http://antirez.com/news/122

It serves absolutely no purpose, other than for a group of people to feel like they have an ideological hold on the IT industry. Some of these people are already coming with new lists of "forbidden words" they are trying to impose with the old same excuse of "diversity and inclusiveness". Enough.

There are countless examples in the history of the world about slaves, including different ethnics, in every continent. May they have a word on this issue too?

- "Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible"

- "Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions."

As someone said elsewhere in this thread, it makes you wonder what's really going on while we are distracted by this stuff.

What I find interesting is that there (probably? maybe?) isn't a shadowy CIA-like organisation promoting this stuff, this "tactic" is a naturally emergent property of the woke belief system.

I think I find this more frightening than if there actually were a shadowy organisation pulling the strings: here we have a philosophy, which many well-intended people subscribe to, that causes them to behave like a sophisticated intelligence agency deliberately trying to disrupt a foreign power.

It's a tactic they first used in the 70s in Europe, when "real" left parties (i.e. the old-school socialist/communist parties, affiliated with the soviet union) started gaining ground. All of a sudden they started funding a lot of stuff like that, because it weakened/marginalized those parties. Why fight for workers rights when you can fight for LGBT, immigrant, women rights, etc. I.e. the right of fifteen distinct groups that have no power.

Much more recently that tactic was used to destroy the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I wonder what is different now. The woke movement doesn’t seem to get any weaker, even as it adopts more and more identity groups.

Adressing real issues cost money. Making bullshit changes is free.

The culture shock is particularly noticeable for non-anglo people.

The funny thing is that this whole tradeoff of breaking an API to make it better is nothing new; The woke is just bullying everyone by asking the tradeoff to be ignored completely in their favor.

I suppose they are not doing it for your feeling's sake. They are doing it to avoid being a target of a woke mob feigning offense for their own ideological gain in the on-going identity culture war which is happening in the west.

I'd love to see some demographics around this. When I lived in the bay area, most of my friends were part of this woke / "activist" community. I had some friends who disagreed, but mostly they were terrified to say so for fear of the mob.

Here in Australia, it seems like the demographics are the other way around. I know a few people who are part of the leftist woke / "activist" tribe. But most people I interact with socially think that while racism is a problem, the twitter mobs are a bit silly, and the woke stuff is overblown.

I don't know how you'd measure, but I'd love to see stats on what percentage of the communities in different cities hold this political stance. Is it growing or shrinking? Is it widespread in the west, or is it mostly just a bay area / portland / NY phenomenon - with small satellite groups in other countries?

The problem is that most of the West tends to imitate cultural and political trends that originate in the US. And this is already being imitated. In most other countries we are not yet seeing a war to the extent we see in the US, but the American situation could be the canary in the coal mine.

LOL no

You have a moderate right and a far right party by now.

Even in 2016, an analysis between Hillary Clinton and Theresa May showed some of Clinton's views were to the right to those of May.

It's going to be funny a few years down the road when the trend comes to Australia before they actually notice.

https://iview.abc.net.au/show/why-are-you-like-this

I don't know if iView works overseas, but I think the show is on Netflix too.

I work with a Canadian team but American parent company. We see what they are going through and it is definitely different. I think our version of equality is just working together as peers and respecting each other, there is no performative or ablutionary aspect.

For the record, I think parent co. is genuine and seems very diverse too. Views are my own yada yada.

1a. The number of valid participants is low. It is easy to feel powerful sitting comfortably hidden in your parent’s basement behind a keyboard craving attention and direction. Misery loves company and when such people band together their numbers can appear large compared to something like a real world gathering of persons in a physical space. But it’s not real people in a real space, because that takes considerably greater effort.

1b. The numbers also appear artificially inflated because there is a low effort of repetition, which can appear as false participation, spam, trolling, denial of service.

2. There isn’t any real investment in most of this. Most of the motivation are bored people looking for inspiration to be emotionally concerned. They will point where the carrot leads. That isn’t a movement. A real movement features numerous participants willing to make a personal investment like those criminals that stormed the capital.

Insisting to help people is quite insulting, actually. Empowerment means you voice your own grievances. It doesn't mean recruit an army of armchair activists to do it for you.

Or to put it this way, if the "woke mob" decided to protest capitalism or even higher/stricter taxes, do you think that anything would change? Probably not, because production for profit it still at the core of every corp while at the same time the woke crowd has a limited understanding of capitalism to begin with (as can be seen by the claims that capitalism is by necessity based on racism). It is the worst of both worlds.

