Probably what you should take away from this is not “wokism gone crazy” (err, sorry “wild”). The more important lesson here is that the bloat in academic institutions has gotten so outrageous that people start bullshit time-consuming initiatives to justify their positions and the positions of their reports.
Absolutely no one will take this seriously including the person who wrote it but they will be able to put it on their performance review that they removed exclusive language from Stanford web pages.
Words like whitelist and blacklist have been banned by woke theater fiat at the bigco I work at, although I have seen no evidence they actually have anything to do with racism. I suspect our banned words list has a lot of overlap with Stanford's.
Rabblerousers like to rabblerouse, and nobody wants to be the voice of reason when the people who decide your paycheck make stupid political decisions.
I actually hate whitelist and blacklist for completely non-woke reasons. I find the terms confusing, and often misleading in operational contexts. I can't tell you the number of situations I've been in when one person's "IP whitelist" was a whitelist to block IPs and another's was to specifically let IPs in. I always insist at $WORK that we use descriptive terms (an IP blocklist, an account allowlist) simply to ensure there are no mistakes and that everyone agrees on what's going on.
That makes sense, but it is not the reason why these terms were removed, and reasoning really does matter. Bad logic can lead to good conclusions, but that doesn't change the fact that it is bad.
In particular, this idea that giving a negative connotation to the color black and darkness in general, and a positive connotation to the color white and lightness in general, implies some kid of racial bias is absurd, ahistorical, and frankly disturbing (since it creates controversy retroactively out of nothing).
I too personally find the terminology itself a bit confusing. I have some cognitive overhead on trying to remember what "whitelist" and "blacklist" actually means. But it's minor. Allow-list and block-list is intuitive. I _would_ be in inclined to update my terminology for the sake of clarity and practicality, but given the current context of the culture war we are currently in, I have consciously decided not to change my language. The language list that is on Stanford's site has infiltrated my employer (a major tech company) as well. The ELT and HR has made it clear they want everyone in the company to abide by it. Sure, making this small change for this specific example will result in slightly improved productivity, but it will come at the cost of emitting a social signal that the words "whitelist" and "blacklist" are bad, which they very well are not. This is a trade I not willing to make.
This is an interesting emotional phenomenon; the more people claim I'm being "racist" by using "blacklist" or "master" the more I'm inclined to keep on using it, as a kind of "fuck you and your accusations".
It's not even that I mind adjusting my language if people object to it; but there's a world of difference between "I really don't like it when you use the phrase [...]" and "you're being racist when you use the phrase [...]".
while "Allowlist" and "Blocklist" are certainly better for being more self-documenting, whoever is in a position to create a whitelist and get it backwards obviously has a deeper problem re:RTFM
> whoever is in a position to create a whitelist and get it backwards obviously has a deeper problem re:RTFM
This is true, but also probably an indication that the term "whitelist" isn't as universally understood [by developers] as the "how dare you suggest using allowlist!" crowd suggest...
The difference is in the expected response when you use the "wrong" term. If I started talking about a blacklist someone could ask "Maybe we could use the term 'blocklist' in the documentation because its clearer to someone not as familiar with the technical terms?". They could also respond with "Why are you using such a loaded and out of date term? It is suspicious and sets a dangerous precedent, and doesn't belong in a place of work. You are getting a verbal warning."
Recently got an oncall task, somebody was complaining about such a word occurring in an internal tool. Some people are quite zealous about this. Of course you don't want to be the one arguing about this...
do people understand that light / darkness is the most primitive dichotomy there might be. I guess all organisms are working in day / night cycle, most of religions have / had god of light. America (sic) please get your act together. You are the biggest exporter of wokeism in the world
In my childhood, one of the lighter-colored classmate justified the reason for supremacy of lighter-colored people providing black/white-based language as an evidence. These included the words black-list and white-list. Because of these rhetoric that is ingrained in children (who might later grow up without challenging them), I have always supported getting rid of these kinds of language.
Context: I am from a place where both darker-colored people and lighter-colored people exist. Here in my country, lighter-colored people are considered better than darker-colored people. I am a darker-skinned person.
