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I couldn't agree more. I've been watching this shift in acceptable standards in America move from intent to perception with considerable consternation. It seems

I couldn't agree more. I've been watching this shift in acceptable standards in America move from intent to perception with considerable consternation. It seems that an absence of malintent in language is no longer sufficient defense. If one perceives the language as offensive, it is. This is an absurd standard because with a sufficient audience size, someone will find something offensive. This standard is a de facto end to all discussion. It only takes one hyper sensitive audience member (legitimate or troll) to shut down all discussion. This is not a sustainable strategy for society. It is of course impossible for algorithms to parse perceived intent by the lowest common denominator, and attempting to do so is nothing more than defensive legal posturing.

watwut 5y ago
Because "intent" rule was easy to abused and was in fact abused often. Directly by people seeking or enjoying to be "toxic" (in loose meaning). All you have to do is to pretend little bit you are clueless again and again, despite being told again and again. And to shut up targets - "he/she does not mean that", "he/she is just insecure", "you know how he/she is". If you cant prove intent, you had no grounds to even talk about that that person is doing to you again and again.
- Gareth321 5y ago
  I don't contend that. I'm arguing that the cost of the move to a perception based standard is far higher than the former. I'm arguing that it is, in effect, completely unenforceable, arbitrary, and destructive to not just individuals, but society as a whole. Free speech is not without cost, but it has been successfully utilised to everyone's benefit for hundreds of years. I can only surmise that those advocating for this have never read about or understood the importance of the Enlightenment. They don't understand the horror of living under a social regime where the powerful control language and effectively thought. They don't understand why the ability to risk offense is critical for democracy, science, and social progress. Eliminating free speech will harm the most vulnerable in society; not the most powerful.
  - forgingahead 5y ago
    I can only surmise that those advocating for this have never read about or understood the importance of the Enlightenment. They don't understand the horror of living under a social regime where the powerful control language and effectively thought. They don't understand why the ability to risk offense is critical for democracy, science, and social progress. Eliminating free speech will harm the most vulnerable in society; not the most powerful. You are certainly correct - unfortunately the people burning the books are not the ones reading or writing them (even if they pretend to do so, with advanced credentials or padded resumes).
  - watwut 5y ago
    > Free speech is not without cost, but it has been successfully utilised to everyone's benefit for hundreds of years. American history itself had tons and tons of situation where people risked a lot for saying things - including death. All within the scope you talk about. The time span you talk about include runup to civil war, civil war, reconstruction - all of which were full of political violence. This also when dueling was the thing. Where men of means were expected to shoot each other over words. If you did not, you was effectively over in that town. And the line between "duel worthy" offense and not could be very thin. > Eliminating free speech will harm the most vulnerable in society; not the most powerful. Moreover, we are not talking here about legal standard at all. Neither was legal standard EVER. You could legally seek to insult and offend people as much as you wanted. Nobody cared about intent. This is about when people say "you are jerk". There is threat to free speech, especially with new proposed laws, but it has zero to do with intent vs effect.
    - Gareth321 5y ago
      >American history itself had tons and tons of situation where people risked a lot for saying things - including death. You would think we would learn from these examples and make offensive speech more acceptable, rather than less. I'm not sure how you conflated legality with social acceptance. My arguments center around the later.
    - mbg721 5y ago
      I don't know that you can take dueling at face-value; dueling got to the point where you were expected to show up to the duel, but actually shooting someone dead was classless and would have made you a social pariah.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  This is a tough problem, because we are also experiencing people who take offence in a toxic manner. E.g. people who object to a statement because it might possibly be offensive to another group, despite members of that other group being present and not being offended. Clearly they are doing this out of the same enjoyment of other people's discomfort that you describe.
  - smcl 5y ago
    I think some people do go a little far, but I don't think everyone's doing this out of some sadistic desire to watch people squirm. More likely they're just a bit too earnest and as a result try to correct others and overcompensate. Most people here have been an annoying college-aged kid at some point with an axe to grind on some specific point, we should remember that. That said, it's interesting this has come up during a discussion about how the intent behind what someone said is often either misunderstood or discarded.
    - marcus_holmes 5y ago
      I agree, but there seems to be no similar leeway for people who have said offensive things with no intent to be offensive. Any speech that could be construed as offensive is presumed to be malicious. So it seems fair to assume that taking offence needlessly is also malicious.
      - Chris2048 5y ago