You mean the professional-managerial class? Or something else?

I get your sentiment, but this seems to be putting the cart before the horse, in multiple ways. Divorce rates and births out of wedlock do not have "a slew of knock-on effects"; they are the effects. There are only two reasons to care about those rates:

- They are easily measured, due to existing government accounting (birth/marriage/divorce certificates, etc.)

- Religious bullshit

I'll ignore the latter, since it cannot be reasoned with.

In the case of divorce, it doesn't happen without reason. Anecdotally, my parents divorced due to alcoholism and domestic abuse; my childhood, social mobility, earnings potential, etc. was improved by their divorce. Tackling alcoholism and domestic abuse may have "a slew of knock-on effects", including lower divorce rates; yet the reverse is not true, e.g. making it harder to get a divorce will not reduce alcoholism and abuse, it would merely subject more children to it for longer.

If we make the charitable assumption that the goal of what you're saying is for more children to receive more help and support, rather than the opposite described above, then that's several levels removed from what you actually said; and each of those levels introduces exactly the distracting, partisan rhetoric that you are arguing against.

- The first level of abstraction is focusing on the US. This seems fair enough, assuming you're in the US. Yet it's still important to note this abstraction, e.g. in the context of foreign aid. For example, it might be more efficient (i.e. give more help to more children) to spend more on foreign aid, since money can go further in poorer countries; alternatively, spending that money domestically might be more efficient (give more help to more children) due to targeting and accountability. If we want to give the most help to the most children, we should base policy on measured impacts; yet this is often framed as a "left vs right" partisan issue (pretending for the moment that the US even has a left wing), which distracts from actually achieving the stated goal.

- Next, you further narrow your focus to the black US population. This also seems fair, as they are a disenfranchised and oppressed group, and hence this focuses on a large number of large issues that need fixing. Even from a purely utilitarian point of view, it may be cheaper (or even reduce costs) to, say, tackle over-policing of black neighbourhoods; compared to tackling some more diffuse, less directly-controllable issue in other populations (e.g. suicide rates in white males). However, it's again worth noting the abstraction: in particular, a large improvement for the minority black population may have less impact than a smaller improvement for a larger population (e.g. the female population). Again, policy should be based on measurable impacts towards the stated goal, and again this has been turned into a partisan circus to distract from real change (e.g. with concern trolling about 'ignoring' white males).

- Next you split the focus between births out of wedlock and divorce rates. I've mentioned the impacts of divorce above; the partisan circus in this case involves 'traditional values', and bleeds into other areas like gay, trans and women's rights.

- The phrase "lowered births out of wedlock" is problematic, since (again) it is very far removed from the assumed goal of 'the most help to the most children', and hence puts the cart before the horse; and secondly it is charged with dangerous ambiguity. For example, lowering birth rates of 'undesirable' demographics (e.g. unmarried black people) could be achieved via eugenics; I'm hoping that is not what you had in mind, but that depends heavily on the reader's overton window; hence provoking both the far right and their opposition. Another way to lower this rate would be forced marriage; again, I hope that wasn't your intention, but again that depends on the reader, and the normalisation of such rhetoric stokes division.

I agree with your overall point that 'culture wars', 'wokeness', etc. are a distraction from solving real problems; yet what you are saying is itself an example of such distraction. I'm not aware of a word that sums up 'concern-trolling about how "wokeness" is concern-trolling', but that's how I would describe your phrasing.

In this case, I'm not aware of any person or group (e.g. Black Lives Matter, 'wokeists', etc.) who has asked for Github to change their naming policy, let alone demand it under threat of protest/boycot (AKA 'cancel culture'/'voting with your wallet', depending on which side of the circus one is sitting). Exactly the same can be said of Washington DC renaming Black Lives Matter plaza, and many other such real, measurable examples. Hence, when discussing such actions, any focus (for or against) on 'woke' individuals is itself a distraction.

Those who applaud such moves (if that's actually a thing; I've come across nothing but scorn for such actions) have been successfully distracted from the real issues that have sparked protest and boycot; whether it's GitHub's sexism and discrimination, or the US police system's racism and lack of accountability.