You say this, and yet much of the tech industry has taken to removing words like blacklist and whitelist already, even though they have no racial undertones whatsoever. Similarly, the master branch of many projects has been renamed to main, even though it had nothing to do with slavery, and master remains an extremely common term.
I always think of "master branch" in the same way as "master copy", and never associated it with "slave branches" or whatever. Renaming all the branches seems like needless busywork and frankly, people who would be offended by any use of the term "master", including ones like this, will need to understand the context and motivation of the use of a term as part of growing up and participating in a society with lots of other people. If everyone's right to not be offended were taken to a logical extreme, you end up with this minefield where literally no one is free to speak their mind and has to defend against every possible offended take. You can't even use a word that has a specific meaning if it also has some other meaning. It's just blasting holes in language and thinking and conversations.
I've had luck pushing back against it. I'm not sure if it's because I'm in Japan which doesn't buy into woke culture or if the people around me had just had a gutsful too. It doesn't hurt to try.
It's good to hear there's some places that don't buy in to the rampant silliness. You'd think a bastion of free speech like the USA would be one of those, but apparently the political polarization has caused people to lose their minds.
Honestly I've been fine with main branch. It's shorter. My problem is it's not consistent because it takes forever for a bigcorp to do something. So now we have repos with a main branch (the current branch) and a master branch (hasn't been touched in the year and half since the switch).
I don't have a particular problem with main, I was in fact more used to it as it was the default in P4.
However, the arguments for this renaming are absurd, and i think that absolutely matters.
And note that I actually think renouncing the use of master/slave in favor of primary/secondary or something similar is actually warranted. But extending this to master branch, when many of the people doing the change had a Master of Science title probably, is annoying and arbitrary.
It never is enough. There's entire armies of staff now for which this nonsense is their job. Just like a DEI department will always fabricate new types of division. It's their business model.
>At what point do we say “this is enough” rather than hand-waving it away as yet another excess of academia?
That point will never happen, because those who stand up will be righteously cut down. An acquaintance is seeking a faculty position and they are being asked ideologically filtering questions in interviews, with the pretty overt suggestion that the wrong answer to any would disqualify them as a candidate.
> At what point do we say “this is enough” rather than hand-waving it away as yet another excess of academia?
There will never be enough, because "enough" has not been defined. They have no interest in doing so. Even if they did, the "end goal" would never be reached, because they have too much of a seated interest in preserving their grievances.
It is quite a risky tactic to confront a bureaucracy with an "absolutely no one will take this seriously" attitude.
Particularly stuff like this, they are demarcating an in-group and an out group. The primary reason people come up with this sort of silly list of magic words is to start discriminating against the out-group.
I definitely see your point and believe this happens often. In this particular instance, I believe adherence to this list will end up being a mark of shame even in academic circles. Using some of these terms is so brainless that people can tell who mindlessly follows bullshit like this.
It's not that I'm dismissing the possibility of sinister cultural signifiers. It's just this one attempt to establish them inorganically seems to me like it will obviously fail.
Maybe its like the defence industry after the war: They have the capacity to wage war but the war has been won so what to do now? Disband all that or find wars to fight?
I actually subscribe to the idea that the words of choice can be harmful but this practice of constantly trying hard find words to ban is ridiculous. When the culture evolves and certain words start hurting people, sure let's be more careful about it. No need for an institutional directive for word, people themselves change their language as the culture changes.
At current stage it definitely feels like someone who doesn't have something to do invents a job.
You seem to assume that this is applied against the will of the academic staff. It seems to me that most of the professors are fully on board with this program.
In the end it will be all self correcting. Those woke universities reputation is melting like ice cream in the sun. I remember Brian Armstrong mentioning in an interview that he starts to see companies adding basic skill tests in their recrutment as they don't really trust those universities selection process anymore. I certainly lost any respect for those universities, and I graduated from one of those.
> It seems to me that most of the professors are fully on board with this program.
I wonder. Could be that they don't want to be ostracised.
This happens in companies as well. In mine, we have a similar list of words to avoid. I'm pretty sure 95% of my colleagues think it's bullshit but we never discuss it openly. Mostly it's a thing from the US youth, some of them seem to be actively tracking anything that could be remotely considered unfair to minorities and are very vocal about it.
