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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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Showerthoughts
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while in some ways I can see your point, I would just have a hard time saying this in a work meeting here in the deep south with black colleagues present
most sociologists and some psychologists would refer to this as a subconscious, or subdued form of racism.
it is kind of silly a the end of the day. How a terminology originally referring to a power dynamic. Has been so excessively ingrained in relation to race (which isn't very historically relevant) such that even using these terms in a generic capacity, not relating to in any form what would constitute this "negative slavery" concept, that it makes people feel uneasy, summarizes rather weirdly, the human condition.
maybe this is just my autism speaking, but i see so little resemblance contextually, and almost zero historical relevance that i see almost no connection between the words and the practices at hand. Like you could do a wikipedia speedrun from technology to slavery, but you could also do that from any topic, to slavery. Everything is so interconnected there is nothing pure anymore.
Isn't the inverse - "I asked x number of black people and they were OK with it" or even "I assume y% number of black people are ok with it" subject to the same criticism?
I am white so we're probably getting to the edge of propriety in this conversation.
yeah they're both equally susceptible to the same problem. Ultimately though, one of the things we can best do to examine something like this is relate it to other similar concepts/problems. PTSD for example, hearing a certain word or phrase may make you deeply uncomfortable or uneasy. It's not recommended to simply cope with that, or stop hearing those terms. It's recommended to learn how to work with and against it, in order to become a more functional human. And you could argue a similar thing in regards to master/slave terminology being used.
You could also expand into the general normalization of a concept. For example curse words are only bad because we deem them to be. If a white guy explains the architecture of a piece of software using master/slave terminology to a group of people which includes black people, specifically in the country of america. It might be weird, but realistically, it probably shouldn't be. Why? It's simple, there's nothing that prevents this from being a presentation from a black person explaining an architecture using a master/slave architecture in the exact same manner as the white guy, to a room of people that includes white people. Is that weird? I see no reason for it to be weird there either.
The entire reason the master/slave terminology is frowned upon is because of the power balance in that specific situation, however if there is no power imbalance, it's debatable as to whether it matters or not. It's perfectly fine in the BDSM space even between white/black people because it's a consented accepted terminology in that specific context. So we could even extend the social acceptableness of it based on who consents to experiencing that dialog.
There are a lot of ways to look at and think about things, ultimately it's probably worth not thinking all too hard about most things as they don't lead to much.
definitely, but that's part of the fun, if you can't discuss things in a philosophical manner whats the point of even asking the question in the first place.
Or isn’t the other half of that …… if you have a toxic personality and wish to change that, there may be no single fix but to pay more attention to many small habits contributing to that toxicity.
This whole conversation reminds me of the similar one many years ago, about crude jokes and pictures/calendars in the workplace. The dominant population said exactly the same things. However now we’re all more professional and work is much less toxic, not just for women, minorities, people with different preferences, but also less toxic for us white male heteros as well. We all won that one
yeah that's certainly an option, but defining a toxic personality or a toxic personality trait in it of itself is a really hard and difficult process, and doing that externally is arguably worse. As it's rife for gaslighting and abuse, but that's a different story.
As for crude jokes, if you mean like, sexual harassment i think that's different. I think crude language in general is perfectly reasonable, though the trick is obviously being able to read the room. There's a fine line between hanging with the friends, and then being a fucking asshole.
Whitelist and Blacklist is on that stack as well.
this is actually a terminology that i would be interested on seeing the historical context for actually. My assumption has always been light based "whitelist referring to a well lit room, where as blacklist refers to a completely dark room" making things easy/hard to find as a a result.
It could also literally just be a coincidence and it simply sounded better for the allow list to be whitelisted, and the deny list to be blacklisted, humans have weird connections to words like that.
Fucking thermodynamics is racist guys
Black absorbs, white reflects
Blackhole, sun
fuck these people
Are we back to the fetish-based terminology?
ironically, this is the same reason that black people are uh, black, at least i think.
Human biology and evolution is racist.
For most people it's a lot more simple and subconscious than that. White=positive, black=negative. Most people do not consciously apply this to race, but they don't have to for the subconscious association to take root.
i would assume it's more accurately interpreted as "white=allowed, and black=denied" but in order for that to transmit to your subconscious racism i feel like you probably need to be racist already.
