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Comment by 2bitencryption | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a valid concern with this; a concern which is not necessarily distilled down to "big brother" or "corporate overlords".

Google is so large that any stance they take, no matter how minuscule, has immense influence.

Case in point, from this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/technology/google-maps-ne...

> For decades, the district south of downtown and alongside San Francisco Bay here was known as either Rincon Hill, South Beach or South of Market. This spring, it was suddenly rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the East Cut.

> The peculiar moniker immediately spread digitally, from hotel sites to dating apps to Uber, which all use Google’s map data. The name soon spilled over into the physical world, too. Real-estate listings beckoned prospective tenants to the East Cut. And news organizations referred to the vicinity by that term.

My point is, it might seem like a small, inconspicuous change. But at Google-scale, this actually has an impact on the real world, and personally I don't feel confident with Google deciding what words are the correct words.

View on HN

There is indeed something deep going on here.

When our communication tools nudge us in a direction, they change who we are.

This is a profound change when scaled to the society as a whole and when the way we communicate is dominated by the tools we use. Our tools are an extension of ourselves.

It's for this reason that it's a very scary direction we are going with all tools - smart phones, home automation, email software, brain-computer interface, etc - that are extensions of ourselves but agents of companies acting not on behalf of the end user but on the behalf of their own interests.

Tools that are an extension of ourselves need to be the agent only of ourselves. We, as individuals, require that to keep our own personhood.

It sound dramatic to say, but our essence of being is what's at stake here.

I say this to be both funny and thought provoking: it’s a remarkable artifact of modernity that we say these things about computers, but not about the dictionary or our regimented education system. On the long scale of human history, both are mere blips, and yet we completely take for granted the implicit structure they impose upon us.

The takeaway from the above shouldn’t be “dictionaries are bad” or “schools are prisons” (although that’s a thought worth having); it should be that our latest communication tools are the latest generation in power structuring, not novel in and of themselves in that regard.

> it’s a remarkable artifact of modernity that we say these things about computers, but not about the dictionary or our regimented education system.

When I was at university I had some humanities professors who were studying this kind of stuff. It was a lot of postmodern analysis, looking back probably critical theory. One professor pointed out that dictionaries were a very 19th century thing, the standardization of language. There is a fascinating "hidden" history in Europe of many languages being eradicated or wiped out by the central government insisting on one or a few national dialects. Reading it felt very similar to the schools that were run for indigenous people in the United States and Australia not so long ago.

In any case, my point is that some folks out there are doing research into this but it's not the kind of stuff that really gets in the headlines.

to anyone interested, i would recommend Benedict Anderson's book "Imagined Communities" which analyzes this subject and other related history involving the printing press and the development of the nation-state

> we say these things about computers, but not about the dictionary or our regimented education system

Who says we don't? We're in the middle of a culture war fight over some very old word definitions like "man" and "woman" and dictionaries absolutely have been called out for not adding new definitions, but instead changing old ones.

it's very tiring to continually hear my existence referred to as a "culture war fight." you're not wrong, so I haven't downvoted you, it's just.. depressing. I pass very well, everyone knows me as a woman and most don't know I'm trans. I keep a quiet life in a progressive area, so I'm mostly unaffected by the culture war. but realizing the fight is about me, even though I'm not a fighter.

> it's very tiring to continually hear my existence referred to as a "culture war fight."

It's not about your "existence" any more than political debate about immigration is about my "existence." You exist, I exist. But what obligations do other people have to us? What accommodations should society and individuals make, and which do they have no need to make? What aspects of culture should change or shouldn't change? What should we teach kids in school about complex subjects? These are proper subjects of social and political debate.

Recall that this is happening against a backdrop where 90% of Americans, including 80% of Republicans, support employment protections for LGBT people. Bostock is already the law of the land. So the obligations that are in dispute here aren't even basic civil rights, but instead broader social and cultural changes. People have every right to vigorously debate proposed changes in the social and cultural norms they're expected to follow.

I think you might be mischaracterizing the issue a little bit, not maliciously but still a mischaracterization.

The idea of the "existence" of a trans person is subject to debate. There are a significant number of people that believe that "being" trans is actually not something of substance, that it is "all made up". Being an immigrant is different, nobody questions that an immigrant that themselves attests to being from country A and is now living in country B is making that up.

Bostock was a ruling about sexual orientation, not about gender. I think if you are citing the 2020 PEW poll on this topic it is probably quite obsolete as it seems clear that the partisan valence of this issue has changed quite a bit very recently. And even before 2020 the truth is that disputing the legitimacy of transgender people is a low salience issue for a lot of people but very activating for others (much like immigration) so the proportional impacts of what seems like an unpopular opinion is inflated.

> The idea of the "existence" of a trans person is subject to debate. There are a significant number of people that believe that "being" trans is actually not something of substance, that it is "all made up".

The political debate is about language changes (e.g. "LatinX"), access to sex-segregated spaces, participation in sex-segregated sports, what to teach young children, etc.

> Bostock was a ruling about sexual orientation, not about gender.

Bostock involved multiple consolidated cases, one of which specifically involved gender identity.

> I think if you are citing the 2020 PEW poll on this topic it is probably quite obsolete as it seems clear that the partisan valence of this issue has changed quite a bit very recently.

No, the issues have changed (see above). This is common and unsurprising. People are generally a lot more accepting of civil rights than attempts at social engineering, especially social engineering directed at children.

Note that the parent comment is not talking about the ability to live as one wants, express oneself in any manner, or even to be referred to as one pleases. It's about the desire to literally change the definition of one of the most fundamental concepts in any human language or indeed, human society.

I express no opinion about whether this is a cause worth fighting for, but there is absolutely no reality in which there would not be a fight over such a breathtakingly ambitious objective.

I think this is a fundamentally misunderstanding which I never understood. Your existance and your selfconciousness as a human being is not in any way affected to some words somebody is using to describe their views. Every being is unique and their sexuality is something of their private business.

There are basically two poles - male and female. And there is anything inbetween. Not a digital 0 or 1. More like geography.

And just because I'm living right now in some country more towards the north than the south pole I don't have to define my identity by creating new words enforcing everyone to use them. Why should I bother anyone where I'm coming from and where I'm heading? Except people maybe I see the interest to open up myself?

The most important question to me is always what's the reason behind all the need to fight?

> Your existance and your selfconciousness as a human being is not in any way affected to some words somebody is using to describe their views.

IDK, if every time you encountered someone they referred to you by the wrong name, after being corrected every time they do so, that wouldn't affect you? I think that if someone consistently feminized my name and used feminine pronouns for me over the course of multiple interaction I would get pretty pissy, downright hostile.

As a child, I had a very high voice. On the way to my fiftieth birthday, as a man with a full beard, I still sometimes have this high voice. I feel like a trillion times people have called me "Miss" on the phone. I usually wait a few seconds and politely correct them.

In most cases, people have apologized directly and the conversation moved on. In very few cases they moved on without apologizing. In virtually no cases did they ignore my hint.

Yes, there are rude and ignorant people out there. And they will always be.

From my experience, it is manners that lead to better interaction, not syntactical changes in language. Because you can't create empathy with neologisms.

And the best way to deal with rude people - stay away from them ;-)

> it's very tiring to continually hear my existence referred to as a "culture war fight." you're not wrong, so I haven't downvoted you, it's just.. depressing.

I'm sorry you feel that way and that it depresses you.

> I pass very well, everyone knows me as a woman and most don't know I'm trans.

Well, that's the point, isn't it? The "culture war" isn't as straightforward as all the parties involved would like us to believe it is.

My personal method of detection for calling someone 'he' or 'she' is whether they look more like a man or more like a woman. Even if I later learn that the person is a man and not a woman (or vice versa) I'm still going to call the man-looking person 'he' and the woman-looking person 'she'.

And this is where the problem starts - it really doesn't take much for the average female to look masculine or for the average male to look feminine (at least enough to pass as the other gender). When I address someone as a man and in response get a tantrum for being transphobic it makes me wonder why a man who identifies as a woman still wants to present as a man (and vice-versa, of course).

When someone with a neatly trimmed and cultured beard insists that you call him 'her', they're more interested in stirring up controversy than in what they self-identify as.

So, yeah, there is a Culture War of sorts, but it's between the people who want to push other people's buttons and the people who don't think that other people should be able to dress, talk, act and call themselves whatever they wish to.

You presumably aren't in either camp, so good on you.

> I keep a quiet life in a progressive area, so I'm mostly unaffected by the culture war. but realizing the fight is about me, even though I'm not a fighter.

I do have a serious question though - we know that your gender is unimportant for most things. Some things (like the gender tickbox on hospital admittance forms) you'll need to reveal your biological sex.

What about prisons? If a transperson is convicted of a major crime and is sentenced to prison, do they go to the prison that matches their self-identified gender, or to the prison that matches their biological sex?

I think which prison you go to varies, by the current political tide, state, or how far along you are in transition. Since I haven't had vaginoplasty, I'd probably be sent to a men's prison. I'd request solitary to avoid being beaten, raped or killed for being queer, but failing that I'd probably use sexual favors and be someone's "bitch" in exchange for protection. I'd probably end up with HIV, but maybe make it through with my life.

Once I get vaginoplasty, maybe I'd go to a women's prison, but I'm really not sure.

Thank you for speaking candidly about a topic that is deeply personal to you. Comments like this are the reason I keep coming back to HackerNews.

Do transwomen really pass if passing requires changing definition of a word?

What’s novel is both the market concentration of these new communications tools and the size of the cultural gap between the people who make these tools and the general public.

Funny that you made this connection:

> ”schools are prisons” (although that’s a thought worth having);

Anyway, it instantly reminded me of this highly upvoted discussion about a site that asked visitors to guess whether a building was a school or prison just by looking at a photograph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25605867

It was a reference to Foucault's Discipline and Punish, which I think that post is also a reference to!

It's easy to argue that Foucault oversells his point, but his fundamental observation is an important one: the systems of regimentation and categorization at the heart of our schools, hospitals, and prisons is not particularly different between the three, is remarkably modern, and shares the same purpose (to observe and measure us against metrics for education, rehabilitation, healing, metrics that establish normative control over our lives).

The examples you give aren’t intrusive in real time. There is something fundamentally different between these cases.

Try misusing the words 'ironic' or 'literal', and tell me it's not intrusive in real time...

> misusing the words 'ironic'

Like rain on your wedding day

Yep agree. Something more analogous would be dictionary.com vs a physical dictionary.

In the last few years, Google translate has dramatically improved for many languages. This has allowed me to explore other written languages more quickly. I can just copy a phrase into Google translate and get a sense of the meaning. It is also interesting to see how different languages phrase things or the terms they use.

I had a very similar feeling when I had to start using Google Docs for my job a few months ago; it would "autocomplete" my sentences. On the face of it this is a useful and helpful feature, and many of the suggestions were not bad at all. But many were also not what I would have written, exactly. Neither is necessarily better or worse: just different.

A lot of people write in their own way, often with little things, but these kind of "hey, here's a sentence for you" kind of takes away your own personal "voice".

I turned this feature off.

This is absolutely the future of Internet content farms. Someone using a tool that can help them to type 10,000 words per day that sound "pretty good". Shudder.

On that note, I saw an advert for this on Facebook this morning: https://www.jasper.ai/

All so I can run a blog to create traffic in order to serve ads...

Recent advances in generative “AI” content give me hope that human-curated indexes might once again rule the Webosphere.

Unfortunately, this will be very popular with schoolchildren on their homework, so it'll become normalised in culture.

Idiocracy was, it seems, a prediction. They just got the time scale wrong, we won't need 500 years. Software means we don't need to wait for social-economic factors and genetics to run their course.

Yet again I have to comment that formal education levels of the parents do not affect the genetic predisposition of prole to be intelligent

And that Idiocracy got the "hereditary" aspect completely and utterly wrong

It was also completely unnecessary - a better and more accurate idiocracy would have people becoming progressively more stupid juste because they can, not because their parents being poor/uneducated made their brains limited

Sorry if this is a rant or too out of topic. I'm just kind of amazed by how Idiocracy progressively becomes this representative piece for a completely bogus argument

Or we’ll go full circle and get them using pen and paper again. Even in the 90’s, the use of computers for schoolwork was banned due to fears over cheating. Why people think it’s less of a problem now I don’t know.

