8 ms·

They apparently spider and scan their own websites for "harmful" language: I just find this wild. How and when did language itself become so dangerous to this

They apparently spider and scan their own websites for "harmful" language: I just find this wild. How and when did language itself become so dangerous to this degree? Along with most adults in my social circle, I care and think about my health, my family, my friends, my work, my dog, my environment, my community, etc. I could not give a flying fuck about language policing. Language isn't going to protect me on my bike from speeding cars on my street. Language isn't going to fill the dams in a drier and drier California. Language isn't going to do jackshit about 400+ ppm CO2 levels. And on and on. These language policing idiots, and I am choosing my language here, are fucking clueless about the real challenges we face as individuals and as a society. Even worse, they are redirecting valuable resources to stupider and stupider bullshit. How do we close this Pandora's box? How do we go back to debating meaningful problems and solutions and tell these language policing idiots to do something useful? https://itcommunity.stanford.edu/news/poc-it-2022-progress-and-looking-ahead-2023 https://itcommunity.stanford.edu/news/poc-it-2022-progress-a... "EHLI Scans In addition to the educational website, EHLI involves scanning Stanford University domains and sites to determine where and how identified harmful language is being used. The end goal is to help individuals and units eliminate harmful language that could be perpetuating stereotypes, inequality, violence, and racism. Seven web domains authorized by the CIOC were scanned in a pilot phase to test the process of receiving, analyzing, and addressing scan results. This pilot phase led to a change in how terms are categorized from the scans, using these three priority levels: Most egregious terms that need to be addressed immediately Terms we do not expect to find on our sites but will scan for due diligence Terms that can be used in a non-harmful way, generating many false positive results For the seven domains in the pilot, baseline scans have been recorded, and scan results are now recorded monthly. The process for working with content owners for remediation is still in a planning phase. Additional domains to be included in the scanning process are being evaluated, in close partnership with the CIOC."