We do have to take it seriously. We, collectively, all people who find this paper to be shocking and foolish, need to loudly declare it as such and ridicule the notion.
If this kind of thinking is tolerated without pushback, it will become the default. Advocates of this thinking are dedicated radicals who care more about implementing it than most people like you (not meaning offense) who would just chuckle and do nothing, thinking it is silly.
This is Stanford University. This is a prestigious engineering university, not UMass Amherst.
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edit to add: The thing that absolutists don't appreciate, whether they are far-woke speech warriors like this submission, or far-right conservatives worried about any shift in the status-quo, is that *there is a line, somewhere in the middle, for all things*. We need to be thoughtful about some speech, but this list is the logical extreme of it. We need to understand systemic racism exists in the US, but we don't need to make every single aspect of society revolve around race. We need to support the poor and the uneducated and the unemployed more than we do today, but we don't need to give them blank checks or have completely open borders.
In American discussion today, there seems to be little room for nuance like this, for "practical lines" like this, because each side either wants or is afraid of an idea being taken to its logical extreme.
It is up to people who agree with this to understand that there is a line, and as such, one needs to *hold that line*. Radicals will try to push it too far, and we need to stop them vocally. "c"onservatives will try never to move the line, and we need to make them budge.
It is not feasible to "just ignore" any large organization looking to move the line too far. It has to be actively challenged.
I agree with part of what you are saying on the subject of bloat, but looking at what has happened in the recent past, I think it's naive to believe this is not going to be implemented.
It will, like banning "master" repositories, and other examples have already happened.
Quoting Orwell in all irony:
"It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."
I guarantee you that things like this are being driven by the attitudes / beliefs of the wider student population. Even if this particular initiative does not explicitly involve any specific student groups.
That is, the attitudes of the staff are downstream of the students.
This is also reinforced by the fact that (entry-level) staff at universities are often recent humanities graduates from that university.
I disagree. In my experience, these attitudes start with a _very specific_ group of students, by no means representative of the larger student body. I've actually experienced far more dissent to rules like this on campus then agreement, even accounting for silence. You stated yourself that these staff are usually recent humanities graduates. Even in the workplace, where I've experienced the big co commandment list handed down from on high, that list was by far a minority decision in terms of actual workforce engagement. At least where I am, students are not asking for things like this, employees are not asking for things like this, small task forces of motivated people are creating these rules and enforcing them globally through the fear of their supervisors.
I think the argument that calling git branches "master" hurts people is ridiculous, but I also think that "main" makes more sense. The master/main branch doesn't have any power over other branches - it's just the one that you happen to use primarily. "Main" describes that better.
I sometimes regret having built up tons of Bash aliases, because in the long term it ends up with me not really knowing half the tools I use, just my little cryptic vocabulary.
In my view, it’s a bit more nuanced. In modern development at companies, most of the time trunk-based version management is used and having it called “main” makes sense, but earlier, when got was one of the few VCSs out there for open source development, I think master may have conveyed a different meaning. Generally, with the highly-distributed nature of systems like Linux, you need to know which remote and branch the version you are updating or referencing was mastered in for the remote you are submitting a patch to, for example. I think of it as coming from the term master copy—not because it has power over other branches but because it’s the canonical authoritative source for that remote.
Sure it is better. But changing things comes with a cost. Tons of git tooling which could previously just ASSUME master was the primary branch must now figure out what the branch is, instead.
The amount of time people have spent on this change fixing broken tools and workflows makes it a stupid change all by itself.
I note that "master (verb)" is on the list, but "mastery" is not.
So apparently a Stanford M.S., M.A. or M.F.A. degree may be said to denote mastery of a subject, but its holder cannot claim to have mastered the subject. So many ways to get it wrong...
In Canada, the professional regulators who control whether you're allowed to to call yourself an engineer and whether your company is allowed to do engineering, are also making this kind of thing mandatory. They are considering it a part of workplace safety, akin to preventing oil spills and lethal accidents: an engineer's top priority, lest they lose their license.