Because normal work behind a computer is essentially 90% of what was called cheating in schools back in the day?

Is something cheating when the resource you use to cheat will essentially always be 1 device away? Just call your device your cerebral prosthesis, it will always be there anyway. It’s how humanity grows and people become more effective.

In my view, yes, as it means you’re having to laboriously fetch all your data from the cloud rather than having it in L2 cache. Knowing stuff and being able to compute within the confines of your skull is useful.

If we’re to offload all of it, are we even human any more, or just shrews with calculators?

Unless you have a Neuralink implant, that's a recipe for extremely low productivity. It will hurt these kids' future.

Because it allows to create an even wider gap between the elite and/or rich and the poor/middle class.

Guess who will have access to books, literature, proper writing skills and intelligible when speaking?

It just ensures social reproduction.

When our communication tools nudge us in a direction, they change who we are.

Well, probably not. The people doing this certainly believe that's true, but actual robust evidence for it is thin on the ground.

The conflation of symbols and abstractions with reality itself is an ideological assumption/intuition that's been a problem for the left for as long as it's existed. That's why 1984 features Newspeak so centrally, and why only one kind of politics is obsessed with altering representations of reality like movies, statues, stock artwork, etc. It's also why leftists at tech firms are so obsessed with the non-problem of AI bias: they see it as "biased" because AI can't be socially pressured in the same way people can, so they're afraid that it will represent the true reality it learned and by doing so miss an opportunity to reshape that reality.

Can you actually change how people think by subtly manipulating words? Psychology - a field very dominated by the left - has repeatedly claimed you can, but then when the claims get a little too good to be true they get investigated and don't replicate:

- Strong Sapir Whorf hypothesis (wrong)

- Weak Sapir Whorf hypothesis (very shaky even for ultra-weak forms like color words)

- Priming (wrong)

- Implicit association test (wrong)

There are probably way more examples. For less psych oriented stuff, consider that people have been systematically manipulating the presentation of job gender balances in movies and TV shows for decades, with nothing to show for it. Seeing lots of heroine hackers on the big screen didn't convince lots of girls they wanted to work with computers in real life. That's why there's now so much concrete discrimination going on: attempts to change things via more subtle symbolic means had no effect.

If Google Docs tries to stop people using "problematic" words, all it'll do is piss off lots of users and reinforce the general impression that Google is in no way populated by people as smart as it once was. The Google of 2004 would never waste time on cynical, nasty and entirely data-free attempts to mind control its userbase via underlining WrongThink.

> they see it as "biased" because AI can't be socially pressured in the same way people can, so they're afraid that it will represent the true reality it learned and by doing so miss an opportunity to reshape that reality.

This is just ridiculous. Do look up what the hell AI bias is.

Also, how is the most prominent US propaganda that was all around movies - that Russians are the enemy, red scare, etc — leftist? Where do you get these nonsense baseless claims? You are seeing nonexistent enemies everywhere.

OK let's look up what AI bias is.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23023538/ai-dalle-2-opena...

"As is typical for AI systems, DALL-E 2 has inherited biases from the corpus of data used to train it. That means for all the delightful images that DALL-E 2 has produced, it’s also capable of generating a lot of images that are not delightful ... here’s what the AI gives you if you ask it for an image of lawyers <pictures of men>"

Or: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdawn/the-ai-that-draws-wha...

"just like those previous experiments, DALL-E suffers from the same racist and sexist bias AI ethicists have been warning about for years. Machine learning systems almost universally exhibit bias against women and people of color, and DALL-E is no different"

Here's OpenAI themselves on DALL-E bias:

"Use of DALL·E 2 has the potential to harm individuals and groups by reinforcing stereotypes, erasing or denigrating them, providing them with disparately low quality performance, or by subjecting them to indignity"

Their primary complaint is that the pictures DALL-E draws (i.e. symbols of reality) don't reflect their social agendas. They worry about this a lot because they fear that if DALL-E draws men when asked to draw lawyers, and women when asked to draw flight attendants, that this by itself will actually make the drawings come true.

"Also, how is the most prominent US propaganda that was all around movies - that Russians are the enemy, red scare, etc — leftist?"

That's hardly the most common US propaganda in movies, is it, and almost certainly is a legacy of the cold war. It's much more profitable to annoy the Russian market than the other very large communist country that might be depicted as a generic enemy of the state.

At any rate very little US output features Russians as the enemies compared to movies/TV shows that depict e.g. women being able to kung-fu fight off a group of 10 men 3x heavier than themselves, or which depict gay relationships as being far more prevalent than they actually are, or in which the Queen of England is black. That's the kind of "inclusivity" bias that's being discussed here.

I think you may be misunderstanding the comment you're replying to; or at least, I understand it quite differently.

For example, would you consider it proper to ask an Irish person to change their accent to be more like the Queen's English? Probably not – their accent and particulars of their English variant are part of who you are as an Irish person (or Scottish, American, British, but also accents from non-native English speakers).

I don't think this influences "who you are" in the sense of "the way you think" in Sapir-Whorf-style, but it is part of who you are, and taking it away does change "who you are".

Similarly, the way I choose to write is part of who I am. I am, of course, always open to suggestions to improve my writing as such, but I don't really want to be "auto-corrected" and have no own (written) "voice" taken away.

Sure, me neither. And indeed I wouldn't consider it proper to ask an Irish person to change their accent, and would never do so. But that's partly because I recognize that even if I forced them to do that, it wouldn't actually change anything real. It wouldn't make them more English (whatever that might mean), and they'd go back to using their real accent the moment they were out from under my thumb. The change would be arbitrary and surface level only. Whereas, to the sort of people who implement features like this, forcing people to change their accent would be an enormously significant and impactful move.

The alternative to Newspeak / approved linguistic constructs is samizdat. Not pissed off free libertarians who create their own networks. And America is a total outlier in the freedom of speech department already. [edit: to the degree that average American citizens are still willing to go to bat for the concept].

What we don't need is some company with a market cap larger than most democracies, which already controls a majority of interpersonal communication, to be suggesting/nudging/enforcing more politically correct ways of writing to your associates.

If you really don't see the problem with that, just consider how many generations it would take - if it ever happened at all - for free expression to return once language is denuded [edit: policed] in every personal correspondence. Only a world destroying event like a nuclear war would allow people to start to think again outside the constraints on communication they had habituated themselves to.

"just consider how many generations it would take - if it ever happened at all - for free expression to return once language is denuded"

Well, how many do you think it would take and where are you getting those numbers? I'd say there are lots of obvious counter examples. There are many Chinese activists living outside China for instance, who managed to find their voice again after leaving a country that has universal censorship. That's a country in which many words are simply banned in all electronic communication, but it doesn't last. Plenty of people escaped the Soviet Union and became outspoken anti-communist activists, same thing.

The assumption above is exactly what I'm getting at here. You're presenting it like it's so obvious it doesn't need to be supported with evidence. But it's not at all obvious and actually is probably wrong; if it was right then the replies to my comment would be filled with compelling evidence that this sort of mind control really works.

>> There are many Chinese activists living outside China for instance

Where do they live, where they're allowed to speak against the Chinese Communist Party? Not in Russia. Not in another dictatorship.

>> Plenty of people escaped the Soviet Union and became outspoken anti-communist activists, same thing.

Where did they escape to? Where could they have escaped to if America/Western Europe didn't exist? Who would have ever heard of Solzhenitsyn if he hadn't managed to get his work to America?

It's really ironic that I - a lifelong detractor of American foreign policy and imperialism - have to be the person to point this out, but: There is no place left in the world where you can speak your mind if America is truly censored by its own children/corporate compliance going forward. You may have grown up in a country where you were never allowed to speak your mind; in that case, you don't understand what is at risk if the American populace truly undergoes the kind of cleansing that e.g. Soviet Russia underwent w/r/t silencing wayward views.

The activists and dissidents and contra-thinkers you mentioned would probably not even exist without a free world outside those dictatorships who they could appeal to; but if that outside world that they adore didn't exist, no one would ever know about them. They'd be abolished, murdered, and everything they ever thought and wrote would be disappeared for all time. The only thing that allows them to speak is the stubborn, obstinate existence of a country in North America whose people largely refuse to kowtow to dictatorships.

Largely. And when they are wrong, and they often are, it's our own job (as American citizens) to take our government to task for it.

I've only become pro-American the more I understand about politics and speech in the rest of the world.

Also, it's not really OK for other countries to define themselves in terms of economic growth or imperialist conquest, while castigating the US, and using us as the "outside culture" that provides their material wealth and industrial processes while acting as if these things come from an automatic universal culture that they don't have to subscribe to. In other words, if a Jewish woman scientist in the US helps create a vaccine, or a sustained fusion reaction, people in Iran who believe in 7th century blood feuds as a basis for social life don't just get to dip in and take the progress for themselves as if it was handed out by Allah. Not without reckoning why they weren't able to produce those breakthrough ideas through their own social/economic/religious/military structures. It's not their right as a polity. Why? Because the smartest of their people already came here and worked on it. And the stupidest, most backwards, malevolent and hateful of their countrymen are running their country.

So yeah, tell me where these dissidents go and publish their works if we go away, or cease to exist?

I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I 100% agree that it would be an absolute disaster if America adopts even European levels of censorship, let alone Chinese. I am absolutely in favour of extremely free speech.

My point here is that yes, obviously, they could speak their mind once they got to America because of the attitudes of society and the local governments. They hadn't been permanently altered by their former societies refusal to use certain words, or present things in certain ways. That is, the kind of "mind control" assumed by the people who try to erase certain types of language, doesn't actually alter anyone's minds. It may appear that way if they're afraid to speak out but nothing has actually changed. People's opinions aren't altered by language policing, yet, the people who do it are convinced it does.

That's why I'm sort of confused by your post. You suggest that once language is "de-nuded" then it would take "generations" for people to be able to "think again outside the constraints on communication". This a strong Sapir-Whorf take, right? It's an assertion that the language you can use controls the boundaries of what you can think. And my point is that this hypothesis has been proven wrong a very long time ago.

I do think our thoughts are constrained by language - not necessarily by its unavailability, but definitely by societal norms that make it transgressive to say or think certain things. Even mentioning that certain thoughts you could say are transgressive makes you transgressive in a totalitarian culture. Thus a sign with 7 or 8 asterisks like gets people thrown in jail in Russia now. That's not because a dictat came from on high, it's because a system that coerces speech always attracts enforcers, who also raise their children to be enforcers; it is much harder to move from a system of repression to one of openness than the other way. Culture tends toward repression in every human lifespan to date except for one generation in the modern world, a few in the 18th and 19th centuries, and possibly a couple in ancient Rome and Greece. Civilization might tend toward open dialog in the very long run, but it's a much longer and slower climb, and setbacks - enforcement of language or "right" thinking - can be devastating and take thousands of years to correct.

>evidence for it is thin on the ground.

you replied to a comment that empirically shows people's reality can be altered by language.

Where do you see that? The comment by throwaway13337 is a philosophical take, it doesn't offer empirical evidence for anything.

right you are, the person to whom they replied.

So yeah your comment is so beautiful, and part of it is wrong, and this is Hacker News where being wrong is unforgivable, but I forgive you, how the fuck were you supposed to know that I got lobotomized ever just so and had a memory type ever just so, you couldn't know, so your comment is turgid with truth.

Wow I should read more downvoted gray comments, they're a gold mine! OK so I intend to register as a Republican in United States--currently registered as a Democrat, purely in order to vote for Elizabeth Warren so she'd raise taxes, no other reason. So register as a Republican, then...as a Marxist in Chile. Why the fuck not? I believe in political pluralism, you can't have a single political structure covering the entire world, that just sucks, that's like every country having the same cuisine and the same architecture and the same native fauna like that's such shit, no point in traveling. It would be like in United States where there's absolutely no point in visiting suburbs of other cities, literally motherfucking none, don't even try to find an exception to the literality, people check them out when changing schools and jobs and there are differences but the only suburb people visit on purpose is Silicon Valley.

