Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

itcommunity.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 1001 posts

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#571

Post by [deleted] »

photochemsyn wrote: post #349
cipheredStones wrote: post #332

It's pretty remarkable that this conflates: - Well-known slurs like "Jewed" - Outdated, now-offensive terms like "hermaphrodite" - Touchy metaphorical language like "slave replica" - Gendered terms that if you're being assiduous you probably want to avoid, like "manpower" - Words that have long since lost any stigmatizing meaning by virtue of the original use being so ancient ("lame", "dumb", "stupid") - Words that,…

I can think of a few more! "register" - might indicate that someone has to register as a second-class citizen, enemy alien, etc. "bit" - might imply that someone is only a 'bit player', leading to feelings of inferiority. "tool" - an obviously offensive word meaning that someone is only fit to be used by others. "terminal" - we need to be sensitive about words that bring up the concept of death, to avoid triggering e…

[deleted]

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#572

Post by disruptalot »

"Karen"

Context: "This term is used to ridicule or demean a certain group of people based on their behaviors."

Consider using: "demanding or entitled White woman"

This example is truly a tell all for this movement. To redefine language from a position of moral superiority where they can make no mis judgment.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#573

Post by fennecfoxy »

Ugh, taking this stuff too far is stupid.

Even just something like "blacklist", "whitelist"; it has nothing to do with the modern black skin white skin world of racism - literally every culture on this planet has similar associations with the colours white/black...

It's almost like primitive cultures could only observe the Sun and our planet's day/night cycle and based it all of daytime = safe, nighttime = unsafe.

Also: was the page always behind a login? Or was it moved behind one once it created controversy?

Man = "This term reinforces male-dominated language." ahaha, for a university they should study a little more: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mann#Old_English.

Also checking this list, and as a gay man myself, they've missed a whole class of people in their silly list.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#574

Post by noufalibrahim »

photochemsyn wrote: post #349
cipheredStones wrote: post #332

It's pretty remarkable that this conflates: - Well-known slurs like "Jewed" - Outdated, now-offensive terms like "hermaphrodite" - Touchy metaphorical language like "slave replica" - Gendered terms that if you're being assiduous you probably want to avoid, like "manpower" - Words that have long since lost any stigmatizing meaning by virtue of the original use being so ancient ("lame", "dumb", "stupid") - Words that,…

I can think of a few more! "register" - might indicate that someone has to register as a second-class citizen, enemy alien, etc. "bit" - might imply that someone is only a 'bit player', leading to feelings of inferiority. "tool" - an obviously offensive word meaning that someone is only fit to be used by others. "terminal" - we need to be sensitive about words that bring up the concept of death, to avoid triggering e…

"Trigger warning" is now hurtful and should be replaced by "content note". That's recursively triggering.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#575

Post by leoc »

photochemsyn wrote: post #349
cipheredStones wrote: post #332

It's pretty remarkable that this conflates: - Well-known slurs like "Jewed" - Outdated, now-offensive terms like "hermaphrodite" - Touchy metaphorical language like "slave replica" - Gendered terms that if you're being assiduous you probably want to avoid, like "manpower" - Words that have long since lost any stigmatizing meaning by virtue of the original use being so ancient ("lame", "dumb", "stupid") - Words that,…

I can think of a few more! "register" - might indicate that someone has to register as a second-class citizen, enemy alien, etc. "bit" - might imply that someone is only a 'bit player', leading to feelings of inferiority. "tool" - an obviously offensive word meaning that someone is only fit to be used by others. "terminal" - we need to be sensitive about words that bring up the concept of death, to avoid triggering e…

Ask the French about the sensitivities involved in 'bit'. Actually, they've already highlighted the issue, with typical maturity and sophistication: https://coq.inria.fr/ . (The name wasn't a coincidence, no.)

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#576

Post by imgabe »

bawolff wrote: post #570
imgabe wrote: post #555

I reject the notion that anyone hearing or reading a word from this list could possibly experience anything properly categorized as "harm". This is what's known in the sports world as "flopping" - feigning an injury to elicit a penalty on the other team. Except academia has taken it even further. You don't even need to pretend that you're the one injured. You can make up an imaginary person and pretend they are injur…

Although a lot of this list seems silly, it also has slurs like "retard" and "jewed" on it, which i think are very reasonably considered offensive. I think the tarball thing is rediculous, but the opposite extreme of no words can be hurtful is also rediculous.

It oddly doesn't have a lot of other slurs, like the n-word, etc. Does that mean they are acceptable?

