Banning words won’t make the world more just • Hacker News Board

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#871

Post by tptacek » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 8:39 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #864

wonderwonder wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it as unintentional discrimination. It's treating the people they are relabeling as children that need the kind progressives to step in and save them. It's so condescending. Minorities don't need white Knights to save them, neither do the disabled. If an individual wants me to not refer to them as x because they find it offensive, no problem. But a group of academics should not be able to sit around and decide…

> I see it as unintentional discrimination. It's treating the people they are relabeling as children that need the kind progressives to step in and save them. It's so condescending. I don't know how "unintentional" it is, but it sure is "discrimination" and "condescending." It's like how liberal whites dumb down their speech when talkign to black people: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/11/30/white-liber...…

Isn't it enough just to point out that Hispanic/Latino people reject "Latinx", rather than continuously trying to psychoanalyze the people (who are not exclusively white) who do choose to use it? At a minimum, you're now citing social science research to make your point, but you are yourself a vociferous critical of social science research.

You're making it hard to agree with you or to reach a shared understanding; like, I think "Latinx" as a universal term for Hispanic/Latino people is silly and mostly an elite discourse shibboleth, too, but the Extended Rayiner Cinematic Universe of paternal white behavior is not something I buy into.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#872

Post by smcl » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 8:41 PM UTC

red-iron-pine wrote: post #838

smcl wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Terrified" is a bit much, I think most people just want to get along and are happy to use whatever term is acceptable to those it describes. Our understanding of what those terms are might shift over time, and it may get muddied by well-intentioned people trying a bit hard to avoid offence (or by people clumsily trying to police it) but it's generally progressing fine. And I think as long as you're compassionate, wi…

Terrified might be a bit strong but fearful or afraid isn't. I am definitely afraid of stepping on a verbal landmine in a work context. This is my meal ticket, and what's keeping my family housed. There is a very real fear or stepping on toes, even if accidental, and that translates to behaviors. I'm also afraid of sticking my neck out in heated situations. I've had to push back managers, PMs, and other coworkers in…

It sounds like you've got a pretty stressful workplace overall to be honest. I don't exactly want to be having debates about the big social issues of today with my colleagues, but on the other hand I don't think anyone should feel like they are walking on eggshells.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#873

Post by zzo38computer » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 8:41 PM UTC

lynx23 wrote: post #664

Tzela wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested as well. I run a small science club for kids, mainly coding and electronics. Accessibility and being more inclusive is a very old bullet point on my long list of things to do, but I never found a place to start. Do you have any recommendation on where to learn this?

Hard question, because the field so diverse. In a sense, accessibility is much more then just trying to make computers useable for the blind. At a fundamental level, it is about making software flexible enough to be used in different modalities. People with very little motor capabilities are quite capable of looking at a screen, but they need help moving the mouse and perhaps a good predictive onscreen keyboard to be…

> In a sense, accessibility is much more then just trying to make computers useable for the blind. At a fundamental level, it is about making software flexible enough to be used in different modalities. [...] For the output part, it boils down to having an API which makes a third party app (like a screen reader) able to traverse the logical structure of what the application is presenting on-screen. [...] So a web automation or testing framework could actually be written on top of the accessibility APIs, and sometimes actually is.

I agree. If the features are well-designed, then they can be good for many uses, whether or not you are blind.

You could also add pronouncing file (especially if a document is using unusual words), it is useful if you are blind and using synthesized speech, but also if you are not blind and do not know how is the word pronounced then you can easily learn. (Likewise, if you watch television then you can put on caption in case you do not know how to spell some unuusal word (such as someone's name). Captions could also be useful for a "caption scrollback" menu to display prior captions in a list, although I have never seen this implemented, but I think it would be useful.)

Another situation where speech synthesis is often used (by people who are not blind) is GPS-based navigation systems. They often pronounce the street names wrong, so adding data for pronouncing, and then implementing that properly, would be better.

(I have mentioned before that I think that adding a "ARIA view" (with user-defined CSS) might be a best way to make a consistent visual display which uses ARIA instead of the visual styles defined by the web page author (widgets, etc can also be used, and would also be consistent instead of each web page having its own widget styles). However, I have not seen such a thing implemented in a good way.)

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#874

Post by selfmodruntime » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 9:08 PM UTC

lumb63 wrote: post #776

rayiner wrote: post #233

The Sierra Club guide is hilarious: https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/default/files/sce-authors/u... . > People of color” has in the past served as a collective term for people who are not white. A preferred term today is “BIPOC” referring to Black, Indigenous and people of color, which provides a unifying term for ease of use while still acknowledging the reality that Black and Indigenous people in the United States…

My opinion is the motivation behind “BIPOC” is to exclude Asians, who are rarely considered as minorities due to their economic and academic success.

They're also the victim of harassment and hate by primarily other minorities, which makes for an uncomfortable fact.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#875

Post by biorach » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 9:11 PM UTC

bilvar wrote: post #843

biorach wrote: post #755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i'm colourblind so I'd posit that the people who banned the term brown-bag are ableist Upvoted on the optimistic assumption that this was a joke

Of course it is! :)

in a thread like this Poe's law reigns

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#876

Post by parineum » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 9:24 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #674

parineum wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Groups don't have homogeneous opinions on this stuff. The prime example these days being Latinx. If people aren't called what they prefer, as long as they weren't called a slur, a simple correction is fine. Or, if you're never going to see them again, just let it go.