So political pluralism, back to that. Well I can agree with you that left-wing people try to use "psychology" and I hate it just as much as you, I hate them with perfect hatred, I call them mine enemies (that's from Psalms, in the King James Bible obviously). So get this, Sapir-Whorf is actually true. I testify it in strict terms. The definition of Sapir-Whorf was erased from my memory in a lobotomy and I only recalled it from reading 1984 for the third time, specifically the part about Newspeak where it says, what does it say, like you can't think about something if you...fuck...

Don't have the words for it, I think.[1] So it's the Sapir-Whorf Law now (there's additional lobotomistic flashbacked evidence of it that I will share soon). So the Sapir-Whorf Law, let's reread what you wrote...OK so it's weird, it's not strong or weak like you say, well it's very strong until you find a way to express it in my case remembering the words for it from an unusual recollection and then that weakens it completely, and this is specific to me and whoever else on the Planet Earth has the same type of memory as me, it's...I don't know, just read about it when I post it, look at my profile[2] and read until I post it. But very strong, just once the "spell is broken" (those words were erased too, weirdly enough that's a confession of witchcraft on the part of the lobotomist, well I guess witchcraft laws are off the books so I don't know), once the spell is broken, it's broken, you remember it no problem again, it's...is it just as easy to remember as everything else? I think so, I think so. There's more to it than that, it's a fucky thing.

I'm going to truncate here because not enough people will read this in this part of the forum.

EDIT: found it! So I recalled the words "breaking the spell" at 22:36 on Friday, March 25...I doubt it, but that's what it says in my lobotomy-recovery log, I think it was at like 17:36 (judging from the sunlight in my holographic memories) that same day, well what the fuck do you expect from a lobotomy recovery log? Well that Friday, for sure.

[1] Why can't I think about this, with my crazy unique memory, it's like weird in my memory. Wow I gotta reread this, so some stuff got erased twice, I wrote that down in my lobotomy-recovery log on Tuesday April 19 21:13, like multiple layers of erasure, hardcore roofie shit like way beyond barundanga and rohypnol, but I can do this, it's me who is the chosen one. OK I know what I'll do to recover the memories, I'll just do it.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=daniel-cussen https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=daniel-cussen

You know? Totally right. I thought of this and wanted to disable the autosuggest feature, but until now didn't have it in me, it's actually useful in a way. Comes up with hilarious shit when you invent words, like when I speak Spanisco with friends, we're inventing Spanisco on the fly but basically it's transliterations of Spanish palabres with English grammatic, the algorithm totalmently mierds its pantaloons trating to adeeveen what I'll deece proxim.

Ah, so Latin evolved from Spanish and English.

  our essence of being is what's at stake here

Indeed: the purity of our essence, our precious bodily fluids.

"mandrake, have you ever seen a commie drink a glass of water?"

This is simply not something that should be left to Google. English isn't my native tongue and I basically learned it on the internet. Of course people will think I express myself with utmost hostility.

I would guess Google will try to exempt words that some over-educated employee has a strong opinion about. But no word would ever carry the amount of offense that this paternalism of Google itself expresses.

Nothing dramatic. Look at China.

Every communication is actively monitored by the government. Any unimproved ideas are harshly dealt with

*approved

This is pretty scary. Inclusivity fine but what else can they push and censor.

I am from different country and most of the words are gender neutral which in US pretty big deal like (landlord, guys - which is gender neutral in our country).

Its like pushing your culture on different countries. I don't want to see the Americanisation on our country cultures.

There is no issues of inclusivity in our country. Google is pushing their agenda on different groups, cultures and countries,

This is how it starts.

https://twitter.com/thecitywanderer/status/15161769835495301...

>I don't want to see the Americanisation on our country cultures.

This is something that I just cannot reconcile with the notion that all these measures are meant to make things more inclusive. All I see are groups of rich and powerful people telling people "below them" how to behave, and makings tons of money doing it. D&I is a grift.

>Its like pushing your culture on different countries.

I think the original point was there is no way for Google not to do this. Sometimes cultures have opposing viewpoints which makes a neutral decision impossible. One obvious example is with displaying disputed borders in Google Maps. Any decision there is going to be political. Lots of people are going to be upset with Google for making the wrong decision regardless of which decisions they make, but I think that anger is misplaced. The real problem is Google has the power to make this decision for too many people. Companies like Google are simply too powerful and need to be broken up.

There is no reason to put this feature. This is political feature and can be used in many ways and affects other countries and cultres you cant imagine

There are second order and third order consequences of having this kind of features.

Google should not push their politics and agenda on other countries and cultures. It affects every other country in different ways.

In future this kind of feature can be used in many ways we dont know.

Well, yes this is a political feature, but your comment leads me to believe I didn't make my point clear enough. Almost every feature is political when you are the size of Google. You may only be objecting to this feature because it goes against your culture. However there are thousands of other decisions that Google has made that support your culture at the expense of some other culture. Many people here are viewing the problem as Google choosing the wrong culture. I am saying we should instead focus on the immense power Google has to force one culture on another culture.

If Google is broken up, the decisions of the new smaller companies will still be political.

So what would have been achieved?

Competition. Google is able to use its power to push out competitors. Without that power, there would likely be lots more companies challenging the various product categories that Google currently dominates. Not every company would reach the same decision on all these issues, especially if these companies arose in different cultures.

presumably those smaller companies would be beholden to the jurisdictions they're located in, where the laws are drafted by people who are democratically elected.

so, i guess democracy would have been achieved. or at least a relative increase in democratic control

well at the very least the companies in question actually reside in the jurisdiction in which they serve and are thus at least in some form accountable to the people and hopefully share some values.

Being German I'm kind of tired of the fact that American social media sites have for some reason exported QAnon protests to our cities while women get banned for showing a nipple.

Is the suggestion there actually complaining about landlord being a gendered word? I didn’t even realise that people thought landlord was gendered although I know landlady is a word. Often a landlord is a company, for example.

But if you actually look at the suggestions, aren’t they sometimes better in the sense of being more precise? Proprietor works better for describing a pub landlord, for example, as many pubs are being managed by people who rent the building, landlord could confusingly either refer to the person running the business or to the company owning the building, though I guess to some extent proprietor has that problem too. If you’re talking about a rental property instead, landlord is probably more precise because eg your landlord might own a lease and be subletting rather than owning the property itself.

Sometimes people in my culture treat obviously gendered words as gender-neutral to the point that they re-gender them when they need to be specific. For example "policeman lady", "postman lady" or "men's perfume". So I think the gender-neutralizing of words happens naturally without having to change the word itself, just like your example of landlord becoming gender neutral.

> But if you actually look at the suggestions, aren’t they sometimes better in the sense of being more precise?

I didn't know the distinction until you pointed it out, and didn't know very well the range of meanings proprietor had until now. Which I suppose highlights an important problem with such suggestions: if they suggest replacing a term A with a more precise term B that does not signify what was intended to be conveyed by A, based on concerns that both author and audience do not care about, and the author blindly accepts the suggestion, then such suggestions are creating miscommunication.

>I am from different country and most of the words are gender neutral which in US pretty big deal like (landlord, guys - which is gender neutral in our country).

Ask your hetrosexual male friends how many guys they have slept with. I would imagine response will illustrate "guys" is less gender neutral than might think.

Context matters.

Some locations they use "y'all", some use "you guys". It's gender neutral in that sense.

In the sentence you gave, the context wouldn't be gender neutral because you said "slept with".

If you enter a room and say hey guys, it's neutral. If it's all girls you could say hey gals, which would be fine, either works.

I can't imagine anyone other than liberals that would be offended by a blanket statement of "hey guys".

It's really a stupid thing to get hung up on. It's like searching for something to offend you.

It doesn't make sense until you realize the goal. What you're doing is creating arbitrary rules to form a kind of censorship via social pressure because you can't censor speech legally.

Women use you guys to refer to a group of other women all the time. As you said context matters.

I don't think words need to be gender neutral. Grammatical and biological gender are not really the same. I think this urge to clean languages is a bit detached.

Personally, I have no skin in the game of gendered language. Sometimes I think it's exaggerated, sometimes I think it's necessary. I do have a hard time changing how I speak, old habits die hard. As far as people and everyday communication is concerned, I address people the way they want to be addressed. Nothing to do with gender, just general politeness. E.g. I wouldn't use a nick name people hate, so why would I insist in calling someone "her" (or "he") if they don't want to?

I wasn't referring to calling someone another gender. Doing so is just minimum courtesy. I do believe that courtesy cannot be mandated though and I would not want anyone having it mandated for my sake.

I meant words like mailman and such. Of course a mailman could also be a woman. I think calling someone a mailwoman is fine, but the word does not carry intrinsic offense.

We don't disagree, I think. Gender neutral job titles are ok, as far as I'm concerned. Mostly that is, as the female jobs are, historically, more often lower income jobs in the same domain (nurse vs. doctor comes to mind). Coming back to courtesy, if a female mailman prefers to be addressed as mailwoman I would do so.

Funny side note, the German language has some interesting edge cases. E.g. the rank of Hauptmann (Captain in the army and air force) usually isn't gendered, the other ranks aren't neither. So usually female soldiers of that rank are addressed as Frau Hauptmann. The funny thing is Hauptmann is also last name... The plural of the rank Hauptmann is gender neutral again, it's Hauptleute...

i just go with mail carrier and keep it simple

Of course, I just think that the term mailman, even if gendered, isn't exclusionary.

I don't feel like i have the right to decide as an individual dude whether it is or not.

Taking offence is an individual decision too.

I don't think see it as "taking offense" personally. If somebody just happens to prefer it, then I don't see why I wouldn't. No skin off my back.

I don't believe this is entirely honest since you probably also have a limit in what you are willing to accommodate, be that faith, self-identification or just a usual form of courtesy.

Granted, apathy would be my solution too, but here I am expected to align the way I express myself.

I do believe that the desire to frame anything gender neutral is not something I want to put too much thought into but I don't mind conflict if someone requests to accommodate what is basically a faith.

Inclusivity is a problem in every country.

> There is no issues of inclusivity in our country.

Your country has a literal caste system, go ahead and pull the other one.

There are many countries this could apply to. For example, landlord, as in someone who rents out a property is considered gender neutral here in Ireland. The term landlady exists, but is only used for female publicans, and only rarely, as publican and vintner are both used more frequently in that context.

"Guys" is mostly male oriented, but wouldn't be unheard of for a mixed gender group, and similarly "Lads" here is often gender neutral despite it being the most male of working class male stereotypes in the country that is our nearest neighbour.

Here in Australia, “guys” is generally used in a gender neutral way. Even when hanging out with groups of only women, I’ll use it and so will others without batting an eye. Eg, “What are you guys doing after this?”

Years ago I had an American friend tell me “guys” was sexist. I’ve been thinking about it for years since her comment. I think in an Australian context she’s wrong. And I think we move in the direction of gender equality by making words less gendered. Not by inserting gender bias where there was none.

You make “landlord” a gendered term by policing it as such. What a waste of a good word.

In the USA, guys can be used in a gender neutral context, but it also can be used to refer to males only.

"Ok guys, lets go to lunch" is probably gender neutral.

"Guys line up on the right, gals on the left" is not.

"Do you sleep with guys?" is not gender neutral.

In South Africa "guys" is gender neutral too.

I wish the Americans can keep their weird culture war within their own borders.

This one is still widely argued; many women say they don't care and are happy to be included in the guys, and others consider it a real terrible thing to say. I have to conclude that it's unlikely that stopping using guys as a gender-neutral address will truly move the needle in equality.

> an American friend tell me “guys” was sexist.

How odd.

Did you ask why they are so sensitive? Most of us elsewhere on the planet would laugh at such a ridiculously petty statement.

Landlord is gender-neutral in English, and has been so for a long time.

Even in the US? Because as the link the grandparent comment shows, it is one of the words Google Docs is warning away from as insufficiently inclusive

Yes, even in the US. But of course, given enough influence, you can make absolutely anything non-inclusive. And social pressure will make everyone have to accept it.

