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"Human Lambdas"… "Mechanical Turk"… you're fully aware these are horrible names for horrible ideas, right?

by jdub 5y ago

Closi 5y ago
This is how the sausage get's made. If you work inside the meat industry, the room where animals get slaughtered is called the kill chamber. It's not called the "cattle life transition chamber" because it is self-aware and it's better to call a spade a spade.
- thraxil 5y ago
  That might not be a great example. The meat industry is pretty notorious for euphemisms. They're usually called "meat processing plants" rather than "slaughterhouses". When farmers need to conduct a mass extermination (more officially referred to as "depopulation"), one common technique is to shut off the air supply to the barn which causes the heat to rise so the animals suffocate and roast to death. The technical term for that technique is "ventilation shutdown". And that's all without getting into whether terms like "meat", "sausage", "beef", "pork", etc. are just polite ways of saying "parts of animal corpses" and "livestock" as "animals that we feel are acceptable to kill."
  - Closi 5y ago
    I think that is a difference between internal and external communication. Within the industry in the UK at least, meat processing plants can be both 'kill-facilities' and 'no-kill facilities' which is specifying if they have a slaughterhouse in them or not, but the term meat processing plant includes both. The site operators will not shy away from what is happening - you can't when you are in the room when it happens, and it's actually worse for workers if you de-associate from it. That doesn't mean when you write a press release you use these terms. External communication gets fluffed-up for the rest of the world, and you don't write 'kill facility' on your address in Google Maps because you don't want to get splattered in red paint.
- clarkevans 5y ago
  We don't have to make sausage.
  - Closi 5y ago
    As long as people are buying sausage, people will make and sell it. And to extend the metaphor beyond where it should probably go, products taste better when sausage is added and people don't always need to know the ingredients. Your data will have gone through something very similar to this a million times - it might have been validating your photo on a dating site or transcribing your receipt for expenses, but these sort of use-cases would not be done as cleanly if it wasn't for human in the loop.
- musingsole 5y ago
  > it's better to call a spade a spade. There are slaughterhouses that have different jargon, but even "slaughterhouse" shows your point. I'd put out there that slaughterhouses don't have the best track record of humane treatment and when efforts are made to improve, they often backslide into old habits (even at the cost of productivity). All of this is about mindset. So, picking a different name and not encouraging your butchers to see themselves as executioners would probably help. (Temple Grandin's books provide this insight)
- nathancahill 5y ago
  > it's better to call a spade a spade Speaking of political correctness..
  - intergalplan 5y ago
    It's fine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_a_spade_a_spade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_a_spade_a_spade Any concern over it is very recent and ahistorical. Like the false etymologies of "rule of thumb", but far less well-established (and hopefully it remains poorly-established—there's plenty of justified language-policing, we don't need to make up reasons to do more of it)
  - Closi 5y ago
    > Speaking of political correctness. Ironically your statement is an example of “political correctness gone mad” for me at least. It’s a metaphor about shovels, there isn’t anything politically incorrect about it. Someone has just dreamed up an alternative meaning to be offended about.
xwdv 5y ago
Maybe a better term would be “micro freelancing”.
prepend 5y ago
Mechanical Turk is on of the best product names I’ve ever seen. It’s accurate. It has a clever story behind it that almost no one knew beforehand. I like it because it sparks curiosity and it pays off when people learn. As opposed to other “quirky” names that aren’t clever and are intrinsicly meaningless.
the_local_host 5y ago
Applying "human" as an adjective to something else seems almost guaranteed to sound unkind to humans. No one wants to be a "human [something_not_human]".

"Human Lambdas"… "Mechanical Turk"… you're fully aware these are horrible names for horrible ideas, right?

by jdub 5y ago

"Human Lambdas"… "Mechanical Turk"… you're fully aware these are horrible names for horrible ideas, right?

This is how the sausage get's made. If you work inside the meat industry, the room where animals get slaughtered is called the kill chamber. It's not called the "cattle life transition chamber" because it is self-aware and it's better to call a spade a spade.

thraxil 5y ago
That might not be a great example. The meat industry is pretty notorious for euphemisms. They're usually called "meat processing plants" rather than "slaughterhouses". When farmers need to conduct a mass extermination (more officially referred to as "depopulation"), one common technique is to shut off the air supply to the barn which causes the heat to rise so the animals suffocate and roast to death. The technical term for that technique is "ventilation shutdown". And that's all without getting into whether terms like "meat", "sausage", "beef", "pork", etc. are just polite ways of saying "parts of animal corpses" and "livestock" as "animals that we feel are acceptable to kill."
- Closi 5y ago
  I think that is a difference between internal and external communication. Within the industry in the UK at least, meat processing plants can be both 'kill-facilities' and 'no-kill facilities' which is specifying if they have a slaughterhouse in them or not, but the term meat processing plant includes both. The site operators will not shy away from what is happening - you can't when you are in the room when it happens, and it's actually worse for workers if you de-associate from it. That doesn't mean when you write a press release you use these terms. External communication gets fluffed-up for the rest of the world, and you don't write 'kill facility' on your address in Google Maps because you don't want to get splattered in red paint.
clarkevans 5y ago
We don't have to make sausage.
- Closi 5y ago
  As long as people are buying sausage, people will make and sell it. And to extend the metaphor beyond where it should probably go, products taste better when sausage is added and people don't always need to know the ingredients. Your data will have gone through something very similar to this a million times - it might have been validating your photo on a dating site or transcribing your receipt for expenses, but these sort of use-cases would not be done as cleanly if it wasn't for human in the loop.
musingsole 5y ago
> it's better to call a spade a spade. There are slaughterhouses that have different jargon, but even "slaughterhouse" shows your point. I'd put out there that slaughterhouses don't have the best track record of humane treatment and when efforts are made to improve, they often backslide into old habits (even at the cost of productivity). All of this is about mindset. So, picking a different name and not encouraging your butchers to see themselves as executioners would probably help. (Temple Grandin's books provide this insight)
nathancahill 5y ago
> it's better to call a spade a spade Speaking of political correctness..
- intergalplan 5y ago
  It's fine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_a_spade_a_spade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_a_spade_a_spade Any concern over it is very recent and ahistorical. Like the false etymologies of "rule of thumb", but far less well-established (and hopefully it remains poorly-established—there's plenty of justified language-policing, we don't need to make up reasons to do more of it)
- Closi 5y ago
  > Speaking of political correctness. Ironically your statement is an example of “political correctness gone mad” for me at least. It’s a metaphor about shovels, there isn’t anything politically incorrect about it. Someone has just dreamed up an alternative meaning to be offended about.

xwdv 5y ago

Maybe a better term would be “micro freelancing”.

prepend 5y ago

Mechanical Turk is on of the best product names I’ve ever seen. It’s accurate. It has a clever story behind it that almost no one knew beforehand. I like it because it sparks curiosity and it pays off when people learn. As opposed to other “quirky” names that aren’t clever and are intrinsicly meaningless.

the_local_host 5y ago

Applying "human" as an adjective to something else seems almost guaranteed to sound unkind to humans. No one wants to be a "human [something_not_human]".