Less than five years ago, this term was used to describe what my team was doing. The criticism was correct, and my team did change its ways.
At the time, I was unaware of this term, and the explanation given to me was the "misunderstood" one, as explained in the article.
Since that incident, I, too, have pointed out patterns of "cargo culting" as/when I identified them. Not too many, but definitely more than a couple. More than once, I've repeated the same explanation. I've even used the "misunderstood" explanation as a fun anecdote to share at gatherings (both work, and social).
While I don't think less of the original person for referring to my team as a cargo cult (they were sincere in their criticism), the article will definitely stop me from using the misunderstood version of events as the "true" origin of the term. It will change the way I speak about it, even if I refer to this term in the future.
I agree that the article was really interesting and useful in fleshing the origins out into a full human story rather than a single cute anecdote, but what the article describes doesn't really change Feinman's story, it just adds to it.
Cargo cults exist(ed), and like most religious systems throughout history they hinged on a belief that performing certain rituals would have effects on the real world. Some of them did, in fact, see the trappings of the European colonizers as a form of ritual and attempt to recreate the techno-rituals by creating effigies of the European technology.
Nothing in that story is fundamentally disagreed with in TFA. So while it's really helpful to be able to give more life to a previously glib anecdote, the metaphor is still very apt.
The main takeaway for me is that cargo cults were really not any different than most polytheistic religions (and therefore most religions) throughout history in viewing ritual as essentially a technology through which to access good things [0]. But I'm afraid that any new term derived from that insight would be even more problematic for trying to distill an even larger swath of human experience into a single phrase.
I love how this article embraces the complexity of the phenomenon : at least one time, not only """cargo culting""" actually worked, it even did so for a logical reason !
> In one unusual case, the islanders built an airstrip and airplanes did come. Specifically, the Miyanmin people of New Guinea hacked an airstrip out of the forest in 1966 using hand tools. The airstrip was discovered by a patrol and turned out to be usable, so Baptist missionaries made monthly landings, bringing medicine and goods for a store. It is pointed out that the only thing preventing this activity from being considered a cargo cult is that in this case, it was effective. See A Small Footnote to the 'Big Walk', p. 59.
You’re making the world worse, not better. First, you’re perpetuating the idea that anybody should be offended by anything like this. You’re never going to meet an actual Melanesian cargo culter, and nobody else should take offense to this phrase.
Second, you’re impairing your own ability to communicate with doers because most smart people know what the term “cargo cult” means from Feynman.
Not smart people but probably mostly software and computer people in general (but if you equate software and computer people with smart people then the statement is true).
Apparently, Fundamental of Data Engineering book does refer to cargo-cult metaphor inside its content [1].
But if I'm pulling out the 'cargo cult' metaphor, it's because I'm about to criticise someone for unquestioningly repeating things they've seen elsewhere, without understanding the details.
So if I repeat some nonsense urban legend as fact, in order to criticise them for taking nonsense urban legends as fact - that's going to make me look kinda dumb. Even if it is an urban legend I heard from a nobel prize winner - I can't criticise the mote in my brother's eye until I've removed the beam in my own eye.
I think the reason some people have problems here is that the term "cargo cult" is in the middle of transition from being merely a reference to a story (which you need to explain to someone half the time you utter the phrase), into being an independent phrase with its own established meaning - i.e. taking meaning from how it's used, instead of the original story.
(Now I wonder whether Tamarian language is really referencing stories, or referencing the popular understanding of those stories. Sokath, his eyes closed.)
You clearly didn’t read the article. Feynman didn’t know what cargo cults were, he repeated misinformation from a movie that incorrectly dramatized real practice. And further, his “cargo cult science” definition doesn’t match the modern-day “cargo cult programming” definition.
The point is that the metaphor is not just oversimplified and misinformed, but means conflicting things and is overused to the point that is meaningless.
I don't know. Nuanced, more accurate version is way less useful tool of communication than the popular one. Ultimately origins don't matter. Things mean, what they mean now for most people. If it's useful meaning it will be retained and passed on. It it's useless it will be transformed into something more useful or dropped from the language.
So you refuse to use a common in your domain communication concept because? Who does that help? Do you make sure not to use the following 'problematically sourced' terms either?
"Grandfathered in" comes from the "grandfather clauses" in post-Reconstruction U.S. laws that allowed white people to bypass literacy tests and poll taxes for voting if their grandfathers had the right to vote. This excluded many Black Americans whose grandfathers had been enslaved and could not vote. This seems like a way more problematic term to use especially when you use it in public facing policies (such as keeping old pricing levels) that apply to your potentially black customers. That could actually be offensive. But it's not because that isn't how normal communication works. People don't go looking to take offense, they take offense when offense is given. Though I would happily expend the brainpower to replace this one.
"Rule of thumb" claimed to come from an old law allowing a man to beat his wife with a stick no wider than his thumb. This saying comes from normalized misogynist physical abuse in our society. Again, this one should go way before cargo cult.