Those (like yourself) who scorn such applause (again, under the assumption that it actually exists in some non-manufactured/devil's-advocate form) have also been successfully distracted from those real issues of sexism, discrimination and racism. Complaining about 'wokeness' is a partisan circus, abstracted away from the stated issues themselves, fighting hypothetical slights from imagined enemies.

Of course, I'm not immune from such attacks myself. In this case, I'm grounded by the sheer prevalence of such backwards logic as you've expressed here, which I come across without seeking it out (cherry-picking smallfry posts scoured from Twitter/Tumblr/etc. is a perennial hobby of the 'anti-woke' distraction machine). On sites like Reddit I merely find it concerning (whether real or astroturfing to shift the overton window, the effect is similar). When it starts infecting sites like HN, which tend to reward thoughtful, reasoned content rather than knee-jerk memes, I feel a need to push back :)

Translation: people who see an opportunity to debase others for free and put themselves on a pedestal

Update: We call this class of people Mullahs here in Iran. It's been slowly but surely becoming apparent to us that they are somewhat of a societal parasite.

Edited: removed snark

Edited: removed snark

[+] note how you just assumed "the other side", and the existence of exactly 2 sides.

The alternative interpretation is that they're consciously being malicious.

Another example, Bezos recently banned books critical of transgender from being sold on Amazon. And just like that, everyone forgot about Amazon's brutal suppression of union organising activity in their warehouses. Similarly the rest of Big Tech thinks it can toss out token gestures and placate those who are critical of its business practices.

What are they going to do? Stop using GitHub? Good f ing riddance

The master branch thing was an attempt at misdirection and throwing the mob a bone.

It's a classic PR move. The entire objective was to generate distracting noise.

Policing language is popular among corporations for the same reason oil companies got "woke" about recycling in the 80s:

* It doesn't really change anything and doesn't affect profit margins.

* It affects everybody albeit very lightly and is extemely visible.

* It naturally leads people to shame each other, taking the heat off the corp.

* They can score some progressive points at minimum cost.

Same mechanism, different era.

I'd argue if someone is feigning offense we should call them out on it, not collectively fucking prostrate ourselves.

This whole fiasco just makes me wonder what the hell is going on in the background while we're being distracted by this... surströmming-level red herring.

I would bet that most people didn't have any idea that words like "grandfather" or "blacklist" had (or didn't have) any racist history.

Wouldn't it have been better to just let the words outgrow their history? These words were already dead or dying as racist terms. Not any more.

And, policing language generates a spectacular amount of distracting, harmless (to Microsoft) controversy.

Faulty pattern recognition machine at blame.

I at least was intellectually gratified to learn about it.

> In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.

It's still used to refer to a male teacher, particularly in elementary schools, as well as being the title used by lawyers.

A slave owner was simply a slavenhouder.

I think an important difference between ex-colonial European powers and the US is that the (ethnic) slavery did not take place on European soil. Most colonies were operated with very few Europeans to oversee, and as such people were not as exposed to it as people in the US, where masters and slaves would perhaps not live in the same part of town, but also not a continent away. So this may explain why those terms seem inoffensive/only have their meaning outside of the slavery context in Europe.

But I'm really worried about how we import everything American to Germany without thinking twice.

Left newspapers have started to write BIPoC everywhere when it comes to domestic issues. What exactly are the indigenous people of Germany? Even blacks are relatively rare. It would make much more sense to coin an acronym that includes Jews, Sinti and Roma, given our sordid history. But we simply take what American culture has thought up.

Landlord was pretty chill and I kind of miss being able to just ask anything and he would try to make it happen (including things like repairing car motors).

Housemates were of the mildly radicalized religious kind, with daughters that did not attend the normal school system and are now being married of early.

I don't know if the German "integration system" has failed for the later ... they have the freedom to chose and they chose a path that is different from what is considered "normal" in the "West".

As a Canadian (Vancouver), I can tell you true integration happens over generations of people working together and respecting each other. In those conditions, it is unavoidable.

If either group lacks respect, the outcome is always conflict.

You put their kids into school together young and they won't know not to be friends until you tell them. That was my experience, anyway.

I'm all for give and take but I wouldn't want the "give" to result in backwards steps for woman's rights being imported from the countries of origin

No we think that forced marriage has no place in Europe, or the oppression of woman's. And yes, that's our culture..so is the freedom to choose your religion and to have free speech. If someone from another culture comes we are happy to integrate it into ours, but NOT when it clashes with our Laws.

