4 ms·

If you read "master branch" and think of slavery, you have reading comprehension issues that won't be fixed by renaming the branch. (I know bitkeeper used mast

If you read "master branch" and think of slavery, you have reading comprehension issues that won't be fixed by renaming the branch. (I know bitkeeper used master/slave terminology for repositories; that is completely irrelevant to git).

adjkant 6y ago
Given how even distributed systems used to use master/slave frequently, and some still do, and that people don't say "master branch" and typically just say "master", I think it would be surprising for someone to avoid that association if they are educated in computer sincere using those terms (which again many places do). Also, it's not reading comprehension, it's subconscious level associations that people basically can't avoid.
- loceng 6y ago
  If it's triggering underlying emotional trauma, then there's still unhealed/unprocessed trauma; rightfully so, though "actions speak louder than words" seems oddly fitting here.
  - adjkant 6y ago
    Two things: 1. Where did I say anything about emotional trauma? 2. Even if that was the case (for most it is not as far as I can tell), I am surprised to hear an argument for "ah yes, let's not decrease emotional trauma if we can for low/no cost".
    - loceng 6y ago
      What are you referring to then regarding "subconscious level associations that people basically can't avoid"? A subconscious association, if using reason, critical thinking, would separate master-slave in the context of programming vs. human slavery. If they are reacting to it, rather than responding, it's emotional - not reasonable based in logic; you probably can't tell because it's subtle, subconscious and not blatant - you have to understand it through behaviour patterns and mechanisms. How about decreasing the emotional trauma by actually helping people heal, so they can be calm and not have to fear police brutality or a police state etc, to implement accountability and integrity in our systems? And in another reply I made I suggested that coddling people makes them and us weaker as a society, and allows worse consequences to grow. Arguably doing "low/no cost" things is lazy and procrastinatory, especially when it's relating to something unreasonable or incorrect like associating master-slave in programming to master-slave in human slavery; yes, an unreasonable request not given into by a child being unreasonable will likely lead to a tantrum. Not responding would be bad and further traumatizing, responding with thought and an actual plan would be deep and powerful, giving into people's unreasonable requests or for-profit company opportunism to look good doing something shallow because people are misinterpreting language is something else. In another comment I made: "Coddling will only lead to greater problems later, though yes, it certainly is a gesture showing respect — because of the improper associating, trigger it is causing an unreasonable mob. Coddling people makes them and society weaker, it doesn't strengthen them - it turns their anger into something other than critical thinking. Large for-profit corporations who are happy to jump to an easy decision like this seem to be more opportunists than leaders to make a statement like you said in response." - that statement I was referring to is: 'If you read "master branch" and think of slavery, you have reading comprehension issues that won't be fixed by renaming the branch.'
      - adjkant 6y ago
        > How about decreasing the emotional trauma by actually helping people heal, so they can be calm and not have to fear police brutality or a police state etc, to implement accountability and integrity in our systems? Sounds great, even better for sure! Let's do both! At your day job (if you're in the tech world), which do you have more control over? > A subconscious association, if using reason, critical thinking, This is now how subconscious/unconscious biases work, you're again skipping right into "but just logic out of it". People don't react to it with some emotional or anger emotion in the moment, they engrain the association subconsciously in their head, and you have to take massive effort to catch yourself with this. An effort that would be far more than changing the word, and one that tech companies are also trying to work on generally with implicit bias trainings recently. This is focused on sexism but discusses implicit bias, the training, and its flaws in depth: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon-valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-... Most implicit bias trainings at tech companies today are targeting the same things. While the effects of said trainings are muddy to say the least, the theory behind them is well agreed upon and studied. I'll leave the generalized psych research to you, but here's an example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148600/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148600/
- bonzini 6y ago
  The concept of a master branch is completely detached from distributed systems, so much that every clone of a repository has a separate master branch. I am not a native speaker so my brain might work differently but I don't believe the theory on associations. We're even talking of a noun vs an adjective. Do people make the same associations also when you hear about a Masters degree? Or when you hear about Slavic people, do you feel for the times when they were enslaved? I have no problem with replacing master/slave, there are usually clearer names since that pair has been overloaded (though changing master/slave to master/replica should be just as acceptable as e.g. primary/replica or active/backup, for the same reason!). Even outside distributed systems other names are clearer (controller/device for example).
  - adjkant 6y ago
    All three are used as a noun to me, FWIW. When you say "merge to master", master is a noun. My point above is that it's more uncommon in my experience to fully say "master branch". "Masters degrees" as far as I linguistically understand means "mastery of subject", which is indeed the same language, though perhaps closer to feudal master/subject, which was more ethnic slavery in Europe than the specific iteration in the US. Maybe we do eventually change that one too. Higher education has the same problematic founding as everything else. Let's not forget that Harvard and many other top schools were literally constructed by slaves. As said elsewhere, this is very much about engrained subconscious defaults and norms and you've just highlighted another. I think generally these are indeed small effects and you have to pick your battles, but I am always saddened when people spend so much effort fighting and arguing against these really costless changes. No one is saying to change overnight and break everything, but it costs nothing to slowly transition away. Those who argue it "changes history" I also find curious as those people seem to be doing a great job ignoring or denying the histories of the words in those same arguments.
    - bonzini 6y ago
