The whole thing has to be ridiculed from top to bottom, both for what it's direct stated goals are, but also for fear that it will make its way into more places if it's not nipped in the bud.
Note: some words on the list, such as a several obvious slurs they chose to include, of course must be avoided. Black hat (hacker) or black box or blind review or commited suicide or user (!!!!) or calling a spade a spade or man-in-the-middle or [...] are not among those.
I will use this term to my grave and yet I’ve never committed violence to animals. Nor do I promote it.
It’s a figure of speech.
Please self-censor in the future, or the Stanford Brain Police will be forced to take appropriate measures.
/s
And "daemon processes", being just generally scary
Apparently Stanford is not teaching their students the definition of words like figure-of-speech and cliche.
Do you eat them?
And who are you to judge that? Are you in any way subject to descriptors they offer alternatives to?
I'll have to admit my bias though, I presume everyone here who rails against this list is themselves a financially, physically and mentally healthy heterosexual white male aged 20-40. You're not going to be offended by any of these terms, that's fine, it's not for your benefit.
Regardless, I'm a speaker of English, and I have read up on the origin of most of those words, and understand how connotations work - apparently better than whoever put together this list, who seems to think "whitespace" is using white in a way which implies white=good, or "black box" somehow implies that black=bad.
Also note, words are rarely a real problem. People can use perfectly normal good words to belittle you, even unintentionally (my father was asked a few times "do you have Google there?", for a country that's been a member of the EU for well over 10 years). The attitudes people have don't particularly change with the language they use.
Reminds me of a segment John Stewart once did, where a state senator from some US state took the word and started complaining that "African-American kids just don't learn as well as white kids, they just lack the mental ability [...]". As John joked at the time - if you're going to be that unabashedly racist, just call them the n-word, it won't make things worse.
Sure I see a lot of hand waving here about that, but this community is notably not necessarily the most diverse (edit: by diverse I mean has notable blindspots and well-known biases).
For example a lot of people here on HN have no problem using terms like “master” and “slave” in a technological context, but other people have told me those terms make them uncomfortable. I don’t want my students to feel that way so I don’t use those words in a classroom context, even if every single person on HN is okay using them.
Maybe we can all appreciate that perhaps the people who wrote this list are in fact expressing a genuine concern about language that is held by others, even if you do not personally see the concern?
> it will sooner or later be adopted by many other places looking for a list of "safe words".
First, I appreciate the slippery slope, but at this point it’s behind a Stanford login, and is really only addressed to Stanford IT. Then again it says it’s in line with peer institutions so perhaps the slope has already slipped.
But even if more people want to do this, so what? It’s their choice. These documents are about others policing their own language, not them policing yours. Your comments about “ridiculing” and “nipping it in the bud” are closer to policing the speech of others than this list is.
HN, like the American tech industry in general, is almost certainly more diverse than the Stanford administration and faculty. Moreover, diversity in HN is organic. Folks on here may happen to be Laotian American (or even Laotian—HN is international). Nobody selected them for inclusion in the community.
By contrast, diversity at Stanford, especially among faculty, is carefully curated by the overwhelmingly white faculty. Your average immigrant from a former colony may not care about eliminating “colonial language.” But the white Stanford faculty wouldn’t hire those immigrants into the cultural studies department of the university. You’re much more likely to get a job at Stanford by writing papers on how colonial terms “cause harm.”
The faculty system and widespread use of race and nationality conscious hiring gives white people at elite universities tremendous power. There’s few other organizations where the white leadership gets to hand pick any minority representation based on its own ideological priors.
I imagine if you are white you might compensate for that by being more woke to protect your career. This is, after all, still a majority white country in spite of the admissions policies of elite universities and the racial makeup of tv commercials and the immigration policies. So that may reflect on staff hired decades ago. Although I believe elite universities will begin to change the racial makeup of their staff and students more aggressively since the status quo is indefensible.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stanford_University_pe...
As they say, you can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. We shouldn’t be looking to academics hand picked by white elites to figure out how to police minority communities, or what words to use or not use with respect to minorities, etc. Elite universities are inherently bad vehicles for leading the discourse on those issues.
This system has shown to increase diversity in academic departments, and it’s not something the white faculty can conspire to keep under control. The issue is that progress is slow for two reasons: 1) positions open up rarely and 2) the hiring pool is limited. These are issues that are being worked on, but progress is being made.
