The thing more of us need to understand is this has never been about "safety", it's about power and control.
Becoming able to control someone's thoughts is very, very powerful and sought after, and what are thoughts composed of? Language. Define the language and you define how people think.
Define people of latin origin should be referred to by "latinx" and nothing else and congratulations: An entire collection of cultures was removed of their identity and subjugated.
Define all environmental concerns as "global warming" and later "climate change" and congratulations: You just invalidated swaths of inventions and solutions created by our forefathers and turned entire fields of science into a handy little political tool to fling around for profit.
Define science as something to be unconditionally trusted and congratulations: You just turned science into a religion and gained one of the biggest religious forces known to man to use for profit.
The people behind all this are very ingenious and very dangerous; he who controls language owns the human world.
Hanlon's razor applies. I don't believe that most of the people doing this are motivated by malign intent. Some are, some people really get off on telling others what to do, getting people fired, etc. But most truly believe they they are doing a service to minority groups.
In your example of "Latinx" for example, if you are a white person who doesn't speak Spanish but you really want to help improve society, it probably sounds like a great idea! Put women and men on an equal footing. It's very easy to walk through a field of landmines if you don't know there's any landmines there. It's very easy to be an activist if you don't know anything at all about the world.
It's better to attack the idea than the people. Push back on that Overton window. Rename your main branch to master. Call someone a Karen.
I think that the rationalization to self is indeed about goodwill. But the monkeybrain does love to elevate self above others, and I find that the people who write these are, to some degree, incapable of separating the motivations of true societal benefit and oneselves' lust for moral superiority from each other. This power motivation is so strongly encoded within us that if you're not explicitly aware of how its guiding your actions you WILL fall prey to it.
My generous take is that whoever wants to go this deep towards language policing has experienced real trauma that has debilitated them. That's something I can view compassionately.
But perhaps in having been traumatized and victimized, they view their identity as primarily a victim, because they don't know how to move on from or get over or heal from the trauma. And in an attempt to "redeem" their past, they want to create a landscape in which they can use their victimhood to accrue, wield, and exercise power, via guilt-tripping others, shaming others, and using their traumas and sufferings (again, something I can relate and sympathize and empathize with) as "street-cred" to flex on others who are all part of those who are "contributing to the traumatic systems that have harmed people like them."
On the flipside, though, are people who refuse to acknowledge their traumas, because they've bought into a false belief system that to be hurt by life means you're weak, and to be weak means you don't deserve respect and the rewards of society and that you're somehow inferior to those who haven't been traumatized or taken advantage of, etc.
I feel like both are two sides of the same coin. One becomes all-consumed with their traumas. The other sticks their head in the sand. The former wants to police and control everyone by using their traumas as a means to jockey for power over others. The latter often shits on people who talk about any and all trauma – even in healthy ways – because to admit it in themselves means they're somehow lesser-than and inferior, weak and unworthy.
That seems to be the extreme ends of this whole thing. But healing from traumas seems to be kind of the third way, so to speak, and an uncomfortable journey that upends both extremes, without being a "meeting in the middle" type of proposed solution.
I would say that McCarthy and his acolytes, was also motivated to do good (protect America).
The villagers burning 'witches' were motivated to do good (protect the village, and incidentally get their neighbours lands / jobs ... hmmm)
The students in the Cultural Revolution in China were motivated to do good (bring us forward into the utopia ... hmmm).
There is a nice saying, present in many languages: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".
And while I think intention does actually matter (vs. the a frequent claim by the woke), results matter more. (Intention matters because, e.g., it influences how you treat the action.)
> all this “believe experts” dogma is legit indistinguishable from the rhetoric of evangelical christians. ffs please just go to church and leave science to the skeptical assholes.
First, quoting a poorly formatted tweet as if it was something OP said is annoying. Second, arguments about "science skepticism" have little to do with the language experiment shown in the submission.
> The thing more of us need to understand is this has never been about "safety", it's about power and control.
Precisely.
It's an attempt by some groups to have others jump through hoops that they define. The end goal is never language, but the ability to control what others do and be the one calling the shots.
I can't remember the book it came from, but there was an author who wrote about his time growing up in an Eastern European communist country. During "Independence Days" his dad had to put a flag up in his store window. It wasn't optional. If he didn't do it, the police would stop by and ask why he didn't have a flag in his window.
