolls.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word...
...
It isn’t surprising that standard programming terms such as “master/slave” and “whitelist/blacklist” are now verboten. Nor is the nixing of gendered pronouns. But apparently, for reasons that elude me, the use of “black box,” which has no negative connotations I am aware of, is also inappropriate, according to Google’s guidelines.
...
Other terms describing computer programs have also been proscribed. A developer can no longer say that some functionality is “crippled” by a bug or that anomalous data seem “crazy.” And “dummy variable,” a key term in coding, should now be replaced with “placeholder,” which seems no more inclusive to me, and I doubt a dummy variable, even if it could care, would.
My favorite proscription is against the word “smartphone.” Presumably Google assumes other phones will be offended.
...
I call their strange way of thinking "the magic-spell theory of meaning". New age people have a similar notion of a "true name" like abracadabra.
Plenty of decisions that I view as stupid I acquiesce to avoid having to fight.
Next day my boss schedules a meeting to say that there would be no HR repercussions for me.
If this is the sort of s*t-show is going on, I decided to move to another team, and got the heck out of there.
Management are petrified of offending anyone vocal, regardless of how unreasonable their threshold of offense may be.