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sacnoradhq 4y ago
Fashions will change and fade, and find fault with every word like grasping at straws to find something to be offended over. I'm sorry, that term is now racist: grasping at threads. I'm sorry, that term is now sexist: grasping at leaves. Ad infinium.
- jimbokun 4y ago
  I believe a large fraction of the words they label offensive were previously replacements for other words considered offensive.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    'Frequently, over time, euphemisms themselves become taboo words, through the linguistic process of semantic change known as pejoration, which University of Oregon linguist Sharon Henderson Taylor dubbed the "euphemism cycle" in 1974, also frequently referred to as the "euphemism treadmill"' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism
    - d0100 4y ago
      We just have to up the pejoration rate so much that the euphemism cycle is so short that they stop attempting to police it
  - avereveard 4y ago
    The need for express the category doesn't go away with the word, so new words replace the category, and banning the word does nothing to the underlying category Best seen with the transformation of terms around disability, where even transformations as late as differently abled are now derogatory and to be avoided.
    - pksebben 4y ago
      I had that very thought reading the entry for "abort". so what happens when we nuke that word? "I've had a cancellation". well, now we're calling it that, and the argument is now about that, and round and round we go. I'm not against changing how we use language, but perhaps there are deeper issues that could be dealt with to avoid having to retcon our dictionary in the first place.
soundnote 4y ago
> These language policing idiots, and I am choosing my language here, are fucking clueless about the real challenges we face as individuals and as a society. Even worse, they are redirecting valuable resources to stupider and stupider bullshit. This is spot on. They are cultural parasites who siphon resources and attention from their host.
Dalewyn 4y ago
The thing more of us need to understand is this has never been about "safety", it's about power and control. Becoming able to control someone's thoughts is very, very powerful and sought after, and what are thoughts composed of? Language. Define the language and you define how people think. Define people of latin origin should be referred to by "latinx" and nothing else and congratulations: An entire collection of cultures was removed of their identity and subjugated. Define all environmental concerns as "global warming" and later "climate change" and congratulations: You just invalidated swaths of inventions and solutions created by our forefathers and turned entire fields of science into a handy little political tool to fling around for profit. Define science as something to be unconditionally trusted and congratulations: You just turned science into a religion and gained one of the biggest religious forces known to man to use for profit. The people behind all this are very ingenious and very dangerous; he who controls language owns the human world.
- bsimpson 4y ago
  > all this “believe experts” dogma is legit indistinguishable from the rhetoric of evangelical christians. ffs please just go to church and leave science to the skeptical assholes. - https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1381237434512502784 https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1381237434512502784
  - unethical_ban 4y ago
    First, quoting a poorly formatted tweet as if it was something OP said is annoying. Second, arguments about "science skepticism" have little to do with the language experiment shown in the submission.
- refurb 4y ago
  > The thing more of us need to understand is this has never been about "safety", it's about power and control. Precisely. It's an attempt by some groups to have others jump through hoops that they define. The end goal is never language, but the ability to control what others do and be the one calling the shots. I can't remember the book it came from, but there was an author who wrote about his time growing up in an Eastern European communist country. During "Independence Days" his dad had to put a flag up in his store window. It wasn't optional. If he didn't do it, the police would stop by and ask why he didn't have a flag in his window. If he refused, he's be on the "naughty list" with the authorities which could impact his employment, his housing, his kids schooling. Putting the flag in the window was never the goal of the government. The goal was to show citizens they had no choice. The author talks about how capitulating the demand was dehumanizing and just ground down any resistance to authority that may have existed. "If I don't have the choice as to fly a flag or not, what choice did I have with more important aspects of my life?" It's like putting stars of David on Jews in Germany. It wasn't just to identify them in public (though that was a goal) it was also to show them "who was in charge".
friend_and_foe 4y ago
We close the box by mercilessly mocking these ninnies and refusing to give money or influence to institutions that engage in this sort of chicanery. Don't send your kids to Stanford. Say whatever words you want.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
onetimeusename 4y ago
> How do we close this Pandora's box? I don't see an end to this, I think it's getting worse. It looks like a revolution picking up speed. The places that stopped revolutions did it with very heavy measures. If there is a way to stop this that is not that, I don't know what it is. I don't think this guide is meant to prevent harm. It almost seems like this kind of language policing is like a shibboleth to identify the in from the out group. It forces you to join the in group or suffer the immediate consequences of being in the out group. So like instant career suicide if you disobey the rules. If you don't comply, you are now in the same camp as the most evil people on the planet. No one wants that association so they comply. It's extremely effective. So I don't see it going away.
- foofoo4u 4y ago
  There must be something from the past we can learn from. The Salem witch trials come to mind. The Puritans in their towns believed witches to be real. That they existed among them. That they were evil and harmful to their well being. This lead members to believe sightings of behavior to be witchery. But most concerning is the social mechanisms you describe. Where the risk of ostracization outweighed truth. Why risk questioning the claim of a witch when it can cost you your life? The panic grows and eventually takes hold of the town. Everyone is complicit in the behavior, regardless if everyone actually believes it or not. This story is not unique. We've seen it in WWII Germany and communist regimes around thew world. This language list by Stanford is just a modern reincarnation of the same thing. The language list isn't actually about making people feel safer. It's a means of power and control. The founding fathers of the United States were well aware of this human behavior. The freedom of speech. The presumption of innocence. Right to a jury. Right to privacy. Are all principles enshrined into law to serve as a countermeasure to our proclivities of mob rule and hysteria. These are all effective. But we now live in an age of social media. Mob rule has returned. But it's now all virtual. Do we need to formulate a new list of rights to counteract virtual mob rule?
  - taolegal 4y ago
- 4y ago
coffeeblack 4y ago
Language policing is a great tool to control society. There is always some “flaw” in your language. So you have always something for people to “struggle session” about, in order to become better communi… I mean woke. Ideologies based of group identity have been using this since the early days.
trabant00 4y ago
> How do we close this Pandora's box? We can't right now. We could have done it 15 years ago, as I remember being able to openly talk about it at work (master vs main) but everybody who agreed with me could not be bothered to take a stand. Right now I would be terminated instantly for arguing "tarball" can not be harmful, such is the environment.
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
> How do we go back to debating meaningful problems and solutions and tell these language policing idiots to do something useful? By refusing to placate emotional cripples and authoritarians. By refusing to accept the false assertion that everyone is innately entitled to respect. Respect is something that is earned. Those who seek to police our language due to imaginary harms that they assert someone may suffer are not entitled to respect - quite the opposite. It is long past time we as a society started actively disrespecting these people. We should heap scorn and ridicule on the people who came up with this ridiculous blacklist of commonly used words and drive them out of decent society. We should actively disrespect the self-appointed hall monitors that claim the power to decide the acceptable parameters of public discourse. The fact that such petty, small-minded people have filled the halls of power in most of most powerful institutions, from academia to government, is a withering indictment on our society.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  > We should heap scorn and ridicule on the people who came up with this ridiculous blacklist of commonly used words and drive them out of decent society. Let's put things in perspective. Stanford, on its own website, behind a Stanford login, posted a list of words they want to try to avoid using on their own websites and code. That's it. For this great offense, you suggest: > We should heap scorn and ridicule on the people who came up with this ridiculous blacklist of commonly used words and drive them out of decent society. Really. To reiterate, these people who you say should be driven "out of decent society" aren't even imposing that you shouldn't say these words. It's just for them. And for this you want to encourage their banishment at a societal level? You suppose they are the authoritarians, though? You, as always, are free to do whatever you want. Say all the words on the list in a row if you want. No one will stop you. Your comment is very dissonant for me, because it seems to be anti-woke, yet pro cancel culture. I feel like this must be evidence for Horseshoe Theory.
  - crackercrews 4y ago
    > behind a Stanford login It was only put behind a login wall after this made the rounds on social media on Monday, according to the WSJ. [1] 1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-stanford-guide-to-acceptable-words-elimination-of-harmful-language-initiative-11671489552 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-stanford-guide-to-acceptabl...
fleddr 4y ago
That's the clever thing about this setup. You can't stop it because any pushback makes you a "fascist" or any other "ist". It's shielded from any type of criticism by shame and mob justice. You can't tweak this nor will they self-correct. This is a monster to forcefully remove, but nobody dares to do that.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sacnoradhq 4y ago