      In "Merge to master", "master" is a proper noun, the name that was given to the branch because it is "the master branch" (adjective); just like St. Paul took his name from the adjective "paulus", meaning small. Otherwise, it would be "merge to the master" which I have never heard. It's not a costless change; all documentation would be split between that for "master" and that for "main". The cynic in me sees Embrace, Extend, Extinguish all over again.
- kylebyproxy 6y ago
  > that people basically can't avoid This is the coddling referred to in a sibling comment. What basis do you have for thinking such misconceptions are unavoidable? This is tantamount to saying "people can never change", which flies in the face of all evidence I've seen. It seems to me entirely more likely that most folks simply don't take the time to practice decent cognitive hygiene. Surely, the parties responsible for relabeling the default branch will see this as tacit admission of guilt on the part of GH and wield it as vindication of their views going forward. Rather than pushing back on the issue, challenging these people to perform the self-analysis needed to disabuse themselves of faulty logic, decisions like GitHub's only work to foster and perpetuate a distorted world. Evidently, this is somehow too much of an ask. How did it ever come to pass that it's _everyone else's_ responsibility to kowtow to the lowest common denominator? Why is it verboten to hold them to a higher standard?
  - adjkant 6y ago
    This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how psychology works. "Cognitive hygiene" is not something most people have, if any. To claim you have it is quite arrogant to most of psychological research. > Surely, the parties responsible for relabeling the default branch will see this as tacit admission of guilt on the part of GH and wield it as vindication of their views going forward. This is an approach that is not productive, but also not applicable here as those types of actions are usually once the rest of the world has moved, and a small minority has not. This is quite early in such a transition and if anything I would expect Github to be praised for it. I certainly appreciate Github starting the process and conversation here.
loceng 6y ago
To me when people are so angered that they can't separate contexts of language use, it's a signal or canary that things are out of control. And then reasonable people fold to requested or demanded change, like giving into a child rewarding them for something not reasonable, re-enforcing the illogical thought behaviour - doing it because it's easier to make satisfy a few angry, unreasonable people (perhaps a mob) who are associating language that has nothing to do with people in the context being used that they're changing. Coddling will only lead to greater problems later, though yes, it certainly is a gesture showing respect — because of the improper associating, trigger it is causing an unreasonable mob. Coddling people makes them and society weaker, it doesn't strengthen them - it turns their anger into something other than critical thinking. Large for-profit corporations who are happy to jump to an easy decision like this seem to be more opportunists than leaders to make a statement like you said in response. Political parties do the same, I can't remember what that's called though.
- adjkant 6y ago
  Why do you assume this is driven by anger and that the worries here are "coddling" and a "weaker society"? Why can't this simply be "hey, that term has some serious historical baggage and it doesn't sit right with some people, why not change it? As a white person, the term "slave" in distributed systems always made me feel that way. Not as much for master and whitelist/blacklist personally, but I see no harm in transitioning our terminology away from these types of terms. It's simply a subconscious effect that helps engrain bad defaults we shouldn't be teaching people like "white good, black bad". Study after study has shown that has bigger psychological effects. None of that has to do with anger. Can we please get rid of this narrative about "coddling" and "triggering" and "anger" when the reasoning for changing terminology has nothing to do with it?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dingaling 6y ago
    Can you avoid using the term 'triggering' please, it has connotations of shooting people. See how deep this rabbit hole goes...
tomxor 6y ago
Until you mentioned it, I didn't even realise this was a PC thing. I'm all for improving the rights of minorities, but this behavior of eradicating all trace of references to anything tentatively related to historical racism seems like useless noise at best and dangerously naive at worst... If our society becomes so sensitive that we cannot even utter a word that implies another word which when placed in an entirely different context and the assumption of malicious intent becomes racist then we are doomed to repeat history as a species - i.e unchecked, this pattern of behavior can only evolve into censorship which is itself detrimental to future generations understanding racism in our history.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
filoeleven 6y ago
So your gripe is that people loose the context when its obvious what is meant, yeah?
- bonzini 6y ago
  I see what you did there, but I still cannot understand your question. I am not bothered by common English spelling mistakes, if that's what you were asking.
  - filoeleven 6y ago
    I made another comment that is more descriptive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23520695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23520695 My hypothesis there (that most people bothered by this change WOULD be bothered by the spelling mistakes) doesn’t apply to you since you are applying a consistent approach to contextual interpretation. My guess could be quite wrong. Here’s a question along similar lines: the word “niggardly” is a synonym of “stingy”, but through an etymological accident is almost a homophone of a very charged word. Do you also think that “niggardly” is a word worth keeping around? Would you use it while talking with or referring to a black person? It’s more archaic than “master”, so it’s not an equivalent situation, but the overtones strike me as being similar. This is a genuine question in the spirit of curiosity. There’s both a logical and emotional/visceral component to many words we use, and the overlap is not usually a problem. I’m trying to better understand how people evaluate a charged word’s usefulness in communication. If “master” is charged—maybe not for you personally, but potentially for people you’re talking with—and “main” serves just as well, what’s the issue with swapping it out?
    - h_r 6y ago
      I'm genuinely curious if there are black or African American programmers who actually use git who are offended by the term. Speaking for myself (white programmer) it just seems to be an obvious use of the adjective form of the word as either the principal branch (like master bath) or the branch from which other branches are copied (as in the initial, pristine version). If there are such comments I haven't come across them yet. There are several comments by other white people who see this as a highly commendable act. Does anyone actually subject to racism see this move as a positive step that addresses a real problem?
hn_is_toxic 6y ago
If you read "this hurts me" and think "I disagree, therefor you can't read" you have empathy issues.