"Cakewalk" originates from the 19th-century practice of enslaved Black people performing exaggerated dances that mimicked European ballroom styles, often judged by plantation owners. Winners were sometimes awarded a cake. This one is just straight up racist and should go way before cargo cult. Especially to represent something being 'easy'. I can't imagine it feels 'easy' to dance funny to entertain your violent owner. The only 'easy' thing was that is was a brake from the slave driver out in the field. You know what, f' using that term (damn I just reversed the point I was making on myself on this one but f' this term).
Heck English itself is problematic/racist at it's roots with it's tendency of saying the french sourced word is proper, and the non-french version is low class. When are we going to take back English from the imposed by violence for French conquerors French influences?
The world is already exhausting. Adding in this level of constantly self policing our thoughts/communication that, in the end, leaves us poorer with less tools for communicating concepts is lose/lose. If something makes people feel bad, yes we should change it. But going looking for reasons to be upset about things and reducing our vocabulary/communal communication over 'researched' outrage is a net negative and seems an Orwellian dumbing down.
> the article will definitely stop me from using the misunderstood version of events as the "true" origin of the term
That's absolutely fair and if that had been there point of the article, I'd be 100% behind it. I love learning new things about words and phrases. Etymology is my jam.
But no. That wasn't the point of the article. It's saying "you are wrong, you should feel bad, you're not allowed to use the thing you were wrong about anymore". I generally fall quite far on the left, politically. But when people talk about "woke nonsense", this is the kind of thing where I find myself agreeing with them, much as I did a couple of years ago when we were all socially pressured into renaming our "master" branches to "main" branches.
> "you are wrong, you should feel bad, you're not allowed to use the thing you were wrong about anymore".
I didn't remember reading that in the article. Just as a second-check, I've re-read and none of what you say appears in the text. You're building a strawman.
> you're not allowed to
Specifically about this part, we're talking about someone writing on his blog about something he took the time to dig into and sharing his opinion. There isn't much the author can do to be less prescriptive, besides shutting up.
This trope of interpreting every counter-cultural opinion, in every form, as "the powers that be want to gag us" is a way of saying that you won't hear even the smallest dissent.
"The pop-culture cargo cult erases the decades of colonial oppression, along with the cultural upheaval and deaths from World War II. Melanesians deserve to be more than the punch line in a cargo cult story. Thus, it's time to move beyond the cargo cult metaphor."
for which the OPs summary is an acceptable paraphrase.
> for which the OPs summary is an acceptable paraphrase.
So someone writing their opinion on their personal blog is equivalent to some authority making a ruling about what you're allowed to?
Freedom of speech has always come with other people being free to tell you that you're wrong and should stop. There is nothing wrong in it, and no freedom of speech is harmed as long as the person stating their position is not in a position to enforce some form of authority.
People may not like what they hear, but feeling oppressed because someone wrote their disagreement on a personal blog is a pathological form of this free-speech rethoric.
You're changing the subject. They said it was a scolding blog. You said that there was no scolding. Someone pointed out obvious scolding. You said freedom of speech includes the right to scold. What you should have said was "sorry, I was mistaken."
You started dishonestly (accusing someone of distorting the article when they were just disagreeing with it), why would anyone now want to have a completely different conversation with you about "free speech"? Do you assume that everyone should want to censor everything that they disagree with?
> People may not like what they hear, but feeling oppressed because someone wrote their disagreement on a personal blog
Now people aren't allowed to feel? Why?
> is a pathological form of this free-speech rethoric.
Are you a doctor or something? Do doctors diagnose rhetoric? Is it "rhetoric" to say how something makes you feel? Why are you telling people how to feel, or giving lectures about free speech?
You've done a great job of tearing off from the actual topic in just the right subtle ways to make it seem like what you're saying actually makes any sense in the context of the blog post and the person you're replying to. Bravo.
Someone’s personal conclusion can be summed as “you should feel bad”? I think that’s if you feel bad for using the metaphor after reading this, that’s on you. The author just wrote up a deep dive into the problem and concluded that it’s not a great metaphor, in their opinion.
The thing about these woke types is they usually mean really well. But in the process they will effortlessly fall into being absolute cunts.
This one time I got a 'concerned' mail from a dude, remarking that he didn't like some of my public comments. It was longwinded, verbose and Very Serious. He tried to empathize with me by imagining what my politics might be, how I might feel about some of his remarks, etc.
The thing was:
- he got my politics completely wrong
- at no point did he actually cite a single concrete example
- he never actually asked any questions or clarifications
The entire thing was a one-sided lecture he was delivering to an image of me he had created in his head. Once you understand this, you understand woke and why so many people find it so unbearable.
