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Words flagged in search of current NSF awards

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Re: Words flagged in search of current NSF awards

#161

Post by belorn »

philipov wrote: post #109
Yizahi wrote: post #71

I remember how "master" and "slave" were banned a few years back in information technology context and people cheered that ban. And surprise surprise, the same mechanism of arbitrary bans can be turned 180 degrees. And it appears that if the only criteria is a superficial offense at the established word unrelated to the imaginary offense, then many different people can use that same mechanism to ban or attack whateve…

There was never a ban like this on the master-slave terminology. A lot of places started moving away from those terms, but plenty of others just kept the old naming. There was no top-down directive from the federal government like there is here - I don't think it's fair to compare them as if they are equivalent situations. This is heavy-handed in a way that makes peer pressure look completely benign in comparison.

A lot of people like to focus very exclusive on the aspect if its top-down, with the implied message being that censorship is acceptable as long its done by companies or community leaders rather than government. Yes, it is worse when it is done by governments. But no, it doesn't make censorship acceptable. So much debate happens because some people view all censorship as bad, that is rules intended to inhibit speech and shutdown wrong-thinking, while others want to distinguish between government censorship and "good" censorship. As someone who stand in the "all censorship as bad" category, there is no good censorship! Only grades of wrong.

Different wrongness do get compare. That doesn't make very very very wrong to be equivalent to just very wrong. Both are however wrong. The kind of censorship and self-censorship we have seen in science, popular media and even humor in the last few decades has been insane compared to the decades previous. To throw in a random example, someone who criticized religion was murdered a few days ago in Sweden, and as a society we kind just expected it and waiting for it to happen. Something like Monty Python could not exist today as they would had either been censored or murdered, and so they would have been forced to self-censor long before their skills as comedians would have grown.

Censorship is not something we can pick and choose from.

Re: Words flagged in search of current NSF awards

#162

Post by platybubsy »

jeffbee wrote: post #111
drawkward wrote: post #2

thus begins the end of pax americana; you can't have a space-age economy if you don't have science.

Isn't "Space Age" derogatory at this point? That's how I use it: to mean something that is obsolete.

I haven't heard it be used like that before. It definitely has a positive association in my mind.

Re: Words flagged in search of current NSF awards

#163

Post by philipov »

belorn wrote: post #161
philipov wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was never a ban like this on the master-slave terminology. A lot of places started moving away from those terms, but plenty of others just kept the old naming. There was no top-down directive from the federal government like there is here - I don't think it's fair to compare them as if they are equivalent situations. This is heavy-handed in a way that makes peer pressure look completely benign in comparison.

A lot of people like to focus very exclusive on the aspect if its top-down, with the implied message being that censorship is acceptable as long its done by companies or community leaders rather than government. Yes, it is worse when it is done by governments. But no, it doesn't make censorship acceptable. So much debate happens because some people view all censorship as bad, that is rules intended to inhibit speech…

Then you agree that what's going on now is wrong, and there's no need to bring up lesser wrongs to distract us from that.

Re: Words flagged in search of current NSF awards

#165

Post by jeffbee »

platybubsy wrote: post #162
jeffbee wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't "Space Age" derogatory at this point? That's how I use it: to mean something that is obsolete.

I haven't heard it be used like that before. It definitely has a positive association in my mind.

You should consider whether you might in fact be old!

Re: Words flagged in search of current NSF awards

#166

Post by freejazz »

Febra33 wrote: post #136
Yizahi wrote: post #71

I remember how "master" and "slave" were banned a few years back in information technology context and people cheered that ban. And surprise surprise, the same mechanism of arbitrary bans can be turned 180 degrees. And it appears that if the only criteria is a superficial offense at the established word unrelated to the imaginary offense, then many different people can use that same mechanism to ban or attack whateve…

That ban is imaginary. It never existed. Many people decided to use other terms at their free will and others didn't. Both terms can be still found in plenty of projects.

Master. Slave. Look at me go!

Re: Words flagged in search of current NSF awards

#167

Post by theossuary »

o11c wrote: post #144
theossuary wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Freedom of speech does not imply freedom of funding. The first amendment is specifically about preventing government reprisals for speech. If I would have won a federal grant, but was denied it because I said "trans rights," that's the definition of a first amendment violation.

