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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15602 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Standford posts about its Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI), HN Reacts

Links to EHLI source: https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguage.pdf / http://web.archive.org/web/20221219160303/https://itcommunity.stanford.edu/ehli

Link to HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34039816

Note: my intent in linking to another forum isn't to create a in-group/out-group dynamic. My intent is to comment on how this is a sign about a broader cultural shift. Moderators, if this skirts too close to the offending the spirit of themotte, please let me know (or just delete it).

HackerNews is an online watering hole where a large number of Anglosphere people congregate to talk about startups, programming, and entrepreneurship. There is also no lack of plain old geeking out about cool tech, especially of the DIY variety that relates to drones, 3d-printing, or, more recently, AI.

The group skews somewhat left of center politically speaking. Over the past decade that I've been lurking it, it skewed a little bit more, in the sense that moderators became more accepting of openly political content that was aligned under the "21st century American progressive" label. I witnessed an influx of posts and comments about topics like coops, the evils of capitalism, etc. although, thankfully, that never became the main object of the community.

However, the thread I link to above has accumulated over 1200 comments in under 24h, which is a rare occasion--the death of a great contributor, a major shift in the industry, etc. More importantly, from sampling the first two pages, the overall sentiment appears to be negative toward what Stanford put out.

Before going deeper on the reaction, here's a taste of what Stanford posted:

Grandfather: This term has its roots in the "grandfather clause" adopted by Southern states to deny voting rights to Blacks.

Red team: "Red" is often used disparagingly to refer to Indigenous peoples, so its use in this context could be offensive to some groups.

Blackbox: Assigns negative connotations to the color black, racializing the term.

Brave (do not use): This term perpetuates the stereotype of the "noble courageous savage," equating the Indigenous male as being less than a man.

This kind of political weaponization should all be familiar to experienced Culture Warriors on themotte. But seeing the overwhelmingly negative reaction to this sort of thing on HN makes me adjust my likelihoods around what, excuse the cliche, I see as the pendulum swinging back away from leftist authoritarianism.

I have no idea what it's swinging towards, especially since in reality the pendulum is a 4d object zigzagging through multiple political dimensions. Still, it's a welcome sign that at least this flavor demagoguery is losing its bite.

I don't think the Culture War is in any danger of dying down. But I suspect (and hope) that the reaction on HackerNews is an omen of the CW shifting directions, so at the very least we'll have something new and exciting to debate about.

Edit: Some people have remarked in the comments that this isn't that astounding since HN has always been more grey-tribe aligned and more likely to react negatively to woke overreach like this. I find myself needing to readjust map.

But seeing the overwhelmingly negative reaction to this sort of thing on HN makes me adjust my likelihoods around what, excuse the cliche, I see as the pendulum swinging back away from leftist authoritarianism.

Weird, given how they reacted to blacklist/whitelist and master (branch).

Maybe it's just a little too much nonsense? I mean, "blackbox" doesn't have negative connotations, in any way. "Red Team" - they made an argument which should be used to ban "Red" by itself.

Aside from the nonsense ("user" is offensive?), there are reasonable arguments against blacklist/whitelist (it's less self documenting than denylist/allowlist) and master (the master branch isn't privileged in any way over other branches; it being the canonical source of truth is just a convention overlaid on git's model), and for greenfield projects I'm mildly in favor of those switches. But the key point is that it is individual teams who can decide this for themselves; when orders come in from on high that existing codebases need to be retrofitted to use these new terminologies, it creates a lot more work and risks. And a list like this is very obviously a top-down policing of language that has no interest in helping real work or real people.

There are arguments, at any rate. I wouldn't call them reasonable. "Blacklist" and "whitelist" are well understood technical terms, there is going to be almost nobody who doesn't know what they mean. And "master" doesn't necessarily connote privilege. I mean I appreciate that people tried to furnish non-political arguments for switching off those terms. But the arguments are bad, imo, so they don't really justify why we should change established industry terms.

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