I also find it baffling that inclusivity folks find a term that used to be male exclusive becoming applicable to both male and female as problematic. Wouldn't they want something like this to happen?

I don't see this as too baffling- in their logic, if you have two alternatives (landlord and landlady, say) and landlord gets picked, it's evidence of patriarchy (because it defaulted to male). They would prefer "landperson", or perhaps "rent seeking capitalist"

Yes, just like "actor" is gender-neutral (although "actress" is still explicitly female).

When I rented a room from a woman in Atlanta, the other tenants and I always referred to her as "landlord" and nobody batted an eye. The only time I hear "landlady" is when One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer plays on the radio. So that's my datum.

Would you say Ireland has no issues with inclusivity? Come on.

Why does e.g. Ireland's poor treatment of the travelling community mean we need to defer to American interpretations of language? Is America such a shining paragon that everyone needs to copy their every action?

This is a lazy argument

I didn't make that argument, though.

If the starting position was "America's diversity concerns are not [e.g.] Ireland's concerns" I'm more sympathetic! In fact I think having software that tries to do this is fundamentally broken! But the starting position is always "we don't have any problems here" which is an even lazier, and wrong, argument.

In that case you're as equally arguing against an argument I didn't make. I did not say that Ireland has no problems. I said that Ireland does not have problems related to the gendered implications of landlord, guys, or lads, due to these words having much less gendered implications in the Irish context. (and elsewhere in the thread, that the south eastern Ireland usage of "boy" does not have the racial implications that it does in certain contexts in the US).

Nowhere did I say that Ireland has no issues with inclusivity.

You started this reply chain on a response to a post claiming India has no issues with inclusivity, and mentioned instead we should also be considering Ireland for some reason! What are you doing?

This is pretty scary. Inclusivity fine but what else can they push and censor.

Inclusivity is fine, as long as you're not encouraged to be inclusive? Are you sure you think it's fine?

It's certainly fair to say that you feel that inclusivity has gotten out of hand and that it shouldn't change the way we talk. But it seems disingenuous so say that it's "fine", but think it's scary when it's suggested to you.

This is why I'm concerned about the word "inclusive" in the original tweet. I don't want to see the Americanisation (or worse, San Franciscoisation) of all Western cultures.

I worked at an Australian tech company that expanded its offices into USA tech hubs. Very quickly our American staff started complaining about non-inclusive phrases commonly used at the company - phrases like "guys" instead of "folks". In Australia "guys" is a gender-neutral term when used collectively. It's very commonly used and not considered non-inclusive by any Australian I know. But of course they forced the change and the word "guys" was effectively retired from conversation there.

Is it more inclusive to force an Australian company of largely Australian employees to adopt an American culture because of a few easily offended Americans on staff? Or is that less inclusive? It seems like forcing people to drop their own cultural affectations and assuming that your American ones are the de facto correct ones is (in a small way) rather imperialist.

Yes this is a minor example on the scheme of things. But I think it's illustrative.

I totally agree. When I started at my current job there was one primarily English speaking person in our weekly teams meeting. For her (an Australian) guys was always inclusive. She used it all the time even for purely female groups.

Color me irritated when we at the company were advised not to use it anymore by our inclusiveness people.

When people talk about a term being "gender-neutral", that doesn't just mean "people use this term to refer to people of all genders"; many people also mean "do people of all genders, upon hearing this term, feel included, rather than othered". For instance, using "guys" to refer to a group emphasizes the idea that "guy" is the default and "not guy" is the exception not worth noting.

"not considered non-inclusive by any Australian I know" does not mean "not considered non-inclusive by any Australian". You've just given an example of the type of response that you and potentially some of your colleagues might give to people attempting to raise this issue. How many people you know might accurately predict that that would be your response, and thus not raise the issue because it would cause strife?

Inclusiveness is not exclusively an "American" issue, nor is it a matter of being "easily offended". Someone raising this issue to you may not be expressing offense; they may be expressing a desire to include people.

(This is not an argument specifically for "folks"; I fully agree that you shouldn't necessarily adopt a specific replacement term if that term doesn't make sense locally. Perhaps there's an inclusive term that does make more sense locally, to avoid having something that feels like a loanword.)

That's a good point, however, the original point still stands.

The term 'hey guys' may very well be materially 'inclusive' enough that it doesn't warrant intervention necessary.

In much the same way 'landlord' is not materially a non-inclusive term either.

If you want to split hairs, it's a never ending problem, the sweater will come apart.

Some people draw the line at 'hey guys' - some people draw the line at 'landlord'.

And FYI - your statement about 'Inclusivity is not an American problem' reeks of ugly cultural Imperialism. Though there's surely a kernel of truth, more than likely the applied manner will boil down to 'Americans version of everything at the remote office' - which is paradoxically might be 'exclusionary' of other cultures, like those in Australia.

A better approach might be to let Australia figure it out on their own.

> The term 'hey guys' may very well be materially 'inclusive' enough that it doesn't warrant intervention necessary.

That's not a decision made unilaterally by speakers and writers of the language; it's a decision made by those listening and reading, as well. You can't decide how your words are perceived; you can only choose what words you use.

> Some people draw the line at

Some people don't think of language in terms of "lines", as though saying "fine, this far, but no further". Language is a living, changing thing; every piece of it is interpreted in varying ways by different people, and those ways change over time. Using it, like many other human interactions, is an exercise in modeling others around you, and the net effect you want your communication to have to its many audiences, and the environment that communication will create, and all the connotations it may convey. When trying to record that in a dictionary, it may round to a few broad buckets or categories, but the language as it lives in people's heads seems more continuous than discrete.

That's true of all communication, not just specific words. If you tried to plot individual words or phrases in meaning-space, some of them would have fairly sharp well-identified points where the majority of people agree, and some of them would have fuzzier boundaries, and some of them would have multi-modal distributions. And even that oversimplifies, because it's entirely possible to model people at multiple depths, "this is what the speaker means when they're saying it, this is what parts of the audience are hearing, this is what other parts of the audience are hearing", such that your own model of some communication is a mental model of many interpretations.

This pattern applies in many different cases, and people do it all the time: predicting whether your audience is likely to know a particular piece of jargon from your field and comparing that to the value of the jargon or the need to define/explain it; accurately conveying levels of confidence/certainty/uncertainty; considering whether your audience will know a meme; attempting to come across as professional; choosing the right vocabulary level for the audience; making a new piece of terminology; naming a program or project; making a pun.

> Language is a living, changing thing

Yes, that's the usual argument that comes up at some point in those discussions: "Language has always been changing", etc etc.

What this glosses over, in my opinion, is that there are vastly different ways how language changes. Language is always changing on its own, simply because the way people talk is constantly evolving: Today's slang might become tomorrow's high language and todays high language will probably feel hilariously stilted and old-fashioned a few generations on.

It's something completely different to deliberately alter language: Encourage or discourage certain words or even languages, replace words with others, etc. Historically, that has always been closely tied to politics, power struggles and battles between opposing narratives, and I don't think it's different here.

> And even that oversimplifies, because it's entirely possible to model people at multiple depths, "this is what the speaker means when they're saying it, this is what parts of the audience are hearing, this is what other parts of the audience are hearing", such that your own model of some communication is a mental model of many interpretations.

Fully agreed, and I think you should always tune a presentation to your particular audience - but I think especially then, it's telling that Google Docs isn't even asking what your audience is. They are giving suggestions that they believe to be absolutely true, no matter which audience you are writing for.

Yes, sometimes language changes happen deliberately, sometimes they happen accidentally, and everywhere in between. Some changes that are perceived as happening naturally were deliberate. Affecting language deliberately vs accidentally is more-or-less entirely orthogonal to which side is correct. The involvement of politics doesn't eliminate the possibility of a correct side and an incorrect side, or a more-correct side and a more-incorrect side.

"it's a decision made by those listening and reading, as well. You can't decide how your words are perceived; you can only choose what words you use."

Yes, the Australians can make that choice, not Google.

That's the point.

The strife is an ongoing American cultural war, however. Other countries generally have much more important ongoing local battles. It's a good political angle to hew in the US because it's very hard to attack - it's structurally similar to many past moral panics.

> do people of all genders, upon hearing this term, feel included, rather than othered

How other people feel is not something anyone can control. If someone is clearly addressing a group you are a part of, and clearly means to include you in their address to the group, and you decide to feel "othered" because of this term or that term, that is your problem. You need to re-evaluate how you feel. People feel all sorts of ways about everything. Sometimes your feelings are wrong.

> many people also mean "do people of all genders, upon hearing this term, feel included, rather than othered".

Yes, but this is a vastly more fuzzy criterion than the original one. What does "feeling included" mean? Who has the authority to declare how a group "feels" about something? Who even belongs to that group?

E.g., it might very well be the case that australian women did feel included when the term "guys" was used, because that was what they grew up with.

My (Australian) partner opens WFH group meetings with "hey guys", while working with mostly other women. Don't know any one that has taken offence to guys personally, either.

> Inclusiveness is not exclusively an "American" issue

Guys is used as a generic term in all English speaking countries except the US. It’s used by women to refer to groups, including exclusively female groups.

It is the US that’s out of step here (colour me surprised). Stop trying to force US English on the rest of the world.

> Guys is used as a generic term in all English speaking countries except the US. It’s used by women to refer to groups, including exclusively female groups.

This is true in large parts of the US too. There are regional dialects where this is not true, but it is not a general feature of American English.

For that matter, I'll believe "guys" is gender neutral when I start hearing straight men talk about all the guys they've dated.

> In Australia "guys" is a gender-neutral term when used collectively.

It is in the U.S. too.

Yeah, it's mostly the people who tried to push "LatinX" on us that demand guys is sexist. They a very small, but extremely vocal minority on twitter and then internet in general.

There is a fitting essay [0] by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

[0]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

There is also an excellent chapter on it in Roger Scruton’s “Fools, Frauds and Firebrands” book.

Why are Google and Microsoft enabling a small number of people with the power to dictate our language?

Because the people demanding this are wildly, disproportionately aggressive, and the number one priority of basically everyone at those firms these days is to just keep their heads down and stay on the gravy train. Even the CEOs.

It doesn't help that it's all phrased in moral terms. Managers there don't get any sense of morality from their work so they're extremely vulnerable to being told that they have to do X to be a moral person. They don't know how to push back and say "actually, my behaviour is moral, your behaviour is immoral, unacceptable and you will now be fired for it". Also: firing is a decentralized process and means fighting HR.

This is a wild hypothesis, but many people believe it including me. Woke politics and culture war is essentially modern day version of bread and circuses [1]. The biggest scandals in America last decade was illegitimate Iraq War and 2008 financial crisis. But in the decade of 2010s the biggest issue is how many genders and pronouns are out othere. So go figure. Bonus point if you can invent a new gender and pronoun for yourself.

US is bombing some Middle Eastern country which has nothing to do with 9/11. But the issue of the day for Americans is how inclusive is "guys". US was funding a lab in China where COVID might have come from. Don't worry, the issue of the day is whether a 4 year old should be able to transition to another gender. So some Americans can feel good about their moral superiority.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

This destruction of culture and language actually has the potential for a lot of short term gain by consumer facing corporations (Here's a good summary of how this sort of thing works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bRhMLhc8wQ)

Given that they can get away with practically whatever they want otherwise (look at how many people are still running Windows despite the completely unacceptable behavior by Microsoft) why wouldn't they do things that result in profit?

That video is awful. I made a good faith attempt to watch it to get an opposing point, and I made it right up to the 11 minute mark where he starts explaining that the woke agenda is anti-white and "they want to replace people of European descent in their own lands with a servant class who is lower IQ, easier to control, works for lower wages, and is driven entirely by material consumption."

To sum up for anyone else who wants to avoid it, the whole argument is that culture drives consumption, and it's better for the elites to have a homogenous population who all consume the same things, and that "woke capital" is an attempt by the elites to coerce the populace into homogenizing.

It's basically the "gay agenda", but now rich people are behind it.

They work there.