You're wrong in this case. All you have to do is replace the target and it becomes obvious. If a scientist currently or previously spammed papers of the form "why Nazis were right all along", we should all hope the government doesn't fund that subject or person. The mass retraction of previously published papers is ethically concerning, but choice of who/what to fund in future is always completely in-scope for leader…

You're too gullible if you think these purity tests aren't going to be applied outside of the grant applications themselves. This is clearly an attempt to isolate out "woke" scientists and researchers, irrespective of what they're researching.

Re: Words flagged in search of current NSF awards

#168

Post by o11c »

theossuary wrote: post #167
o11c wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're wrong in this case. All you have to do is replace the target and it becomes obvious. If a scientist currently or previously spammed papers of the form "why Nazis were right all along", we should all hope the government doesn't fund that subject or person. The mass retraction of previously published papers is ethically concerning, but choice of who/what to fund in future is always completely in-scope for leader…

You're too gullible if you think these purity tests aren't going to be applied outside of the grant applications themselves. This is clearly an attempt to isolate out "woke" scientists and researchers, irrespective of what they're researching.

Gullibility has nothing to do with the logical question of "is this a free speech concern or not, and if it is is it in the subset covered by the Constitution?"

You can't oppose chaos while giving up on rigor yourself.

Re: Words flagged in search of current NSF awards

#169

Post by nom »

Dig1t wrote: post #139
Yizahi wrote: post #71

I remember how "master" and "slave" were banned a few years back in information technology context and people cheered that ban. And surprise surprise, the same mechanism of arbitrary bans can be turned 180 degrees. And it appears that if the only criteria is a superficial offense at the established word unrelated to the imaginary offense, then many different people can use that same mechanism to ban or attack whateve…

Absolutely correct. We’re still not allowed to use “whitelist” and “blacklist” because it’s somehow racism. We have linters which bar us from checking in code with these words and a bot which scolds us publicly in chats. Now the same people who applauded that policing of speech suddenly are offended when their explicit political speech is being removed. It’s just simply hypocrisy.

> and a bot which scolds us publicly in chats.

that is quite disturbing to me

Re: Words flagged in search of current NSF awards

#170

Post by zzo38computer »

whatshisface wrote: post #80
techbananas wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn’t crazy about moving away from master, but this isn’t a word ban, it’s a concept ban. They’re not really banning the word diversity, they’re banning the study of diversity by any name. Renaming master to main, doesn’t mean that you can’t do trunk based development, it just means you’re using a different term.

If there was any value at all in renaming it to main, it was preventing people from being reminded of the unhappy concept of slavery. I don't think one ban is more conceptual than the other, if there's a difference it's that scrubbing an unhappy concept from research is more pragmatically damaging than scrubbing it from nomenclature - not because one's morally better, but because the former is more difficult to evade…

I disagree. If people want to call it "main" that is OK and I do not have an objection, although slavery and racism is not a part of it. Using different words does not solve slavery or racism or anything like that.

There are some minor advantages of "main", but many of the previous objections to the change are invalid and based on ignorance of the working of git; once I figured out how it works, I do not have an objection, since you can call the branches whatever you want to do anyways, and the names "master" is not something special anyways except for what it is called if you do not otherwise specify a name. Furthermore, existing repositories on GitHub are not automatically changed, and they added function for renaming branches (which can be useful for other reasons too), so for these reasons I think what they did is good.

Some minor benefits of "main" is that it is shorter than "master" and starts with the same two letters as "master" (which might sometimes matter, e.g. if the branch names are listed in alphabetical order and you want to find them in the list). These benefits seems like only minor benefits to me, though.

However, my opinion about the change in SQLite, changing a table name from SQLITE_MASTER to SQLITE_SCHEMA, is different. I think that the new name better describes what it is for (it is the table for the schema of the database), but I would not have made that change, since it can cause problems. They did consider some of them (such as authorizer callbacks, which is something that I had thought of too before I knew what they did about it), and work around them, but that just makes it more messy, so I still think it was a bad idea, but now it is done and it would not be good to undo this change, either. If I was in charge of it I would have deferred the change until SQLite4, rather than changing SQLite3. (There is also the issue of the SQLITE_SCHEMA error code.)

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