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A comment on Ethically Sourced Lena Picture.

Re:Ethically Sourced Lena Picture by throwaway920333 on Friday March 03, 2023 @10:45AM (#35011081)
It used to make no sense to me how people would put so much effort into things like this that don’t matter. Yes, the photo is originally from Playboy, but most people don’t even know that because it’s cropped. It’s just a picture of a woman’s face.

This and things like renaming master to main I now see as examples of the foot-in-the-door strategy[1]. Get people and teams to agree to a small request like changing their test image, and then they will be more likely to go along with big changes later, because they have publicly expressed support for diversity goals and they have a psychological need to remain consistent in their actions (avoid cognitive dissonance)

[1] https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/...

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Re:Ethically Sourced Lena Picture by whamlastxmas on Friday March 03, 2023 @11:22AM (#35011601)
This is a slippery slope fallacy
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Re:Ethically Sourced Lena Picture by throwaway920333 on Friday March 03, 2023 @02:24PM (#35013887)
You can call it a fallacy, but it's scientifically proven to work (see the reference in the parent comment).
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Re:Ethically Sourced Lena Picture by whamlastxmas on Friday March 03, 2023 @06:17PM (#35016318)
My point is that these "foot in the door" changes are reasonable on their own merits without it being some ulterior motive to ask for more later. And making the assumption that there is indeed this motivation to ask for more later, and so we should disallow these requests today, is the slippery slope "what will they ask for next?!" fallacy

I agree that human psychology likely works that way, though.

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