If he refused, he's be on the "naughty list" with the authorities which could impact his employment, his housing, his kids schooling.
Putting the flag in the window was never the goal of the government. The goal was to show citizens they had no choice. The author talks about how capitulating the demand was dehumanizing and just ground down any resistance to authority that may have existed. "If I don't have the choice as to fly a flag or not, what choice did I have with more important aspects of my life?"
It's like putting stars of David on Jews in Germany. It wasn't just to identify them in public (though that was a goal) it was also to show them "who was in charge".
> During "Independence Days" his dad had to put a flag up in his store window. It wasn't optional. If he didn't do it, the police would stop by and ask why he didn't have a flag in his window.
Václav Havel is really an incredible figure. From a political dissident repeatedly imprisoned for his writings and advocacy, to first President of Czechoslovakia after the fall of communism and the country’s first free elections.
> It's an attempt by some groups to have others jump through hoops that they define. The end goal is never language, but the ability to control what others do and be the one calling the shots.
Nicely put. Living in a Eastern European country we've just swapped a word "communism/socialism" with "democracy", so in effect very little changed. Ironically, not putting the flag out in towns an villages will now brand you as a anti-Croat and a communist sympathizer which can have very serious consequences if you ever want to get employed by the local government (usually the only source of employment in a lot of places).
Slightly related to the control of languange. One of the first editions of the National Geographic Magazine in Croatia (in Croatian language) featured a big article about a deadly disease spreading mostly in Africa, and how you could be born infected and it was terrible and everything. I've read that article and the disease was called "kopnica". I've never heard about it before, but it sure did seem nasty.
A month later (or could be two, doesn't matter), there was an angry letter to the editor which accused the magazine's proofreader of inventing a new word for AIDS (a word which everyone on the planet knows about). That proofreader in the reply thinly accused the reader of harbouring anti-national thoughts and some other horrible sentiments. I was shocked and wowed never to buy NGM in Croatia ever again.
Similar thing happened in IT magazines over here which started to "translate" English words by means of just inventing Croatian sounding ones. That made no sense to me, but it did make some proofreader's and academia careers.
Once I was on a public consultation "conference" about drone regulation in my country and had
some polite technical questions on the end of one talk. The government official berated me for "using foreign words [english] when we have such nice [newly invented] Croatian words" and then didn't bother to answer any of my questions. Half of the audience laughed how clever the official sounded. Also it was a bit sad that consultation was just a formality, but thats a different story.
So you're completely right. Language can be molded into small hoops for your enemy to jump through first. In general, a set of rules you create, and your enemy has to abide with making the communication asymetrical easing the control one has over the other.
And it's a vicious cycle which generates support. If you can pressure a neutral to adopt your 'language', they are likely to eventually convince themselves that they support your ideals, since why else would they go through the trouble of adjusting how they speak?
More than a dozen replies join a chorus of agreement here.
I wonder if there’s another framing for this. One of the top educational institutions in the world is formalising a communications approach that doesn’t casually evoke, reference, and cause suffering. This dynamic might only be present in a small percentage of their audience—in fact it affects quite a significant majority—but in either case it’s a win worth pursuing on the scale of their operations.
The antidote to the fear and hysteria of change is transparency — and what a marvellous gesture of transparency here, from Stanford. (Remember the Byzantine episode from ICLR?)
Context matters. Each of the guidelines linked here has some. It’s a gift: you can now use that language more precisely.
And he who better controls his own language, better controls his world.
Becoming able to control someone's thoughts is very, very powerful and sought after, and what are thoughts composed of? Language. Define the language and you define how people think.
Define people of latin origin should be referred to by "latinx" and nothing else and congratulations: An entire collection of cultures was removed of their identity and subjugated.
Define all environmental concerns as "global warming" and later "climate change" and congratulations: You just invalidated swaths of inventions and solutions created by our forefathers and turned entire fields of science into a handy little political tool to fling around for profit.
Define science as something to be unconditionally trusted and congratulations: You just turned science into a religion and gained one of the biggest religious forces known to man to use for profit.
The people behind all this are very ingenious and very dangerous; he who controls language owns the human world.