>You put their kids into school together young and they won't know not to be friends until you tell them.

And what when they go into different schools (Jewish or Muslim etc), live in different parts of the City (look at Paris or Berlin), and never met someone outside of their bubble until 20 or later?

BTW:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamophobia_in_Canada

I said it in another post ... it's not about being forced into something, it's about freedom of choice. And that is something universal, it's just codified in our laws.

It's completely fine if a women decides to become married and have children early ... it's probably not a good choice ... but morally there is no way to reject that.

The problem arises when people never learn that they have a choice ... I have (female) friends from rural Germany that think it's perfectly reasonable to go study and once finished move in with their husband and be the perfect stay-at-home mom.

edit: heck ... I even have friends from larger cities who would just prefer to be stay-at-home moms because that gives an excuse to sloth on the couch for half of the day :-)

>The problem arises when people never learn that they have a choice

Exactly, that's the problem with the bubbles like (Ghettos/Banlieues), and "special" schools.

Borrowing that specific term for other purposes is stupid.

I was forced to because the government in my country steals and wastes so much money that the economy breaks and you can't make money there. Still the quality of life is much better at home and I'd rather stay there.

All my friends are immigrants, I couldn care less to integrate here. Ideally I'd just rather live in a town with just immigrants from my country. As long as you keep them out of politics they'll probably won't rob you.

Her country is clearly superior in almost everything except for weather and food. I like living here and I've made good friends and enjoy my life here.

Now the curious part comes... I have zero attachment to both countries, their culture and their national identities. I couldn’t care less about their language or customs. I just see myself has some kind of post-nationalistic person that would much rather speak English with everyone, hang out on the internet and live wherever.

As far as I'm concerned national identities and culture are useless and holding us down as a species. I really wish people could outgrow this nonsense.

In hindsight I don’t think I was raised in a particularly enlightened culture. Do those even exist? I would much rather have us move past dumb social biases and constructs and work together to build a better future and a more universal and cooperative world.

On person's unbiased Baysian predictions based on a lifetime of experience and evidence, looks a lot like biases and prejudice to the delicate of mind.

And they get nasty about it.

So no, there will be no building of a better world.

You brain might think it’s very smart and clever and has the world all figured out but most likely it doesn’t. The world is a chaotic system beyond any one's comprehension. All generalizations that are not purely mathematical and 100% abstract in nature are wrong.

Perhaps a quick reread of the site guidelines is in order.

That town was in your country which you fled though.

Some nationalities integrate more than others. This goes for different European countries even, so it has very little to do with "race".

Obviously we did not respect the Indigenous people and I hope that can me mended through generations of mutual respect.

I think Vancouver is better because of the rich mix of cultures. It's not perfect here but I think it is pretty good. I have seen a Muslim man give his shoes to a homeless man on the bus and walk home barefoot in the rain. I believe anything is possible.

Ha! I remember a drunken night with a north-american colleague; he asked why didn't we have indigenous people here in Europe. Then he suddenly realized the answer: oh, but it is you, you all are!

I don't think this is true. What percentage of White Americans, during the period of slavery, owned any slaves? Was it even 1%?

It is one facet of American history yes, but it is very far from the "definition" of the country.

It is all about context. Question is, why certain groups emphasize - or better: impose deceivingly by altering him - the wrong context to a crystal-clear situation.

That would be a rather rude, dare I say hateful thing for me to say, wouldn't it? In reality, I really enjoyed all the places in Germany I've visited, and most of my interactions with German folk that I've interacted with socially and professionally over the years. I especially enjoyed taking a technical and engineering German language course, so I can appreciate words like "Kaftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung" and "benzinbetriebenes Motorsystem". I wouldn't think to make such a comment about the German people, like you did about people in the USA.

If you want to transplant the "master"-example, look at all the discussions of how they name certain sauces,schnitzels and deserts as well as a weird insistance that offensively named streets, underground-stations and (for some reason) pharmacies "must not need to be renamed, why would you even be offended".

Germany is not the example to go with concerning offensive language.

> look at all the discussions of how they name certain sauces,schnitzels and deserts

Okay I do - and that is exactly the useless actions that the submitted text and this discussion is about. For some reason you just ignore all that was said and just repeat those exact criticized points as if nothing happened.