adjkant 6y ago

Given how even distributed systems used to use master/slave frequently, and some still do, and that people don't say "master branch" and typically just say "master", I think it would be surprising for someone to avoid that association if they are educated in computer sincere using those terms (which again many places do). Also, it's not reading comprehension, it's subconscious level associations that people basically can't avoid.

loceng 6y ago
If it's triggering underlying emotional trauma, then there's still unhealed/unprocessed trauma; rightfully so, though "actions speak louder than words" seems oddly fitting here.
- adjkant 6y ago
  Two things: 1. Where did I say anything about emotional trauma? 2. Even if that was the case (for most it is not as far as I can tell), I am surprised to hear an argument for "ah yes, let's not decrease emotional trauma if we can for low/no cost".
  - loceng 6y ago
    What are you referring to then regarding "subconscious level associations that people basically can't avoid"? A subconscious association, if using reason, critical thinking, would separate master-slave in the context of programming vs. human slavery. If they are reacting to it, rather than responding, it's emotional - not reasonable based in logic; you probably can't tell because it's subtle, subconscious and not blatant - you have to understand it through behaviour patterns and mechanisms. How about decreasing the emotional trauma by actually helping people heal, so they can be calm and not have to fear police brutality or a police state etc, to implement accountability and integrity in our systems? And in another reply I made I suggested that coddling people makes them and us weaker as a society, and allows worse consequences to grow. Arguably doing "low/no cost" things is lazy and procrastinatory, especially when it's relating to something unreasonable or incorrect like associating master-slave in programming to master-slave in human slavery; yes, an unreasonable request not given into by a child being unreasonable will likely lead to a tantrum. Not responding would be bad and further traumatizing, responding with thought and an actual plan would be deep and powerful, giving into people's unreasonable requests or for-profit company opportunism to look good doing something shallow because people are misinterpreting language is something else. In another comment I made: "Coddling will only lead to greater problems later, though yes, it certainly is a gesture showing respect — because of the improper associating, trigger it is causing an unreasonable mob. Coddling people makes them and society weaker, it doesn't strengthen them - it turns their anger into something other than critical thinking. Large for-profit corporations who are happy to jump to an easy decision like this seem to be more opportunists than leaders to make a statement like you said in response." - that statement I was referring to is: 'If you read "master branch" and think of slavery, you have reading comprehension issues that won't be fixed by renaming the branch.'
    - adjkant 6y ago
      > How about decreasing the emotional trauma by actually helping people heal, so they can be calm and not have to fear police brutality or a police state etc, to implement accountability and integrity in our systems? Sounds great, even better for sure! Let's do both! At your day job (if you're in the tech world), which do you have more control over? > A subconscious association, if using reason, critical thinking, This is now how subconscious/unconscious biases work, you're again skipping right into "but just logic out of it". People don't react to it with some emotional or anger emotion in the moment, they engrain the association subconsciously in their head, and you have to take massive effort to catch yourself with this. An effort that would be far more than changing the word, and one that tech companies are also trying to work on generally with implicit bias trainings recently. This is focused on sexism but discusses implicit bias, the training, and its flaws in depth: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon-valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-... Most implicit bias trainings at tech companies today are targeting the same things. While the effects of said trainings are muddy to say the least, the theory behind them is well agreed upon and studied. I'll leave the generalized psych research to you, but here's an example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148600/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6148600/