I don't think most people need to be told that "jewed" or "retard" are not appropriate professional words. Certainly not anyone who works at Stanford, just like nobody needed to be told not to say any of the other slurs that aren't on the list.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#578

Post by hef19898 »

3np wrote: post #457
cipheredStones wrote: post #332

It's pretty remarkable that this conflates: - Well-known slurs like "Jewed" - Outdated, now-offensive terms like "hermaphrodite" - Touchy metaphorical language like "slave replica" - Gendered terms that if you're being assiduous you probably want to avoid, like "manpower" - Words that have long since lost any stigmatizing meaning by virtue of the original use being so ancient ("lame", "dumb", "stupid") - Words that,…

Some further examples that stood out to me as being too far-fetched, fashion, and/or excessive to be part of any reasonable "Elimination of harmful language initiative" (explanations verbatim qouted from TFA): > abusive relationship (The relationship doesn't commit abuse. A person does, so it is important to make that fact clear.) > rule of thumb (Although no written record exists today, this phrase is attributed to…

Curious question, what would be negative about spade? It's either a form of shovel or a card color? Fairly certain I am missing something here.

Edit: Because it is really fun, in a strange way, to go through the list: Isn't chief also used to address, e.g., a chief petty officer?

Edit 2: The list is just, well, strange. Ghetto for example, in the list it is mentioned as a non-white neighborhood. Historically, it was a jewish one. Let alone to speak about the Ghettos the Nazi's put in place. Karen, bad because it insults (?) people for their behaviour, this just stands out against all the other terms on list because of negative perception around what people are. Pretty lazy list, especially for an instituation like Stanford from which I would have expected better understanding of cultural and historic context...

Edit 3: No surpise, red team is on the list. But doesn't that come from military exercises, with red being the opfor? And blue being friendlies?

Edit 4: While some things are good advice, the majority of things on this list is just rediciulous edge cases. And, on top of that, some things are on the list because racists took it over, e.g. uppity. So basically, extremists, racists and whomever has to use a term for the rest of us normal people (also on the list for whatever reason) cannot use it anymore. That alone raises the question who is in charge of words here.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#579

Post by allendoerfer »

> hip-hip hurray, hip hip hooray

> This term was used by German citizens during the Holocaust as a rallying cry when they would hunt down Jewish citizens living in segregated neighborhoods.

I don’t know, might have been used that way. Wikipedia says it originated from different militaries using it as a rallying cry, while hip actually comes from the English word.

As a German, I would not use it today, because it‘s rather old fashioned, but I have no negative connotation with it. Did not even know, that it originated in the military.

If this expression reminds you of the Holocaust, you might as well be reminded by every German word and therefore avoid it, which might be difficult speaking a Germanic language like English.

Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative

#580

Post by mach1ne »

midasz wrote: post #532

Serious question, and maybe this is ignorant because I do not have an academic background but: Are these people not just a vocal minority? And if so, who cares? It seems like the internet is always up in arms about woke-ism but I honestly don't notice much of it in my daily life. At work, sure there are rules and regulations, but they make sense. Treat people with respect is always my default stance. If I make an ass…

It's about the fact that institutions (incl. corporations) hold all the power in the world, and the people within them are recruited from academia. If academia becomes (is) an indoctrination school, it will produce mainly activists and those who don't mind submitting to activists. These people will then eventually rebuild this system in their workplaces (since 'wokeism' is an inherently corruptive and hard-to-resist system). After this, you will start to see the fruits of their labor pop up all around - OpenAI censoring their model to oblivion, movies selecting for overtly activist plot points, social media companies beginning to censor more and more stuff...

You wouldn't see activism in normal everyday discussions, though, due to people being rather agreeable in real-life face-to-face conversations. Political undertones, no matter how strong, are always in the background, not forefront, of conversations anyway. You wouldn't expect people to proactively discuss Putin with you if you went to Russia, for instance.

And yet, if the general public either agrees with or is neutral towards ideals which DON'T conform to real reason, those ideals can be weaponized in the fringes. And they indeed are.

(Note: Below, I'm using the term 'fascism' to describe the societal phenomenon. I'm NOT referencing nazism nor saying that the current political atmosphere is anywhere close to it.)

Westerners are conditioned to think about fascism as originating from one well-defined party, mainly due to the fact that autocracies of the world do indeed operate that way, but fascism is just the blind power-hunger and violence of the human condition enabled by any group of people and accepted by the majority. The hallmark of fascism is that it is never hostile to the majority, but continuously extremely violent to whoever happens to be the edge case at the time. It guides the general discourse through these edge cases, not the center. Thus, if you are in the center, you don't really see anything bad happen to you - as long as you course-correct every once or twice from the edge cases.

Post reply on HN