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by ThrowawayR2 2171 days ago
> "Think about how that sounds from the perspective of someone learning this: “we don’t actually use this term following the dictionary definition, we just like keeping it instead of using more accurate words”"

A bus doesn't have four wheels. An interpreter isn't a human being with language fluency. A bit doesn't refer to the business end of a drill. A port isn't a place where you find cargo ships. People manage to deal with jargon just fine.

> "What do we lose by switching to precise terms which don’t require everyone to internalize an overloaded meaning in multiple contexts?"

The time wasted reeducating (and I use that word intentionally) everyone?

1 comments

Again, the problem isn’t jargon as a concept but that a few specific terms have negative connotations. “Slave” has baggage which “bus” does not. There isn’t a call to rename the mouse because the name isn’t inextricably linked to a horrible part of history.

As for the cost of switching, one nice benefit to using more accurate terms is that they’re already familiar - if you swap “slave” for “worker” or “replica”, nobody is going to need extensive retraining to adjust.

Just out of curiosity, is chess master gives also bad connotations ?

Do chess pieces color seem racial to you ?

No, because the white and black pieces are exactly the same. This is unlike whitelist/blacklist where you’re specifying a preference where white is desirable and black is not.
They are not same, white moves first, and first move is an advantage in a chess game.
What historical baggage does whitelist/blacklist have?
white = good black = bad

Does that seem like a great association to defend when it can trivially be changed with no confusion or loss of meaning?

Light = white Darkness = black
Educate yourself please. This narrow worldview is disingenuous and does you no Good.

Black is positive in finance.

You should read my comment more carefully: I was specifically referring to the whitelist / blacklist usage where there is no common usage reversing the relationship of the terms. I have no objection to finance using it because it’s positive and doesn’t resemble past racist usage.