Minorities aren’t a monolith or fungible. The fact that Harvard hires some minorities doesn’t change the fact that those minorities were hand picked by white elites and operate within an institution dominated by elite whites.
Now, that doesn’t mean those minorities can’t be great professors, as individuals. But it does mean that their views on minority issues shouldn’t be give any more weight than those of the elite whites that selected them and on whom they depend for their position and status. Leadership on those issues must instead come from people who are put in positions of leadership by minority groups themselves.
But it does change the makeup of who gets to make future decisions. I also feel like you're doing here what you often decry when white liberals do it: infantilizing minorities. You're discounting and minimizing the people who are not white elites, who do have a voice in making such decisions, as if they are completely invisible or beholden to other forces.
For instance, our faculty search committee had 1 white male on it. The first round interviews were done by the committee, final selection of candidates was done by the whole faculty, and the vote on who to hire was unanimous. The chair, who is not a minority transmitted the decision to the dean, who is a minority, and the candidate was hired. This person will be serving on the hiring committee next semester. I'm failing to see the invisible hand of the white elites here, who have somehow masterminded this turn of events.
And even if they did, why should we assume that minorities who are hired by white elites are somehow beholden or deferential to them? These faculty have their own agency and are highly educated in their own right. They can make up their own minds.
The point I was trying to make was that HN has some very real and very wide ideological blindspots. It's true what you say that there are many viewpoints here on HN, but they aren't all uniformly represented. That said, the commentariat here is also self selected, so not necessarily representative of the general population.
> By contrast, diversity at Stanford, especially among faculty, is carefully curated by the overwhelmingly white faculty.
That may be true, but at the same time there are more stakeholders who have input into initiatives like these.
> But the white Stanford faculty wouldn’t hire those immigrants into the cultural studies department of the university. You’re much more likely to get a job at Stanford by writing papers on how colonial terms “cause harm.”
Do you have evidence that such people didn't have input or their input wasn't allowed? Or are you just speculating to make a point? You seem fixated on white Stanford faculty, but it's not clear that the linked list is even a product of the faculty, it seems like it's a product of a committee of the IT department. It seems to me like you just have some ideological things to say about Stanford faculty without really addressing the facts on the ground re: this list.
Adams is talking about white political elites rather than white academics, but as Elizabeth Warren illustrates, there’s a lot of ideological overlap between the two.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm completely baffled by how you've managed to reach the opposite conclusion to the one I'd expect.
Thus, advocacy that purports to attack “white elites” can nonetheless take power away from minorities and give it to elite whites. Historically, advocacy on behalf of minority groups was done by minority groups themselves. For example, the black civil rights movement was closely tied to black churches. Today, such advocacy has been increasingly taken over by white elites. BLM is funded mainly by affluent white people. Ibram Kendi was selected to be a professor at BU by an overwhelmingly white faculty. Or to use another example, consider MacKenzie Bezos giving tens of millions of dollars to “AAPI” activist organizations. Those groups don’t answer to recent Chinese and Bangladeshi immigrants in Queens. Their whole incentive structure is oriented toward appealing to rich white people like MacKenzie Bezos.
The net effect of that is that much advocacy that claims to empower minorities actually ends up taking power away from minorities and empowering white elites. You can see this clearly in New York City, where white people in Manhattan strongly opposed Eric Adams, and so did minority activist groups. But actual minorities overwhelmingly voted for him. But in many, many cases, minorities don’t get to directly weigh in like that. Instead white-dominated institutions act on behalf of minorities, based on their own ideological preferences.
Identity politics is gleefully adopted by the elite institutions, and the base of resistance against it is working class.
This isn't a hypothetical, these kinds of lists are already being applied in industry. Google even tried to apply such a list to a user-facing product earlier this year, to highlight 'inappropriate' words in Google Docs, but the feature was retracted [0].
It's only a matter of time before some well-meaning do-gooder takes a look at an even broader list like this and decides it needs to be applied to their company's code and documentation, or to their product.
The communities deciding those terms as "potentially harmful" are even less diverse: mostly white, mostly of the aspirational classes, mostly of a certain ideological bent and demographic, with the token social climber members that don't represent their communities thrown in for good measure...
