Comment on If "Master/Slave" terminology in computing sounds bad now, why not change it to "Dom/Sub"?
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks agoyeah no i understand, i’m just saying that’s a potential point where i could’ve originated and then morphed over time. Even if it was founded on race originally, it’s not super likely it would matter today in any broader contexts.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Idk if that’s for white folks like me (and you?) to decide), and there is no harm on erring on the side of caution.
It’s like the deal with micro-aggressions. Alone they’re not much, but a constant buildup of these little things can leave someone feeling raw and very sensitive to it.
I don’t think the etymology started with race, I think it started with day/night. But I’m not an expert on etymology, and while I’m very curious, it probably doesn’t really matter here.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
yeah, probably not, and that’s why i tend to err on the side of these discussions not being very productive. As for erring on the side of caution, idk. I’m not really sure theres that much caution even present to begin with. It might even be sufficient enough to just not use the terms around specific people per their request, or not at all, who knows.
i think my problem, is that people have a very analytical and sterile approach to these things. In terms of classifying and denoting things micro aggressions as a term makes sense. But from a broader societal perspective, i think it’s useless, if not negatively impactful.
It’s better to identity specific facets of society that are problematic, for example treatment and behavior of certain people differently from others, as opposed to “treating the symptom” so to speak.
it really could’ve been from anything, but at the end of the day whatever it started from is irrelevant to it’s use case today, and anybody using it to be offensive is offensive for other reasons at that point.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I think it’s difficult to separate the two, they form a feedback loop. It’s like the broken window theory.
People see these little ambiguously exclusionary acts, and if they see enough of them then they get the subconscious message that exclusionary acts are ok, and the (possibly accidental) targets of the acts get the subconscious message that they’re not welcome which makes the subject raw and sensitive and primes them to look at acts through that lens.
In college I took a class on how humans and computers interact, and one of the things my professor was passionate about was how the terminology of programming languages tended to be exclusionary to women. Not explicitly so, but just using violent language that women were raised to find uncomfortable (eg killing a process), and it was pushing women out of computer science.
This was like 15 years ago, and he was already passionate about it at the time, so this isn’t really a new thing, its just getting broader attention.
I don’t know if that’s happening here, but it costs nothing to change so even a potential minor improvement is worth it.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
this is the reason i think we need to treat them more broadly, it’s a broad problem, the solution also needs to be broad, unless we want to ignore an entire segment of the problem entirely.
Did they ever mention the history of the CS field generally being sexist towards women? I would also argue that women being “averse” to terms like killing is equally presumptive, women cooked in the kitchen throughout the 1950’s, you think they got acquainted with the concept and idea of killing things? Like turkeys, chicken, cows, etc. They almost certainly understand the concept of death. They’ve seen it first hand, arguably more so than men throughout history ignoring things like war. If we include child birth it’s even MORE aggressively supporting of this point. It wasn’t that long ago that you would have children, and they would just, die sometimes. These days thankfully, miscarriages are the most significant threat to giving birth to a living child. Those didn’t stop, i’m not sure if they lowered? I think that’s why they’re so statistically prevalent compared to everything else, but idk shit about miscarriages so don’t ask me lol.
Thankfully the sexism in the field has improved, the problem stems more from the CS field being predominately men though. Girls were never really being pushed into the field, there are more being pushed into it now, but it’s still not super significant, even through anecdotal experience, we just need to be engaging girls in the cs field from an earlier stage. People are just predisposed to giving and educated boys about computers, rather than girls, for some reason.