Where these discussions about how Germans call their pharmacies connect to the article is that in both cases the arbiters who decide how things are called are the white - once you start to involve the people that these offensive words are about, you suddenly get a different sense of how important or offensive these words are. There's a recent example of a talkshow where a couple of white more-or-less-celebrities decided that these words are just german heritage, and really what is all the fuzz about ? To appease the ensuing mini-scandal the station organized a roundpanel of people who might be affected by these slurs - and surprise, they really weren't so fond of them.

Or see this article about a campaign to rename a trainstation: https://isdonline.de/umbenennung-der-mohrenstrasse-mehr-resp...

You are obviously right, changing words by itself doesn't change a thing - but if I can't even count on someone not using slurs about me, I can't expect to respected at all.

There are racists, and fascists, neo-nazis and old-nazis. They do exist, it's just that they don't pose that widespread of a problem in every day life, like it does in other western countries.

I'd say gender (in)equality is something you will encounter much more often in every day life over there.

It's about choice ... there are women (also in Germany) that gladly _chose_ to stay at home, _chose_ to prepare meals for their husband and _chose_ to care for the kids.

On the other hand there are women that _chose_ to give their children into daycare weeks after birth to go back to work.

It's not about condemning any lifestyle as wrong, it's about given everybody (males included) the ability to life their live as they want.

Sadly this is far from the reality with median wages being barely high enough to sustain one person, forcing women (and men) to work and robbing them of their agency.

We've got a minister of interior that does not want to start a study on racism in the police forces.

That's two of the big issues, that's not even every-day racism where it's hard to get an apartment or a job with a "foreign name", underrepresentation in leading positions or that in some parts you'll get at least hassled for walking with brown skin.

Germany is and always has been extremely conservative and integration/racism is an issue precisely because the largest party always saw imported skilled labor as people that should be forced back "home" again, even with a second and third generation growing up in Germany.

What exactly do you know about "the" German way?

I don't know if and where you've been to Germany, but having went to school there entire years of our history class were dedicated to the Nazis.

That is of course simplifying it a lot, but Germany as a whole has a problem with right-wing extremism who almost regularely murder people, and a police force who regularly have scandals involving members being present day Nazis, and these Problems not being adressed properly.

So I am not sure learning about The Nazis of the olden days is very helpful withouth showing the reach that these ideologies have into present day Germany.

And I say that as someone who has gone through these years that you reference as well.

To be precise it is about the atrocities committed by the Nazis and how they managed to subvert the society to be able do their crimes. By the way they started early on to change the everyday language.

> Indeed, Goebbels initially opposed the term propaganda, recognizing that in popular usage, both in Germany and abroad, it was associated with lies. Even after the ministry had been in existence for a year, he proposed changing its name to Ministry of Culture and Public Enlightenment, but Hitler vetoed this proposal.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ministry-o...

Every country is different. Developing world wouldn't care about rights, because they have to make cakes as fast as possible, and developed world can spend much time on being fair. It is something we should do.

Is a name change really that difficult for everyone? I remember when I first saw 'main' branch on Azure, yes, I have to slow down a bit, is it the end of world? It means something important for the US, and would be good for the future generation, I think I can afford the personal inconvenience. We, developers, are having the best job in this world, do we really need to get pissed off for this?

It's just a complete misunderstanding of the topic. Changing "master" branches simply confuses signified and signifier, and the fact that multiple signified can have the same signifier (like the signifier stool and the signified faeces and a thing to sit on. Removing the word doesn't remove the concept.

If these companies actually wanted to work for diversity, they could just do exactly that: employ more people from other backgrounds, or have extra internships for early orientiation in high school, or fund computer labs schools in poor neighbourhoods and so on.

Edit: As an illustration of how this doesn't affect the underlying meaning: In Germany there's a similar discourse going on, and the result is that the German radical right also started to talk about migrants instead of aliens or foreigners. But they didn't change their attitudes at all! They just adapted to the new word and kept their old concept.

So whole world has to change because US has its core problems?

>We, developers, are having the best job in this world, do we really need to get pissed off for this?

do we?

spend thousands of hours of your free time in front of computer just to learn stuff, then spend 3.5/5 or even more years for degree

then stay competitive / in touch with tech as a part of life style

just to have office/remote job with good pay?

is this "best job"? seems decent, but I wouldn't call it "the best", especially in countries where programmers do not have really outstanding pay like in SF.