        There's another aspect too: mysterious third-party echo chambers deciding what's now offensive. The black/whitelist thing is a good example; very often the topic is introduced as if the issue is resolved "we got together and had a discussion, and yes it is offensive" and suddenly everyone not present in that conversation has to accept this verdict. Other times, you get the "well it's so very easy to make this small change, it's practically rude (or suspicious) not to" - a completely wrong sentiment for many reasons, but easy to make you look difficult for arguing about.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
pydry 5y ago
Intent is always difficult and often impossible to judge. There is no happy medium here, particularly since those seeking to offend and to wolfwhistle to signal their allegiance to other people who hate your race (for example) will try to couch their terms to hide within the shadows of plausible deniability unless they feel completely safe. It's more a question of how many false positives and false negatives your culture is prepared to tolerate.
- mcherm 5y ago
  Of course, offense is just as difficult and impossible to judge as intent. In both cases, one can simply ask the individual, "Were you offended?" or "What was your intent?" But biased or motivated itself reporting makes each unreliable. I certainly agree with your final conclusion: it depends on what society is willing to tolerate in terms of false positives and in terms of false negatives. And particularly, the balance between those two kinds of errors.
  - yeetaccount4 5y ago
    Anyone can say they’re offended without any cost to themselves. It’s ‘cheap’, and the outcome is often very ‘expensive’ for the offender. You could even make the case that virtue is derived from being offended. This disproportionality invites bad faith. I’ve stopped caring about people’s offense.
    - zehaeva 5y ago
      Anyone can say they didn't mean it that way/they were joking without any cost to themselves as well. Not to say that there isn't anything wrong with how people have been increasingly incensed in the last few decades, but that's basically what it was like in the 90s and before. Someone was like, "whoa dude what you said wasn't cool" was met with "it was just a joke". Your reasoning cuts both ways I think.
      - yeetaccount4 5y ago
        It doesn’t cost the other party anything to say you were joking. Saying you’re offended can lead to lost economic opportunity for somebody.
tenebrisalietum 5y ago
Standards based on perception sounds ugly at first, but fundamentally it's an expression that you don't have an automatic entitlement to communicate with me. Should a big external entity like government or companies control that? No. Bu I'm totally fine for accepting complete responsibility for filtering my communications intake. I just wish that ... - all social media implemented simple word filters. A word is on YOUR list, the post or chat line doesn't make it to your page/chat. It'd be awesome if these lists were exportable, syncable, and tradeable online. And I wish the AI revolution would benefit me personally instead of companies. I would like an AI that censors on my behalf only if and when I want it to, and a personalized AI that I can train to flag accounts/people that I don't want to interact with based on language. I would also like some mechanism to indicate how much is getting caught in the AI-generated filters and allow me to stop or modify its behavior. Once the AI is doing mostly what I want, I would like to be able to share it. I don't know how that would work. - Group owners should have similar mechanisms for all posts in a group.
simiones 5y ago
> I've been watching this shift in acceptable standards in America move from intent to perception with considerable consternation. I think that both intent and perception are important, and they are both judged in the more modern understanding of "toxicity". Malintent is a direct "strike". But, lack of malintent doesn't mean that perceived offense should be entirely ignored. Let's imagine a scenario: as in the example above, an English person says "can I burn a fag" and an American person believes they are casually thinking about hurting a gay man. The English person meant no harm; but, the American person is not at fault for not understanding this. They can complain, and the English person should explain their intent. The American person should learn and remember the meaning of this expression in British English, and the English person will need to remember that this expression may sound offensive to American listeners, and avoid it in such scenarios. Basically, the important aspect is that a misunderstanding is not always the fault of the listener (which the intent-only model suggests: you took offense, but I didn't mean that, so you're silly for feeling offended). It is of course also not only the fault of the speaker (which the perception-only model would suggest: I felt offended by what you said, so it doesn't matter what you meant, you owe me an apology or more). Both parties are involved in a miscommunication, if indeed there was one.
- shrikant 5y ago
  > [...] an English person says "can I burn a fag" and an American person believes they are casually thinking about hurting a gay man. FYI, it's combination of difficult-to-discern keming with the default font on HN, and your unfamiliarity with the phrase, but it's actually "BUM A FAG" and not "BURN A FAG".
  - simiones 5y ago
    Yes, you're right, thanks for correcting that! Incidentally, did you intentionally write keming instead of kerning?
    - shrikant 5y ago
      Yes :) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/keming https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/keming
userbinator 5y ago
I've been watching this shift in acceptable standards in America move from intent to perception with considerable consternation. I don't really want to take the discussion in this direction, but note that almost all of that "shift" comes from one side of the political spectrum.
mbrodersen 5y ago
Yep you are absolutely right. People routinely get offended by anything that they don’t agree with, and often interpret whatever is said using the worst possible out of context straw man interpretation. I personally get offended when PC advocates whip themselves into a frenzy over the slightest misunderstanding. So I guess I should blame those PC advocates for harming me?

