6 ms·

> 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 ar

by lin83 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - rcoveson 4y 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 4y 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"
        rcoveson 4y ago
        German is an English word that English speakers use to describe Germans. It doesn't have any etymological relationship with the word that Germans use to describe themselves. Latino and Latina are Spanish words that American English speakers have adopted in the last ~80 years due to the significant intermingling of Spanish and English speakers. Their use spans a spectrum of Spanish-only speakers, bilingual speakers, and English-only speakers. Not only does the English word "Latino" (my eyes roll typing that) have an etymological relationship with the Spanish word "Latino", their etymologies haven't even diverged. English speakers who took a Spanish class in high school even pronounce Latino in the Spanish way, "lah-TEE-noh" instead of "luh-TEE-no", because they think of it as a Spanish word.
- dizzant 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
      Using that example, who does the suggestion help: the writer, or the recipient?
      - otterley 4y ago
        Why not both?
        4y ago
- tmnvix 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
How there it fix my writing. Their should be absolutely no red underline anywhere because I wrote it.
- josephg 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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)

by lin83 4y ago

otterley 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - rcoveson 4y 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 4y 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"
      - rcoveson 4y ago
        German is an English word that English speakers use to describe Germans. It doesn't have any etymological relationship with the word that Germans use to describe themselves. Latino and Latina are Spanish words that American English speakers have adopted in the last ~80 years due to the significant intermingling of Spanish and English speakers. Their use spans a spectrum of Spanish-only speakers, bilingual speakers, and English-only speakers. Not only does the English word "Latino" (my eyes roll typing that) have an etymological relationship with the Spanish word "Latino", their etymologies haven't even diverged. English speakers who took a Spanish class in high school even pronounce Latino in the Spanish way, "lah-TEE-noh" instead of "luh-TEE-no", because they think of it as a Spanish word.
dizzant 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
    Using that example, who does the suggestion help: the writer, or the recipient?
    - otterley 4y ago
      Why not both?
      - 4y ago
tmnvix 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago

How there it fix my writing. Their should be absolutely no red underline anywhere because I wrote it.

josephg 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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)