I still haven’t figured out how to pronounce Latinx in Spanish…

Latin-x. Which of course makes it super hard to apply to all the other gendered words in Spanish. At least make it a different vowel like latini.

Oh i thought it was pronounced like how we pronounce lynx ... la-tuh-nks

Definitely ends in ɛks. But that’s an English x being grafted on to the end of the word. For a Spanish x it ends in eh-kees for equis the Spanish pronunciation of x. I personally find it rather amusing how culturally insensitive the ‘culturally sensitive’ are.

I think you are spot on about this. Different communities and regions have varying definitions for words, and there are probably thousands of such cases. Trying to dictate one "correct" usage for each is extremely arrogant and disrespectful.

Not to mention that meanings can evolve over time a great deal. If these types of corrections become common place I'm not sure what all of the ramifications will be but I suspect they will be bad on the whole.

FWIW, "guys" is the default gender-neutral collective term commonly used in large parts of the US, including the west coast, even when the speaker and the collective are all female. The term "folk" has connotations such that it isn't always appropriate, and sounds a bit old-fashioned regardless -- it is not a suitable replacement. If the intent is to gender the collective because it is germane, the common term varies quite a bit with region (most of the women I'm around, raised in big west coast cities, use "girls").

I've lived all over the US and learned to code switch the regional dialects. I've never seen anyone get upset about someone not using the local default collective term in good faith. Trying to get Americans to speak the same version of English is a futile task.

In Australia "guys" is a gender-neutral term when used collectively

It is in 99% of America, too.

It's just a few angry self-important people who like to shout on the internet who are happy to tell you otherwise.

Is the counterpart to "Guys" a gender-neutral term when used collectively?

There is not always a counterpart. "Guys" can be used as a collective noun to address a group of people regardless of the genders of the individuals in the group. That's the point.

There is a counterpart to "guys". People, not infrequently, say "guys and gals" which means that the guys is gendered.

"There is not always a counterpart", means that you recognize there is (at least) sometimes a counterpart. And in English, (unlike say, French or Spanish), the fact that so few words are gendered means that it's actually relevant when they are. Guys is masculine, Gals is feminine.

There are actually unambiguously non-gendered plurals "y'all", "them", "yins". Some of these are colloquial, but their existence also points to the fact that there are groups that weren't served exlusively with the gendered "guys".

Is the word "actor" a problem then? It has had historical male implications, and has a female counterpart, actress? Yet actress is slowly falling out of favour, which is why you have awards now called e.g. Best Female Actor.

Gals comes across as even more old fashioned than actress in my region - it's a term that feels like it walked out of a movie old enough that it had to advertise that it had colour.

Sometimes, as the world evolves, gendered terms get replaced by new gender neutral terms. Sometimes the meaning evolves in different ways (e.g. doctor and nurse are no longer gendered equivalents of each other, as the division in roles has continued to be useful even after the gender stereotypes as to who does those roles slowly fades). And sometimes one term just subsumes the other.

And sometimes, these changes happened many decades ago in other countries that are not yours. It's not very inclusive to expect those people to defer to American expectations of those terms.

Would you be okay with people making a title Doctress? That's a better analogy, to me, for actor->actress, than guys vs. gals. Someone created a gendered term where one didn't need to exist (as demonstrated by the lack of other professions that had this distinction). Where the distinction did exist, is a case like you've pointed out where women were explicitly, or implicitly barred from certain professions for thousands of years. So when we opened up those professions, it seems reasonable to say "no we just want you to call us what you call everyone else", and actress is the exception that proves the rule.

The phrase "you guys" is attempting to be evolved, by parties who use it currently, and don't want to change their behavior to be explicitly inclusive. I'm not going to speak to what's okay in other countries, but the English definition of Guys is from Guy Fawkes, and is intended to mean a man. I would be surprised if the etymology of that weren't the same for Australia, which was also a British colony.

But the last thing I will point out, is that it's not on the in-group "men" to say whether or not they're excluding people. It's the people who are being excluded who get to make that determination for whether or not they feel like there are barriers for them. So when men say "you guys" is inclusive, they're saying "I don't want to change my behavior, so this now includes everyone." And the thing that's being ignored is that there are people who don't agree that they are included in that phrase.

> Some of these are colloquial, but their existence also points to the fact that there are groups that weren't served exlusively with the gendered "guys".

Most of the replacements you cited are regional:

- Y'all is Southern/AAVE.

- Them is third-person, whereas "you guys" is second-person.

- "Yinz" is from Pittsburgh.

- I'm gonna throw in "youse," one of my faves, which is from New Jersey/Philly.

"Guys" is clearly gendered, whereas "you guys," I'd argue, generally isn't--especially in the Northeast US. I frequently hear cis women refer to groups of entirely cis women as "you guys."

This isn't meant as a view of what the ideal state of the English language is (bring back "thou!"), but these discussions frequently involve people talking past each other, and conflating "you guys" (second-person plural, arguably gendered) with "guys" (third-person plural, usually gendered). Effectively replacing "you guys" is a more challenging task, since there isn't a universally agreed-upon alternative, at least in the US.

I'll leave it to others to figure out what that alternative should be, though I will note that I, as a WASP from the Northeast, sound completely ridiculous saying "y'all."

I don't think you can say that a gendered word is not gendered in all contexts.

The recognition that "Guys" is gendered, means that "you guys" will read as gendered to people. And that it will be necessarily exclusionary if you don't identify that way. It's worth noting that "you" is gender neutral and plural on its own. So it's hard for me to accept that adding a gendered word to a non-gendered one magically takes away the gendering. Also, the only people I ever see complaining about having to change this are people who fall into the group that's definitely included in "you guys".

Me <- WASP from Northwest that adopted y'all later in life, because it's just fun to say, and completely unambiguous.

In the Cincinnati area, "Y'all" is singular. "All y'all" is the plural.

Where I am nobody says "gals" unless they are trying to talk like an old timey gangster. Like the cartoonish "wise guy" dialect where they add "see" at the end of every sentence

Gals is another word, like folks, which is not widely used outside the US.

As a European who moved to San Francisco a few years ago. I almost know how to use the 3 shells.

(for anyone who doesn't get the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7nFEnFtvCM)

I've always understood "folks" to mean parents. Not sure I understand how this is a better term.

Being asked to use "folks" in Australia was frankly bizarre. It's not a word anyone uses over there and would be considered a severe Americanism. Pretty sure that suggestion came from our Texas staff, not the Californians.

Pretty sure that suggestion came from our Texas staff, not the Californians.

Fortunately, Austin isn't representative of the majority of Texas, or America. It's like Portland, but with better weather.

(Just last week I learned that "Keep Austin Weird" predates "Keep Portland Weird" by five years.)

Depends on context:

> Hey folks, what's the status of that document?

Just means the people being addressed.

> Are your folks coming to dinner?

is, "Are your parents coming to dinner?"

Wiktionary lists both as definitions: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/folks#Etymology_1

> Obama: 'We tortured some folks'

https://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/john-brennan-torture-...

I can’t hear ‘folks’ without thinking of Neddie Seagoon from The Goon Show. Probably not what proponents of the word are going for, the show being from the 1950s and in many ways ‘of its time’.

I think your understanding is mistaken, or at least regional. While it can mean "parents" when used in the plural with a possessive ("my folks", "your folks", sometimes even "the folks"), in modern American English it's as commonly just a synonym for "people".

Using "folks" (especially in the plural) to mean people can be rather "folksy", though, and I wouldn't be too surprised if some textbook or dictionary mentioned just the "parent" definition. Did you learn it this way as a second language, or as a native speaker somewhere non-American?

Folks has been used to describe a group of people in the southern US for a long time. In pop culture it was used like that by Porky Pig at the end of Looney Toons with "That's all, Folks!" (i couldn't remember the how the stutter goes though)

The trouble with 'guys' when referring to women -

The English language doesn't offer many gender-inclusive alternatives, like the Spanish ustedes or the German ihr. With no good phrase for the plural of 'you,' the plural term 'guys' ended up evolving into the colloquial alternative to refer to a group of people, regardless of whether group members are male or female.

However, Reuters Graphics explains that “people who speak languages with stronger gender associations tend to have stronger gender stereotypes, a 2020 study of 25 languages found. A 2021 study in Israel showed that when women were addressed in a math exam using male pronouns, their scores were low. When they were correctly identified with feminine pronouns, scores rose by a third.”

But many people quite fairly still see 'guys' as a gendered word—the dictionary defines the singular 'guy' simply as 'man.' Sherryl Kleinman, a former professor at the University of North Carolina, discusses in her 2002 essay Why Sexist Language Matters that gender-specific language like 'guys' can affect even children:

"I worry about what people with the best of intentions are teaching our children. A colleague’s five-year-old daughter recently left her classroom crying after a teacher said, “What do you guys think?”. She thought the teacher didn’t care about what she thought. When the teacher told her that of course she was included, her tears stopped. But what was the lesson? She learned that her opinion as a girl mattered only when she’s a guy. She learned that men are the norm." - Sherryl Kleinman, Why Sexist Language Matters

Even though most people who use the term don't do so with the intent of it being sexist or exclusive of women, it can and often does cause women to feel left out of the conversation. Imagine you used 'gals' to refer to a room full of men and women—do you think the men would respond?

- Taken from https://www.hotjar.com/blog/gender-inclusive-language-workpl...

Isn't it ironic that in the name of inclusiveness, certain words are excluded?

> I don't want to see the Americanisation (or worse, San Franciscoisation) of all Western cultures.

I've started observing that fixes for American problems are rolled out globally. For instance, the default branch of VCS repos being recommended to be changed from "master" to "main". Totally out of context where I'm from.

> Isn't it ironic that in the name of inclusiveness, certain words are excluded?

No, because the point of inclusiveness in this context is to be inclusive of humans and human cultures, not words. Excluding words which themselves exclude humans leads to the inclusion of those no longer excluded humans. It isn't difficult.

Thanks for clearing that up :)

God yes I hate how US centric a lot of this stuff is.

I thought the etymology for ‘guys’ was a group of children dressed like Guy Fawkes at events in England. Boys and girls did it so the term was gender neutral, informal, and endearing.

I'm sure they will add controls to select which "english" to use just like Grammarly and others. You can then submit correction to colloquialisms if they come up.

> commonly used and not considered non-inclusive by any Australian I know

That argument has been used to defend all sorts of terms, some worse than others. The example you choose "guys" as gender neutral is also common in US english. But being common does not mean it is correct (racial and homophobic slurs were also common for a long time).

- Group of women === "girls"

- Group of men === "guys"

- Group of women with one guy === "guys"

- Group of men with one girl === "guys"

The "guys" as gender neutral is clearly the result of patriarical society. But does that make the word _harmful_? Hard to say. I lean towards "no". But I'm not in the adversely selected group.

a group of women can be called guys. happens all the time.

your chart should be

- Group of women === "girls","guys"

- Group of men === "boys","guys"

- Group of women with one guy === "guys"

- Group of men with one girl === "guys"

you could call a group of women either a gendered collective noun or "guys". for a mixed group, you can't use a gendered collective noun. obviously.

What happened to the word gals in your list?

It's an American term (and as far as I know, an American regional term), that also seems to have had a decline in the US as people here mostly encounter it in older US movies?

The way languages are used - common usage is almost certainly correct. Correct is whatever is agreed upon by conversation participants. Correct in one group ain't necessarily so in another.

Uhhhh now calling a group of adult women "girls" is legitimately offensive, even in Australia.

Yeah, it's belittling from what I heard. I don't really fully understand anymore since the golden rule has long gone out the window (I wouldn't be offended if someone approached me and me friends and said "Hey, boys". Maybe be a bit uncommon but I wouldn't think much of it).

My hometown in Ireland has "Well, boy" as a colloqial greeting people use between each other. We had neither the empire of other european countries to bring black people here against their will, or the economic appeal to attract them willingly, so this is a term that evolved in a world relatively devoid of black people.

But, bring that to the US and greeting a black american with "boy" has a very different connotation. And there's totally valid reasons to do with local historical conditions that means that this is inappropriate to use in that context.

