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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35419 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Over the past weekend I read an article entitled “Offensive Naming” (Note: There’s a paywall but you get the gist from the preview).

Essentially, the article cites 2 named people. One of which is a totally unremarkable Canadian paleoanthropologist, the other a president of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. The former believes that the system of special naming, which has been around and relied upon for almost 300 years, must be destroyed because of offensive names (including Hitler, Gypsy, the usual suspects).

In a sense, I’ll put my own Cancellation hat on here and say, hypocritically, that Mirjana Roksandic should never have been given tenure, much less the mouthpiece of one of the most respected publications in the world. Here we have an elegant system, that for hundreds of thousands of species on our planet has worked almost perfectly. A couple of trivial edge cases of malpractice cannot be enough to even think about altering such a thing.

I’m a stickler for well-defined systems that effectively cover the vast majority of their use cases. I find myself recalling the hullabaloo over the use of master as a git branch name a couple of years ago, which culminated in every single Application Lifecycle Management software pushing out new defaults for any fresh code repository. As the person who built nearly all our deployment automation around these conventions, I was fucking furious. I reverted the change in our organization and pre-emptively bowed up if any of my employees would complain. Thankfully, none did, probably because they didn’t want to rewrite everything. Nobody’s done a cost analysis of these pushed-down changes, but given software engineer salaries and what I’ve seen personally, it’s in 7-figure territory at the very least.

I’m not sure how cohesive this is, but I think one of the fundamental issues here is how disconnected the people who want changes to systems are from the costs of doing so. Ms. Roksandic doesn’t have to write the software to manage taxonomy or anything else. Doubtless, she’s working in some backwater excel spreadsheet and thinks adding an alias column is as hard as it gets.

I want systems to be discussed and improved upon over time, even if some of those are for silly social reasons, as long as the costs are remotely reasonable. Ideally, these are net-new ones instead of those that have worked well for centuries.

Does anyone in fields that use zoological nomenclature frequently have a comment as to the scale of this sentiment? Is my worry about the toe being in the door of another massively net-negative change to the overall chaos of the world unjustified?

It is always the invisible stuff. Nobody knows about the species names and as for anything code or IT related it is the same thing. Case in point for IT, the headers for Brötli compression in the Firefox proposal was shortened 'bro'. But "north american feminists" decided it had problematic connotations. http://www.favbrowser.com/google-and-mozilla-ditch-the-bro-extension-because-a-feminist-told-them-so/. Guess what... the same year the mozilla foundation decided to fund a network monitoring software that was called "Bro" https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-open-source-support-first-awards-made/

Also I was really nervous when they piled on antirez and Redis for master/slave, back when that was happening I ran Redis in production. A bunch of people casually going like "no problem, just change the words in the public protocol it is only a search and replace". Well yeah in the redis project, but then I have to upgrade the connection libraries and keep track of compatibility and shit. If it is removed from the program stuff stops working for users.

Does of us who run automation and production workloads know that isn't just a search and replace in text even how much the politically correct wants to believe it is. In biology it is even worse if it is printed in books, you can't do even that.

Why is it called A. hitleri? Was it in honor of Hitler, or as one entomologist's way of making fun of Hitler, who was famously germophobic?

Why is it called A. hitleri?

According to Wikipedia:

The scientific name of the beetle comes from an Austrian collector, Oskar Scheibel, who was sold a specimen of a then undocumented species in 1933. Its species name was made a dedication to Adolf Hitler, who had recently become Chancellor of Germany.

So it was named back when Hitler was "The guy who is pulling Germany out of the post-war morass and decline, the strong capable leader" and not afterwards, when he was "Ah. Yeah. Oops!"

I can see arguments on both sides: on one side, that this is the historic name and the opposite, that it was deliberately intended to honour someone who should not be honoured. I think changing the name in this case has a lot more in favour than pulling down statues, but it all depends how stridently the demands are made. If it's a reasonable "not the best idea, all things considered" request, fine. If it's part of a rant about cishetnormative privilege and the patriarchy and all the rest of it, no wonder people aren't convinced.

