When one person accuses another of virtue signaling, even implicitly, there are typically only two possibilities:

1. They hold such a cynical worldview that it's reasonable and coherent to criticize someone else for attempting to publicly advocate for what they honestly believe to be right, or

2. They believe the other person is not being honest in their advocacy, and more importantly that they should call the person's integrity into question by opening that up for discussion.

When you label another individual's behavior as virtue signaling, you forcibly shift the focus of discussion on that person's behavior and identity rather than the thing they're advocating. This can have a chilling effect on people voicing their opinions with honesty and authenticity. Likewise if an idea if worth critiquing, it should merit criticism on its own without calling into question its advocates' motives.

I don't mean to pick on you in particular, I'm just calling out the use of the term.

3. Advocacy that mainly serves to make the advocate sound virtuous rather than substantively address the difficult aspects of a difficult tradeoff or help to wisely deploy resources in a way that will make progress on a problem.

It's distinct from your 1 in that it accepts that people can exist who legitimately care about improving the world.

It's distinct from your 2 in that it doesn't assert the person's advocacy is dishonest (or otherwise not heartfelt), only that their specific contributions are unhelpful or present a bad framing.

Example of a useful difference that 3 highlights:

Virtue signaling: "I just think we should help everyone wherever we can." -> suggests that the speaker is particularly noble while also setting a herculean standard for how to live one's life. (Really? Every single moment?)

Not virtue signaling: "As a rule of thumb, you should give about 10% of your net income to charitable causes, since this is historically feasible, and mainly would force you to cut back in ways that have disproportionately high utility for others. Any more than that is nice, but is more than I can legitimately ask." -> recognizes upper bounds in what they expect out of others, and what might be feasible or excessive.

Naturally, most advocacy lasts more than two sentences, but that gives the general idea.

Rational debate is not the virtue signaler's goal or means. They just want to flaunt a "holier than thou" attitude while actually caring zero about the topic. Demanding that those targeted by virtual signaler's passive-agressive's attacks must not point out the virtue signaler's inherent dishonesty is like complaining that the targets must passively serve the the virtue signaler's desires without a hint of rational or objective thought, as if the only acceptable outcome of a virtue signaler's attack is getting the target to publicly recognize how the virtue signaler is so virtuous and that the world should follow his teachings, no matter how empty and inconsequent and self-aggrandizing they might be.

1. If someone genuinely believes something absurd to be right and reasonable, why are they above criticism? Ridicule is a very valuable and effective tool in maintaining social cohesion and resisting subversive methods that use absurd arguments that are unworthy of or incapable of being reasoned against.

2. This is far more straight forward. If we genuinely believe someone to be disingenuous in their advocacy of the absurd, should they not be called out on it? What responsibility do we have to earnestly engage with deliberate subversion? Identifying it and raising awareness of bad actors and trolls is a valid defence, potentially saving good people a lot of time, money, and heartache.

I'll conclude by saying that I believe your attempt to dissuade people from using "virtue signalling" to identify these behaviours is, itself, virtue signalling. I'm quite sure it would serve your sociopolitical objectives very well if all these people 'in the way' would stop noticing such behaviours.

*The term virtue signaling seems to be used differently by different people, so not sure if that was a fair substitution of definition.

Determining whether a given use of the word is appropriate requires context and careful consideration, and people already tend to have a bunch of work on their plates! For something like "master" I think it's reasonable to go "let's just not use it in our repos, there are alternatives", it's not erasing any useful nuance or meaning.

By the way did you know that the etymology of robot? Wikipedia has this to say

> The word robot was introduced to the public by the Czech interwar writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), published in 1920.[79] The play begins in a factory that uses a chemical substitute for protoplasm to manufacture living, simplified people called robots. The play does not focus in detail on the technology behind the creation of these living creatures, but in their appearance they prefigure modern ideas of androids, creatures who can be mistaken for humans. These mass-produced workers are depicted as efficient but emotionless, incapable of original thinking and indifferent to self-preservation. At issue is whether the robots are being exploited and the consequences of human dependence upon commodified labor (especially after a number of specially-formulated robots achieve self-awareness and incite robots all around the world to rise up against the humans).

> Karel Čapek himself did not coin the word. He wrote a short letter in reference to an etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary in which he named his brother, the painter and writer Josef Čapek, as its actual originator.[79]

> In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, he explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures laboři ("workers", from Latin labor). However, he did not like the word, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested "roboti". The word robota means literally "corvée", "serf labor"

If anything, the article affirms my gut feeling when I first started using version control back in the day. It didn't occur to me someone else might feel similarly.

When creating a new repo using Mercurial, the default branch is called default, which always made more sense to me.

Interestingly enough, both Mercurial and Git were created by Linux kernel hackers to handle the Linux kernel source code after the Linux project could no longer use Bitkeeper. They were released 12 days apart in April 2005.

Just pointing out that certain things, even seemingly small things, are often assumed to be okay. And especially in team settings, people don't always feel comfortable speaking up or being that person.

Reminds me of the aphorism: There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

https://twitter.com/vaidehijoshi/status/1271555823139876864?...

All CI/CD pipelines, scripts, tools. Integration fixes, regressions and failed deployments because branch was main not master.

Turns out that Git’s use of master decends from a use that is about master/slave: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...

It could be argued that by default, Mercurial discourages rewriting history unless you really want to and you know what you’re doing.

So the definition of a ‘master’ branch is more applicable to Mercurial than it is to Git.

If people start jumping on the bandwagon of renaming "master" (or any such term) en masse because of it being "potentially offensive", that makes people think the usage of the word is offensive, and the potential offensiveness and having to explain that it's not becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And then we'll all need to change what we call this or that, just because people can't remember that words have multiple meanings.

Let's not turn meanings that are not problems into ones that are.

Do you have any examples of such conversations, specifically regarding to the naming of the "master" branch?

Fixed that for you.