The challenge is when there is no single term that doesn’t offend everyone. So you can call a group “Latinx” and offend some and call a group “Latinos” and offend some and call a group “Latinos/Latinas” and offend some. I want to offend the fewest people with my speech. I would like to use opinion polling to both offend fewest as well as signal that I’m working to offend the fewest. What’s annoying and frustrating to…

I don't want to be offensive to people either but I also don't want to have to keep up on polling of what the plurality of any particular group is okay being referred to as. There are an infinite set of groups that I'd have to keep track of.

I'll find out if something's offensive when I say it, with no ill intent, and someone respectfully lets me know that they'd prefer to be called something else. My language will change over time in response to the overall language changing over time.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#877

Post by lynx23 » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 9:39 PM UTC

xhxhxh wrote: post #869

lynx23 wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web accessibility is indeed a very important thing for people like me. I am aware we are a very small minority with rather special needs in this regard, but believe me, investing in accessibility and therefore allowing people with visual and motor disabilities to interact with the digital world can have unexpectedly wonderful consequences for those benefiting from it. It is not often that I manage to pull tech people…

Hey man, what software do you recommend for screen reading? I'm trying to test my websites on accessibility and I've tried JAWS and NVDA so far (while using Lynx to navigate it) but found them a bit confusing. I'm not sure how one would use them in practice to navigate a site like Hacker news, which is relatively simple. Do you use something else entirely?

I am not quite sure I understand. If you're really trying to use JAWS or NVDA to work with lynx on the web, you are mixing things up. There are basically two worlds for blind users: the "old" text-only terminal interfaces thing which started in the good old DOS days at least for me) and was kept alive in Linux terminal applications. And the GUI world, where you have a screen reader interact with the various elements an application is putting on-screen. In the first world, the screen reader basically just sees a grid of characters. In the second world, the screen reader needs to reconstruct a text representation from the widget info it can obtain.

In other words, if you want to work on the web, with something like NVDA as a screen reader, you want to use Firefox or some other modern browser, not lynx.

If you are like me, spending 99% of your time in tmux, lynx is a nice thing to use, but there is nothing really accessibility specific here. Lynx is just a terminal application. And if you are a skilled blind user used to dealing with plain-text grid-stuff, you can use it just fine for whatever it still works for...

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#878

Post by rayiner » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 9:44 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #871

rayiner wrote: post #864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see it as unintentional discrimination. It's treating the people they are relabeling as children that need the kind progressives to step in and save them. It's so condescending. I don't know how "unintentional" it is, but it sure is "discrimination" and "condescending." It's like how liberal whites dumb down their speech when talkign to black people: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/11/30/white-liber...…

Isn't it enough just to point out that Hispanic/Latino people reject "Latinx", rather than continuously trying to psychoanalyze the people (who are not exclusively white) who do choose to use it? At a minimum, you're now citing social science research to make your point, but you are yourself a vociferous critical of social science research. You're making it hard to agree with you or to reach a shared understanding; l…

"Latinx" is just an easy-to-analyze example of a wider phenomenon where elite whites intervene on behalf of minorities while being wholly indifferent to what those minorities actually want. "Defund the police," racial preferences for hiring and education, "micro-aggressions," and many others are examples.

I think the psychoanalysis is necessary to understand the phenomenon in a coherent way. Obviously I can't get in their heads. It's just a theory based on conversations where mentioning polling and statistics would be met with dead shark eyes in response.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#879

Post by tptacek » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 9:51 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #878

tptacek wrote: post #871

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it enough just to point out that Hispanic/Latino people reject "Latinx", rather than continuously trying to psychoanalyze the people (who are not exclusively white) who do choose to use it? At a minimum, you're now citing social science research to make your point, but you are yourself a vociferous critical of social science research. You're making it hard to agree with you or to reach a shared understanding; l…

"Latinx" is just an easy-to-analyze example of a wider phenomenon where elite whites intervene on behalf of minorities while being wholly indifferent to what those minorities actually want. "Defund the police," racial preferences for hiring and education, "micro-aggressions," and many others are examples. I think the psychoanalysis is necessary to understand the phenomenon in a coherent way. Obviously I can't get in…

Well, racial preferences for hiring and education was something you used to support. What were you thinking when you supported it? Does it line up with your diagnosis here?

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#880

Post by prewett » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 9:59 PM UTC

lynx23 wrote: post #363

What was it, 10 to 20 years ago, people started to be noticeably nervous when they were coming near a description of my disability. It used to be so simple. I am 100% blind, and guess what, I prefer the term blind because it is pretty descriptive and relatively short. But all of a sudden, people external to the community started to fumble around with "visually challenged", and all the nonsense variations of that in m…

I've been reading "Cynical Theories" by Pluckrose and Lindsay which explains this whole thing as coming from a one-dimensional, activistized Postmodern framework. In this framework, society is a subtle network of power that creates oppressors and oppressed, sustained by "truth" created through language. There is no such thing as objective truth, so truth is a social construct created through language. But since the word "blind" is used by the default, in-power group, your claim to prefer "blind" is acquiescing to the oppressive in-power structure. So if they really buy into the framework, they cannot actually use the word you prefer, or they would be furthering the oppressive structure.

Ironically, intersectionality adds that truth is created by identity groups (e.g. "blind", "blind females", "blind black females", etc.), and cannot be truly known by people outside that identity group. So even by their own assumptions, your claims as a member of the blind identity group ought to trump their assertions. But, this is functionally a fundamentalist religion, and the assumptions are sacrosanct. (I am using "fundamentalist" here meaning a one-dimensional ideology that is non-negotiable, which is essentially how Christian fundamentalism, for example, currently operates.) You might be able to mess with the minds of cultural believers, though.

This absolutely has increased the distance between groups, because the real goal is not kindness but activism to disrupt entrenched power structures.