If "Master/Slave" terminology in computing sounds bad now, why not change it to "Dom/Sub"?
It sounds way less offensive to those who decry the original terminology's problematic roots but still keeps its meaning intact.
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while in some ways I can see your point, I would just have a hard time saying this in a work meeting here in the deep south with black colleagues present
most sociologists and some psychologists would refer to this as a subconscious, or subdued form of racism.
it is kind of silly a the end of the day. How a terminology originally referring to a power dynamic. Has been so excessively ingrained in relation to race (which isn't very historically relevant) such that even using these terms in a generic capacity, not relating to in any form what would constitute this "negative slavery" concept, that it makes people feel uneasy, summarizes rather weirdly, the human condition.
maybe this is just my autism speaking, but i see so little resemblance contextually, and almost zero historical relevance that i see almost no connection between the words and the practices at hand. Like you could do a wikipedia speedrun from technology to slavery, but you could also do that from any topic, to slavery. Everything is so interconnected there is nothing pure anymore.
Isn't the inverse - "I asked x number of black people and they were OK with it" or even "I assume y% number of black people are ok with it" subject to the same criticism?
I am white so we're probably getting to the edge of propriety in this conversation.
yeah they're both equally susceptible to the same problem. Ultimately though, one of the things we can best do to examine something like this is relate it to other similar concepts/problems. PTSD for example, hearing a certain word or phrase may make you deeply uncomfortable or uneasy. It's not recommended to simply cope with that, or stop hearing those terms. It's recommended to learn how to work with and against it, in order to become a more functional human. And you could argue a similar thing in regards to master/slave terminology being used.
You could also expand into the general normalization of a concept. For example curse words are only bad because we deem them to be. If a white guy explains the architecture of a piece of software using master/slave terminology to a group of people which includes black people, specifically in the country of america. It might be weird, but realistically, it probably shouldn't be. Why? It's simple, there's nothing that prevents this from being a presentation from a black person explaining an architecture using a master/slave architecture in the exact same manner as the white guy, to a room of people that includes white people. Is that weird? I see no reason for it to be weird there either.
The entire reason the master/slave terminology is frowned upon is because of the power balance in that specific situation, however if there is no power imbalance, it's debatable as to whether it matters or not. It's perfectly fine in the BDSM space even between white/black people because it's a consented accepted terminology in that specific context. So we could even extend the social acceptableness of it based on who consents to experiencing that dialog.
There are a lot of ways to look at and think about things, ultimately it's probably worth not thinking all too hard about most things as they don't lead to much.
definitely, but that's part of the fun, if you can't discuss things in a philosophical manner whats the point of even asking the question in the first place.
Or isn’t the other half of that …… if you have a toxic personality and wish to change that, there may be no single fix but to pay more attention to many small habits contributing to that toxicity.
This whole conversation reminds me of the similar one many years ago, about crude jokes and pictures/calendars in the workplace. The dominant population said exactly the same things. However now we’re all more professional and work is much less toxic, not just for women, minorities, people with different preferences, but also less toxic for us white male heteros as well. We all won that one
yeah that's certainly an option, but defining a toxic personality or a toxic personality trait in it of itself is a really hard and difficult process, and doing that externally is arguably worse. As it's rife for gaslighting and abuse, but that's a different story.
As for crude jokes, if you mean like, sexual harassment i think that's different. I think crude language in general is perfectly reasonable, though the trick is obviously being able to read the room. There's a fine line between hanging with the friends, and then being a fucking asshole.
Whitelist and Blacklist is on that stack as well.
this is actually a terminology that i would be interested on seeing the historical context for actually. My assumption has always been light based "whitelist referring to a well lit room, where as blacklist refers to a completely dark room" making things easy/hard to find as a a result.
It could also literally just be a coincidence and it simply sounded better for the allow list to be whitelisted, and the deny list to be blacklisted, humans have weird connections to words like that.
If I had to guess, it's just the general "white=good black=bad" which itself is likely related to day/night.
But it's easy to imagine a bouncer at a club with a list of whites allowed in and blacks that aren't. I don't think that's the etymology, but it's also important to remember that language is alive and words can take on unintended meaning.
that seems like an oddly specific origination for that specific term, but it's certainly a possibility. But as with words being alive and taking on unintended meanings, it's also equally likely that it became skin color agnostic at some point, and the term stuck because it was already being used.
I didn't mean that it originated with bouncers, I meant I imagined it coming to be associated with race in such a way 😅
yeah no i understand, i'm just saying that's a potential point where i could've originated and then morphed over time. Even if it was founded on race originally, it's not super likely it would matter today in any broader contexts.
Idk if that's for white folks like me (and you?) to decide, and there is no harm on erring on the side of caution.
It's like the deal with micro-aggressions. Alone they're not much, but a constant buildup of these little things can leave someone feeling raw and very sensitive to it.