I don’t think the author made a single judgment call on people who use the metaphor. However in the first paragraph of your comment, you lumped them into a strawman group that you use profanity to refer to. So my point is just that readers are taking personal offense to an untargeted opinion piece, and then directing that back to the author and unknown other people with uncalled-for animosity.
Edit: “delivering to an image of me he had created in his head” - the author doesn’t know you, afaik. He probably didn’t send you this link personally after writing it. You yourself have decided that the article is targeted at you and that it is intended to be negative.
I’ve used the term cargo cult a hundred times. I generally think it’s a useful metaphor. I do not feel offended in any way by this article.
I didn't imply that the article said those exact words, I was restating the article's subtext. I should have used italics rather than quotes though, my bad.
> You're building a strawman.
Given the large number of people in this thread who got the same impression from the article as me, I don't think so. I think this is the actual subtext of the article, stated simply.
> There isn't much the author can do to be less prescriptive, besides shutting up.
Actually there's a huge amount they could do to be less prescriptive, such as using phrases like here's what I'm gonna do but you can make up your own mind.
> Given the large number of people in this thread who got the same impression from the article as me
People count doesn't make sound logic. You will find large numbers of people believing the weirdest things, if you're so inclined.
> I think this is the actual subtext of the article, stated simply.
You used the sentence "you are not allowed". How do you think the blog owner will coerce you if you do not comply with his order ?
> Actually there's a huge amount they could do to be less prescriptive, such as using phrases like here's what I'm gonna do but you can make up your own mind.
Would you describe your own reply on HN as telling people what they're allowed to do or not to do?
Why are you being so obnoxiously pedantic? You know exactly what he meant in his initial comment haha. I suspect this might be a fools errand to ask as this place is chock full with socially inept nerds as it's a tech board but... have you ever had a conversation in real life? You're solidifying statements and hyperbole in a strange and unnatural manner.
If someone is unfamiliar with the common English term or is understands it is "by habit" but isn't getting the implicit comparison with a practice following an understanding of the underlying process it, like the image of "cargo cult" referenced in the metaphor, may need expanded a bit on first encounter, but it is both more concise, and uses direct denotation rather than metaphor.
The best example of this jumping the shark is “LatinX” which was greeted by howls of laughter and genuine offense by Latin people. Latin. There is already a non-gendered word in English because English is not a gendered language. Spanish is, and trying to make it not is… colonialism? What are you going to do redesign an entire language spoken by hundreds of millions of people? To avoid offending… is anyone actually offended?
This stuff isn’t harmless either. It helps push people toward the far right by making them sound reasonable.
I feel this way about “BIPOC.” I find it absolutely enraging that white people not only would other me like that in polite company, but do so in a way that lumps Bangladeshis in with Pakistanis.
I tried to explain to my parents why my daughter’s teacher recruited her into a “BIPOC” affinity group and they got very upset.
We have anti-harassment training at work, and one of the videos from a few years ago was titled something along the lines of "can you have problematic behavior against your own group" and was a confrontation between someone coded as a second-generation Punjabi and someone stated to be a first generation Gujarati.
The kind interpretation of that video is that "there are always subgroups" but it really felt to me as if they were all lumped in the same bucket of "Indian" by the video producer which seems to me to be rather problematic itself.
Exactly! If the message was “we’re all American and we shouldn’t harass each other” that would be great.
But these trainings divide people up into groups—just along arbitrary lines. All of them put white people over here and “people of color” over there. But I suspect the second strongest affinity for most “people of color”—after their own group—is white people. Because that’s who people interact with the most often outside their own group.
The culture I’m most familiar with, after Bangladeshi culture, is southern British American culture, because those are the people I grew up around. If you subdivide people into any groups more granular than “American”—which I don’t think you should do—you can’t put me over there with the Taiwanese and Latinos as “people of color.” I don’t know anything about those people and have no greater affinity for them than I do for any random American.
My sister in law is Taiwanese, and all her friends are Chinese or Taiwanese. And they seem like lovely people, but I’m more out of place in that setting than I am in a room full of white people in Georgia.
> But these trainings divide people up into groups—just along arbitrary lines. All of them put white people over here and “people of color” over there. But I suspect the second strongest affinity for most “people of color”—after their own group—is white people. Because that’s who people interact with the most often outside their own group.
I'm not sure it's fair to criticize the trainings; part of the reason for the training is to limit the employer's liability, and there's a huge variation in the liability of "being an asshole" depending on how -- and to whom -- the mistreatment is directed, so the training is going to invariably reflect that legal landscape.
Actually, there is no differential standard. The law doesn’t differentiate between who the mistreatment is being directed to. It’s irrelevant whether a black employee is harassing a white employee or vice versa. As far as I can tell, a lot of lawyers gave bad advice about this to their corporate clients over the last few years and the next few years are going to be embarrassing for them.
IANAL, but my understanding is that if you treat people differently based on one of the nine federally protected classes, you are in more trouble than if you treat people differently based on some other class (though treating people differently based upon a proxy for a protected class can also be an issue; e.g. redheads isn't a protected class, but it has correlations with both race and national origin).