Fashions will change and fade, and find fault with every word like grasping at straws to find something to be offended over. I'm sorry, that term is now racist: grasping at threads. I'm sorry, that term is now sexist: grasping at leaves. Ad infinium.

jimbokun 4y ago
I believe a large fraction of the words they label offensive were previously replacements for other words considered offensive.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  'Frequently, over time, euphemisms themselves become taboo words, through the linguistic process of semantic change known as pejoration, which University of Oregon linguist Sharon Henderson Taylor dubbed the "euphemism cycle" in 1974, also frequently referred to as the "euphemism treadmill"' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism
  - d0100 4y ago
    We just have to up the pejoration rate so much that the euphemism cycle is so short that they stop attempting to police it
- avereveard 4y ago
  The need for express the category doesn't go away with the word, so new words replace the category, and banning the word does nothing to the underlying category Best seen with the transformation of terms around disability, where even transformations as late as differently abled are now derogatory and to be avoided.
  - pksebben 4y ago
    I had that very thought reading the entry for "abort". so what happens when we nuke that word? "I've had a cancellation". well, now we're calling it that, and the argument is now about that, and round and round we go. I'm not against changing how we use language, but perhaps there are deeper issues that could be dealt with to avoid having to retcon our dictionary in the first place.

soundnote 4y ago

> These language policing idiots, and I am choosing my language here, are fucking clueless about the real challenges we face as individuals and as a society. Even worse, they are redirecting valuable resources to stupider and stupider bullshit. This is spot on. They are cultural parasites who siphon resources and attention from their host.

Dalewyn 4y ago

The thing more of us need to understand is this has never been about "safety", it's about power and control. Becoming able to control someone's thoughts is very, very powerful and sought after, and what are thoughts composed of? Language. Define the language and you define how people think. Define people of latin origin should be referred to by "latinx" and nothing else and congratulations: An entire collection of cultures was removed of their identity and subjugated. Define all environmental concerns as "global warming" and later "climate change" and congratulations: You just invalidated swaths of inventions and solutions created by our forefathers and turned entire fields of science into a handy little political tool to fling around for profit. Define science as something to be unconditionally trusted and congratulations: You just turned science into a religion and gained one of the biggest religious forces known to man to use for profit. The people behind all this are very ingenious and very dangerous; he who controls language owns the human world.

bsimpson 4y ago
> all this “believe experts” dogma is legit indistinguishable from the rhetoric of evangelical christians. ffs please just go to church and leave science to the skeptical assholes. - https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1381237434512502784 https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1381237434512502784
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  First, quoting a poorly formatted tweet as if it was something OP said is annoying. Second, arguments about "science skepticism" have little to do with the language experiment shown in the submission.
refurb 4y ago
> The thing more of us need to understand is this has never been about "safety", it's about power and control. Precisely. It's an attempt by some groups to have others jump through hoops that they define. The end goal is never language, but the ability to control what others do and be the one calling the shots. I can't remember the book it came from, but there was an author who wrote about his time growing up in an Eastern European communist country. During "Independence Days" his dad had to put a flag up in his store window. It wasn't optional. If he didn't do it, the police would stop by and ask why he didn't have a flag in his window. If he refused, he's be on the "naughty list" with the authorities which could impact his employment, his housing, his kids schooling. Putting the flag in the window was never the goal of the government. The goal was to show citizens they had no choice. The author talks about how capitulating the demand was dehumanizing and just ground down any resistance to authority that may have existed. "If I don't have the choice as to fly a flag or not, what choice did I have with more important aspects of my life?" It's like putting stars of David on Jews in Germany. It wasn't just to identify them in public (though that was a goal) it was also to show them "who was in charge".