It's like the white people deciding on "latinx" for latinos, when majority real world latinos consider it idiotic (and don't find the term "latino" or "latin america" insulting).
>But even if more people want to do this, so what? It’s their choice. These documents are about others policing their own language, not them policing yours.
Hardly
How is 'Latin' offensive?
There is a loud minority within the Latin group who wants the term so they can feel powerful, and of course, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
In the end, all society is accomplishing is rewarding outrage.
We won't be renaming "Latin America" either, so latin/latino is just that, inhabitant of latin america - or from a place "predominantly speaking a latin-derived language". Note that Latinx has the same exact root anyway - and iirc it was never about the concerns above, just a BS misunderstanding of gendered nouns in other languages (because latino being "male" somehow excluded others).
In any case, it should up to the populations to decide if they wanted another term not "white saviours" and a number of privileged activists in a totally different country.
And if the locals themselves wanted to correct a historical injustice, instead of playing with words, they can give rights to indigenous people, stop killing them and taking their land, or they could even move out of Latin America and back into Europe all together...
I am actually sympathetic to avoiding the master/slave dichotomy when naming software systems, exactly because I have heard actual reports of people feeling uncomfortable with these terms, for somewhat obvious reasons.
The same can NOT be said, to any extent, about user, submit, Scrum Master, master branch, Master's degree, webmaster, white space, black box, and the vast majority of other examples on the list.
> These documents are about others policing their own language, not them policing yours. Your comments about “ridiculing” and “nipping it in the bud” are closer to policing the speech of others than this list is.
These documents are about policing the speech of all members of the organization, not self-censoring by the authors of this ridiculous list. And no, my seeking to ridicule this list is not in itself an attempt at policing speech - as in the old tradition of intolerance against the intolerant. That is, they are a small group seeking to use their position of authority to police the speech of many many others, and I am seeking to defend myself pre-emptively by seeking to stop them from propagating the concept - not the speech itself.
They're welcome to maintain and publish their silly little list, they're not welcome to actually impose it on anyone - including the Stanford organization.
And I should note I am just some atheist gay programmer in a Eastern European nation. Not exactly a member of the American cultural hegemony seeking to avoid thinking about their past crimes.
The reasons honestly aren't obvious to me. Doesn't everyone knows slavery existed? I don't really get it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Master branch is exactly the term that was in question. I did some research and found that it was related to "master recordings" in the audio production industry, which itself is a direct reference to a master/slave dichotomy and used as such in the recording industry. Changing the name of the "master" repository to "main" is no cost to me, doesn't impact the lesson plans at all, and makes my students more comfortable. Why wouldn't I make that change?
> These documents are about policing the speech of all members of the organization, not self-censoring by the authors of this ridiculous list.
At the end of the day author of the list is a department of Stanford University, so Stanford is policing itself, as all organizations do (don't tell me your organization doesn't have a brand style guide).
> And no, my seeking to ridicule this list is not in itself an attempt at policing speech - as in the old tradition of intolerance against the intolerant.
So you are policing speech, just speech which you deem to be policing you.
> That is, they are a small group seeking to use their position of authority to police the speech of many many others, and I am seeking to defend myself pre-emptively by seeking to stop them from propagating the concept - not the speech itself.
How are they seeking this? They say it's about their communications. They say the words only have only "potential" harms depending on the context. They say they are not looking to address informal uses of language. So how exactly are they "seeking" to abuse their authority? Because all they've done here is post a list to a website. Is that what you consider to be abusive? Or is it because employees are expected to abide by certain style guides? Because if that's the abuse, all corporations are equally abusive toward their employees free speech rights.
Them: "Here's a list of words we don't want to use ourselves."
You: "You shouldn't tell us the list of words you don't want to use, because then in the future someone might prevent me from saying those words."
Tell me where I'm getting this wrong. How is what you're saying not policing someone else's words, whereas what they're saying is?
A master recording is one that copies are made from. It is much more likely to be related to the same sense of master used in a master's degree, related to teaching and learning (from the original Latin meaning of magister, teacher). Please show me references suggesting that anyone calls copies of the master recording slaves, or thinks of them as subservient to the master recording - or any similar uses for a master branch in git.
So, instead of avoiding a very common word in several industries, you could actually teach students the proper etimology. Either way, many of the students who would complain about the master branch will probably think about getting a Master's degree, or mastering their discipline, so they will inevitably have to come to terms with the fact the word master has very very common meanings that don't have anything to do with slave owning.