If I had to guess, it's just the general "white=good black=bad" which itself is likely related to day/night.
But it's easy to imagine a bouncer at a club with a list of whites allowed in and blacks that aren't. I don't think that's the etymology, but it's also important to remember that language is alive and words can take on unintended meaning.
that seems like an oddly specific origination for that specific term, but it's certainly a possibility. But as with words being alive and taking on unintended meanings, it's also equally likely that it became skin color agnostic at some point, and the term stuck because it was already being used.
I didn't mean that it originated with bouncers, I meant I imagined it coming to be associated with race in such a way 😅
yeah no i understand, i'm just saying that's a potential point where i could've originated and then morphed over time. Even if it was founded on race originally, it's not super likely it would matter today in any broader contexts.
Idk if that's for white folks like me (and you?) to decide, and there is no harm on erring on the side of caution.
It's like the deal with micro-aggressions. Alone they're not much, but a constant buildup of these little things can leave someone feeling raw and very sensitive to it.
I don't think the etymology started with race, I think it started with day/night. But I'm not an expert on etymology, and while I'm very curious, it probably doesn't really matter here.
yeah, probably not, and that's why i tend to err on the side of these discussions not being very productive. As for erring on the side of caution, idk. I'm not really sure theres that much caution even present to begin with. It might even be sufficient enough to just not use the terms around specific people per their request, or not at all, who knows.
i think my problem, is that people have a very analytical and sterile approach to these things. In terms of classifying and denoting things micro aggressions as a term makes sense. But from a broader societal perspective, i think it's useless, if not negatively impactful.
It's better to identity specific facets of society that are problematic, for example treatment and behavior of certain people differently from others, as opposed to "treating the symptom" so to speak.
it really could've been from anything, but at the end of the day whatever it started from is irrelevant to it's use case today, and anybody using it to be offensive is offensive for other reasons at that point.
I think it's difficult to separate the two, they form a feedback loop. It's like the broken window theory.
People see these little ambiguously exclusionary acts, and if they see enough of them then they get the subconscious message that exclusionary acts are ok, and the (possibly accidental) targets of the acts get the subconscious message that they're not welcome which makes the subject raw and sensitive and primes them to look at acts through that lens.
In college I took a class on how humans and computers interact, and one of the things my professor was passionate about was how the terminology of programming languages tended to be exclusionary to women. Not explicitly so, but just using violent language that women were raised to find uncomfortable (eg killing a process), and it was pushing women out of computer science.
This was like 15 years ago, and he was already passionate about it at the time, so this isn't really a new thing, its just getting broader attention.
I don't know if that's happening here, but it costs nothing to change so even a potential minor improvement is worth it.
this is the reason i think we need to treat them more broadly, it's a broad problem, the solution also needs to be broad, unless we want to ignore an entire segment of the problem entirely.
Did they ever mention the history of the CS field generally being sexist towards women? I would also argue that women being "averse" to terms like killing is equally presumptive, women cooked in the kitchen throughout the 1950's, you think they got acquainted with the concept and idea of killing things? Like turkeys, chicken, cows, etc. They almost certainly understand the concept of death. They've seen it first hand, arguably more so than men throughout history ignoring things like war. If we include child birth it's even MORE aggressively supporting of this point. It wasn't that long ago that you would have children, and they would just, die sometimes. These days thankfully, miscarriages are the most significant threat to giving birth to a living child. Those didn't stop, i'm not sure if they lowered? I think that's why they're so statistically prevalent compared to everything else, but idk shit about miscarriages so don't ask me lol.
Thankfully the sexism in the field has improved, the problem stems more from the CS field being predominately men though. Girls were never really being pushed into the field, there are more being pushed into it now, but it's still not super significant, even through anecdotal experience, we just need to be engaging girls in the cs field from an earlier stage. People are just predisposed to giving and educated boys about computers, rather than girls, for some reason.
well that's good to know, i figured they would, but that seems like a more historically relevant point to me.
i mean maybe, but it just seems weird to me that we would establish that women comprehend words like "kill" differently, and that we should cater towards that, while we've spent the last like, thirty years if not more trying to move away from these things.