friend_and_foe 4y ago

We close the box by mercilessly mocking these ninnies and refusing to give money or influence to institutions that engage in this sort of chicanery. Don't send your kids to Stanford. Say whatever words you want.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

onetimeusename 4y ago

> How do we close this Pandora's box? I don't see an end to this, I think it's getting worse. It looks like a revolution picking up speed. The places that stopped revolutions did it with very heavy measures. If there is a way to stop this that is not that, I don't know what it is. I don't think this guide is meant to prevent harm. It almost seems like this kind of language policing is like a shibboleth to identify the in from the out group. It forces you to join the in group or suffer the immediate consequences of being in the out group. So like instant career suicide if you disobey the rules. If you don't comply, you are now in the same camp as the most evil people on the planet. No one wants that association so they comply. It's extremely effective. So I don't see it going away.

foofoo4u 4y ago
There must be something from the past we can learn from. The Salem witch trials come to mind. The Puritans in their towns believed witches to be real. That they existed among them. That they were evil and harmful to their well being. This lead members to believe sightings of behavior to be witchery. But most concerning is the social mechanisms you describe. Where the risk of ostracization outweighed truth. Why risk questioning the claim of a witch when it can cost you your life? The panic grows and eventually takes hold of the town. Everyone is complicit in the behavior, regardless if everyone actually believes it or not. This story is not unique. We've seen it in WWII Germany and communist regimes around thew world. This language list by Stanford is just a modern reincarnation of the same thing. The language list isn't actually about making people feel safer. It's a means of power and control. The founding fathers of the United States were well aware of this human behavior. The freedom of speech. The presumption of innocence. Right to a jury. Right to privacy. Are all principles enshrined into law to serve as a countermeasure to our proclivities of mob rule and hysteria. These are all effective. But we now live in an age of social media. Mob rule has returned. But it's now all virtual. Do we need to formulate a new list of rights to counteract virtual mob rule?
- taolegal 4y ago
4y ago

coffeeblack 4y ago

Language policing is a great tool to control society. There is always some “flaw” in your language. So you have always something for people to “struggle session” about, in order to become better communi… I mean woke. Ideologies based of group identity have been using this since the early days.

trabant00 4y ago

> How do we close this Pandora's box? We can't right now. We could have done it 15 years ago, as I remember being able to openly talk about it at work (master vs main) but everybody who agreed with me could not be bothered to take a stand. Right now I would be terminated instantly for arguing "tarball" can not be harmful, such is the environment.

StanislavPetrov 4y ago

> How do we go back to debating meaningful problems and solutions and tell these language policing idiots to do something useful? By refusing to placate emotional cripples and authoritarians. By refusing to accept the false assertion that everyone is innately entitled to respect. Respect is something that is earned. Those who seek to police our language due to imaginary harms that they assert someone may suffer are not entitled to respect - quite the opposite. It is long past time we as a society started actively disrespecting these people. We should heap scorn and ridicule on the people who came up with this ridiculous blacklist of commonly used words and drive them out of decent society. We should actively disrespect the self-appointed hall monitors that claim the power to decide the acceptable parameters of public discourse. The fact that such petty, small-minded people have filled the halls of power in most of most powerful institutions, from academia to government, is a withering indictment on our society.

ModernMech 4y ago
> We should heap scorn and ridicule on the people who came up with this ridiculous blacklist of commonly used words and drive them out of decent society. Let's put things in perspective. Stanford, on its own website, behind a Stanford login, posted a list of words they want to try to avoid using on their own websites and code. That's it. For this great offense, you suggest: > We should heap scorn and ridicule on the people who came up with this ridiculous blacklist of commonly used words and drive them out of decent society. Really. To reiterate, these people who you say should be driven "out of decent society" aren't even imposing that you shouldn't say these words. It's just for them. And for this you want to encourage their banishment at a societal level? You suppose they are the authoritarians, though? You, as always, are free to do whatever you want. Say all the words on the list in a row if you want. No one will stop you. Your comment is very dissonant for me, because it seems to be anti-woke, yet pro cancel culture. I feel like this must be evidence for Horseshoe Theory.
- crackercrews 4y ago
  > behind a Stanford login It was only put behind a login wall after this made the rounds on social media on Monday, according to the WSJ. [1] 1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-stanford-guide-to-acceptable-words-elimination-of-harmful-language-initiative-11671489552 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-stanford-guide-to-acceptabl...

fleddr 4y ago

That's the clever thing about this setup. You can't stop it because any pushback makes you a "fascist" or any other "ist". It's shielded from any type of criticism by shame and mob justice. You can't tweak this nor will they self-correct. This is a monster to forcefully remove, but nobody dares to do that.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]