Oh hey you offended me by implying my skin color means bad.

The problem with slavery is not that there is a word for it, it's that it exists, and used to be very common. By using the word "master" we are not condoning slavery, nobody can believe that. Just like we are not condoning domestic violence by using the word "hit" in "hit song".

For the word blacklist I can see how misguided people could make a case, since the word black is used for something negative. Still ridiculous of course.

Another absurd example: In my project they decided to change the name of a "blackout tool". There is nothing negative about this tool, it doesn't make things worse, it just colours them black.

Additionally properly identifying the impact of race on ai/ml derived algorithms would be a better use of time.

But of course these would have cost and other implications that companies would not want to do.

So do we know where that decision actually came from?

I don't think it's so hard to understand why some people might be irritated, though. The social attitude that motivates the change to switch away from the term 'master' is not widely held outside of a subset of Americans who are apparently vastly over represented in making these kinds of decisions. It's a bit grating to be saying "consider how others feel" while ignoring how most people feel about it, and making the change made you want anyway.

It's a zeitgeist which results in things like someone complaining that VSCode including a candy cane icon is more offensive than the swastika, and the VSCode repository acceeding this complaint. - I feel if that's where you end up from wanting everyone to feel welcome and included, that you've gotten lost along the way.

Of course there is a balance – too much fighting back and the cure becomes worse than the initial problem.

Just as security theater isn't real security, diversity theater isn't real diversity. We must stand up and denounce diversity theater and those who profit from it so that we can get focus on diversity efforts that have substance behind them.

But what about getting rid of "slave", "blacklist" and "whitelist".

The last two kind of opened my eyes to connotation of black and white, that may be problematic to some. Also I find "allow/denylist" more descriptive, maybe that helps.

It's not an issue. The etymology of the words have nothing to do with race.

Trying to get people to change them _creates_ that link.

There are real issues that could be focused on to bring about effective change. Not this.

It seems like a mistake to invent racial terms out of whole cloth for no reason. It shouldn't be done.

> It shouldn't be done.

That's linguistic prescription. "This word means what it means and if you change it you're incorrect".

I'm not saying that. My position is it shouldn't be done because creating new slurs for no reason is stupid. A prescriptivist and a descriptivist could both agree to that, though they'd disagree with each other on whether the idea of the change is legitimate.

Which is probably a similar position to ccmcarey's original comment. No position was taken on whether the change breaks the rules of language or not, the argument was that either way the change is being bought on by ignorance of both normal usage and the lineage of the word (ie, potentially in defiance of both prescriptivist and descriptivist logic).

This isn't really an issue of prescriptive vs descriptive philosophy. Although the descriptivists will be hopping mad.

Not directly no. But they enforce the unconscious belief that "black == bad" and "white == good". Read up a bit on unconscious/implicit bias [0]. There was an online test floating around that measured your response rate to a white face or a black face and those results were eye-opening.

Also consider how other industries have approached this problem[1] and how things have changed there.

[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/meet-psychologist-ex...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...

No, they don't. What your sources did was bring to light the current stereotypes in people's head, not how they were created. What you want to do is change those stereotypes, not mingling with the words that only communicate the stereotypes. It's about the concepts in the heads, not the words.

If you want to change the stereotypes (which you can't remove, just change), you have to provide different pictures: Showcase black business men/women, talk about the performance of Obama, have high achievers with diverse background do talks in schools, or sports stars do shows with kids, do shows with female arab DJs and so on. In short: Give the brains of people input that forces them to adapt their stereotypes.

This differentiation of signified and signifier often is hard to get right if your own moral system already conforms to the social goal, because in that case the word seems to be equal to the concept/meaning. So we just have to transport to word to transport the meaning, right? But this isn't how language works. Words can only trigger the frame they belong to if the other person already has the concept in her mind.

Words can also be used to put those concepts in people's minds.

So you can use words to describe things (like we do right now), and thus hope to invoke mutual understanding, but you can't put a new concept into another person's head by inventing a word. You can trigger a concept already there if the other person already associates a specific meaning with a specific word, though.

So if you want to better the situation for e.g. African Americans in the US, replacing "master branch" with "main branch" has no effect, because a) this master is not the master/slave master - the words may have had identical meaning (I don't know, perhaps both meanings have a common ancestor), but today the word "master" in the context (=frame) of source code respositories means something completely different than master/slave. Just as "slave" in the US doesn't mean "person of slavic origin" anymore.