bonzini 6y ago
The concept of a master branch is completely detached from distributed systems, so much that every clone of a repository has a separate master branch. I am not a native speaker so my brain might work differently but I don't believe the theory on associations. We're even talking of a noun vs an adjective. Do people make the same associations also when you hear about a Masters degree? Or when you hear about Slavic people, do you feel for the times when they were enslaved? I have no problem with replacing master/slave, there are usually clearer names since that pair has been overloaded (though changing master/slave to master/replica should be just as acceptable as e.g. primary/replica or active/backup, for the same reason!). Even outside distributed systems other names are clearer (controller/device for example).
- adjkant 6y ago
  All three are used as a noun to me, FWIW. When you say "merge to master", master is a noun. My point above is that it's more uncommon in my experience to fully say "master branch". "Masters degrees" as far as I linguistically understand means "mastery of subject", which is indeed the same language, though perhaps closer to feudal master/subject, which was more ethnic slavery in Europe than the specific iteration in the US. Maybe we do eventually change that one too. Higher education has the same problematic founding as everything else. Let's not forget that Harvard and many other top schools were literally constructed by slaves. As said elsewhere, this is very much about engrained subconscious defaults and norms and you've just highlighted another. I think generally these are indeed small effects and you have to pick your battles, but I am always saddened when people spend so much effort fighting and arguing against these really costless changes. No one is saying to change overnight and break everything, but it costs nothing to slowly transition away. Those who argue it "changes history" I also find curious as those people seem to be doing a great job ignoring or denying the histories of the words in those same arguments.
  - bonzini 6y ago
    In "Merge to master", "master" is a proper noun, the name that was given to the branch because it is "the master branch" (adjective); just like St. Paul took his name from the adjective "paulus", meaning small. Otherwise, it would be "merge to the master" which I have never heard. It's not a costless change; all documentation would be split between that for "master" and that for "main". The cynic in me sees Embrace, Extend, Extinguish all over again.
kylebyproxy 6y ago
> that people basically can't avoid This is the coddling referred to in a sibling comment. What basis do you have for thinking such misconceptions are unavoidable? This is tantamount to saying "people can never change", which flies in the face of all evidence I've seen. It seems to me entirely more likely that most folks simply don't take the time to practice decent cognitive hygiene. Surely, the parties responsible for relabeling the default branch will see this as tacit admission of guilt on the part of GH and wield it as vindication of their views going forward. Rather than pushing back on the issue, challenging these people to perform the self-analysis needed to disabuse themselves of faulty logic, decisions like GitHub's only work to foster and perpetuate a distorted world. Evidently, this is somehow too much of an ask. How did it ever come to pass that it's _everyone else's_ responsibility to kowtow to the lowest common denominator? Why is it verboten to hold them to a higher standard?
- adjkant 6y ago
  This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how psychology works. "Cognitive hygiene" is not something most people have, if any. To claim you have it is quite arrogant to most of psychological research. > Surely, the parties responsible for relabeling the default branch will see this as tacit admission of guilt on the part of GH and wield it as vindication of their views going forward. This is an approach that is not productive, but also not applicable here as those types of actions are usually once the rest of the world has moved, and a small minority has not. This is quite early in such a transition and if anything I would expect Github to be praised for it. I certainly appreciate Github starting the process and conversation here.