Note that both of your examples given fall under the protected class of race/color. You still might have a more sympathetic judge and/or jury for one example or the other, so it might be relevant in practice, even if it is irrelevant by the letter of the law.
Have you ever considered that you are taking the wrong message from these trainings?
"white people" isn't real. That's why there is a concept of "passing", and why the KKK in my state marched against other white people. All these groupings are arbitrary on their face.
>But these trainings divide people up into groups—just along arbitrary lines.
How do you suggest material about how dividing people up based on the farce of "race" should be made? It needs to have some "in group" vs "out group" to demonstrate how that dynamic works. Are they supposed to use real and explicit life examples? Should every person joining your org be made to watch a training video where a white manager calls a black employee the N word?
Do you not understand the concept of film and acting and theatre? That you often demonstrate matters through allegory or metaphor?
Or do you also complain that Dr Seuss tried to educate children about racism with the "star bellied sneets" because it's just an arbitrary division?
You complain that "they were all wrapped up into the Indian category", but guess what, that's the same story for Italian Americans and the Irish and at one time that nobody seems to remember, the Catholics. "White" is also a horseshit made up group. There is as much diversity in India as there is in America.
Like I just don't get it. What would you rather have to help train adults about racism and how not to be racist?
I agree “white” is a made up category that isn’t meaningful. But the same people who do the trainings will perpetuate the concept of “white” by talking about “white people” versus “people of color.”
My daughter has four “affinity groups” at her school. “Black girl magic,” “young black men,” “BIPOC,” and “LGBT alliance.” A teacher recruited her and some Turkish kid into “BIPOC” because they have no other non-black non-white kids.
It’s not just a demonstrative analogy. The people running these diversity programs think theses groups are real.
The only good thing to have come about from LatinX is that it enables you to troll your Latino friends with it. Nothing is quite so sweet as friend salt, after all. :)
You're not wrong - objectively, main is an equally good or perhaps even very slightly better name than master. But it's like making a tiny change that requires a huge refactoring - in this case, literally millions of developers were involved, not to mention the countless hours of discussion which are still ongoing years later, as you can see from this thread. Was it worth it?
Yeah, heck, of course I didn't mean anyone should go back and rename shit in already existing repos! Sheesh, what a crazy waste of effort that would be.
But for new projects it really doesn't bother me that the default nowadays is "main" in stead of "master", was all I meant.
That’s definitely not my read of the article. Are you saying you are offended by someone researching this phrase and then suggesting it’s not a great metaphor for multiple reasons? Do you understand you are the one getting mad about what you think someone said, when they didn’t?
Also, “main” is far better name than “master” for the primary branch of a git repo for lots of reasons. Did it hurt anything to change the default? Why are you so attached to the old name? If anything it made our automation code better to stop having hard-coded assumptions of what the main branch was called.
Yes. Change always has a cost associated with it. In some cases, that cost is repaid with benefits. In this case, it hasn't and will never pay benefits.
> Why are you so attached to the old name?
Because I refuse to comply with self righteous busybodies who think it's their job to ensure that everyone is acting right. It was obnoxious when those busybodies were railing against comic books/rock music/rap/movies/video games, and it's just as obnoxious when they rail against "master" as a technical term.
So what you're saying is that you agree with the underlying message, but because it was presented in a way that offends your sensibilities, you're going to ignore it and continue to use a phrase derived from something that's incorrect and never existed?
And really, you're bothered by the idea that 'main' is a more neutral name for the default branch of a git repository, and want to cling to 'master', when that term has traditionally been used to describe someone who enslaves other humans? Really? You're that attached to something like a default branch name in a VCS? Or you aren't, but because it sounded like people were trying to make you feel bad about yourself for using 'master', you're just going to be obstinate and own those libs?
All that seems kinda spiteful and petty. You do you, I guess.
> So what you're saying is that you agree with the underlying message
No, that's the complete opposite of what I said.
Please read again. The part where I said that the underlying message is "you are wrong, you should feel bad, you're not allowed to use the thing you were wrong about anymore".
If the message had been "you're wrong about something, here's the truth, now make up your own mind about whether you want to keep using it", I'd be completely on board with the article. My decision would probably be that I'm gonna keep using the phrase because all of linguistics is built on misunderstandings, mistranslations, and downright lies, so avoiding every phrase that has "bad" origins is a step on the road to 1984. But that's just like, my opinion, man. You can decide otherwise and we can all get along just fine.
I assume you think it's a good thing that we don't use phrases like "[black person] in the woodpile" or "[black person] toes" or "[black person] rigged" anymore. Maybe you agree we shouldn't use names for the Romani or Jewish people as idiom for being cheated. I am certain that there is some phrase or term you wouldn't use that my grandfather would have considered harmless, or his grandfather, etc.