Does that make it wrong for people in my home town to greet each other like that? I don't think so. I think it's very uninclusive for Google to impose an american context where there is none.

The golden rule is a good starting point. As an abrasive person who doesn’t mind when people fight or argue at me, I tried to live by the golden rule and realized people want to be treated how they want to be treated, not how my autistic ass wanted to be treated.

In the same way the term “boy” is never really used insultingly, but people use “girly” or “stop being a little girl” as an insult all the time. So it makes sense that you wouldn’t be offended by the similar term, but some women may not like girls so much. I think this is reasonable and treating people how they want to be treated is the ultimate goal.

There’s a movie with Natalie Portman where she’s offended by a boy calling her a lady. She thinks she’s being called old.

There’s also what I’ll call the Jeremy Clarkson ooo hello ladies, reserved for fancy done up groups of ladies in nice dresses and hats for example from the country woman’s association.

Distinct from the oooo hello ladies of a group of prostitutes making their grand entrance from the back of a hummer I recently saw in the breaking bad movie.

Boys I’ve seen used a lot referring to groups of men in the examples of dogging the boys at a construction yard, pulled the boys for an scv rush in sc2, hello boyyys for Roy and HG implying something rude.

> The "guys" as gender neutral is clearly the result of patriarical society.

No it isn't, there is nothing clear about this nor is it true in any way that actually means anything.

How do you know how many women there are? Are you a biologist?

I'm sorry, I can't ever imagine approaching a group of women/girls and saying "Hey girls/women, xyz".

I will always without a doubt start off by saying "Hey guys, xyz".

Absolutely incredible, it's like you've never spoken to a group of women before. Go call them girls and see what they think.

I hope “Hey Ladies” is still ok, since that’s what I’ve been using for decades.

There is no issues of inclusivines in our country. Why US always want to push their culture on other groups and countries.

We have no issues regrading inclusivity. Most people are very polite and dont have issue. Please (Google, Big Tech) stop pushing your agendas on other countries.

What country is that? I'm pretty sure it will have issues of inclusivity, you just don't see them because you're not affected by it.

I'm guessing the UK. And I agree.

I guess it's maybe because we've had different experiences. For example, I could see me saying "Hey ladies" to the group of girls that I went to school with. I couldn't imagine addressing women on the street or in work with that phrase unless I developed at the very minimum a friendly relationship with all of them.

But that's just me, you are totally correct I've seen lots of people do it without any complaints what so ever.

"Hey everyone..." "Hey there..." "Hey..."

I was responding to the statement that a group of women are to be referred to as "girls" colloquially and not "guys" and that this is somehow, rather amazingly, a patriarchal structure.

Equally, I can not say "hey" and just say what I want to say, so what? I can also say "hello" instead of "hey". Your point proves nothing in this context, though I'm sure you like to think it did.

Note that responses are, well, responses, hence there is the handy "parent" feature. But thanks for illuminating the world of possibilities that speech holds!

Furthermore:

"Hey everyone" - Too formal, I want don't want it to sound like an instruction to the group, just who cares to listen in that group of women

"Hey there" - Might be mistaken for a specific person if I happen to glance at them, I want to refer to the whole group (if they want to hear it)

"Hey" - See above.

I'll stick with "Hey guys", thanks!

There's an organization, the "East Cut Community Benefit District", promoting this. Their main job is homeless removal.

Google used to choose map markers by population. The map of Rio de Janeiro showed all the favelas by name, and ignored the tourist areas. This annoyed Brazilian authorities.

[1] https://www.theeastcut.org/

Yeah, the East Cut is definitely not an example of real estate taking their cues from Google, but Google taking their cues from the real-estate sector. San Francisco's realtor-defined neighborhoods have always been a little off from the colloquially described one.

> Their main job is homeless removal.

Citation needed.

I do not like this type of reply. To me, it is hostile and lazy.

Idea: Try Googling: East Cut Community Benefit District homeless

It only takes a couple of seconds. I just did, and I found an article from FastCompany that discusses this matter.

Ref: https://www.fastcompany.com/90217789/inside-san-franciscos-s...

Nice quote:

  The cost of living here has contributed to a homeless problem that has gained national notoriety. But it is less evident on the surface because luxe apartment building security has worked to clear the streets. The CBD says it helps with the homeless problems and says it has gotten 2,300 calls for homeless outreach assistance from January through October 2018. But a recent study from UC Berkeley found that some CBDs (also called Business Improvement Districts, or BIDs) in California have contributed to the rise of anti-homeless laws across the state by lobbying local governments. “Our key finding is that [CBDs] exclude homeless people from public space through aggressive policy advocacy and policing practices,” says Jeff Selbin, the director of the Policy Center and UC Berkeley School of Law, at a press conference in September about the study. “This finding raises important legal—and I would say moral—concerns.”

You may also find a shi--y content farm piece from www.businessinsider.in that reads like a copy-paste job from the FastCompany article and a bunch of PR from East Cut CBD. No need to add a reference for that article... :)

> I don't feel confident with Google deciding what words are the correct words.

Personally, even if they could accurately decide what are the "correct" word in some sense, it didn't make it less dystopian for me. I would rather make my own mistakes, be wrong, and have some regrets rather than having to put up with the constant holier-than-thou browbeating and woke-scolding.

It's no longer big brother, it's big sibling and it has always been big sibling.

I thought the phrase was "dear sibling" since "big" might not be sufficiently inclusive.

True, it would discriminate against smaller companies.

dear would discriminate against those who are not so beloved.

Best comment!

To be clear, its the best comment because "...it has always been big sibling"

These approaches have a way of wiping the past clean off the slate. There's no problem with the words 'big sibling' - I, as a big sister, am in favor of it. The problem is that the internet is a snapshot pretending to be all of history.

Can it be turned off? It sounds like a fine optional feature and an annoying required one. If I'm writing something, I certainly don't want the word processor constantly throwing up modals ruining my train of thought. Reminds me of Clippy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant

Defaults matter because few people change from it. If everyone zigs because the dominant software defaults to it and you want to zag, you're fighting against that current.

Real world example: Twitter got even worse once they bullied everyone into algorithmic feeds by changing it back from chronological until people gave up and left it.

> Can it be turned off?

Maybe it can be turned off, but the do you dare to turn it off at work?

don't worry, leadership will ensure that flag is permanently enabled via AD group policy and no longer user editable.

Do you dare turn off spell check at work?

Yes, because I know how to spell.

This is a bad reason to turn it off. Knowing how to spell isn’t enough!

I know how to write by hand too, but I still often use word processor software.

It doesn't sound more intrusive than the existing red-squiggle for spelling errors.

Spelling errors usually have an objective fix and are isolated to a single word. Warning about an improper word depends on the surrounding context and is highly subjective. The latter case requires a great deal more cognitive load to deal with and I think it will be much more distracting.

> usually have an objective fix

Well, nowadays. Keeping in mind that the only reason English spelling is standardized in 2022 is the waves of intentional English language spelling standardizations that occurred in the 17th, 19th, and 20th centuries, each of which was supported by dictionaries, education programs, and a general messaging that it would be the intelligent thing to do to get on board with the standard.

I can't help but wonder if people decried the idea of standardization back then. "It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word." ~Andrew Jackson, 1833

(... typing these sentences has triggered my spell-checker three times. I have accepted two suggestions and taken the liberty of disagreeing with the third, after a cross-check with my dictionary to confirm my spelling). ;)

https://twitter.com/thecitywanderer/status/15161769835495301...

This is how it starts. What else will they push and censor.

Next thing you know there will be actual laws that ban what can be said in schools, books being banned, and laws that allow drivers to run over protesters.

Fortunately the people who are vigilant about Twitter moderation policies and word processor features are acting in good faith and will be outraged by actual government attempts to stifle speech.

>ban what can be said in schools

So if you are referring to the "Don't say gay," law, you should actually read it.

Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.

That's the actual text. I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner. The partisan hyperbole around it is ridiculous on both sides.

>books being banned

Like Huckleberry Finn? Agree, books shouldn't be banned. Well maybe Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries. Maybe some shouldn't be taught in public schools, right? How about the Bible? Should that be excluded from the public school corriculum? No screening of A Birth of a Nation you'd agree with? It's not like they're removing them from public libraries or the internet. What is taught in public schools vs what is allowed to be said in a public forum are quite different things as well.

>laws that allow drivers to run over protesters

I don't think that is a free speech issue, plus you are misrepresenting this legislation as well. It's not like a democrat can run over a GOP protestor or vice versa, I believe there has to be an actual threat involved like a group encircling your vehicle baseball bats.

Here's the issue with your argument, you are arguing with an imaginary person. That's like a GOP person saying something like, "libs are socialist!" It's a huge generalization and mis-catagorization. It's an emotional, misinformed argument rather than a rational one, and you are doing the same thing. You're consuming too much news / opinion. Take a break from it, most of it isn't that great for you. I fell into the same trap when I was younger.

> I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner. The partisan hyperbole around it is ridiculous on both sides.

What's problematic about it is that it's enforceable by private litigation. In one recent example[0], shortly before the law was passed, a group of Florida parents demanded action be taken against a 6th grade teacher for disclosing that his marriage was to another man after taking time off for his wedding. Had the law been in effect, it's likely one or more of those parents would have sued.

Such a suit probably wouldn't be successful in terms of winning a judgment. His disclosure wasn't "classroom instruction" after all, and most people probably would consider it age appropriate. Winning isn't necessarily the point though; creating a chilling effect such that teachers have to pretend queer people don't exist seems like the likely goal to me.

Indeed, the teacher in question is quitting teaching.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/-can...

>What's problematic about it is that it's enforceable by private litigation. In one recent example[0], shortly before the law was passed, a group of Florida parents demanded action be taken against a 6th grade teacher for disclosing that his marriage was to another man after taking time off for his wedding. Had the law been in effect, it's likely one or more of those parents would have sued.

Thanks for the article. Assuming it's accurate it sounds like only the school districts are able to be sued. I assume teachers themselves would fall under qualified immunity which applies to all government workers. Florida teachers also have (albeit weak) union representation. Unfortunately in the US anyone can sue anyone else for any reason, so for the individual there doesn't seem like anything would be legally different. Having said that, many Florida schools are absolutely horrible at education outcomes.

>Parents will be able to sue school districts for alleged violations, damages or attorney’s fees when the law goes into effect July 1.

This whole enforced by private litigation trend is troubling, I wholeheartedly agree. Texas is doing something similar with abortion clinics. I believe some democratic states (CA maybe?) is doing it with gun shops too. Hopefully when enough people lose in court and lose their attorney's fees, it will cease to become a thing.

>What's problematic about it is that it's enforceable by private litigation.

I don't see how this is problematic in the slightest.

"They're not following the law make them follow the law (or pay me to go away)" is a really common form that lawsuits against municipal entities take.

> I don't see how this is problematic in the slightest.

Because it's part of a new trend to de facto ban stuff the governing party would like to ban despite it being theoretically constitutionally protected by creating new civil offences and encouraging vexatious litigants to file nuisance suits. In this case the outcome is, as the state which passed the bill intended, that homosexuals are being harassed out of their jobs.

Regarding the state circumventing constitutional protections to make references to the gender of their partner a potentially career-limting move for certain minorities as less problematic than a company adding suggestions to avoid gendered language as a [clunky] grammar checking feature of its software is a point of view, I guess....

> I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner.

Why is it inappropriate for young children to be present for educational discussions about gender identity and sexual orientation? Kids live in modern families! Banning discussions like this is to ban the reality of lived experiences of millions of people.

Just a couple of days ago, my wife, who is a school librarian, told me a story about this. A teacher was in her library, doing story time with her kindergarten class, and for whatever reason the subject of parents came up. This kid stated, “I have a mama and a mami” (it’s a French school in Canada), and the woman said, “no, you have a mama and a papa”. No, the child insisted, “I have a mama and a mami”. And the teacher tried to argue the point, with this five-year-old. Of course the five-year-old knew what she was talking about, and the teacher was being either clueless or bigoted. But that right there is a “teachable moment”, and one that is completely appropriate for children of any age.

