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Can you explain to me what constitutes "political correctness"? From where I stand, it just means treating people equally and not being an asshole. ETA: In co

Can you explain to me what constitutes "political correctness"? From where I stand, it just means treating people equally and not being an asshole. ETA: In considering all the worries of modern living, I have never once been concerned with using the wrong words for a group of people. Am I really the exception? It seems easy to call people by the terms they prefer. Not sure about which terms to use? Then I just ask. I am struggling to see the burden of being "PC".

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
The poll didn't define it, so not all respondents necessarily understood it the same way, but in my experience it's generally used to refer to speech codes requiring people to take great care in how they speak and write to avoid accidentally giving offense. The recent controversy about the USC professor who said 那个 in class, for example, would be a typical example.
- chillwaves 6y ago
  I have no idea what your example means. As far as speech codes, they seem very mild. I would not even call it an inconvenience. Are people mad that certain phrases are now considered slurs and not welcome in polite society? Ex. it is no longer appropriate to call someone a "retard," even in jest. Is this a problem? I'm still not understanding the meat of the objection to "PC".
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    When people say they're concerned about political correctness, they're generally disputing your assessment that modern speech codes are very mild. Many people feel that modern speech codes are quite intense - that it requires significant study to identify all the terms and phrases that currently aren't welcome in polite society, and that complying with the list once you've studied it severely restricts the ideas you can express.
    - chillwaves 6y ago
      Would you like to provide an example that's in english?
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        Sure. One example would be that many companies (including my own) are now instructing engineers to avoid any public usages of the terms "whitelist" and "blacklist". Obviously this isn't the most important thing in the world, but it requires pretty significant mental effort on my part, since the terms had no racial connotations at all until a couple months ago.
        chillwaves 6y ago
        It's telling that the only concrete example in english, though only from two of you, is the same one. It seems like there aren't a lot of examples to choose from. I have personally never heard of this concern, and as you mention it doesn't seem particularly taxing. I would like to understand better the consequence of misusing (or using) blacklist/whitelist. I very much doubt the fallout would be severe.
        SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        It's the most recent and thus the most salient one for a lot of people in software. There are many other examples of neutral terminology that's become politically charged: "all lives matter", "color-blind", the OK hand gesture... I completely agree that none of these rules are individually taxing and that the consequences of breaking them are unlikely to be severe. But when taking everything in aggregate - the sum of all the rules I know about, the concern that there could be new rules I don't know about, the tiny but not unprecedented chance that I could face severe fallout - the net effect is stifling. Again, not the most important problem in the world or even the most important problem I personally face, but still a problem.
        chillwaves 6y ago
  - nemo44x 6y ago
    Most people are against it. Around 80% for each racial group. A bit less for blacks at around 75%. It’s like the 1 thing a super majority of us agree on. However, slice it up by income and education. Middle and especially upper-middle class people are generally for it much more than everyone “below” them but even they don’t like it. From politics, republicans hate it a lot and democrats mainly hate. Except 1 group. Progressives love it with about 30% of them against it. They are the only group that likes it. It is elitist and no one likes it. Except the far left. Yet we are all forced to live with it. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majorities-dislike-political-correctness/572581/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...
    - chillwaves 6y ago
      > It seems like everyday you wake up something has changed … Do you say Jew? Or Jewish? Is it a black guy? African-American? … You are on your toes because you never know what to say. So political correctness in that sense is scary. I'm still struggling with the objection here, but this is ridiculous. It's ok to say "black". Is that hard to figure out? Ask a black person and they will say it's fine. The term "african-american" seems more nonsensical than anything -- not all black people identify with Africa. As to the rest, I don't care about popular opinion, that doesn't inform my world view. Still waiting to hear about the burden of "PC" because I have yet to hear a compelling case. And I have never once wondered whether or not I should call someone a "jew".
      - vangelis 6y ago
        Here's the report: https://hiddentribes.us/pdf/hidden_tribes_report.pdf https://hiddentribes.us/pdf/hidden_tribes_report.pdf Political correctness doesn't appeared to be defined. I assume if you asked people their opinions on concrete events versus a nebulous concept the results would be quite different.
      - nemo44x 6y ago
        You didn’t even write “black person” with a capital “B” as in “Black person”. In many places you’d be jumped on for this recent development.
  - unishark 6y ago
    Do a search for USC communications professor to understand the previous example. It's hard to defend insulting a person's intelligence, regardless of the word used. A better example would be referring to something inanimate like a company policy as "retarded". Even better is the purging of words like "master" from software. Or actors having to apologize for their Halloween costumes. It seems like every major comedian is complaining bitterly about political correctness lately, save perhaps for certain partisan ones.
- Talanes 6y ago
  Which makes all of the claims you and the others have made as to what that data actually means basically useless. All we know is that a lot of people think some definition of political correctness is some definition of problem. That's barely information.
camdenlock 6y ago
It means conforming your speech to current political trends.
- chillwaves 6y ago
  Can I have an example?
  - aleister_777 6y ago
    Whitelisting/Blacklisting. Change of innocuous and unrelated terminology in source code and documentation without any technical justification. No shortage of those examples throughout the industry and open source.
    - chillwaves 6y ago
      So you are saying people have a problem with the term "blacklisting" ? I guess I live a sheltered life then. Nothing like this has remotely ever come up and I live in a major metro.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        Many codebases are moving away from that term. Here's two large efforts that I am familiar with: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/styleguide/inclusive_code.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/styl... https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=1o9zxsxl https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=1o9zxsxl
      - ev1 6y ago
        Yes. You can find PR's on Github and if the maintainer rejects it, accusations of racism and hate crimes. The acceptable term is something like allowlist/denylist/blocklist.
        tdeck 6y ago
        I've seen the discussion come up about changing these terms and whether it was worth doing. Not once have I seen it turn into an "accusation" of racism against a person, much less hate crimes, so I don't think that paints an accurate picture.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

