I appreciate you adding to the conversation.
However, the net result is that words are driven out of the language even if everyone involved in the document wouldn't care.
You're at Google. You need to do some kind of project that can be called a success -- within one quarter. What do you do?
One possibility, the disastrous effects of which we've seen, is to build Yet Another Incompatible Chat App.
This is another possibility. A very safe one, in a way.
You constantly have to demonstrate that you are "useful, self-directed, and doing important things", in an environment where usefulness and importance are extremely hard to judge, and so become very socially-constructed. It can get pretty brutal -- even if, when you step back and take the long view, it all seems ridiculous.
So when you look at what comes out of these companies, it's useful to remember that. Imagine the horrible games in which their employees have found themselves trapped.
(Money's a hell of a thing. Shame you seem to need so much of it.)
No one uses "fuck" in corporate communication either. Is anyone worried about that word being "driven out of the language"? I don't think corporate speech is as influential in overall language use as you are implying.
Anyway, that's what scares me about this, I like language naturally evolving like it is in the above example, to address a specific communication need. I'm really not a fan of some remarkably privileged people using an insanely powerful company to coerce my language in whatever direction they see fit.
Adding quotes to "badass" turns up (on the first page) a mechanics job posted in January, four hits for the same CNA job from over a month ago, and one hit for an administrative job, posted this month.
That doesn't seem like a lot of postings, certainly not enough to be considered an outlier.
Of course to verify that I'd have to do fifty Google searches and chart the data, which I don't really want to do...
I think you should, though, so next time you make such a dubious claim, you have the data to back it up. :)
Swear words are specifically used to be provocative, so naturally they're not going to disappear. Words like "motherboard" or "whitelist" were historically neutral and primarily used in professional settings, so removal from corporate speech is correspondingly a much bigger factor.
To be clear, I'm not particularly worried or concerned about this. I don't consider it any great loss if we start saying "allowlist" and have happily changed my projects to match. It's not a big deal, and the kind thing to do is to go along with those who do care a lot.
Enabling bullies in their social dominance games isn’t being kind.
The classic mistake that Pascal and everyone using his argument to argue for their favorite God lies in the simplifying assumption :
- Compliance is cheap, low-risk and fixed-cost relative to taking a stand
Which gets less and less true as the Wrathful God (or His spokespeople) sees you're completely submitting and realizes they can continue making more and more increasingly humiliating demands. Soon enough, you discover you wish you had drawn the red line earlier.
― George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
https://areomagazine.com/2019/04/02/the-tyranny-of-the-minor...
It's like, of _course_ early peoples created concepts from "day, when it's light" and "night, when it's dark". It has nothing to do with skin colour or ethnicity at all.
Not being tolerant here is a pretty clear sign of close mindedness in reality or just a hint of lacking life experience.
For example, if my english-as-a-second-language eastern European subordinates feel self-conscious about their english, they might find an automated tool helpful - where a professional journalist would be better served by their own judgement.
The 'inclusive language' thing is just weird though.
surely not? even a newspaper should be striving for an active voice, at least anytime the actor is known!
"The United States had maintained neutrality until 1941. However, it was attacked at Pearl Harbor, and then chose to enter the war."
I'd say active is still better here.
It's bad writing for the reader. But lots of writing isn't actually for clear communication. Especially when the government is involved.
I do think there is more activism at play than you might. At a minimum it provides the fear mechanism that prevents employees from challenging the work, particularly if they aren't even on the project (why stick your neck out?).
However, the code format for prose analogy illuminates the writing quality angle brilliantly.
I'm sure I'm not alone in having distinct communication modes in work documents, each with their own reasons to be excluded from the ML dataset:
1. Keep it simple -- when achieved it is highly effective for communicating a work memo, but would be terribly dry if used in auto suggestions for an English major struggling through crafting moving prose.
2. Lazily verbose -- going long is more expedient than crafting a compact message. It's mostly unrefined garbage. (exhibit a this comment)
3. Everything is awesome (positivity inflation) -- a deluge of great, love, awesome, wonderful, perfect, etc. all applied to far too many things, far too often.
Imagine if an ML code formatter included psudeo code inputs, or was given a data set of every local file change (pre-commit) instead of what is sitting in a main branch? My Docs are filled with things that I'd never commit much less pass a code review.
If Google Docs was only used in corporate settings, and we wanted to double down on our drab corporate communication styles, I guess the feature would make some sense.
The problem for me is particularly that the combination of monopolies combined with AI that will learn from data largely filtered by those monopolies will generate some questionable gradients. So, yes, this might ultimately change language very quickly without much of human discourse over it. This will lead to language with less variation and arguably to a world that does not encourage variation and will be in effect less inclusive.
I don't understand what you are referring to when you say "this"; what is "this"? Are you referring to a specific statement by the parent poster, or something described in the OP?
I also don't understand whether the double-negative is intentional (and meant to cancel itself out, and become a positive), or if it is a colloquialism.
This = 'the comment being replied to'.
This actually !(not make sense).
V
This actually does make sense.
As an enterprise feature, enterprises would interested in this because they wouldn't want their employees communications to get them cancelled or put on woke twitter. Despite their writing style guide[1] being a bit too woke for my liking i'm sure some people find it a good reference, especially if they don't have capacity to create their own corporate guide.
I'm putting aside intentionally and just curious about how this actually encourages empathy?
Not hiring union-busting consultants to convince employees to not join a union against their best interests.
The people vouching for this at Google are likely product marketing managers, public relations folks, social media managers, etc. All they do is write corporate garbage all day, and much like we have "nit"s in PR's for formatting, variable names, etc; they likely have similar reviews that get flagged for "non-inclusive language" or whatever this is. So they have brilliant idea: the Code people use auto linters/formatters that we enable by default (hey gofmt) and everyone loves it, how about we do the same for the Prose people!
Basically: "All I write is corporate garbage, and all the writing I consume is corporate garbage, and all my coworkers only write corporate garbage, therefore everyone would love a corporate garbage-ifyer!"