But more importantly you don't change the stereotype of African Americans this way. That you'll only achieve by constantly pushing different images of African Americans in the relevant contexts, like, off the top of my head, a collective day where every github user with darker skin starts to use a real profile picture on github.

You can justify pretty much anything with that reasoning. If you follow through with that, you'd have to ban the words "black" and "white" from the language completely, except in a racial context.

> There was an online test floating around that measured your response rate to a white face or a black face and those results were eye-opening.

This investigation was about seeing faces, not hearing words though.

Interestingly enough, there was one paper that concluded that some of the responses to the test was driven by the prior associations between the colours themselves, rather than the racial part.

Why would you do that? I can wear a black shirt without "badness" being implied.

Not everything is about skin color.

It depends. Am I trying to sleep or stay awake?

Also, what do blind auditions/interviews (a real change that would make sense in the Software industry as well) have to do with language policing?

You were thinking of Good Friday.

Still, apparently the origin of the name seems to have more to do with the idea of a "black day" (a day when a disaster occurs), according to Wikipedia:

> The earliest evidence of the phrase Black Friday originated in Philadelphia, where it was used by police to describe the heavy pedestrian and vehicular traffic that would occur on the day after Thanksgiving. This usage dates to at least 1961.

Why would you do that? Wearing black does not imply that a person is bad. "Blacklist/whitelist" implies that whatever is in the list is bad/good.

While this association is not in any way "natural" or necessary, and it's not even universal, it is still extraordinarily old - dating all the way to Ancient Egypt and influencing European culture from there to now. And thus, it is extraordinarily hard to remove by playing language games with one word.

I should also mention that I am aware that in Japanese culture (and I believe others in that area, but don't know for sure), the traditional color for mourning is white, not black.

This is a pretty huge jump in reasoning. These things have nothing to do with each other. You might as well be saying "red means stop and green means go, so subconsciously people hate Native Americans". Which is nonsense for many reasons.

Perhaps principally that people can discern racial features from faces without using colors at all.

That's pretty strange reasoning. Unless you mean to imply that "red man" is in common usage for a male Native American?

Let me paraphrase this argument, but correct me if you have a different understanding:

  - 'black' and 'white' have some racial associative strength, x, which is sufficient to cause bias in other contexts.  I.e. x > r for some threshold r.
  - 'red' has racial associative strength kx, for some k < 1.    I think we agree that k < 1, since the association is less strong.  Where we differ is I am (hypothetically) saying kx > r, still, whereas you (seemingly) think kx < r.

In fact, we _haven't_ demonstrated the first point anyway, so it's just compounding an already hand-wavey explanation of how things work. If someone can assume x > r with little evidence, why can't I assume kx > r? You might have priors on the size of k because you think 'red' is less strongly associated with race, but we know nothing about x or r, so it's pretty irrelevant. If you can hand wave the first point, you can hand wave the second. As I did.

I'd rather there was no hand-waving. But if that's the game we're playing...

But unconscious bias testing has been shown not to test anything in a consistent manner, being largely unreproducible, and unconscious bias training has been shown not to impact anything much or even consistently impact test results.

Such things appear to be pseudoscience and bordering on a scam.

Absolutely no one is using words like blacklist in association with black people, in the same way that (almost) no one uses lame in reference to a crippled person anymore.

Do you even know any black people that give a damn about changing words just to appease American black people? Most of my family is black and so are most of my close friends. They would all find this absurd.

Mind you, these are Trinidadian black people, and so we are all the descendents of slaves as well. This is all so condescending and borderline demeaning that white people think that we are so inept that we think such changes would affect literally anything in life.

Stop it. Please.

Or maybe should I realize that as a literate adult, I have the ability to understand context around the words that are used?

Also, what is the problem in calling the relationship between two processes (one fully controlling the other) master-slave? It's a perfectly suitable analogy and does not have anything to do with any one person's ethnicity or history. I'll go a step further and say that looking at this whole thing entirely in the context of the mistreatment of african americans is unfair to people all over the world who have a history of slavery - as other posters have noted, there are plenty examples of that for people of all races. This is not exclusive to one group of people and no one can claim ownership of the word.

Any resemblance to words used to describe skin color is coincidental, I think.