I don't like arbitrary language policing, either. I think there was a much stronger case for eliminating "master"/"slave" than "master branch", for instance, and if people were to argue for eliminating "mastery" as well I'd consider that ridiculous. It's fine if you don't consider this particular argument persuasive, but if it's a step toward Ingsoc we've all already been sprinting in that direction for centuries.
It's not the words or the metaphors, it's the people!
If someone wants to use words against someone else, they'll find a way, no matter what.
Policing words is fascist, if anything, police people bad behaviour, actually, police how your society works and start investigating why you you masterfully created, nourished and spread to the World so many cultural stereotypes about everyone who is not you and doesn't want to be like you!
They talk to us about you, it's not the words you use, but *how* you use them.
Try to understand that thinking "you person of color -> you bad" it's not any better than thinking "you [n word] -> you bad".
I’m always puzzled by this common sort of tone-policing reaction to an article that says “we should do X” or even “you should do X.”
This sort of phrasing of one’s opinion is as old as essays and speeches themselves, as far as I know. Here is an english translation of a speech by Cicero, the one from which our good old lorem ipsum placeholder text was derived.
Of course it is sensible for a person to have an opinion on the conduct of others, and to express that opinion. Where is the problem?
Unless said author was in a position of power over me I would understand the “we should X” phrasing as kind of like… the standard way that opinions have been expressed throughout history…
Well, maybe this - writing in this imperative tone - is something that we should work on changing? It seems like a more useful change than policing individual words or phrases because of dubious historical misunderstandings.
Did you ever write something like this in a school essay?
"I think that people should do XYZ"
If so, and your English teacher was at least minimally engaged, they should have pointed out why the "I think" is entirely redundant and best removed.
The reader knows that this is your opinion. They may reasonably presume these are your opinions and that you are not writing the essay at gunpoint or while under the influence of alien mind control. Furthermore, no reasonable reader would mistake your opinion for some sort of imperative they are compelled to obey.
(Now, I hope this isn't misconstrued to mean that all opinions should be expressed authoritatively and imperatively. That is not always the right tone.)
I think that your focus on high school grammar is (perhaps intentionally) missing the point here. I've explained my position on multiple other comments in this thread, if you care to look, and it's not about a grammar issue. It's a societal issue which I've seen called SJWs (social justice warriors) which is characterized as mostly wealthy white Americans (although it spread to other groups too) deciding that they need to "help" minorities that they've never met in some way, usually by policing language or fashion. It's a low effort way to appear to be affecting social change while actually not doing much and in fact most likely just alienating potential allies who would otherwise be supportive of more important changes.
Can you talk about your observation (assumption?) that people talking about these issues are talking instead of helping in material ways. This is a false dichotomy. Talking about a thing is not incompatible with doing a thing.
(I see from your comment history that you've talked about Typescript, and being Irish. Does that mean you don't actually write Typescript and you're, uh, not being Irish in a proper enough way? No.)
It's acceptable to discuss a societal issue even if you're not actively doing something about it. There are a lot of things going on in the world and a finite amount of hours in one's day. We can only personally reach out and touch a depressingly small subset of them. I think Putin is a rather malignant head of state, but I am not actively working to depose him, and I don't see a conflict there as long as I'm clear about that.
deciding that they need to "help" minorities that they've
never met in some way, usually by policing language or fashion.
This is a key concept and I'm sure I won't change your mind. But for the record: the belief here is that when you have a privileged group and an underprivileged group, the privileged group has a large role to play in righting this wrong.
As an admittedly contrived example, suppose we work at a majority-white company where white employees are openly using racial slurs against black employees. As a white person, I've got a responsibility to confront this and steer things in a better direction. If I'm in management then part of my job is to shape enact and enforce policies to keep this from happening.
I think we'd agree on that cartoonishly obvious example, but another key belief is that there are a lot of "lesser" racist acts that may not be as egregious as the "n word" but are still well worth combating.
Certainly, I think that any particular policy at any company is up for discussion. I've no doubt there's a lot of overreach in this area. Some companies are surely doing real shitty jobs, but the problem here is "companies doing real shitty jobs" and not the core idea of "hey, let's shape a good company culture here."
But I think you are making a lot of other unsupported assumptions: that these policies are enacted by "rich white people" with zero input from the groups they claim to protect, and that these policies are being enacted without other more material changes, and so on. Again: surely true in some cases, but I believe you are conflating bad implementations with bad ideas.
> I'm sure I won't change your mind. But for the record: the belief here is that when you have a privileged group and an underprivileged group, the privileged group has a large role to play in righting this wrong.
I think you'ce misunderstood me here. I strongly believe in positive, progressive social change, and I strongly believe that in a large part this has to come from the dominant section of society.
The issue I have here is with frivolous linguistic change wrapped up as real social change.
These SJWs, or whatever you want to call them, are essentially role playing at social change.