Apparently in honor, if wikipeda is to be believed.

I'm somewhat incredulous, naming a blind beetle after a statesman seems like an insult.

unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/Z4uxN

The stakes here are renaming a few species with weird names, so ... seems unimportant tbh. Taxonomic names are regularly changed, often because species weren't related in the manner previously thought, so it wouldn't be that disruptive to do a few more. Obviously the motivation for doing so is very dumb, it accomplishes nothing and creates needless work, but it won't be destroying taxonomy or anything.

Taxonomic names are regularly changed, often because species weren't related in the manner previously thought, so it wouldn't be that disruptive to do a few more.

TBH I appreciate you saying this though. I was under the mistaken impression that there would be downstream effects, of mass renames. Perhaps there would be at the scale that would "satisfy" those who want to, but it makes sense that the system isn't totally fragile.

seems unimportant tbh.

If it's too unimportant to object to, it's too unimportant to insist upon.

No, not if the cost/benefit favors one side.

Yeah, that's why uncompromising fanatics always win.

If someone is making an objection, clearly they have their own calculations about what the costs and benefits are. One side or the other (or neither) may be right, but that can be decided on the merits, and dismissing the values of one side out-of-hand as invalid doesn't strike me as productive.

Or to put it another way, apply "just get over it" omnidirectionally or not at all.

They are saying

  1. Such changes would impact a small number of species

  2. Such changes are common

  3. Therefore, this doesn't matter that much.

They even agree that the motivation is "very dumb" and "creates needless work".

You simply rounded their answer to the nearest meme argument (X is unimportant, so why are you complaining) and responded with the appropriate meme response.

Sorry, but history has put me very much on guard against salami-slicing tactics.

"Oh, come on! They care about it so much, and you have no reason (we'll permit to you) to object! Just this one time, this one time give them everything they want."

But this is an iterated game. It's never just "this one time." A few "this one times" and suddenly Putin is trying to grab the entire rest of Ukraine and how could this have happened?

But there is a criterion that tells me when we're not hurtling down a slippery slope, though: some specific, sturdy catch somewhere before the bottom. A Schelling point that can be pointed to to say that the line of argument can be extended only there and not indefinitely. Is there one in this case? Probably. I can't envision any given one that's particularly clear, myself, so if there's something that seems clear to anybody else, I would much appreciate the clarification.

Taxonomic names are regularly changed, often because species weren't related in the manner previously thought

They are regularly changed because the previous names were wrong: placing a species in the wrong genus, grouping two species into one, and so forth. They are never changed because someone doesn't like the name.

There is a firm principle that scientific names can't be changed unless it's justified by new discoveries. Changing even one name will open the floodgates. You know it won't stop at Hitler. There are many other species named after bad people, and still more named after people wokeists would consider bad. It will lead to all sorts of squabbles, with no benefit whatsoever.

The Hitler beetle's name wasn't even changed after World War II. I think everyone agreed at that point that Hitler was bad; many had experienced his badness first-hand. But they stood by their principles, because they knew changing it would just make everything much more complicated.

You're not disagreeing with them... They even say

Obviously the motivation for doing so is very dumb, it accomplishes nothing and creates needless work

They are affirming that not only is the motivation dumb and it will create needless work, but that it will be abused and create conflict within the field of taxonomy. i.e. They are saying the consequences will be worse than what the OP is proposing.

Maybe I'm confused but I don't find any support in the article for doing away with the convention of having a scientific genus-species naming schema for distinct species. Rather, the article points out a couple of species that are unfortunately named and suggests changing the names of those species specifically as well as perhaps refraining from naming future species after celebrities or other famous people.

You're correct - my post has to do with both the norms of the system being changed in the future to provide some sort of external actor with more power (such as the ICZN) getting to decide which names are acceptable, and retroactively changing others already made.

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