> At the end of the day author of the list is a department of Stanford University, so Stanford is policing itself, as all organizations do (don't tell me your organization doesn't have a brand style guide).
> Tell me where I'm getting this wrong. How is what you're saying not policing someone else's words, whereas what they're saying is?
This is what you are getting wrong. You are viewing this list as if it's a list that the Stanford University as a whole came up with, and organically adopted. Instead, this is a list created by some small committee who was given the power to impose this on the rest of the Stanford University organization.
If the HR department at my company adopts a similar list and forces everyone in the company to use it, that's not an example of "the organization self-policing", it is an example of "some idiots in one department trying to police the speech of the whole organization".
As I said, those that came up with this absurd list full of mistakes and false notions have every right to publish and maintain it (well, they should correct some of the more obvious falsehoods at least). I also have every right to let as many people as I can know that it is ridiculous and makes false assertions.
I am particularly doing so in the hope that as many organizations as possible will see how absurd it is and will not accept their own speech being policed by its silly standard - at least the organization I work for.
The student in question was a fan of Pharrell Williams, and started to understand the master/slave terminology in the recording industry through him. He was very distressed to find the field he wanted to get into, CS, was doing the same thing. Here's a comment I made about some of the research I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26497027
From that comment:
> "The word master has two meanings: 1. The original recording made in the studio is called a master, because it is the master (meaning controlling entity) from which all copies are made (the machines making the copies are called slaves—master/slave; get it?). ... 2. The word master also means a recording of one particular song. Thus, you might say an album has “ten masters” (meaning ten selections) on it. These individual recordings are also called cuts, because of the historical fact that each selection was “cut” into vinyl."
So it refers to control (master/slave) rather than expertise (master's degree).
> So, instead of avoiding a very common word in several industries, you could actually teach students the proper etimology.
But I teach CS and not linguistics, so etymology doesn't fit the curriculum. Curious what would you say given the research in my comment history.
> Instead, this is a list created by some small committee who was given the power to impose this on the rest of the Stanford University organization.
Look at the committee governing the IT department at Stanford: there's representation from across the University. Committees only have power through the rest of the organization. Are you saying this is a rogue committee? Are you saying they also have enforcement power over this list? Are you saying that no other committee's regulations override this list? Sorry, but I don't see any world where a small committee in the IT department holds sway over the entire org. What's more likely is that they've been given a specific remit by a larger committee with actual power, and this list is a work product of that committee. It only has as much power over you as you're willing to give it.
> As I said, those that came up with this absurd list full of mistakes and false notions have every right to publish and maintain it (well, they should correct some of the more obvious falsehoods at least). I also have every right to let as many people as I can know that it is ridiculous and makes false assertions.
Great, agreed. Stanford is exercising their free speech, you are exercising your free speech. As it should be.
> Sorry, but I don't see any world where a small committee in the IT department holds sway over the entire org.
In my experience from how corporations work, it is quite typical to have some small group in some centralized department (typically HR for internal language decisions, but it can be Marketing/PR or IT as well) make sweeping decisions for the entire organization, only sometimes needing additional buy-in from 1-2 C-level execs. I don't know how different the dynamics are in Stanford, but given my understanding that private universities are more and more being run like corporations, I assume it's not outside the realm of possibility.
At the very least, I quite doubt that all of the faculty were consulted and a democratic vote was held to agree on the need for a list such as this, let alone on its actual contents.
Even if they cannot enforce this list, it will be cited as an authority by others. Given Stanford's stature, this list will be given weight by many in academia and industry.
> Stanford is exercising their free speech, you are exercising your free speech. As it should be.
Stanford is exercising its free speech to tell other people not to speak freely. Imagine what you would say if Harvard were telling students not to talk about abortions because it could trigger listeners who had siblings that were aborted. Or saying that the words "clingers" or "deplorables" or "basket" are inappropriate because of what a politician said one time. Would you be such a big advocate for their free speech?
Okay, but I'm still missing the actual harm. You're talking about other people deciding what words they want to use for themselves, but who is asking you to not use particular words? Is it that you're worried one day your employer will ask you to change a word that you used on your company's website? What is the harm to you?
> Imagine what you would say if Harvard were telling students not to talk about abortions because...