I will highlight again that I don't think these are all rich white Americans, just that that is where the movement originated.
Sure, they can force through a minor change (often entirely incorrect, in the case of master branch having anything to do with slavery, or deciding that latinos should be referred to as latinx even though the actual latinos seem to largely deride this term).
But that does exactly zero to improve anyone's lives, except for these few already mostly privileged SJWs who get to pat themselves on the back.
Meanwhile, the main actual change that has happened is that loads of people - potential allies - have been frustrated or even alienated by this whole foolish endeavor, and society as a whole has shifted a step to the right.
I don't care about using main, master or whatever, I'm not a word fetichist. But I care about people campaigning for changing a perfectly innocuous word I'm using because they decided they didn't like it for absurd reasons.
I won't say that. As much as I frown upon the holier-than-thou attitude plaguing talks on social justice topics, the words we use do have influence on how we think and act.
master in the context of git never referred to slavery, it's derived from the "master record" used by the audio industry. The process of renaming the default branch was started by someone outside the project who never contributed to git in any way before or after that.
Thankfully, there are many countries outside the US where this sort of 1984-style language policing is not accepted and we'll continue "clinging" to our "legacy terms", tyvm.
Portuguese has the word "mestre" from the same Latin origin. Since it has evolved in a separate context, it may give a glimpse of the original meaning, way before slavery. A "mestre", in Portuguese, is one of three concepts:
- Someone who has mastered some art;
- A teacher;
- The lead artisan in a team, the one who has mastered the art, teaches and leads.
The slave master is a very narrow interpretation on these meanings, and the woke push against the word is myopic. The word has a long history, none of it connected to slavery.
This is the same in British English. I found the main/master switch absurd. I went to school, and was taught by masters: an English master, History master and so on. In my cultural context, the switch was just cultural colonialism from America.
This is the same in other European languages. For example in Polish, the equivalent word, "mistrz", refers to all the things GP said, but doesn't even have a meaning that could be applied to slavery.
As for American English, wake me up when they rename Master's degree.
Also, even with the master/slave interpretation, there's nothing wrong with it. It's not offensive to use terms that refer to slavery. No reasonable person thinks "oh because this database has a master and slave replica the maintainers think slavery was ok". No reasonable person is so psychologically fragile that the mere mention of slavery hurts them.
> No reasonable person is so psychologically fragile that the mere mention of slavery hurts them
And yet, weirdly to me, there's a lot of people acting like it costs them personally to switch words.
I never gave this topic much thought when it first came up, because it never mattered to me in the fist place if the default branch was called "master" or "A1" or "πρώτα".
Someone wants it called different because of aesthetics? Sure, have fun with the new name! It's no more significant to me than "jif" (the cleaning fluid) being renamed "cif", or Marathon, Snickers.
Of course, if anyone were to have suggested to me that the name alone would be enough to solve racism forever, I might have pointed that the Berlin Wall's official name translated as "anti-fascist protection barrier", as an example of the way people use words to divert from a complete lack of real action or worse to act in direct opposition to the normal meaning of the words.
Thankfully, there are many countries outside the US where this sort of 1984-style language policing is not accepted and we'll continue "clinging" to our "legacy terms", tyvm.
FWIW some of us in the USA will also continue using the original words as they were intended rather than injecting social issues into language and trying to control people with compelled speech. I for one put all the words back when people swap them out by using FoxReplace for Firefox, Word Replacer II for Chrome and nobody even notices unless I happen to quote them. The people trying to control language are quite selective. For example they have chosen not to tamper with "Masters Degree" but they will change master everywhere else.
>I for one put all the words back when people swap them out
This is the silliest, pettiest, snowflakiest thing I've seen in a while.
"Words can't hurt you" say people who are so upset that languages change through various means (yes even intentional! Ask the French) that they go out of their way to edit other people's content to say what they would rather it say.
It's really funny to decry 1984 Ingsoc as you actively rewrite your individual view of reality to conform to your sensibilities, as if that isn't exactly the same ideology.
This is the silliest, pettiest, snowflakiest thing I've seen in a while.
Partially agreed. I am silly and petty in response to other people trying to force BDSM on me. They try to force everyone into Domination, Submission and Humiliation so I neuter their pseudo mind-rape and teach others how to do the same.
I get that the core issue was frustrating for some and I agree it felt a bit performative, but: I’m always amazed when someone tries to claim that this incredibly thin step away via a music term _with the same originating meaning_ somehow completely disconnects “master” from slavery.
Why don’t we spend energy on getting to the issues we actually care about instead of standing on shaky arguments and calling it a day. It’s lazy thinking.