I don't think the etymology started with race, I think it started with day/night. But I'm not an expert on etymology, and while I'm very curious, it probably doesn't really matter here.
yeah, probably not, and that's why i tend to err on the side of these discussions not being very productive. As for erring on the side of caution, idk. I'm not really sure theres that much caution even present to begin with. It might even be sufficient enough to just not use the terms around specific people per their request, or not at all, who knows.
i think my problem, is that people have a very analytical and sterile approach to these things. In terms of classifying and denoting things micro aggressions as a term makes sense. But from a broader societal perspective, i think it's useless, if not negatively impactful.
It's better to identity specific facets of society that are problematic, for example treatment and behavior of certain people differently from others, as opposed to "treating the symptom" so to speak.
it really could've been from anything, but at the end of the day whatever it started from is irrelevant to it's use case today, and anybody using it to be offensive is offensive for other reasons at that point.
I think it's difficult to separate the two, they form a feedback loop. It's like the broken window theory.
People see these little ambiguously exclusionary acts, and if they see enough of them then they get the subconscious message that exclusionary acts are ok, and the (possibly accidental) targets of the acts get the subconscious message that they're not welcome which makes the subject raw and sensitive and primes them to look at acts through that lens.
In college I took a class on how humans and computers interact, and one of the things my professor was passionate about was how the terminology of programming languages tended to be exclusionary to women. Not explicitly so, but just using violent language that women were raised to find uncomfortable (eg killing a process), and it was pushing women out of computer science.
This was like 15 years ago, and he was already passionate about it at the time, so this isn't really a new thing, its just getting broader attention.
I don't know if that's happening here, but it costs nothing to change so even a potential minor improvement is worth it.
this is the reason i think we need to treat them more broadly, it's a broad problem, the solution also needs to be broad, unless we want to ignore an entire segment of the problem entirely.
Did they ever mention the history of the CS field generally being sexist towards women? I would also argue that women being "averse" to terms like killing is equally presumptive, women cooked in the kitchen throughout the 1950's, you think they got acquainted with the concept and idea of killing things? Like turkeys, chicken, cows, etc. They almost certainly understand the concept of death. They've seen it first hand, arguably more so than men throughout history ignoring things like war. If we include child birth it's even MORE aggressively supporting of this point. It wasn't that long ago that you would have children, and they would just, die sometimes. These days thankfully, miscarriages are the most significant threat to giving birth to a living child. Those didn't stop, i'm not sure if they lowered? I think that's why they're so statistically prevalent compared to everything else, but idk shit about miscarriages so don't ask me lol.
Thankfully the sexism in the field has improved, the problem stems more from the CS field being predominately men though. Girls were never really being pushed into the field, there are more being pushed into it now, but it's still not super significant, even through anecdotal experience, we just need to be engaging girls in the cs field from an earlier stage. People are just predisposed to giving and educated boys about computers, rather than girls, for some reason.
well that's good to know, i figured they would, but that seems like a more historically relevant point to me.
i mean maybe, but it just seems weird to me that we would establish that women comprehend words like "kill" differently, and that we should cater towards that, while we've spent the last like, thirty years if not more trying to move away from these things.
I mean we literally have deer hunting seasons to cull the population of deer as they no longer have natural predators, what's the harm in using the term "killing" for referring to ending a process. It makes sense when you think about it. A process is born or created, and then it may fork, or it may not, and those forks may be killed, they may not be, the mainline process will inevitably be killed, either at its own discretion, or forcibly. through a termination.
It might be violent, but it's a process, it's literally just lines of code that are being run. There's nothing special or fancy behind them, it makes perfect sense to use terms like "killing a process" and "stop" and "terminate" for shutting them down, it's immediately interpreted.
we know from raising children that it's not good to shield them from potential allergens (the get allergies if you do that) and that it's also good to expose them to generally more unsanitary environments (they build up a better immune system response ability) as well as encouraging them to do things they may or may not be capable of, teaching them how to deal with failure, and teaching them how to deal with the general pain and suffering of life. Why have we suddenly decided that "maybe we shouldnt use kill as a terminology to describe the act of ending a processes lifetime" that seems inconsequential to me in the grand scheme of things.
There might be data to support it, but i think the data to support that we simply don't push younger girls towards the field of CS is significantly more evident. It has a historical basis, and it tracks with what we're doing today, and the majors and degrees that they're focusing on as well. While we're here, we should probably also do something about younger men in the education space, and the world at large, as they don't exactly have anything to aspire to or focus on.
just another moderately relevant example here to extend upon my point.
The one thing men had was control and responsibility over women when they didn't have rights. Now that they have rights, we haven't exactly changed anything in regards to how we raise boys, and we're surprised when they start following the likes of tate and the manosphere crowd. Women haven't previously had this opportunity to the same level they do now, so they're still taking advantage of it because they can. But we've basically forgotten about an entire sect of society accidentally at this point.
I don't think it's intentional, i just think it's a consequence similar to the decline of the tradesman over the years. Now those jobs have generally better prospects than getting into college, and they've become a very tempting opportunity.