>Why is it inappropriate for young children to be present for educational discussions about gender identity and sexual orientation?

Because it's creepy and weird for adults, who are supposed to be teaching math and so on, to have conversations with young children about sex. What I don't get is how this became controversial. Probably because of the internet, again, amplifying the worst takes and the worst interpretations of any given event.

>Kids live in modern families! Banning discussions like this is to ban the reality of lived experiences of millions of people.

The overwhelming majority of kids do not, but that's besides the point and saying "we should wait to discuss sex and sexual orientation until kids are old enough" doesn't "ban reality" in any way. It's instructive that you assume the teacher was "clueless or bigoted" and not, ya know, trying to sidestep an awkward conversation about sex in front of five year olds.

I strongly believe that even if we'd accept the notion that this awkward conversation needs to be sidestepped, it's completely inappropriate to do it by invalidating the reality of that child's family and requesting them to agree to a ridiculous lie ("no, you have a mama and a papa") which insults their family. Arguing about this topic is entirely opposite to sidestepping the issue, it's the teacher explicitly starting the awkward conversation and failing at it.

Furthermore, while that indeed is not the lived reality for the majority of the individual kids, it's IMHO relevant for very many classrooms or teachers which will have at least one family like that; with 20-30 kids in a classroom, a 1% "rare case" will be represented in 20-30% classes and in almost every school.

Also, it's my understanding that the traditional family model is not even the majority in quite a few places where less than 50% of kids are raised in a marriage with both their parents, due to divorces, remarriages, deaths in family and simply single parents; so a kid may have a "mom and two dads" (i.e. the biological dad and mom's husband) or many other family structures; I recall hearing an (tragic?) joke about a particular class observing that there the majority kids were raised by two-woman family, namely, their mother and grandmother; etc. So it is important for teachers to acknowledge the diversity of actual parenting, you can't assume that "a mom and a dad" families are universal because so many families are not like that, those are not rare edge cases or exceptions, and they can't even be treated as deviation from the norm because in current society the nuclear two-parent family is not that dominant to be considered a true norm.

> Because it's creepy and weird for adults, who are supposed to be teaching math and so on, to have conversations with young children about sex.

> It's instructive that you assume the teacher was "clueless or bigoted" and not, ya know, trying to sidestep an awkward conversation about sex in front of five year olds.

That's a strawman argument. Sexual orientation and gender identity != sex. Nothing about this conversation needs to be awkward. "Oh, interesting, NAME, you have two moms? Well, everybody, that's true, you can have a mom and a dad, or two moms, or two dads. Some people have one parent, and some are raised by their grandpa or grandma or someone else. Does anyone else here have two moms? Does anyone have two dads? Or a single parent?" Blah blah blah. It's not awkward, it's not sexual, and it normalizes the experience for the great many children who live in "non-traditional" families.

> It's instructive that you assume the teacher was "clueless or bigoted" and not, ya know, trying to sidestep an awkward conversation about sex in front of five year olds.

This is exactly what people are talking about, by the way.

"I have a mama and a mami" is a potential awkward conversation about sex that needs to be sidestepped. "You have a mama and a papa" is no problem.

If we accept that as a premise, don't you see the issue with the law?

> Because it's creepy and weird for adults, who are supposed to be teaching math and so on, to have conversations with young children about sex.

If kids don't learn about it from the good adults in their life, they're going to learn about it from the dangerous adults in their life. CSA thrives on the culture of silence imposed by those who think any discussion even obliquely related to sexual relations (and you're the one saying having two moms is "about sex"!) is inherently "creepy and weird".

Kids have a need to learn words to describe things which might be happening to them, and a right to see their self-image, family structure, and any proto-romantic/sexual feelings acknowledged.

> Why is it inappropriate for young children to be present for educational discussions about gender identity and sexual orientation?

It’s not something that extremely prepubescent children need to be instructed on.

> Kids live in modern families!

Then their families can instruct them.

> But that right there is a “teachable moment”, and one that is completely appropriate for children of any age.

What, exactly, should the school be teaching the kids in that moment, and how would this law prevent it?

I’m fairly certain admitting the existence of a child’s parents is not “classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity”.

> What, exactly, should the school be teaching the kids in that moment

How about this: "There are lots of different types of families, and among those many types, there are ones where there are two moms or two dads, and that's okay". [1]

> and how would this law prevent it?

IANAL but according to this analysis [1], 'Classroom “instruction” could mean eliminating books with L.G.B.T.Q. characters or historical figures. But “classroom discussion” is broad. That could discourage a teacher from speaking about gay families with the whole class, even if some students have gay parents.'

In other words, precisely the scenario I just described. This is a gag law that prevents educators from having the kind of conversation that should have happened in the library at my wife's school.

1: The first part of this lesson is a simple fact, and the second part ("that's okay") is a value judgment, but given that gay marriage is legal in FL and constitutionally protected, and that same-sex couples can, for instance, adopt children, that value judgment seems to be not just ethical but legally enshrined.

2: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/us/what-does-dont-say-gay...

> Why is it inappropriate for young children to be present for educational discussions about gender identity and sexual orientation?

Because kids’ brains aren’t fully developed until age 25 and sexuality is a complicated and potentially damaging force that parents try to insulate their kids from until they’re old enough to understand what it is and what it isn’t.

Also, more fundamentally, because many parents are just fresh out of trust: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/planned-parenthood-st-loui.... There’s a vocal faction of the left that’s obsessed with sex. These are the folks who thought same-sex marriage was a bad thing because they wanted more sweeping changes to sexual and gender norms. These folks are always trying to sneak in the door behind people advocating for equal rights, and right now we’re in a phase where the broader center left doesn’t have the backbone to stand up to them.

I would argue that saying, "some people have two mommies," is arguably age appropriate, but adding, "because some women like to have sex with other women," would not be. The teacher in question should have just said, "ok," or something and not tried to bring in a deeper discussion about sexual preferences.

>may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 *or* in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.

That "or" is pretty crucial, and any lawyer worth their salt will point out that this will not limit it to K-3. It bans ALL discussion of the topics, "age appropriate" or not, from K-3, AS WELL AS opening the way for private litigation for discussion that some parent decides is inappropriate for ANY grade level.

Per the New York Times:

>The impact is clear enough: Instruction on gender and sexuality would be constrained in all grades. But its language is vague and subject to interpretation.

>The language highlights the youngest students, but the “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate” provision affects all ages. Those terms are highly subjective, and parents, school staff and students are likely to clash over the ambiguities.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/us/what-does-dont-say-gay...

As to whether the topic "is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader" I recall kindergarten discussions on students who might have two mommies or two daddies, which would be banned by a reasonable interpretation of the law.

You wrote:

  I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner.

I'm confused. If a child has two parents of the same gender, or a parent that is transitioning gender, or is friends with... or has reletives that... etc.? What if a child wishes to present as a different gender?

Why isn't it appropriate to discuss all of these? Young families that I know now own some children's books with "non-traditional families" (yuck, I don't know a better term -- please suggest!) Of course, the books are age-appropriate.

The point is to normalise gender and sexuality diversity as early as possible. Generations before had to learn much later.

>If a child has two parents of the same gender, or a parent that is transitioning gender, or is friends with... or has reletives that... etc.? What if a child wishes to present as a different gender?

>Why isn't it appropriate to discuss all of these?

Totally fine with that in the home. This topic is not appropriate for public school teachers instruct to their students in a K-3 setting. If, as a parent, you feel it is appropriate with your children at that age, instruct them at home.

Look at it this way, by allowing it, you are essentially forcing parents with teachers who want to bring up the subject to have their kids instructed on gender topics in K-3; a subject the parents didn't opt-in for either. Not only that, there's no guarantee some Math or English teacher is even qualified to teach the subject. That's definitely not cool.

Is the topic of a child having a biological mother and father at home appropriate for K-3?

> That's the actual text. I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner. The partisan hyperbole around it is ridiculous on both sides.

The way it's being enforced is the issue. I don't see any issue with discussion of gender identity with kindergardeners or 3rd graders. If they can understand that mommy and daddy love each other and got married, they can understand that daddy and daddy or mommy and mommy did too. The law's intent is to allow the first, but prevent the second (and we see evidence of this due to age-appropriate books featuring gay characters getting removed, but not age-appropriate books with straight relationships).

> Like Huckleberry Finn? Agree, books shouldn't be banned.

No, Huck Finn shouldn't be banned.

> Well maybe Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries.

No. If they're taught they should be taught in context (and admittedly you're probably not going to read Mein Kampf cover to cover outside of a college course), but if it's relevant to the curricula, sure (and I'm sure there are excerpts in some euro-history textbooks!)

> Maybe some shouldn't be taught in public schools, right? How about the Bible? Should that be excluded from the public school corriculum?

No, there are obvious contexts where the bible should be taught as part of the curriculum! When we discussed world religions came up in my high school history we absolutely read bits of the Bible and Quran, as well as some Vedic verses and more.

> No screening of A Birth of a Nation you'd agree with? It's not like they're removing them from public libraries or the internet. What is taught in public schools vs what is allowed to be said in a public forum are quite different things as well.

I watched clips from Birth of a Nation in my HS history classes, again: as long as it's contextualized well, sure, in fact more than sure! Yes, we should encourage well-contextualized viewership of shameful things from history.

Also as a bit of an addendum, if the worry really is primarily around "grooming" and childhood sexual assault, some age appropriate instruction about sex and specifically how and what is inappropriate for adults to do is one of the most effective things to keep children safe. If a kid doesn't have the words to describe what was done to them, or the understanding that it was inappropriate, they're much less likely to report.

> I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner

My brother was born when I was in kindergarten. When there's about to be a new family member, how that happens and where they come from is a natural topic to discuss. And if you're going to discuss reproduction, the topic of men and women being attracted to each other is already on the table which means that the fact that not everybody has that attraction is also on the table.

My main problem with the law as written is the clause "in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students." The science of education is less than 100 years old, and modern child psychology is younger than that. I don't think anybody has any idea what is or is not age appropriate. This law takes something that should be addressed on a case-by-case basis by the parents and teachers who know the students best, puts a cudgel in the hands of one of those parties, and says they should be set against each other. That's profoundly stupid.

>When there's about to be a new family member, how that happens and where they come from is a natural topic to discuss. And if you're going to discuss reproduction

You should not be teaching reproduction to kindergartners as a public school teacher.

>The science of education is less than 100 years old, and modern child psychology is younger than that. I don't think anybody has any idea what is or is not age appropriate.

I'm pretty sure they do.

> You should not be teaching reproduction to kindergartners as a public school teacher.

As it did no harm to me, I cannot agree. In fact, I have yet to hear one instance of a child coming to harm learning that knowledge in a healthy way at the kindergarten age.

My position is that is a case-by-case question. Does it need to be on the syllabus (what passes for a syllabus in kindergarten)? Maybe not. Should parents be able to sue if the topic comes up organically? No, that's quite disruptive to what should be a collaborative process. And given how little we know of the hard sciences of either child psychology or mass education, bringing force of law down on this topic is severe government overreach.

> I'm pretty sure they do.

I'd have to know who "they" is to respond.

By “ban” you mean the government that is providing a taxpayer-funded service choosing what content is provided as part of that service by taxpayer-paid employees, right?

I think they mean the government providing a taxpayer-funded service letting citizens bring private lawsuits instead of going through the regular channels for addressing errors if deviations from curricula occur because for some reason those channels (which are also government-defined) are inadequate, yet cannot be improved.

We'd best not pull the thread on why they can't be improved.

You forgot the /s

Nothing is being censored here; it's a simple recommendation. If they start censoring personal correspondence, they open up a huge opportunity for another option to disrupt them. It's not an impossible scenario, but it's an unlikely (and more importantly: self-correcting) scenario.

Self-correcting because frustrated users will simply start their own Google? Even if that happens, their second generation of employees will start a revolt if their company doesn't follow the latest DIE best practices.

I honestly think that only the Russian/Chinese model of a nationalized IT ecosystem has a chance to resist these trends.

