Grustaf

Is there any indication or reason why they would want to block LGBTQ+ content? Haven't both companies been very vocal supporters of LGBTQ+ in the past?

Do you actually believe that the issue with porn is that it "upsets people's feelings"?

$50,000 seems like a pretty cheap price for saving a life though.

I personally never trust statements where the grammatical subject is "science"

Location: Copenhagen and Stockholm

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Technologies: Startup CTO, and advanced iOS and Mac apps from start to finish

Résumé/CV: Apple, MLB, Marshall, various startups. Theoretical physics M.Sc. + classical languages + finance.

Email: arrow_02_paddies [cinnamon bun] icloud [dot] com

Every time I have to do something complex related to home renovation, book keeping etc I wish there was a platform for this. Often you don't want to engage a firm for a week, you just need some advice, but you are happy to pay a healthy hourly fee for it.

It's not the "access" to those books that gave you an edge, 95% of children would be completely uninterested in those books. As you know, today 100% of Western children have free and instant access to the best math teaching material you could imagine, right from the phones, but math grades keep falling.

No, I am very far from agreeing with you. I am saying that if you keep all other conditions the same, you will still see vast differences in the ease of understanding mathematics. This is borne out both by science - there is strong consensus that intelligence is highly heritable, and everybody's experience.

So even if we limit "aptitude" to a strictly genetic sense, it will still explain most of the difference in math ability at 7. All other factors related to growing up will add up to less than half of that.

Regarding practice compensating for genetics, I am not talking about having more supportive parents or more demanding pre-school, I am talking about Asian level hardcore drilling. That can certainly make up for most of the difference, at least when it comes to basic mathematics. But that means that the concepts that a child with math aptitude will pick up in 5 minutes will take 5 hours of drilling for another child.

Pretending to care? I am not saying I care about communist symbols, I am saying it would be absurd if I did, I wasn’t in the war. And yes I agree that all the people that pretend that the word ”master” is an issue are behaving badly. It’s pointless virtue signaling by proxy.

I really don’t understand this cope. It’s scientifically established that intelligence is highly heritable, especially the analytical kind. It also agrees with experience, we all know people who have a very hard time understanding mathematics, while others sail through it.

Of course it’s not fair, life isn’t fair. But the good news is that you can quite easily compensate for lack of aptitude with more work, and that is most definitely the case for mathematics, up to and including undergraduate level.

I grew up in Sweden where everyone goes to the same kind of pre-school, that does very little math teaching. Still, the difference in aptitude when we started school was significant. But we all know this.

Asian families, for sure. But that’s doesn’t explain that vast chasm we all observed between non-Asians in school growing up. Why not just accept that it’s possible to be born with an aptitude for math?

But how could some 7 year olds have vastly different ”pre-requisites” than others?

In my experience aptitude plays a far bigger role. Yes, you compensate for lack of aptitude with a lot of hard work, but that’s a different matter.

It's not weird at all, and it's the same in all languages. Some of the countries are very new, or the speakers of the language only came in contact with it recently. Then it's more likely they will use a country-related term. If on the other hand you have been in contact with the people for hundreds, or thousands of years, long before modern nation states, you will probably be using a tribal name for them, like Dane or Swede.

It is usually easy to understand if you just look into it.

Do you think anyone would take that seriously? I sure hope anyone I associate would just laugh and presume that I'm joking. It just isn't reasonable to be that sensitive. It certainly isn't adaptive, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was something about it in DSM.

Using "chairman" to describe a position implies that it's occupied by a man.

No, obviously not. A "chairman" can just as well be a woman. What it does imply is just that _historically_, chairmen were mostly men. You might object to the word because its etymology reveals a past where men occupied these roles, but it is not true at all that the word today implies anything about the sex of the person.

That exact type of usage is when I use "they" to refer to a person of indeterminate gender, e.g. someone to be hired.

Yes, if you are giving instructions to the guard at the front, telling him (sic) to "let them in", that is the traditional, organic usage. Which is distinct from the politicised usage where you either know that the candidate is a woman but still say "them", or its a person that considers herself "non-binary" and insists that you use gender neutral language. Those two situations are different from the traditional usage.

Further, its use is quite restricted - it doesn't admit all the inflections and noun-verb agreements that "he" and "she" do.

I agree with all your arguments, but just want to point out that this is not actually true. "Indefinite they" does inflect just fine. "Who attacked you, did you see them? No, but they dropped their gun." etc.

That is of course awful in every way, but I really wonder, isn't the real problem that there are bad people? I think we can agree that people who are heartless enough to bully a vulnerable person like that, they will not stop just because a new euphemism is promoted. So how does it actually help? I can understand that if you are being called a slur, you want that slur to go away, but if it's going to be replaced by another slur, what is actually achieved?

If you had ancestors that were slaves in the 1800s and for that reason want to avoid any word that looks like "master", even if used in a different meaning, then by all means go ahead and change your git branch name, that's your business, as silly as it is. I only object if you want to project this absurdity on others, and make THEM change THEIR branch names.

