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Banning words won’t make the world more just

theatlantic.com

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

#921

Post by msla »

faeriechangling wrote: post #896
msla wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar story: When I was a child, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. This is now malady non grata: For one thing, it's been folded into autism spectrum disorder, the DSM-5 being more on the lumper end of things than previous DSMs were, and, for another, it has a checkered history, with Hans Asperger using his position as a doctor in Vienna during the Second World War to choose which children were sav…

Autism is an insult, it’s a shortened version of “autism spectrum disorder”, disorder is intrinsically an insulting word, and the diagnostic criteria describes variations in human behaviour as dysfunctions and so on. The increased use of “autism” as an insult and people avoiding it is because it is an insult and always was from its conception. That is why doctors regularly try and plot to screen people’s DNA for this…

> Autism is an insult, it’s a shortened version of “autism spectrum disorder”, disorder is intrinsically an insulting word, and the diagnostic criteria describes variations in human behaviour as dysfunctions and so on.

No, people use "Autism" as an insult because they think it's a way to say "retarded" which won't get them slapped down.

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

#922

Post by LudwigNagasena »

tptacek wrote: post #810
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> capitalizing Black, which is something our mutual fave John McWhorter has been advocating for some time Is this sarcasm? I am not quite sure what this is supposed to convey.

No, there is nothing sarcastic about this.

I don’t think John McWhorter has been advocating that.

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

#923

Post by jaclaz »

Lukas_Skywalker wrote: post #663
Lazare wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My partner is disabled, and by chance and via support groups she is a member of, she has many friends annd acquaintences who are as well. And while it's by no means universal, she and all her disabled friends absolutely loathe the "people first language" currently in vogue (ie, "person with a disability" over "disabled"). And it's odd! Because while there are certainly disabled people who prefer one form over another…

Slightly related: in German, a strange thing happened at the end of the last century. Disabled people used to be called "behindert" (might be translated as "impeded" or "hindered"). I think the word was a good choice, because it took the blame away from people, and just described that they had to overcome bigger obstacles because of their situation. In the eighties or nineties, people started to use the term as a slu…

The "unworthy" meaning has been lost over time in Latin derived languages, the Italian "invalido" is (was) an official word to mean someone that for any reason was not fit for work, typically, but not only, soldiers wounded in the war and workers wounded on the job (amputees).

It was also common (with no negative connotation whatever) to extend the term to people with mobility issues, to blind people, etc.

It has been replaced first by "disabile" (disabled) and later with the more politically correct "diversamente abile" (differently able) which is (IMHO) really terrible.

The latest euphemism is "persona con disabilità" (person with disability) which makes even less sense.

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

#924

Post by skissane »

msla wrote: post #920
skissane wrote: post #891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Later still, the very word "Autism" seems to have faded out of polite speech, with people like me being referred to as "on the spectrum" with no explicit mention of which spectrum It is terribly ignorant, because people who use "spectrum" as an alias for autism/ASD don't know that psychiatry/psychology contains many other "spectrums" – the schizophrenia spectrum, the obsessive-compulsive spectrum, the bipolar spect…

> What if, one day, people look back on ASD/autism/Asperger's/etc just as we now look back on hysteria, phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, the Ptolemaic model, the steady-state universe, etc, etc, etc? None of that makes sense, in that new ideas about how the world works can't change the results of old experiments. That means I'll always be me, I'll always have been me, and part of that involves dealing with things…

Here's a paper I really like – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6880188/ – they looked at the brains of four groups of children – those with a primary diagnosis of ASD, ADHD, OCD and the "typically developing" ("normal" children with no diagnosis at all). They used machine learning to assign the children to clusters, based purely on brain imaging and test results (IQ and behavioural scales) – without any reference to the diagnostic labels. The 10 clusters they got had poor overlap with the diagnostic labels – see especially figure 3 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6880188/figure/...

I don't think their research is at all the "final answer" to what is "really going on" – it needs replication, and you might get different clusters if you added more diagnoses – but let's just pretend for the moment it is. People with an ASD diagnosis were in all 10 clusters, so who knows which one you would be in. Now, given your emphasis on "I am different", maybe you are in one of the clusters which is "further from normal", such as 8 or 9 or 10. But, whatever "you have", it would be clear that (1) plenty of people who "have ASD" don't "have what you have", (2) unless you happen to be in cluster 10, the sole ASD-only cluster (which only had 10-15% of ASD), some people who "don't have ASD" do "have what you have". Doesn't it therefore follow, that whatever it is, "autism" or "ASD" or "Aspeger's" isn't a good label for it?