The thing is, most non-Americans dont connect master with slavery at all. In the same way we wouldnt connect cotton with slavery. It was a term used within the context of slavery, but wasnt created _for_ slavery. In fact, it long predates african-american slavery:
_late Old English mægester "a man having control or authority over a place; a teacher or tutor of children," from Latin magister (n.) "chief, head, director, teacher"_
So if we dislike the user of master, do we ban whip? Or any other term negatively associated with slavery that actually predates it? I think the actual answer is contextual, and in the context of git, there is no relation to slavery whatsoever for most of the worlds populace
I'd wager good money that if you did a rapid-fire word association test on a spread of non-us english speakers, over half would say "slave" after master.
As a counterpoint, why do we spend huge volumes of energy trying to change minor linguistic term that is only tenuously related to a historical issue, rather than deal with the countless real social issues that exist today?
The reason: because it was easier, it allowed corporations (especially Microsoft) to give the appearance of making social change, and because it distracted us from dealing with the real issues. In other words, laziness.
And you know what, if you're firmly on the progressive left, as I am, that's no big deal. It's annoying, maybe it alienates me from taking part in social action. But it won't, for example, change who I vote for.
However, we (the West) live in a period of history balanced on a narrow edge between social progression and social regression, with all manner of bad actors waiting on the wings to take advantage of our slipups. And this was a slipup, no matter how well meaning the people who pushed it through were. This, and many, many other small annoyances, were in all likelihood what it took to push a significant number of people to change their vote in the recent election. It's not the only reason, perhaps not even the main one. But any change is significant when you're balanced on an edge.
> distracted us from dealing with the real issues
Strongly agree with this. (And this kind of moral licensing in general. Ooh, well done for switching your toilet paper to an eco friendly version you were marketed on instagram, but why haven't you changed anything else in your life that matters).
But also, small things do have to change. If nothing changes, the status quo remains, and the status quo is stacked against many people. (Because of gender, race, culture, wealth, location, etc). It's easy to say "focus on the big things" but the small things can change along the way too.
This was not a small thing to change. It was a minor thing, in itself. But the actual process of changing was huge, and took months of energy and pointless discussion from millions of people. I would guess the change could be counted in the millions of people hours.
I'm strongly in favor of progressive social change. But when even the smallest of change takes this much effort and leaves people frustrated and alienated, we should not be focusing this much effort on insignificant changes. It's like trickle down economics - hundreds of minor changes like this will not trickle down into large changes. Most likely the opposite - they'll alienate and infuriate enough people over time to cause a societal swing in the other direction.
If we're gonna put effort like this into bringing about change, let's make it meaningful, something that effects our daily lives now.
Just understand if you’re the one forcing language, hiring based on race, and forcing people to take part in medical experiments — you’re the regressive one.
Nice strawmen, but I've never done or been involved in any of those things and I don't, personally, consider them progressive. I'm more inclined to think of changes like
improved rights to self expression (as trans, gay, or pretty much anything else that doesn't too badly infringe on other people), social safety for poor people, more equitable sharing of generation wealth, especially related to land ownership, better care for the environment, better access to healthcare, education, and housing for all people, considering other species as sentient and according them the same rights as humans, and not viewing corporations as human as socially progressive issues.
I also recognize that in all of these things, balance and nuance are required and conflicts are common and won't always be resolved in a way that makes me, personally, satisfied.
> forcing language
This entire thread is a majority of people, on a generally quite progressive forum, arguing strongly against forced language change. I do not believe that the majority of genuinely progressive people want or believe in forced language changes, with the exception of a few specific ethnic and gender based slurs.
I think you are unfair to your leftist comrades. Yes, perhaps the problem of using disrespectful words is not very serious, and there are more important social problems. But this is not a reason to ignore them and especially to belittle the merits of people who SUCCESSFULLY solve those problems and little by little ensure social progress in our society.
> Yes, perhaps the problem of using disrespectful words is not very serious, and there are more important social problems. But this is not a reason to ignore them...
That is, in fact, a reason to ignore them. Even if you agree it's a problem (I don't), triage is important. Use your social capital on solving problems of importance, not on annoying people with solutions to minor problems.
I personally thought it because of some exposure to that industry / video / AV over the years. But then I looked for some examples to confirm and easily found many.
Aha, interesting, thanks! I had no idea; I'd always thought it was from "master copy" like in, say, a manuscript that is duplicated by hand. (Sure, the life of a mediaeval monk working in a scriptorium was pretty strictly regulated, but I doubt anyone saw them as slaves, exactly.)
Though that Ampex manual isn't all that convincing in this context, IMO. It's about the hardware level, all capacitors and oscillators and stuff, in "master" and "slave" amplifying circuits. That has pretty much nothing at all to do with "master tape" per se; it's more like "master" and "slave" hydraulic cylinders in the clutch or brake system of your car.
Your HN link feels like a much better argument here. (Though I admit I haven't followed any of the links in it yet; going just by the quoted bits in the comment.)
I read the above replies as believing the linguistic use of "cargo culting" is fine, yet also appreciating knowing that the origin is nuanced and not completely correct (although building a radio mast from bamboo is close enough). "There's more than one way to skin a cat" has an unpleasant origin, yet I'm not going to stop saying it.
