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

601–610 of 1001 posts

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

#601

Post by nemo44x »

KMag wrote: post #193
richbell wrote: post #137

> 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…

Someone's going to go ballistic when they run into lecture notes on red-black trees. Skip lists are also ableist. Hopefully we don't find anything troubling in the pasts of Adelson-Velsky and Landis, or AVL trees will also be on the chopping block. At least they'll probably be able to lecture about treaps.

Don’t even try and talk about a binary search. I only search on a spectrum now.

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

#602

Post by iinnPP »

ancapsfascists wrote: post #474
kashunstva wrote: post #465

> 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.

[dead]

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

#603

Post by spritefs »

The point here isn't actually to not offend, it's to have some byzantine set of rules to force on others

I remember at a job orientation a year or so ago, the HR people and management spent a long time talking at us about DEI shit. They asked for questions and one of the people in the audience brought up unconscious bias (which wasn't in their presentation for some convenient reason). They got kind of shitty with the guy. Not in any sort of non-plausibly-deniable way, they just changed the subject really fast

This is DEI in practice: it's some upper management head game where anyone who doesn't answer "I MOST CERTAINLY AGREE!!!1!1!" is doing it wrong

The real solution imo is DEI accelerationism: just crank the wokeness to the absolute maximum, to the point where management starts to reconsider opening their mouths about it. You can be a ridiculous asshole, just make sure you're on the woke side and there's very little they can do to retaliate

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

#605

Post by account-5 »

How long before this percolates into normal life?

Ridiculous nonsense!

Guess my mum was lying when she told me as a kid that sticks and stones could break my bones but words could never hurt me. Looks like words are worse than torture, the way things are going. No need to pull out fingernails in secret black sites, just say some naughty words and see how long they last! Haha.

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

#606

Post by jojobas »

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.

By banning words like "retard" you just create a void that will be filled with another word very quickly (the word itself used to be a medical term).

Imbecile, special needs, oligophrenic, whatever, something associated with intellectual disability will be used instead.

They are not trying to ban "harmful language" from being said or written, they are trying to have you suppress "harmful thoughts", or ideally render you incapable of harbouring them.

Do you want Stanford (or anyone else) to dictate what you can think?

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

#607

Post by narrator »

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…

The reason these kinds of rules are showing up everywhere is to get control of organizations by inventing grievances that can be deployed at any time to remove inconvenient people and quickly take over the organizations they've built. A variant of this is the WEF's Stakeholder Capitalism where outside groups can infiltrate corporations and then use invented grievances to quickly take control of these organizations.

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

#608

Post by iinnPP »

How much collective value has been used on politically correct speech? How much just from this thread of replies?

How many starving children have died who would instead be saved by that same collective value?

I want to say millions because I truly believe it would be close to billions(assuming that many could be saved).

Instead we encourage replacement words which over time become just as offensive. Of course, insults don't need to be limited to just English words either. Thus proving the entire endeavor is impossible since aggressors control more word choices than moderators.

Save a child. The UN says that is going to cost you about $160USD on average. (Based on 6.6B for 42M and please don't turn this into a dingbat/secondcoming thread)

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

#609

Post by narrator »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #596
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…

An old tactic to discredit an opponent and suppress norms of free speech. It goes like this: "Thing that is not violence is violence." Voilà. You wouldn't want to endorse violence, would you?

The broader tactic is redefining the meaning of words to claim the moral high ground in a debate. They steal the entire intellectual history of a concept by just redefining it to support their argument.

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

#610

Post by School-Cotton »

slavik81 wrote: post #324
School-Cotton wrote: post #60

“You guys” is the plural form of “you” for most speakers of colloquial American English, and is completely ungendered, in an empirical sense: if you observe native speakers speaking naturally and colloquially, you will find that everyone who uses it (regardless of gender) uses it consistently to address groups of multiple people (regardless of gender). It’s derived from the noun “guy”, which is indeed often gendered.…

> etymology doesn’t determine meaning. Otherwise we would have to conclude that “woman” is male-gendered because it etymologically derives from “man”. Man was not gendered when "woman" originated. In Old English, the words for men and women were "wer" and "wif", while "mann" described any person. Over time, wifmann became woman, and for whatever reason, wermann didn't end up becoming a word. Other examples of trouble…

Okay, but my point still stands. If etymology determined meaning we’d have to conclude that “man” is ungendered, which is clearly wrong.
Post reply on HN