The poll didn't define it, so not all respondents necessarily understood it the same way, but in my experience it's generally used to refer to speech codes requiring people to take great care in how they speak and write to avoid accidentally giving offense. The recent controversy about the USC professor who said 那个 in class, for example, would be a typical example.

chillwaves 6y ago
I have no idea what your example means. As far as speech codes, they seem very mild. I would not even call it an inconvenience. Are people mad that certain phrases are now considered slurs and not welcome in polite society? Ex. it is no longer appropriate to call someone a "retard," even in jest. Is this a problem? I'm still not understanding the meat of the objection to "PC".
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  When people say they're concerned about political correctness, they're generally disputing your assessment that modern speech codes are very mild. Many people feel that modern speech codes are quite intense - that it requires significant study to identify all the terms and phrases that currently aren't welcome in polite society, and that complying with the list once you've studied it severely restricts the ideas you can express.
  - chillwaves 6y ago
    Would you like to provide an example that's in english?
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      Sure. One example would be that many companies (including my own) are now instructing engineers to avoid any public usages of the terms "whitelist" and "blacklist". Obviously this isn't the most important thing in the world, but it requires pretty significant mental effort on my part, since the terms had no racial connotations at all until a couple months ago.
      - chillwaves 6y ago
        It's telling that the only concrete example in english, though only from two of you, is the same one. It seems like there aren't a lot of examples to choose from. I have personally never heard of this concern, and as you mention it doesn't seem particularly taxing. I would like to understand better the consequence of misusing (or using) blacklist/whitelist. I very much doubt the fallout would be severe.
        SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        It's the most recent and thus the most salient one for a lot of people in software. There are many other examples of neutral terminology that's become politically charged: "all lives matter", "color-blind", the OK hand gesture... I completely agree that none of these rules are individually taxing and that the consequences of breaking them are unlikely to be severe. But when taking everything in aggregate - the sum of all the rules I know about, the concern that there could be new rules I don't know about, the tiny but not unprecedented chance that I could face severe fallout - the net effect is stifling. Again, not the most important problem in the world or even the most important problem I personally face, but still a problem.
        chillwaves 6y ago
- nemo44x 6y ago
  Most people are against it. Around 80% for each racial group. A bit less for blacks at around 75%. It’s like the 1 thing a super majority of us agree on. However, slice it up by income and education. Middle and especially upper-middle class people are generally for it much more than everyone “below” them but even they don’t like it. From politics, republicans hate it a lot and democrats mainly hate. Except 1 group. Progressives love it with about 30% of them against it. They are the only group that likes it. It is elitist and no one likes it. Except the far left. Yet we are all forced to live with it. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majorities-dislike-political-correctness/572581/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...
  - chillwaves 6y ago
    > It seems like everyday you wake up something has changed … Do you say Jew? Or Jewish? Is it a black guy? African-American? … You are on your toes because you never know what to say. So political correctness in that sense is scary. I'm still struggling with the objection here, but this is ridiculous. It's ok to say "black". Is that hard to figure out? Ask a black person and they will say it's fine. The term "african-american" seems more nonsensical than anything -- not all black people identify with Africa. As to the rest, I don't care about popular opinion, that doesn't inform my world view. Still waiting to hear about the burden of "PC" because I have yet to hear a compelling case. And I have never once wondered whether or not I should call someone a "jew".
    - vangelis 6y ago
      Here's the report: https://hiddentribes.us/pdf/hidden_tribes_report.pdf https://hiddentribes.us/pdf/hidden_tribes_report.pdf Political correctness doesn't appeared to be defined. I assume if you asked people their opinions on concrete events versus a nebulous concept the results would be quite different.
    - nemo44x 6y ago
      You didn’t even write “black person” with a capital “B” as in “Black person”. In many places you’d be jumped on for this recent development.
- unishark 6y ago
  Do a search for USC communications professor to understand the previous example. It's hard to defend insulting a person's intelligence, regardless of the word used. A better example would be referring to something inanimate like a company policy as "retarded". Even better is the purging of words like "master" from software. Or actors having to apologize for their Halloween costumes. It seems like every major comedian is complaining bitterly about political correctness lately, save perhaps for certain partisan ones.
Talanes 6y ago
Which makes all of the claims you and the others have made as to what that data actually means basically useless. All we know is that a lot of people think some definition of political correctness is some definition of problem. That's barely information.

camdenlock 6y ago

It means conforming your speech to current political trends.

chillwaves 6y ago
Can I have an example?
- aleister_777 6y ago
  Whitelisting/Blacklisting. Change of innocuous and unrelated terminology in source code and documentation without any technical justification. No shortage of those examples throughout the industry and open source.
  - chillwaves 6y ago
    So you are saying people have a problem with the term "blacklisting" ? I guess I live a sheltered life then. Nothing like this has remotely ever come up and I live in a major metro.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Many codebases are moving away from that term. Here's two large efforts that I am familiar with: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/styleguide/inclusive_code.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/styl... https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=1o9zxsxl https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=1o9zxsxl
    - ev1 6y ago
      Yes. You can find PR's on Github and if the maintainer rejects it, accusations of racism and hate crimes. The acceptable term is something like allowlist/denylist/blocklist.
      - tdeck 6y ago
        I've seen the discussion come up about changing these terms and whether it was worth doing. Not once have I seen it turn into an "accusation" of racism against a person, much less hate crimes, so I don't think that paints an accurate picture.