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Comment by morgante | Hacker News Reader

It's a little of both. There's enough woke influence over corporate communication to drive all employees to want to avoid non-inclusive words in docs. At that point, this becomes useful even for employees who don't agree with it—I'd rather just have the word flagged now and fix it instead of going back and forth later.

However, the net result is that words are driven out of the language even if everyone involved in the document wouldn't care.

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It's also simply --

You're at Google. You need to do some kind of project that can be called a success -- within one quarter. What do you do?

One possibility, the disastrous effects of which we've seen, is to build Yet Another Incompatible Chat App.

This is another possibility. A very safe one, in a way.

You constantly have to demonstrate that you are "useful, self-directed, and doing important things", in an environment where usefulness and importance are extremely hard to judge, and so become very socially-constructed. It can get pretty brutal -- even if, when you step back and take the long view, it all seems ridiculous.

So when you look at what comes out of these companies, it's useful to remember that. Imagine the horrible games in which their employees have found themselves trapped.

(Money's a hell of a thing. Shame you seem to need so much of it.)

>However, the net result is that words are driven out of the language even if everyone involved in the document wouldn't care.

No one uses "fuck" in corporate communication either. Is anyone worried about that word being "driven out of the language"? I don't think corporate speech is as influential in overall language use as you are implying.

Yes, a lot of people see any infringement on their freedom of expression to be unacceptable, while expecting everyone to engage with that expression.

> No one uses "fuck" in corporate communication either.

Swear words are specifically used to be provocative, so naturally they're not going to disappear. Words like "motherboard" or "whitelist" were historically neutral and primarily used in professional settings, so removal from corporate speech is correspondingly a much bigger factor.

To be clear, I'm not particularly worried or concerned about this. I don't consider it any great loss if we start saying "allowlist" and have happily changed my projects to match. It's not a big deal, and the kind thing to do is to go along with those who do care a lot.

> the kind thing to do is to go along with those who do care a lot.

Enabling bullies in their social dominance games isn’t being kind.

Yeah, I generally either mock them or go into malicious compliance mode. Once they realise I really don't care about losing my job they stop pretending to care about this stuff

It's a perverted version of Pascal's wager, the "You lose nothing by pretend-believing" argument of theologians, but reinvented for an age where social mobs are the new wrathful God. If you stick your neck out and refuse the newspeak, you present a target for Them, you're essentially betting they're too weak to do anything to you, a bet you could either win or lose. But if you comply, then you're safe no matter what the actual influnce The Mob has. The Nash equilibrium is always choosing "COMPLY".

The classic mistake that Pascal and everyone using his argument to argue for their favorite God lies in the simplifying assumption :

- Compliance is cheap, low-risk and fixed-cost relative to taking a stand

Which gets less and less true as the Wrathful God (or His spokespeople) sees you're completely submitting and realizes they can continue making more and more increasingly humiliating demands. Soon enough, you discover you wish you had drawn the red line earlier.

You have a very warped definition of the word "bully".

“Political correctness is America's newest form of intolerance, and it is especially pernicious because it comes disguised as tolerance. It presents itself as fairness, yet attempts to restrict and control people's language with strict codes and rigid rules. I'm not sure that's the way to fight discrimination. I'm not sure silencing people or forcing them to alter their speech is the best method for solving problems that go much deeper than speech.”

― George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

Nobody can be an example of tolerance that has a problem with formal or informal modes of communication. It will never be true or believable.

> The number of complainants can often be quite small. For centuries, theorists have worried about the potential of unrestrained democracy to lead to a tyranny of the majority, in which majority groups ride roughshod over the rights of minorities. What we often see today is instead a kind of tyranny of the minority: a system in which a particularly extreme and motivated fraction of the populace can wield outsized power in the face of a majority which is either too indifferent or too scared to oppose it.

https://areomagazine.com/2019/04/02/the-tyranny-of-the-minor...

I don't think there's actually any substantial pushback on the word "motherboard" either. That's not a real thing people are mad about. It seems like Google's AI is just not very good at judging what is considered inclusive or not.

That is just enabling some pretty bad actors in my opinion who don't even care about minorities. People that do care tend to be very flexible about language use.

Not being tolerant here is a pretty clear sign of close mindedness in reality or just a hint of lacking life experience.

Whitelist/blacklist was a hilarious one since it derives from the light/dark day/night separation found in pretty much every culture on the planet.

It's like, of _course_ early peoples created concepts from "day, when it's light" and "night, when it's dark". It has nothing to do with skin colour or ethnicity at all.

Funny. I remember graduating over 20 years ago. My first job out of University was on a construction site as a supervisory engineer. My direct manager, a crusty old guy, took me aside one day and explained to me the importance and necessity of applying the word "fuck" as part of my role. This was not a joke on his part. He had observed that I was a soft university educated well spoken book type. Nobody who I was supervising was going to take me seriously ever. I never actually applied his advice to the full extent but I did learn to toughen up somewhat .

"Fuck" and "badass" are relatively common in job postings in Utah. I assume it's because people from out of state are worried they'll join a company with a bunch of stiff Mormons so we need a signal to let them know that's not the case. Benefit #1 on the list is beer on Fridays.

Anyway, that's what scares me about this, I like language naturally evolving like it is in the above example, to address a specific communication need. I'm really not a fan of some remarkably privileged people using an insanely powerful company to coerce my language in whatever direction they see fit.

Relatively common? Can you share links to 2 examples?

Yes but I’ll let you google search “Utah job postings badass” yourself

When I Google it, the first result is... your post, and none of the other results include the word.

Adding quotes to "badass" turns up (on the first page) a mechanics job posted in January, four hits for the same CNA job from over a month ago, and one hit for an administrative job, posted this month.

That doesn't seem like a lot of postings, certainly not enough to be considered an outlier.

Of course to verify that I'd have to do fifty Google searches and chart the data, which I don't really want to do...

I think you should, though, so next time you make such a dubious claim, you have the data to back it up. :)

If you don't use "fuck" in corporate communication, you're not doing it right. Use swears very sparingly (not in every email or presentation, for sure) and only deliberately for emphasis when you need a little shock. Especially effective when the leadup is really dry.

Correct. There is a time and a place for a little cognitive shock and awe to shake loose the cobwebs of stagnant thought.

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