A friend of mine's mother is a researcher at a University and is in conflict with one of the department heads. She was denied some sort of career advancement over "You mentioned to someone that you liked the way they did their hair. This made your working environment unsafe for minorities as person could be reminded that their hairstyles are different than majority white styles [fwiw she also has exceptionally messy curly hair]".
Obvious nonsense, and the person who she complimented agreed. But when an administrator doesn't like someone, and needs to find a reason to cause them problems, this sort of list is a very useful tool. Maybe you don't even have to say it - "Professor X was found in repeated violation of our racial safety standards, and we just can't have racist staff".
I'll add that I don't have an issue with removing racist/bigoted language - but this list largely consists of obvious slurs that nobody needs a ruleset to avoid, or mundane words where no person would even begin to feel racist/offended outside of an administrator finding excuses to make more rules.
it will take very little time in the current climate for this to spread from the academic circles into the corporate world, where all the HR/ethics/etc deadweight departments have people with those worthless degrees
next thing you know, master is now main, blacklist and whitelist are allowlist and denylist, and so on
There used to be a social market for nice little infographics that could readily illustrate inconvenient truths. I've wondered why we haven't seen the same for college topics. A simple infographic could show the amount of spending on diversity initiatives that could instead have gone to reducing tuition expenses. Between salaries and actual program costs, the number must be embarrassing for universities (not as embarrassing as football program costs but...that's another topic).
What if what you are calling bloat is actually a highly effective revolutionary machine? The way the US is structured, elite schools like Stanford are the gateway to the most powerful positions in the country. Jobs like scientists, judges, lawyers, bureaucrats, federal agents, politicians, and academic staff are gated behind having an elite degree. So I actually see this as being extremely ominous and not just bullshit.
The gatekeeping function of elite universities is an incredibly important point to make, and is absolutely the most urgent reason to take this seriously.
No other reason is needed, but "principle" is being violated here. Bad ideas need to be pushed back on. I think that's true whether or not rules achieve "de facto" status, because a society's dysfunction is proportional to the degree it that lets bad rules slide "because they'll never be enforced". In this case these bad rules lay bare an ignorant and bigoted world-view that is fundamentally anti-human. It is teaching students and teachers all the wrong lessons, and ironically is not even helping the people it's claiming to want to help. It is pure and overt thought policing and Stanford, and anyone who cares about the school and its legacy, needs to clean house yesterday.
I do believe that woke language functions as a cultural signifier that keeps the elite safe and guarantees them success. This particular list is just too egregiously dumb to function correctly. I would be willing to bet that 99% of these replacements simply don't happen outside of Stanford domains, and the ones that do happen won't be due to this list.
In every day life yes. maybe. Stanford already has that secretive, anonymous discrimination report form and has encouraged students and staff to make reports. So if I speak to my friends I think nothing will happen and daily language may not change.
But the secretive reporting system will make people paranoid and when dealing with administration commissars and academic boards, I imagine the rules will be used to weed out opponents and anyone they believe does not comply with their goals.
And yes it is stupid. There are even words I am surprised they did not include like "fat". Oops, I used the word stupid.
HN certainly has taken this seriously, which IMHO is disappointing.
1300+ comments on something that has hardly anything to do with technology. Really?
To me, this is a dumb and actually kind of funny list, due to some ridiculous notions (e.g. "stand up meeting" is ablelist?) that seem poorly put together with zero thought for context. It's as if someone got an assignment to put this together and tried to really, really stretch any possible connection they could into this. Like you said, a "bullshit time-consuming initiative".
That's all it is. I don't get why people are paying attention to it. It's not worth much thought at all.
It's worth some thought because, while we deal with technology, we also live in a society. That society is currently going through a bout of insanity. It affects us. It's like a fish living in polluted water. You don't care about factories on land, because you're a fish. Except, when they pollute the water you live in, you do care.
And Stanford has a certain amount of cachet, or influence, or reach, or whatever, even into tech circles and tech companies. So this nonsense may be coming soon to the company you or I work at. So, yeah, we care. We take it seriously, because it impacts us.
Absolutely no one will take this seriously including the person who wrote it but they will be able to put it on their performance review that they removed exclusive language from Stanford web pages.