I mean we literally have deer hunting seasons to cull the population of deer as they no longer have natural predators, what's the harm in using the term "killing" for referring to ending a process. It makes sense when you think about it. A process is born or created, and then it may fork, or it may not, and those forks may be killed, they may not be, the mainline process will inevitably be killed, either at its own discretion, or forcibly. through a termination.
It might be violent, but it's a process, it's literally just lines of code that are being run. There's nothing special or fancy behind them, it makes perfect sense to use terms like "killing a process" and "stop" and "terminate" for shutting them down, it's immediately interpreted.
we know from raising children that it's not good to shield them from potential allergens (the get allergies if you do that) and that it's also good to expose them to generally more unsanitary environments (they build up a better immune system response ability) as well as encouraging them to do things they may or may not be capable of, teaching them how to deal with failure, and teaching them how to deal with the general pain and suffering of life. Why have we suddenly decided that "maybe we shouldnt use kill as a terminology to describe the act of ending a processes lifetime" that seems inconsequential to me in the grand scheme of things.
There might be data to support it, but i think the data to support that we simply don't push younger girls towards the field of CS is significantly more evident. It has a historical basis, and it tracks with what we're doing today, and the majors and degrees that they're focusing on as well. While we're here, we should probably also do something about younger men in the education space, and the world at large, as they don't exactly have anything to aspire to or focus on.
just another moderately relevant example here to extend upon my point.
The one thing men had was control and responsibility over women when they didn't have rights. Now that they have rights, we haven't exactly changed anything in regards to how we raise boys, and we're surprised when they start following the likes of tate and the manosphere crowd. Women haven't previously had this opportunity to the same level they do now, so they're still taking advantage of it because they can. But we've basically forgotten about an entire sect of society accidentally at this point.
I don't think it's intentional, i just think it's a consequence similar to the decline of the tradesman over the years. Now those jobs have generally better prospects than getting into college, and they've become a very tempting opportunity.
There are many problems and many solutions. We don't need to focus on one problem and pick only one solution.
My entire point here was that there is concern that industry jargon can be accidentally exclusionary to some demographics, interest and research on it isn't new, and the effect is usually a "death by a thousand cuts" type thing, like migroaggressions are.
I didn't specialize in this, so my knowledge on it is from one part of one class I took like 15 years ago, but I can absolutely see how it could matter.
People aren't rational and society doesn't raise us rationally. We can be perfectly ok with something in one context but not ok with it in another context. We can be ok with one thing, but not ok with another similar thing.
I agree there are deeper societal issues about how we raise boys and the incentives/traumas we put on kids. That doesn't mean we cant pick off this low hanging fruit at no cost.
It's important to meet people where they are, not where we think they should be.
it's certainly possible it matters, but ultimately in the field of engineering, if you're designing a bike, it's probably more important to fix that problem where the bike crumples in half impaling the rider on the way down rather than the fact that the water bottle mounting holes need de-burring off the factory line to help prevent them from cutting people slightly.
Dealing with microaggressions is definitely one of the problems at all times, there is a question of whether it even exists to any significant degree, considering a lot of people make jokes about other things at the sarcastic expense of something. Is self deprecating humor a self microaggression that we should stamp out because it subconsciously influences people to be a worse person?
You see what i'm getting at here? I feel like it's just a really hard problem, with a really hard solution, and i feel like the best solution is to treat it like a moderately insignificant problem, while being consciously aware of it. In fact one could probably argue being consciously aware of microaggressions is going to make you immune to them from the get go.
I also feel like it's probably effort needlessly spent relative to other issues as well, like for example we could move to stop microaggressions, or we could like, move to stop racial bias hiring practices, which are probably going to be more beneficial. Or like, make an AI less racist, or like, don't use AI for crime detection and stopping at all probably.
like it's a death by thousand cuts sure, but i feel like we're ignoring the missing leg and the dislocated and fractured jaw here as well.
yeah, absolutely a great stop gap measure here would be doing this on a person by person basis, if X doesn't like Y using Z term, they can mutually come to the agreement to not do that.