loceng 6y ago

To me when people are so angered that they can't separate contexts of language use, it's a signal or canary that things are out of control. And then reasonable people fold to requested or demanded change, like giving into a child rewarding them for something not reasonable, re-enforcing the illogical thought behaviour - doing it because it's easier to make satisfy a few angry, unreasonable people (perhaps a mob) who are associating language that has nothing to do with people in the context being used that they're changing. Coddling will only lead to greater problems later, though yes, it certainly is a gesture showing respect — because of the improper associating, trigger it is causing an unreasonable mob. Coddling people makes them and society weaker, it doesn't strengthen them - it turns their anger into something other than critical thinking. Large for-profit corporations who are happy to jump to an easy decision like this seem to be more opportunists than leaders to make a statement like you said in response. Political parties do the same, I can't remember what that's called though.

adjkant 6y ago
Why do you assume this is driven by anger and that the worries here are "coddling" and a "weaker society"? Why can't this simply be "hey, that term has some serious historical baggage and it doesn't sit right with some people, why not change it? As a white person, the term "slave" in distributed systems always made me feel that way. Not as much for master and whitelist/blacklist personally, but I see no harm in transitioning our terminology away from these types of terms. It's simply a subconscious effect that helps engrain bad defaults we shouldn't be teaching people like "white good, black bad". Study after study has shown that has bigger psychological effects. None of that has to do with anger. Can we please get rid of this narrative about "coddling" and "triggering" and "anger" when the reasoning for changing terminology has nothing to do with it?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dingaling 6y ago
  Can you avoid using the term 'triggering' please, it has connotations of shooting people. See how deep this rabbit hole goes...

tomxor 6y ago

Until you mentioned it, I didn't even realise this was a PC thing. I'm all for improving the rights of minorities, but this behavior of eradicating all trace of references to anything tentatively related to historical racism seems like useless noise at best and dangerously naive at worst... If our society becomes so sensitive that we cannot even utter a word that implies another word which when placed in an entirely different context and the assumption of malicious intent becomes racist then we are doomed to repeat history as a species - i.e unchecked, this pattern of behavior can only evolve into censorship which is itself detrimental to future generations understanding racism in our history.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

filoeleven 6y ago

So your gripe is that people loose the context when its obvious what is meant, yeah?

bonzini 6y ago
I see what you did there, but I still cannot understand your question. I am not bothered by common English spelling mistakes, if that's what you were asking.
- filoeleven 6y ago
  I made another comment that is more descriptive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23520695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23520695 My hypothesis there (that most people bothered by this change WOULD be bothered by the spelling mistakes) doesn’t apply to you since you are applying a consistent approach to contextual interpretation. My guess could be quite wrong. Here’s a question along similar lines: the word “niggardly” is a synonym of “stingy”, but through an etymological accident is almost a homophone of a very charged word. Do you also think that “niggardly” is a word worth keeping around? Would you use it while talking with or referring to a black person? It’s more archaic than “master”, so it’s not an equivalent situation, but the overtones strike me as being similar. This is a genuine question in the spirit of curiosity. There’s both a logical and emotional/visceral component to many words we use, and the overlap is not usually a problem. I’m trying to better understand how people evaluate a charged word’s usefulness in communication. If “master” is charged—maybe not for you personally, but potentially for people you’re talking with—and “main” serves just as well, what’s the issue with swapping it out?
  - h_r 6y ago
    I'm genuinely curious if there are black or African American programmers who actually use git who are offended by the term. Speaking for myself (white programmer) it just seems to be an obvious use of the adjective form of the word as either the principal branch (like master bath) or the branch from which other branches are copied (as in the initial, pristine version). If there are such comments I haven't come across them yet. There are several comments by other white people who see this as a highly commendable act. Does anyone actually subject to racism see this move as a positive step that addresses a real problem?

hn_is_toxic 6y ago

If you read "this hurts me" and think "I disagree, therefor you can't read" you have empathy issues.