This is not 4chan; "autistic" is not an appropriate description for anything other than the actual psychological disorder.
I just want to make sure I'm following the rules and not offending anybody.
Which doesn't mean that it can't have standards of conduct that make it possible to have civilised discussion.
I think it brings up some very good points about how non-technical people and technical people can interpret situations involving technology in very different ways, for example. And I think it's actually trying to hold the technical community to a much higher standard when it comes to justifying actions that society at large will very likely disagree with.
It's far more harmful and disruptive to see the perfectly legitimate argument of bowlofpetunias being totally ignored and even obscured, merely because some people find a single word in the comment to potentially be politically incorrect or potentially offensive.
Discussion is much better when the focus is on the argument or topic itself, rather than going off on political correctness tangents over a single word in somebody's comment.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3.""
With respect to the "autistic" comment, the "autistic" could have similarly been dropped and the point made much stronger. Instead most people are going to ignore any points that could have been made±—the comment is already greyed out.
Defining characteristics of autism (that is, the medical condition) include a deficiency when it comes to social understanding, a tendency to have an extreme focus on minor details, and an inherent inability to grasp the "big picture".
The earlier comment describes how certain attempts to justify what happened in a particular situation end up exhibiting similar traits. These justifications do not correspond well at all with how society at large interprets the situation, and they have a very narrow focus that ignores the larger social aspects of the situation.
I could see it being insulting if the earlier comment labelled somebody as being autistic in an attempt to discredit them, but in this case it's describing certain traits that correlate quite well with the medical condition and how those who suffer from said condition often behave.
If a person who suffers from a poor ability to understand the society around them, and who also tends to be unrelentingly focused on minute details, can be diagnosed as having "autism", then I think a similar diagnosis is perfectly reasonable when applied to an argument or justification that exhibits the same traits. It's a perfectly legitimate way of describing such arguments/justifications that don't mesh well with the social reality.
Your ignorance of ASD does not excuse piss-poor metaphor.
And, please, be serious about this. Suggesting words like "intolerant" or "wrong" wouldn't be helpful, obviously. If you have such a problem with the term used previously, provide us with one that offers just as much meaning, but isn't "offensive" to people who are overly sensitive.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Its-Raining-Cats-Dogs-Expressions/dp...
> The earlier comment describes how certain attempts to justify what happened in a particular situation end up exhibiting similar traits.
Here's what that comment said: "A non-technical person will not consider that any different. After all, said automated process was created and deployed by Google engineers, so it's still Google engineers browsing through people's private photos."
But this thread is full of people saying that comparing hashes is not anything like engineers looking at your photos, and most of those people do not have ASDisorders, thus claiming only a person with autism would claim such is wrong.
> Putting your nonsense accusations and political correctness hypersensitivity aside
Great way to hold a constructive discussion.
What is an alternative term that conveys the exact same concept that was discussed earlier, but without being deemed "offensive" by people who are particularly sensitive?
If you have a problem with the perfectly legitimate term that was being used earlier, then the constructive thing to do would be for you to provide an equivalent or better alternative.
And while my comment now has -4 it had previously +4 so evidently not everybody agrees with your community standards.
What you describe seems to be happening more and more often these days, and I think it's harmful. Comments will receive many upvotes, and then suddenly start getting many downvotes. Or it'll happen the other way around.
When that kind of fluctuation is happening, I think the only appropriate thing to do, especially when downvotes or downvoted comments are involved, is to show the comment normally, instead of obscuring it with harder to read grey text. Clearly there's some agreement, and there's some disagreement, so the only sane thing to do is to show the comment so readers can make their own analyses of it.
It's not fair, but the staff have mentioned that the site isn't intended to be fair, it's intended to preserve intellectual quality and signal over noise at all costs.
Given the choice between showing a potentially controversial comment by default and censoring it by default, they would probably opt for the latter, because it makes them easier to ignore.
You can still select the text to read it if you want to. Which I guess is slightly better than just automatically deleting them or something.