Another thing we need to consider, is that we can't expect everyone to meet us where we are, because a lot of people (me included as a neurodivergent individual) i do not have normal behaviors, i just ghost friends for long periods of time, i don't hold that against them if they don't like that. That's just a thing i do, and if they don't like it, it's fine, i won't talk to them, and they don't have to talk to me. Anything other than that would be an aggressive overstepping of my personal boundary lines. As well as theirs.
I think this is ironically, a shooting yourself in the foot problem, from the broader context, because we're doing this "insignificant" thing to "marginally improve things for others" when in reality, we may actually just be making things more complicated for people who do not function inside of the bubble of normality.
I think ultimately, the best thing we can do is to simply prime people to not care. Things are shitty, shitty people say shitty things, just don't worry about it and you don't have a problem, at the end of the day, 90% of this shit is relatively minor, and thinking about it is only going to cause unnecessary anguish.
This solution is zero effort
It does. Ask POC
It's zero effort to change jargon like this.
We can do both. That was a bold false dichotomy
If your argument is that neurodivergent people can't switch from "whitelist" to "allowlist" I think that says more about your personality than neurodivergency.
Ok there, that sounds like a pile of FUD to prevent progress
Ok there psychology genius. Tell us how to do this and receive your nobel prize
I'm done replying to your novel length piles regressive bullshit and excuses dressed up in polite language.
idk about that one, maybe that would be the case if the issue was forgetting to weld it into one piece.
there's certainly potential for that, but like i've already stated i'm not sure how immediately relevant it is, nor how productive it would be, there's also the issue of intrinsically applied microaggressions which could easily lead to "hallucinated" microaggressions. That's probably an equally significant problem at scale.
i mean, fundamentally no. Changing long term habits is not a super trivial thing even as an individual, and doing this on the societal scale is basically going to be impossible at large. At least 20% of the population is probably going to start being outright racist in response to this (in america at least)
idk if you curse but if you do, you should be trivially aware of how much effort it can take to simply not curse. It's literally just a force of habit beyond a certain point.
yeah, absolutely, that's definitely an option, my concern is that we're putting too much focus on fixing like 3% of the issue, with like 10% of the effort, when we could be fixing like 20% of the issue with like 25% of the effort, which short term is going to be more beneficial.
that is an incredibly narrow and uncharitable view of my argument. If that's what you think i'm arguing you should probably go read a few books before reading this post.
i mean, it's a possibility, a lot of really subtle solutions do bring about a number of subtle problems, of which are even harder to fix. We have gay rights now, but there is a non insignificant problem with infighting between members of the queer community. How do we fix that? That's a good question. Granted this is a much less subtle example, but my point holds.
ok yeah so it's really simple. You know how you open the internet, and like, people yell at you and shit? And how they like call you stupid and bad and shit? And you know how you can just like, ignore 90% of it, because it's literally meaningless.
It's extremely likely that a large number of microaggressions being committed are entirely subconscious or not even intended to be offensive in any manner. Chances are, you are simply thinking too hard about what is going on, and you should probably worry less about that, and worry about other issues like social representation or even governmental representation.
the irony being, that this entire post is just an elaborate series of microaggressions. Though not likely directed in a racial manner, they are still microaggressions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microaggression
perhaps maybe you should go do some reading on the topic. I'll wait.
Tldr your novella of regressive FUD.
You can't get a perfect solution so you refuse to accept any solution is the Hallmark of the disingenuous redpill in disguise.
Go sell your snake oil elsewhere
my true TL;DR is that i think there are probably better and more apt things to focus on.
i'm not asking for one, i'm just positing that i don't think this is the most optimal and productive way to go about solving our problems at the moment. I feel like we're stepping a little bit too far forward in the grand scheme of things with this one.
Also i like that you call me red pill, very funny. I'm way to nihilistic to be red pill but ok.
unfortunately i'm fresh out of snake oil, i sold it all to smurf accounts (and it was laced with a carcinogen)
Still peddling FUD?
IDK, I didn't read it. Piss off with your disingenuous "no solution is good enough" anti-progressive bullshit
idk maybe you'll have to read it and find out. Maybe i should start writing furry smut in these posts though, you would probably read them then.
Bro I fucking said “whitelist” in a meeting and got so many glares, fuck all of these fucking uneducated pieces of shit that can only punch down because they know nothing except “DATS RACIST”