7 ms·

Oh, come on. It's not telling you what to change, it's giving you suggestions. Even the suggestions can be turned off. Most paying customers of Google are using

• fknorangesite 5y ago
  > Language (like everything) has become politicized It wasn't ever not politicized.
  • paulgb 5y ago
    You're right. Maybe I should have said hyper-politicized.
• lin83 5y ago
  > It's not telling you what to change, it's giving you suggestions. By giving you suggestions it's telling you that it thinks you are wrong. There is no way around that. It's a judgement plain and simple and that changes people's behaviour. > Even the suggestions can be turned off. Let's be honest. No one changes the defaults. > Language (like everything) has become politicized, ANd now my word editor is picking a side...
  • otterley 5y ago
    Can you give an example of where it is making a clearly bad suggestion, and what the adverse impact of adopting it would be?
    • mr_toad 5y ago
      Imagine working on a tax policy and having a proposed tax on “landlords” changed to a proposed tax on “property owners”. If that slipped through and was made public it could be a career limiting mistake.
      • camdat 5y ago
        Imagine working on a tax policy and having a proposed tax on "moles" changed to a proposed tax on "holes". If that slipped through and was made public it could be a career limiting mistake. Thankfully HN wasn't around when spell-check was introduced.
    • vimy 5y ago
      I don't know if it's on Google's list, would surprise me if it wasn't, but most Latinos find Latinx offensive. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/many-latinos-say-latinx-offends-or-bothers-them-here-s-ncna1285916 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/many-latinos-say-latin...
      • lukeschlather 5y ago
        That poll says most prefer Hispanic, it also says most do not find Latinx offensive. It also seems like a bit of a push poll since it doesn't ask any questions about whether or not they find "Latino" offensive. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/06/hispanic-voters-latinx-term-523776 https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/06/hispanic-voters-lat...
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
        • rcoveson 5y ago
          Latinx is revolting, full stop. Nobody who speaks (using the lips and tongue) Spanish as their only language will adopt it. Spanish isn't the jumbled mess that English is. It has a lot of rhyme and reason to it. While not without exceptions, its rules are generally quite reliable. "inx" is a not a Spanish syllable. You can't pluralize it. You can't rhyme with it. Hell, you can't barely pronounce it. I get so tired of people popping up to defend the idea as if it's not so bad, invariably citing data collected from bilingual, second-generation US immigrants. Stop. If it's important to you, then at least have the sense to argue for "Latines", which at least kind of makes sense and doesn't sound like something invented by an English speaker who had only ever seen Spanish written, not spoken.
          • sangnoir 5y ago
            > Nobody who speaks (using the lips and tongue) Spanish as their only language will adopt it. Your argument isn't cogent to me: it's an English word used in an English context. Your line of reasoning could be used to argue that "Anglo-Saxon"[1] is not a legitimate term because the Germanic tribes didn't use the term to refer to themselves. 1. The same goes for "German", "Chinese" or "Belter"
    • dizzant 5y ago
      I work in academia. Frequently, I need to convey various levels of confidence about facts when writing emails to my colleagues. Microsoft Outlooks suggestions are more than a mere annoyance on this front. They consistently suggest that "probably" and "perhaps" and "maybe" and "almost certainly" should be removed from my writing precisely because they convey uncertainty. That is why I wrote them in the first place! If I knew a result confidently, I would say so. Please, let's not have another venue algorithmically pressuring everyone to uniformly remove nuance from communication. There is no one-size-fits-all threshold for "too wordy" or "too passive" or anything else with regard to language. Context is everything.
      • jonny_eh 5y ago
        > They consistently suggest that "probably" and "perhaps" and "maybe" and "almost certainly" should be removed from my writing That just sounds like a poorly implemented feature.
    • registeredcorn 5y ago
      I'm not entirely sure if your question would fit this criteria, but it sounds awfully close to a Negative proof fallacy: https://logfall.wordpress.com/negative-proof-fallacy https://logfall.wordpress.com/negative-proof-fallacy Generally speaking, when a wide sweeping change is going to take effect, the onus of proof about why it should be done is on those advocating in favor of the change, not on those defending the standard. That is, "How is this change useful?" vs. "Why wouldn't this change be useful?" The latter assumes the change is good and asks for proof which cannot exist yet, while the former focuses the questioning on the underlying value of the change prior to implementation. This particular change is a complex one. It clearly has w*stern politics crammed into its carcass, which are tedious to read, and doubly so to speak on. For that reason, I'll try and avoid such topic. Besides, I tend to assume your question is asked in good faith, so I would simply ask: Can you give an example of where it making a "good" suggestion is helpful? Under optimal circumstances, the ability to "help" the writer would be subjective, right? Under suboptimal conditions, the suggestion would be: unwanted, unneeded, or wrong.
      • otterley 5y ago
        > Can you give an example of where it making a "good" suggestion is helpful? Sure: Upon writing, "That guy is a loser," a response from the computer: "You're using using emotionally-loaded and ambiguous language. Consider revising to provide constructive criticism." Ideally, the feedback a computer would provide would be similar in scope and wisdom that feedback from an experienced human editor would provide.
        • registeredcorn 5y ago
          Using that example, who does the suggestion help: the writer, or the recipient?
          • otterley 5y ago
            Why not both?
            • 5y ago
    • tmnvix 5y ago
      There's an example tweet where Google suggests that 'landlord' is not inclusive and 'property owner' or 'proprietor' could be used instead. This will encourage people to avoid the word 'landlord'. They will start using 'property owner'. I'm not okay with that. A homeowner is a property owner. A landlord rents out the property they own. The terms shouldn't be conflated like that (as much as many landlords might want them to be).