Self-correcting because Google already has competition in the cloud editor space. Office suites are valuable software with an obvious business model for monetization.

> I honestly think that only the Russian/Chinese model of a nationalized IT ecosystem

That wouldn't solve the underlying problem if the nation decides some words are inappropriate (in fact, if we're thinking anti-censorship you may have chosen two particularly bad examples ;) ). It's power structures all the way down.

Can you turn that off?

If you turn it off, is it part of your record that you did so?

You can turn it off, but would you. Would you risk turning it off at work where everyone else that looks at your doc sees the purple and you never even got a heads up.

lol

And, if you turn it off, does that info go into the document's metadata, and does that affect search ranking?

If Google were to affect search ranking for something like that, it would be much simpler to just affect it based on the presence of the actual keywords that would have been underlined than retaining some metadata about the configuration of the editor when the document was written.

Spoiler alert: Google already has a deny list of words that will cause a page to not show up outside of focused queries for it. Most people have no idea how much porn is actually on the internet.

Given the username, I'm not sure if this comment is ironic or not

If you like the username, you should listen to the song.

The punchline is that the protagonist spends his life paranoid about shadow organizations watching his every move. In the end, he ends up dead in the trunk of a local strongman who gets away with it because there is no greater order in the world to save or harm him.

That's awesome. I can't say I've ever really listened to They Might Be Giants but the video for it in your profile is hilarious

I use Chrome. I like it better than the alternatives. But, I turn off Google completion suggestions. To see what I mean, go to Google.com in English and type "tr" in the search box (do not press enter). Suddenly things I don't want to see are suggested to me. The same is true in Chrome's address bar unless you opt out (PS: I get most people might find it useful or not care and I'm in the minority). I get if I actually did the search I'd get google's suggestions but something about it completing with pictures to partial input feels more off for some reason.

But, even more, the default home page of Chrome shows the day's Google Doodle. I often like Google Doodles, but, at the same time, often the Google Doodle is some celebration of a person and while that's semi innocuous, one day it suddently felt like someone else's propoganda in front of me. I quickly changed my new tab page to something without Google.

It's scary to me that a few people at Google get to choose each day what to make a ~billion people look at. It seems different than say the NYTimes because the browser is a tool to me, it's not the source of content itself. Sure if I go read the NYTimes they get to choose what's on the front page. But I can choose not to go to the Times. But, by default, Browsers are a source of content (Except Safari? Though it does by default promote 10+ company's sites). Even Firefox, by default, shovles content someone else selected, in my face, intentionally or un-intensionally pushing their agendna on me.

> a concern which is not necessarily distilled down to "big brother" or "corporate overlords".

My first thought was the time that Google banned a genocide researcher and froze their Drive account because it contained images and video of warcrimes for their research. I can only imagine this `feature` going the same way over time. This is going to affect people who are legitimately studying social problems, more than it is likely to help fix the problems they're studying.

For example, the Nuremberg Trial transcript probably contains some pretty choice words. If Google starts suggesting edits, or worse auto-applying them like they do with spelling, we run the risk of whitewashing documents like this unintentionally.

This is going to affect people who are legitimately studying social problems

We don't need people to fix social problems anymore. We have the tech industry to do that for us.

After all, freedom and independent thought don't scale.

"It's an engineering problem"

It wasn’t just google that wanted the name change though.

> The East Cut was established in 2015 by residents and business owners as a community benefit district. The goal is to provide this neighborhood its identity separate from South of Market and South Beach neighborhoods.

Source: https://www.realestateadvisor.com/neighborhoods/san_francisc...

Side note, I can’t access parent source due to paywall.

I used to work on Rincon Hill and the East Cut thing happened after I moved away, so I had long wondered whether it was an old name being revived (it kinda has a gold-rush ring to it) or another real estate scheme like calling the Tenderloin “Lower Nob Hill.”

Going by the article maybe you can just pay a branding company and they’ll get Google to rename your neighborhood whatever you like?

Upper Biztos Heights here I come!

That neighborhood itself calls itself the East Cut. They have signs on all the light posts proudly proclaiming it

This was also proven during the pandemic.

Google made it openly clear that they just block everything on YouTube that goes against Google's stance regarding the pandemic.

Google controlles what the world sees on YouTube.

Eh, I don’t think that’s the point the OP is making and is something we’ve heard ad nauseum during the pandemic.

Google controls what appears on YouTube. That’s not really very surprising. But the idea that Google’s choices (over words or neighbourhood name) spills out into the offline world and alters it… that’s something else.

Google's choices spilling out into the offline world is exactly what the GP was getting at -- by choosing to expose Youtube users to a specific type of content, Google has chosen what escapes into meatspace.

That’s like saying that the New York Times editors’s choices spill out into the offline world because they choose what appears on the pages of the newspaper

Which is strictly true. Except Google has much further reach.

YouTube's primary function is to be open to the public. Anyone can go there, anyone can post videos there. They are like a mall or other privately-owned-but-publicly-open place. Google should not be censoring speech there, beyond already-illegal stuff and other content that is broadly prohibited in public places (porn, etc.)

No problem there. When i log in to (login to?) yt, i know who the boss is.

Well it a kind of sad in this case.

For example they removed some videos that said the virus spreads via aerosols. Now, one and a half year later most agree this is true and good ventilation could have saved a lot of people.

Not really, at the time the science suggested that was the best path. Youtube is a private enterprise and has every right to remove material that they consider dangerous based on their research teams. You were perfectly free to make a video and release it on you own website or peertube or via torrents/usenet. You have a free voice but you don't have the right to mass distribution, that is up to you (the hypothetical generic "you") to see that it happens.

> at the time the science suggested that was the best path.

Science is not a monolith. I can find a hundred distinguished scientists who disagree with that statement.

... that is an especially controversial statement for anyone who remembers how (1) SARS was airborne and (2) masks did help, contrary to the public position of the WHO/CDC.

This cognitive bias is something that is really ingrained in the population by pop-sci media, usually ones that start with "Scientists now say that ____". Technically it's correct that "(some) scientists say that ____" but laypersons can easily misunderstand that "(all) scientists say that ____".

Yes, legally YouTube is in the right.

Morally, society needs to solve the problem of the private platforms that are quasi-utility services.

Can you imagine when/if your power company, water distributor decides to cut you off because you disagree with the official record?

> at the time the science suggested that was the best path

That's not how science works.

As far as I understand, at that time the science did not suggest that this was the best path - at the time the science was inconclusive with reasonable support for both aerosol and droplet options; and the blocked videos had just as much, just as good scientific basis as the official position. They were blocked purely because of the WHO political decision to promote one option over the other, and that WHO decision did not have a proper scientific backing - and when that was challenged in public, the response was to block the scientific arguments which were valid and reasonable already at the time, and some time later turned out to be conclusive.

Furthermore, there was a long gap of many, many months between a scientific consensus that the WHO position was literally wrong and the changing of that position - and during that gap any blocking of these videos was not only without a scientific basis but even directly going against what science suggests.

If they were hiding videos from black activists would you feel the same way?

Not activists and not entirely black, but I know that Youtube works with the Metropolitan Police in the UK to remove drill rap videos that the Met considers too violent (violent content, of course, being one of the things that is against Youtube's TOS).

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvnp8v/met-police-youtube-dr...

(As always, content removal is a controversial topic, and that includes this topic.)

Youtube has been stung by various "scandals" in the past where advertisers temporarily "boycott" (or, at least, raised a ruckus) when an ad appears next to content the advertisers consider objectionable (such as, as I recall, child exploitation content and al-Qaeda / jihadist groups several years ago). As an ad supported platform, I do think that Youtube certainly should have the right to monitor their platform in order to remove content that they believe is bad for business, including protecting advertiser brands from content they don't want to appear next to. Youtube also has legal requirements to follow (eg copyright law) and may do some things more to manage their own brand, or even perhaps manage legal liability. It would be nice if Youtube was more transparent about the whys of their content management, but as a private company they are not obligated to do so.

Youtube is not the last word in streaming videos. There are several platforms dedicated to hosting videos that would fall afoul of Youtube's content policy. Many of the ones I can think of are not funded by advertising, though some platforms are big enough where "niche advertising networks" are possible (eg big adult video networks like Pornhub).

You’ve chosen a case where throwing a dart did hit 20. There are other, less fantastic places a dart can hit.

It would also be sad if YouTube lost control of its private property.

But they also could label 'bad' videos and let the viewers decide what the truth is:

"This video is marked because we believe the information in the video is not correct and might even be dangerous".

Yup, if you don’t like it, just go start your own multi-billion dollar video streaming service.

As an aside, I think login to, but it’s weird. It can be separate, joined to ‘log’ as in login or in some contexts with ‘to’ as in into. Perhaps it should just be ‘loginto’?

"Log into?"

“log into” or “log in to”.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5302/log-in-to-o...

Seeing the recommendations on my YouTube home page, your statement is patently false.

Maybe they recently changed this.

But during the pandemic a lot of videos were blocked. And Google just admitted this was because they thought they were fake pandemic news.

> rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the East Cut.

There was briefly some gentrified name for the area between Soma, Portrero Hill and Mission, around where the Muji was and the highway overpass still is.

I remember it rhyming with SomaSopa from that one episode of South Park, but even more ridiculous because it concatenated 3 words alluding to each of the 3 adjacent neighborhoods. Does anyone remember it?

EDIT: Huh, they've seen to have settled on 'Showplace Square' now. That's new.

It is interesting about the Maps thing. We have a similar one in our city, where part of the CBD is designated 'Frog's Hollow', which was the colloquial name for a small area (basically mostly a slum) for a time in the 1800s. It makes it look like that's the actual name of half our CBD!

But it hasn't slipped back into actual use, it's just a curiosity. Interesting that it's been like that for years and they still haven't fixed it...

> "corporate overlords".

Please use more inclusive language, like "overpersons", or "overaristocracy".

I think what is most difficult is the inability to attribute this change to a clear intent, which can be then be clearly opposed.

What's likely happening under the hood is a Google PM thinks this a good idea bc they have an MBA from a good school, see the market research on grammarly (sp?), knows it nods to helpful social movements sometimes, and decides to roll it out as an OKR from a team of a sub-team of a product of Google of Alphabet.

Who do you push back on against this? Putting aside the massive network effects GOOG can wrangle to roll this out and have it standardize.

The same thing happens with an Amazon warehouse in Rural PA that is doing shady things with workers and data tracking, a Walmart in Montana. The city council decides to do something about it. Who exactly do they complain to with actual impact? There is no one really.

How do you feel about autocorrect?

The village name, from the village next to my village (in Switzerland) is wrong on Google Maps since ever. But it seems, nobody does care or is impossible to reach somebody on Google to correct it.

Have you tried clicking on 'Send feedback', the very small link on the bottom right of the map?

I did when Maps was failing to route through a junction near where I lived in London, because it thought going straight through wasn't legal (it was). It was fixed a few weeks later.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google but nowhere near Maps, and my experience of correction predated my employment. And I don't speak for Google.)

Where Google Maps has a dedicated way of providing corrections, you can get things fixed quickly.

Where it doesn’t, and you have to use a more generic feedback form, my experience is that it never gets corrected. Zero times out of perhaps a dozen that I’ve tried, for several different types of errors (misplaced town markers, a missing consonant in the Bengali spelling of a road name, can’t remember what else off the top of my head). I just don’t bother now. Most seem to get fixed some years down the line, probably incidentally as part of some other more generic data or processing algorithm update. The only time I’ve had any sort of prompt success was when I reported something on a Google Maps-related HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23367961. The fix in that instance was evidently done as a one-off exception, but looking at a few places in Google Maps now, I think the underlying systemic issue is finally fixed (for now).

As far as I can tell, that feedback goes into a black hole. I've sent many corrections there, not a single one has been adopted, including ones where entire streets didn't exist (i.e. they exist on Maps but have never existed IRL).

In the city I used to live, they had to put signs up at the entrance to a street, warning people to ignore Google Maps. It tried to route people the wrong way up a one-way street, and the government had failed to get Google to fix it.

I have no Google account, so no. For dayli use I use map.search.ch, not Google Maps.

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