watwut 5y ago

Because "intent" rule was easy to abused and was in fact abused often. Directly by people seeking or enjoying to be "toxic" (in loose meaning). All you have to do is to pretend little bit you are clueless again and again, despite being told again and again. And to shut up targets - "he/she does not mean that", "he/she is just insecure", "you know how he/she is". If you cant prove intent, you had no grounds to even talk about that that person is doing to you again and again.

Gareth321 5y ago
I don't contend that. I'm arguing that the cost of the move to a perception based standard is far higher than the former. I'm arguing that it is, in effect, completely unenforceable, arbitrary, and destructive to not just individuals, but society as a whole. Free speech is not without cost, but it has been successfully utilised to everyone's benefit for hundreds of years. I can only surmise that those advocating for this have never read about or understood the importance of the Enlightenment. They don't understand the horror of living under a social regime where the powerful control language and effectively thought. They don't understand why the ability to risk offense is critical for democracy, science, and social progress. Eliminating free speech will harm the most vulnerable in society; not the most powerful.
- forgingahead 5y ago
  I can only surmise that those advocating for this have never read about or understood the importance of the Enlightenment. They don't understand the horror of living under a social regime where the powerful control language and effectively thought. They don't understand why the ability to risk offense is critical for democracy, science, and social progress. Eliminating free speech will harm the most vulnerable in society; not the most powerful. You are certainly correct - unfortunately the people burning the books are not the ones reading or writing them (even if they pretend to do so, with advanced credentials or padded resumes).
- watwut 5y ago
  > Free speech is not without cost, but it has been successfully utilised to everyone's benefit for hundreds of years. American history itself had tons and tons of situation where people risked a lot for saying things - including death. All within the scope you talk about. The time span you talk about include runup to civil war, civil war, reconstruction - all of which were full of political violence. This also when dueling was the thing. Where men of means were expected to shoot each other over words. If you did not, you was effectively over in that town. And the line between "duel worthy" offense and not could be very thin. > Eliminating free speech will harm the most vulnerable in society; not the most powerful. Moreover, we are not talking here about legal standard at all. Neither was legal standard EVER. You could legally seek to insult and offend people as much as you wanted. Nobody cared about intent. This is about when people say "you are jerk". There is threat to free speech, especially with new proposed laws, but it has zero to do with intent vs effect.
  - Gareth321 5y ago
    >American history itself had tons and tons of situation where people risked a lot for saying things - including death. You would think we would learn from these examples and make offensive speech more acceptable, rather than less. I'm not sure how you conflated legality with social acceptance. My arguments center around the later.
  - mbg721 5y ago
    I don't know that you can take dueling at face-value; dueling got to the point where you were expected to show up to the duel, but actually shooting someone dead was classless and would have made you a social pariah.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
This is a tough problem, because we are also experiencing people who take offence in a toxic manner. E.g. people who object to a statement because it might possibly be offensive to another group, despite members of that other group being present and not being offended. Clearly they are doing this out of the same enjoyment of other people's discomfort that you describe.
- smcl 5y ago
  I think some people do go a little far, but I don't think everyone's doing this out of some sadistic desire to watch people squirm. More likely they're just a bit too earnest and as a result try to correct others and overcompensate. Most people here have been an annoying college-aged kid at some point with an axe to grind on some specific point, we should remember that. That said, it's interesting this has come up during a discussion about how the intent behind what someone said is often either misunderstood or discarded.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    I agree, but there seems to be no similar leeway for people who have said offensive things with no intent to be offensive. Any speech that could be construed as offensive is presumed to be malicious. So it seems fair to assume that taking offence needlessly is also malicious.
    - Chris2048 5y ago
      There's another aspect too: mysterious third-party echo chambers deciding what's now offensive. The black/whitelist thing is a good example; very often the topic is introduced as if the issue is resolved "we got together and had a discussion, and yes it is offensive" and suddenly everyone not present in that conversation has to accept this verdict. Other times, you get the "well it's so very easy to make this small change, it's practically rude (or suspicious) not to" - a completely wrong sentiment for many reasons, but easy to make you look difficult for arguing about.
  - southerntofu 5y ago

pydry 5y ago

Intent is always difficult and often impossible to judge. There is no happy medium here, particularly since those seeking to offend and to wolfwhistle to signal their allegiance to other people who hate your race (for example) will try to couch their terms to hide within the shadows of plausible deniability unless they feel completely safe. It's more a question of how many false positives and false negatives your culture is prepared to tolerate.

