If they keep this up long enough they'll have a very thin dictionary. And their department of English will go out of business. It would be sad if it weren't so funny.
Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
471–480 of 1001 posts
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#472Obviously there's much to laugh at in this initiative and a legitimate worry about thought being policed. That said, if you are open to changing your mind, there's an excellent 9-minute bit of stand-up comedy from Stewart Lee about political correctness you might want to watch [1] where he discusses why for example it's not "political correctness gone mad" to refer to a prostitute as a sex worker [2].
I do think the general impulse to try and create a kinder language is worthwhile, even if in practice it can spiral out of control due to virtue signaling and people with too much time on their hands.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmsV1TuESrc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmsV1TuESrc&t=309s
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#473Probably what you should take away from this is not “wokism gone crazy” (err, sorry “wild”). The more important lesson here is that the bloat in academic institutions has gotten so outrageous that people start bullshit time-consuming initiatives to justify their positions and the positions of their reports. Absolutely no one will take this seriously including the person who wrote it but they will be able to put it on…
academia is the source of wokism, then it gets populated for political terf wars and selling adds optimization
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#474> OCD Maybe they should ask actual OCD sufferers whether the term offends them when used to mean “detail oriented” because if they had asked me, a bona fide obsessive-compulsive patient, I would have responded with “meh.” My OCD has caused me untold misery, wrecked relationships, and made work difficult, but we all have a subtle sense about when people mean us harm or are just using a term as a shortcut. Almost never…
And your experience is reflective of all folks who have OCD? I can absolutely imagine someone being pretty upset by seeing how casually "oh I'm just OCD" gets tossed around.
I'm queer, I would never presume to say that another queer person's challenges or trauma were the same as mine.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#475This thread started a day ago, but only had about an hour on the front page. Reposts keep appearing, so there is obviously an appetite for this story. Instead of a duplicate/split discussion, I've re-upped the original thread and merged the others hither. If you're going to comment, please make sure you're up on the site guidelines and that your comment is within them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html…
I suspect the appetite has something to do with how ridiculous this whole thing is. Having a meaningful discussion about this is going to be very hard without occasionally bursting out in laughter.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#476> Grandfather: This term has its roots in the "grandfather clause" adopted by Southern states to deny voting rights to Blacks. > Red team: "Red" is often used disparagingly to refer to Indigenous peoples, so its use in this context could be offensive to some groups. > Blackbox: Assigns negative connotations to the color black, racializing the term. > Brave (do not use): This term perpetuates the stereotype of the "no…
I have to congratulate them: That brave bit at least is new.
It's definitely not, the braves have faced criticism over their name and iconography for a long time
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#477It'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,…
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Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#478Probably what you should take away from this is not “wokism gone crazy” (err, sorry “wild”). The more important lesson here is that the bloat in academic institutions has gotten so outrageous that people start bullshit time-consuming initiatives to justify their positions and the positions of their reports. Absolutely no one will take this seriously including the person who wrote it but they will be able to put it on…
> no one will take this seriously But git branch names now say "main".
I think the argument that calling git branches "master" hurts people is ridiculous, but I also think that "main" makes more sense. The master/main branch doesn't have any power over other branches - it's just the one that you happen to use primarily. "Main" describes that better.
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#479Probably what you should take away from this is not “wokism gone crazy” (err, sorry “wild”). The more important lesson here is that the bloat in academic institutions has gotten so outrageous that people start bullshit time-consuming initiatives to justify their positions and the positions of their reports. Absolutely no one will take this seriously including the person who wrote it but they will be able to put it on…
Oh but they will. Words like whitelist and blacklist have been banned by woke theater fiat at the bigco I work at, although I have seen no evidence they actually have anything to do with racism. I suspect our banned words list has a lot of overlap with Stanford's. Rabblerousers like to rabblerouse, and nobody wants to be the voice of reason when the people who decide your paycheck make stupid political decisions.
Recently got an oncall task, somebody was complaining about such a word occurring in an internal tool. Some people are quite zealous about this. Of course you don't want to be the one arguing about this...
Re: Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
#480OCD is not the same as detail oriented. OCD is the disorder of having to have certain things in a certain way. Detail oriented is just that, you care about details. Like someone who paints your house can go fast on the large surfaces, but you get the detail-oriented person to do your window trims in a different color without it splattering over the white facade.
You are correct, this list is suggesting the casual is the problem. Eg, "oh my gosh, I'm soooo OCD about my Starbucks order".