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

#925

Post by msla »

skissane wrote: post #924
msla wrote: post #920

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if, one day, people look back on ASD/autism/Asperger's/etc just as we now look back on hysteria, phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, the Ptolemaic model, the steady-state universe, etc, etc, etc? None of that makes sense, in that new ideas about how the world works can't change the results of old experiments. That means I'll always be me, I'll always have been me, and part of that involves dealing with things…

Here's a paper I really like – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6880188/ – they looked at the brains of four groups of children – those with a primary diagnosis of ASD, ADHD, OCD and the "typically developing" ("normal" children with no diagnosis at all). They used machine learning to assign the children to clusters, based purely on brain imaging and test results (IQ and behavioural scales) – without any…

OK, I think I agree with you: We don't know if ASD or any of our current diagnoses are a particularly good model, but it is possible to cluster people and some people are farther from whatever group of clusters collectively contains the majority or strong plurality.

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

#926

Post by twohaibei »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #559
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" 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. I'm supposing some people might be more anxious about it than others, and in different contexts. If you see a lot of stuff in the news about people saying things you might have said and getting hounded for it that might make you super anxious - you don't know the etiquette any…

As someone not from US working in a US company I'm terrified. Literally.

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

#927

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

the_snooze wrote: post #17

>When Latinx began to be used in advanced milieus, a poll found that a large majority of Latinos and Hispanics continued to go by the familiar terms and hadn’t heard of the newly coined, nearly unpronounceable one. There's also a practical case: these terms make you sound like a damn space alien. Unless your audience already agrees completely with you, you lose credibility by using this language. Posturing for your o…

People argue about how much of this comes from the internet/twitter; in the case of latinx it's clearly an internet phenomenon. The word is entirely unpronounceable, it could only have developed in writing.

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

#928

Post by yosito »

wholinator2 wrote: post #739
yosito wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if we all just stopped for a second and realized that no matter what "side" we're on, we're all just human beings? Namaste.

I mean, this sets off my satire alarms but wouldn't that be a worthy goal? We can cynically deride all attempts to connect humanity as worthless hippy mumbo jumbo, and while I think perfect adherence would be impossible, I think a step or two in that direction is both possible and beneficial for us. This cynical attitude (assuming satire) is exactly the type of thing preventing us from making that kind of progress.

I wasn't being satirical.

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

#929

Post by franga2000 »

usrbinbash wrote: post #910
franga2000 wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strangest thing about the git branch controversy is that "master" was clearly used in a master/copy sense, just like you used to have a master music record that was then copied, but at the same time, basically every embedded communication protocol and many distributed computing systems still use terms like "bus master" and straight up "master-slave" configuration. Sure, for many protocols it's a very accurate des…

> why not start with the places where the words actually mean the same thing If a word describes a bad thing, that's a reason to get rid of the bad thing. It's not a reason to ban the word. Because the latter doesn't help anyone with real problems. Wow, we banished "master" from git. Did that make the world a better place for the people described in these articles (see links)? https://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/saudi07…

Note how that sentence started with "but if we're going to try and remove such language from tech,". It wasn't a support of the idea, just of the execution. "If you're going to try and mug someone, why not do it somewhere with no CCTV?".

As for the reasoning, nobody thinks not having a "master" and "slave" chip in SPI is going to erase slavery and especially nobody (on the right side) is trying to erase the word altogether. The most common argument is that these terms should not be "watered down" by using them elsewhere - when you hear the word "slave", your immediate thought should be "human rights are being violated! who? where? how can we stop it?". It should bring up the thought of some of the worst human suffering in history, not some chips talking to each other.

(again, I'm not giving a judgement of the idea, just explaining the arguments for it the way I understand them)

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

#930

Post by projektfu »

atoav wrote: post #532
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…

Isn't there is an actual difference between blind and visually impaired tho? The way I understood it blind people are a subset of visually impaired people, but not all visually impaired people are blind in a medical sense. So the reasoning behind such language might be to include people who are not technically blind, but still require similar consideration, assistence, infrastructure and so on. Language is odd here.…

Yes and actually that subsetting is why we need the richness of the language. A school for the blind is specifically for people who need to learn to make do without hardly any visual input. Assistance for the visually impaired can range from screen reading and braille to large text and high contrast.

We also have a lot of definitions for blind and retarded, not referring to personal differences. A duck blind. Retarded bacterial growth. A blind sac. Sometimes people take offense at even these uses.

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