As a practical matter these kinds of issues are decided by the community. Administrators will usually make a restriction, the student body will react and make noise, and then things will settle. Either the students get their way or they don't and transfer or suck it up and graduate. The school's reputation will take a hit depending on if the choice was popular or not.
As paying customers, students tend to get their way, but if they don't they can transfer. This is the best way to do things in a free market with free speech.
> As paying customers, students tend to get their way, but if they don't they can transfer.
And as you can see from the comments, many people will be looking elsewhere for their children. That doesn't mean it's good that Stanford is publishing a list like this. This reaction shows how severely Stanford's action transgresses deeply held values.
You're exaggerating the situation again. The Stanford list in question is itself not even rigid, nor about policing. I could make anything sound evil and nefarious by completely misrepresenting it as well. Others are calling this list evidence of authoritarianism. I feel like the response here is really off the charts, when the list itself hardly takes itself that seriously. Alternatives are "suggested". Words on the list are acknowledged to be "potentially" harmful, making room for nuance. They even admit that their title "eliminate" is overselling the effort here. Their main stated goal is to "educate", not to "police".
> Would you not be concerned if words like "abortion" could not be spoken?
Again, no one is banning anyone from speaking any words. If my school instituted a policy that they didn't want to mention abortion in any of their websites, I would be fine with that. I bet your company, wherever you work, would be against you posting about abortion on the company website too (unless it's directly related to abortion healthcare). But my school isn't banning me to say or write abortion (or any other words), and neither is Stanford.
> This reaction shows how severely Stanford's action transgresses deeply held values.
I'm very leery about deeply held beliefs relating to "freedom of speech" these days. It seems to me in many cases those particular values are deeply held just until the moment someone transgresses the belief holder. And I'm not even referencing current events here.
As far as Stanford goes, they'll be just fine. But I'd feel bad for any kid who couldn't attend because their parents got caught up in a culture war.
But it seems like you live in a very different world, where you don't have to worry about such things. I hope you enjoy it while it lasts! It sounds quite lovely.
You can literally report anyone for anything to HR since forever. Consider them the original bias response team. The important difference is that in academia, bias response teams don’t have the power to fire or discipline anyone.
> This list would be used as proof that a particular word is harmful.
This list is only evidence of potentially harmful language, as that’s all it purports to be. That a word is on this list is not proof that it is defacto harmful.
When you can't use words because they share some letters with negative ones, maybe it's gone too far.
It's particularly ironic given that this was the whole purpose of this phrase in the first place. A trigger warning isn't just a random content note or metadata - its specifically to give vulnerable people chance to disengage with content that could otherwise cause them distress. If they feel "anxious about what might follow", that means the trigger warning is working, and they should steel themselves or disengage with the content right now.
(And yes, I understand the tension one might feel between a warning and FOMO, but this is not something you can solve by removing the warning.)
Made even more tragic since it turns out they're not particularly effective:
Imagine being an employee at Coke, and then getting mad they fired you because your advertisements you wrote contained profanity adjacent to the Coke logo. Woke mind virus gone too far? Personally I say "fuck" all the time in my daily life, I can't see why Coke would get all twisted about it. Sub in "Coke" with "Stanford" and "fuck" with any word on this list. These are the same things.
Stanford doesn't want Stanford using certain words on Stanford websites. This apparently has made a lot of people on the Internet who neither work for Stanford nor have any conceivable association with Stanford to become very angry. Because "what if" they come for you next? Sorry but the wonderful truth is that your words are not being policed by Stanford. Go ahead and say/write all the words on this list, no bad will come to you. There are no woke boogeymen at Stanford out to get you.
It’s not a personal choice and I’m sure it will be enforced in short order.
If someone can’t distinguish in context that words mean different things, they need to change, not everyone else.
No, I do not believe that anyone is genuinely offended by "master" and "slave" in the technical sense. I believe that's a bad faith argument that should be ridiculed.
The question is, is the sum of their discomfort more or less than those who are discomforted by these kinds of lists?
(Maybe also add in the trivial annoyance of those like me who when "cd"ing into a folder now have to remember whether this one uses "main" or "master" instead of just being able to instantly swap)
The point Stanford was making was to cover it's ass, and do a token virue signalling gesture, by participating in and endosing the mass hysteria that is this neo-victorian puritanism