mcherm 5y ago
Of course, offense is just as difficult and impossible to judge as intent. In both cases, one can simply ask the individual, "Were you offended?" or "What was your intent?" But biased or motivated itself reporting makes each unreliable. I certainly agree with your final conclusion: it depends on what society is willing to tolerate in terms of false positives and in terms of false negatives. And particularly, the balance between those two kinds of errors.
- yeetaccount4 5y ago
  Anyone can say they’re offended without any cost to themselves. It’s ‘cheap’, and the outcome is often very ‘expensive’ for the offender. You could even make the case that virtue is derived from being offended. This disproportionality invites bad faith. I’ve stopped caring about people’s offense.
  - zehaeva 5y ago
    Anyone can say they didn't mean it that way/they were joking without any cost to themselves as well. Not to say that there isn't anything wrong with how people have been increasingly incensed in the last few decades, but that's basically what it was like in the 90s and before. Someone was like, "whoa dude what you said wasn't cool" was met with "it was just a joke". Your reasoning cuts both ways I think.
    - yeetaccount4 5y ago
      It doesn’t cost the other party anything to say you were joking. Saying you’re offended can lead to lost economic opportunity for somebody.

tenebrisalietum 5y ago

Standards based on perception sounds ugly at first, but fundamentally it's an expression that you don't have an automatic entitlement to communicate with me. Should a big external entity like government or companies control that? No. Bu I'm totally fine for accepting complete responsibility for filtering my communications intake. I just wish that ... - all social media implemented simple word filters. A word is on YOUR list, the post or chat line doesn't make it to your page/chat. It'd be awesome if these lists were exportable, syncable, and tradeable online. And I wish the AI revolution would benefit me personally instead of companies. I would like an AI that censors on my behalf only if and when I want it to, and a personalized AI that I can train to flag accounts/people that I don't want to interact with based on language. I would also like some mechanism to indicate how much is getting caught in the AI-generated filters and allow me to stop or modify its behavior. Once the AI is doing mostly what I want, I would like to be able to share it. I don't know how that would work. - Group owners should have similar mechanisms for all posts in a group.

simiones 5y ago

> I've been watching this shift in acceptable standards in America move from intent to perception with considerable consternation. I think that both intent and perception are important, and they are both judged in the more modern understanding of "toxicity". Malintent is a direct "strike". But, lack of malintent doesn't mean that perceived offense should be entirely ignored. Let's imagine a scenario: as in the example above, an English person says "can I burn a fag" and an American person believes they are casually thinking about hurting a gay man. The English person meant no harm; but, the American person is not at fault for not understanding this. They can complain, and the English person should explain their intent. The American person should learn and remember the meaning of this expression in British English, and the English person will need to remember that this expression may sound offensive to American listeners, and avoid it in such scenarios. Basically, the important aspect is that a misunderstanding is not always the fault of the listener (which the intent-only model suggests: you took offense, but I didn't mean that, so you're silly for feeling offended). It is of course also not only the fault of the speaker (which the perception-only model would suggest: I felt offended by what you said, so it doesn't matter what you meant, you owe me an apology or more). Both parties are involved in a miscommunication, if indeed there was one.

shrikant 5y ago
> [...] an English person says "can I burn a fag" and an American person believes they are casually thinking about hurting a gay man. FYI, it's combination of difficult-to-discern keming with the default font on HN, and your unfamiliarity with the phrase, but it's actually "BUM A FAG" and not "BURN A FAG".
- simiones 5y ago
  Yes, you're right, thanks for correcting that! Incidentally, did you intentionally write keming instead of kerning?
  - shrikant 5y ago
    Yes :) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/keming https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/keming

userbinator 5y ago

I've been watching this shift in acceptable standards in America move from intent to perception with considerable consternation. I don't really want to take the discussion in this direction, but note that almost all of that "shift" comes from one side of the political spectrum.

mbrodersen 5y ago

Yep you are absolutely right. People routinely get offended by anything that they don’t agree with, and often interpret whatever is said using the worst possible out of context straw man interpretation. I personally get offended when PC advocates whip themselves into a frenzy over the slightest misunderstanding. So I guess I should blame those PC advocates for harming me?