I personally have much closer ancestors, that were tortured by the communists within living memory. What if I told you that for this reason the word "comrade" triggers me? Or in analogy with the github situation, if I asked people to stop wearing Che t-shirts? Would you say that was reasonable, or a sign of insanity?

As I said, "allow list" is more descriptive if you don't know the word whitelist in the sense that it's easier to guess its meaning the first time you see it. My point is that this is not generally considered important, just look at 100 random words, most of them would be hard to guess the exact meaning of, even if like me you studied classical languages.

No it doesn't. It's just historical accident. If you look around you will notice that some demonyms are based on the country name, some or not. It doesn't correlate with it being pejorative. "Italian" or "Congolese" are not more pejorative than "Frenchman". They are just newer, because the countries are newer.

Not that any normal person thinks that there is anything negative with "some sort of preference for the country as country, to the degree that a person defines themselves by it". It's politically quite extreme to see that as "pejorative".

"Allow list" is only more "descriptive" to someone that doesn't know what whitelist means. It is generally not considered a problem if you can't guess the meaning of a word from how it looks, most words are like that.

Why does there have to be a slave just because there's a master? That is just one very specific meaning of the word, out of several dozen, and in the git context it was pretty clear that it wasn't used in that sense, but rather something like "master copy". So the master to main renaming thing was especially silly.

But why are you glad that we moved on? Almost none of the old words were offensive in themselves. "Retarded" or "crippled" may sound offensive now, but that is completely unrelated to the etymology or meaning, it is _solely_ because it refers to something people don't want to be, so people started to use them as slurs.

It just seems so futile to have to keep coming up with new words for the same thing, when the new words will inevitably become slurs in the same way, at least if anyone uses them. So it's not like we can avoid the offence, it is just transferred to a new word. Wouldn't it be better to accept that some people will say mean things, and focus on learning to live with that, and on making people be less mean?

it has an entirely different connotation

What connotation is that exactly? Does "The Virgin Islands", or "The Hague" for that matter, also have that connotation in your mind?

I am again just saying that there is nothing racist about the "the" in "The Congo". It is just a natural way to shorten "Republic of the Congo". It might be unusual nowadays, but that does not mean that there is anything pejorative about "The".

"Use case" has nothing to do with it, nothing about language use is fully "rational" or "optimal". It is obviously _possible_ to make do without the article, but what I am getting at is the misdirected anger some people seem to feel towards it.

I responded to this: > neither of those has “the” as part of its official name

which is clearly untrue.

Yes, there are two Congos. Both of them have "the" in their official name:

-République du Congo (The smaller one, with Brazzaville)

-République démocratique du Congo (The larger one, with Kinchasa)

It is true that the official "Republic of the Congo" is typically shortened to just Congo" in everyday speech, my original point was just that there is nothing "racist" or colonial about say "The Congo". It is not called that as a slur because it's somehow lesser than e.g. Namibia, it is just that it's named after the Congo river. But I have heard many people who like to be offended have a vague idea that the "the" is somehow offensive because most countries don't have it.

Obviously it's political, it's not linguistics. It's not that the word "chairman" didn't work, it's that some people feel that it is wrong for a gender neutral term to be based on a male form. That's clearly ideology, not a practical question.

But that is not the question here, I am merely pointing out that it's very easy to understand why some people may object to ideologically invented words, without have any issues with words that appear organically, like "mousepad". Pretending to not understand the difference is just a bad faith argument.

And I am saying that in most of these cases it is not that the terms "have become offensive", it's that academics and activists invent and promote, sometimes enforce, new terms, proactively so to speak.

using gender neutral terms when possible is nice

That's your opinion, and it tends to very strongly correlate with left-wing politics, it's not a consensus opinion.

Most of these words haven’t “become” offensive, activists have declared them offensive. It’s not that Latinos felt offended by that term, some academic activist came up with Latinx because they wanted another shibboleth.

The opposition is obviously not to "new words" per se, it's to words that were invented for political reasons, rather than ones that organically appeared. It doesn't help that they are almost always less descriptive, less exact, or sometimes simply incorrect. Like "differently abled", it actually means "less able".

On the contrary, your example shows that any pejorative connotation is NOT related to the etymology. "Englandman" doesn't sound pejorative, it just sounds strange because it's not an actual word. "Englander" is a real word that is not pejorative, but derived from the name of the country.

Putting aside the fact that it technically IS named "Republic of the Congo ", technically Mexico is named "The United States of Mexico", that's not really important.

People who claim that "The Congo" is offensive don't say that because it's not the official name (which it is), I guess they just presume that there must be some colonial racist reason, and not just the fact that it's named after a river.

"Republic of the Congo", or "République du Congo" in French, "du" being a shortened form of "de le", "of the". Other French speaking republics just have "République de N".

That's the point isn't it, that it doesn't really help to invent new words, the new word will become a slur if it refers to something people don't want to be. I mean "retard" is of course itself a euphemism.