      • dan-robertson 5y ago
        I agree that sometimes a landlord might be subletting something and therefore they might not own it, but what you write is mostly ridiculous: if a landlord owns the property, they are the property owner.
        • leereeves 5y ago
          I think you missed the point. In math terms: landlords are a proper subset of property owners, not equivalent. Using the latter term instead of the former is likely to change the meaning of the sentence. For example: "landlords should pay more taxes" is very different from "property owners should pay more taxes".
          • dan-robertson 5y ago
            Your explanation doesn’t square with the weird comment about landlords wanting to be conflated with property owners, which I read as meaning that the parent thought they weren’t subsets.
            • tmnvix 5y ago
              Apologies if I was unclear. I meant 'conflate' as in 'treat as equivalent'. As for landlords perhaps wanting to be treated as equivalent to property owners, I think the previous poster gave a suitable example of why this might be the case. In many places landlords are being targeted politically (rightly or wrongly). It would be to their political advantage if all reference to them was conflated with regular owner occupiers by use of the term 'property owners'.
  • kaba0 5y ago
    How there it fix my writing. Their should be absolutely no red underline anywhere because I wrote it.
    • josephg 5y ago
      This is a cute comment, but don't muddy the waters. There's a big difference between correcting "their" / "there" and telling me off for using the word "landlord" because someone in a foreign country wants to police how my country uses our native tongue. "Everything is inherently political" is no excuse for making things even more political.
      • sangnoir 5y ago
        You can turn it off. I suspect some people in this thread think no one should have this feature; and it should never have been shipped, so the arguments are rather indirect. Ironically, this thread is part of the culture wars commenters are claiming to be against.
        • josephg 5y ago
          > I suspect some people in this thread think no one should have this feature I think this feature should be opt-in rather than opt-out. If its turned on for everyone, it should only promote non-controversial suggestions, like the spelling of "their"/"there"/"they're". You would probably balk if google docs made "suggestions" to call the war in Ukraine a military exercise. Or if it suggested removing any criticism of the CCP because some people may take offense. Scolding me for using the word "landlord" here in Australia (where its a gender neutral term) feels to me like the same sort of unwanted intrusion into my mental life. This feature makes me really angry. What will Google do when Russia or China ask them to add their own set of locality-specific "suggestions" to google docs?
          • sangnoir 5y ago
            > This feature makes me really angry. Why? Is it because it's political? I also experienced a Google's Photos feature I thought should have been opt-in, as it wasn't working well for me (auto-labeling in its early days) - but it didn't make me angry; I simply turned it off. I genuinely would like to know why this change is triggering to so many people, in case my assumption is off the mark (i.e. Google is entering the culture war fray on the "wrong" side)
• ipaddr 5y ago
  Proper english grammar and left leaning political grammar are very different examples. If Microsoft introduced religious grammar suggestions it might offend a few people and provide benefits to others.
  • paulgb 5y ago
    > Proper english grammar That there is such a thing as “proper english grammar” is itself inherently contentious and political. DFW's review of Authority and American Usage unpacks this a bit, if I recall. It's hard to find online because it's still under copyright, but I found this: https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWAuthorityAndAmericanUsage2005.pdf https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWAuthorityAndAmericanU...
    • DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
      With all due respect to descriptivists, when engaging in any sort of formal communication (written or spoken), prescriptive grammar matters. There are "proper" and "improper" ways of communicating on a formal level. "Ain't" is a perfectly normal construction in some dialects of English, but if you use it in a formal setting, people will notice and will think it's strange. It could be useful for a product like Google Docs to tell you not to use dialectal grammar like "ain't." If you're writing a formal document, you probably want to avoid that kind of language. However, if Google Docs goes beyond that and starts telling you to replace completely normal words like "blacklist" with woke alternatives like "blocklist," that feels more like an attempt to establish some sort of religious orthodoxy. It gives the same vibes as if Google Docs were to start trying to push Evangelical religious sensibilities on its users. It's not helpful, unless you think your audience is extremely uptight and you want to avoid upsetting them.
      • JoshTriplett 5y ago
        Descriptivist language can absolutely describe things like "ain't", by saying "here's what it means, and also here's how you'll be perceived if you say it". Similarly, descriptivist language can tell you what people mean when they say "irregardless", and also tell you that it's commonly perceived as incorrect usage. (That's more useful than just saying "that's not a word".) You can look up a slur in the dictionary, and you'll find it there, along with some history and context and how the word comes across to people. Descriptivist language includes "how formal is this", "how offensive is this", "how correct is this", and so on. It's useful, especially for people who aren't already steeped in cultural norms, to have a reference for "how might I come across if I say this". Words simultaneously communicate meaning and connotation, and it's helpful to understand both the meaning and the connotation. People aren't going to misunderstand the author of a text that says "blacklist"; they're going to understand just fine, perhaps including ways that the author would prefer not to have been perceived, or perhaps in ways the author intends to be perceived. Tooling like this won't change the minds of people who are determined to be offensive (with or without the added assertions that they don't think it should be considered offensive). The point is to inform people how they may come across. It would be incorrect to say "this word is universally considered offensive", just as it would be incorrect to not label the word at all; it'd be more correct to say "this word's status is [disputed/transitional], with [an increased trend towards being considered non-inclusive], and consequent [doubling down by conservative language users]; consider avoiding due to any or all of offense, controversy, or politics".