As someone who has recently been converting our branches to use main everywhere because they were previously a horrid mix, I don't care what American politics thinks is linguistically problematic today. In other dialects where the word master is more common, it's not a problem any more than the word "owner" is a problem. I feel roughly the same way about changing master to main as my Guatemalan friend feels about the word "Latinx": I don't want someone making $350k in San Francisco telling me how problematic it is to speak my own language.
There different pragmatic level of matters that overlaps, and when things are so thightly commingled, it’s hard to get one subset of the lore without the rest of it.
Take "owner". What’s a product owner in a SCRUM terminology? Is that the person that when leaving the company will keep full exclusive (or even communal) rights on the product? Or is that just corporate novlang to put motivation/pressure on the "wage slave" (to honor/take/loan/steal vocabulary from an other extremity of social perspective)?
> a phrase derived from something that's incorrect and never existed?
As I understood from the article, "cargo cults" exactly as in the widely-used metaphor did exist; it's just that they were a small minority of what anthropologists call "cargo cults".
So it seems to me it's you who are being not only spiteful and petty but above all, just plain wrong.
the whole switch from master to main was absolutely idiotic. Especially because it was a way for corporations to appear buddy buddy with disenfranchised people while doing nothing meaningful for them. Case in point, microsoft whom owns GitHub having zero issues with helping Israel commit genocide while pretending to care about black lives. Everyone is happy to be "woke" and "diverse" as long as it doesn't interfere with making a profit.
Exactly, this was by far the worst part of it. Corporate lip service to social change, and all the people who apparently are spending large parts of their lives and energy campaigning for social change just ate it up as if it was real social change. It wasn't, it did nothing except for muddy the waters and anger potential allies.
So what can a corporation do today to promote social change that isn't lip service that won't get attacked as woke? The backlash against these linguistic change efforts is spending proportional amounts of pointless energy attacking them rather than investing in more concrete outcomes themselves. I mean really keep using master branches if you want and push for things you think actually help rather than upping the engagement/outrage on something that you can easily ignore.
A corporation can donate to charities/provide grants/implement policies that help people based on their actual circumstance rather than their membership of some arbitrary group.
For example:
Offer wage negotiation coaching to the bottom x% of earners in any given position in the company (or just straight up give raises to them unprompted). Such initiatives will by definition disproportionately help disproportionately disadvantaged demographics without codifying systemic racism/sexism/etc. The reason corporations don't do things like this is because they are interested in scoring brownie points without undermining the status quo class related power structures.
Similarly when providing scholarships, don't limit them to certain ethnicities. Doing so tends to mostly favor the members of the given ethnic group who are already well off. Instead make the scholarship inversely proportional to household income and select applicants randomly weighted by 1/income without regard to skin color.
Build community centers and libraries in poor communities regardless of who lives there. Give money to the ACLU and other organizations that help victims of abuse rather than tweeting a rainbow flag in June while simultaneously organizing an industry event in Saudi Arabia.
> The reason corporations don't do things like this is because they are interested in scoring brownie points without undermining the status quo class related power structures.
And above all, without incurring any actual monetary costs. (Unprompted raises??? Muahahahahaa!)
> Offer wage negotiation coaching to the bottom x% of earners in any given position in the company (or just straight up give raises to them unprompted)
I mean, if anything the whole thing caused far more harm than keeping a branch name that maybe could but didn't really have a loose relation to the concept of slavery (there are many other senses of the word 'master' with nothing to do with slavery that the git branch name would make sense to mean), in the division and debate that the whole thing caused. Didn't really help anybody, just caused problems...
Do you realize that the only one offended here is you and are using that to gaslight people into feeling bad for something they haven't done and it's mostly not even wrong?
for example: you should learn that main and master mean absolutely nothing to 95% of the people of the World. In my language "master" translates to maestro, which predates US slavery and symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git). they are just labels to us,, if you are offended by that, there are a lot of other ways to cope than attack people who don't care about them and rightfully so.
> symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git).
Even in English, the term "master" branch has nothing to do with slavery. It originates from a master audio recording, usually just referred to as a master, from which other recordings are made.
It actually has the same origin as the parent poster of your comment:
Late Old English mægester "a man having control or authority over a place; a teacher or tutor of children," from Latin magister (n.) "chief, head, director, teacher" (source of Old French maistre, French maître, Spanish and Italian maestro, Portuguese mestre, Dutch meester, German Meister), contrastive adjective ("he who is greater") from magis (adv.) "more," from PIE mag-yos-, comparative of root meg- "great." The form was influenced in Middle English by Old French cognate maistre.
> In my language "master" translates to maestro, which predates US slavery and symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git).
Exactly. Which is also (what at least I think) where "master copy", which has been claimed to be the origin of git's "master branch" comes from. Whether via the music industry's "master tape" as claimed elsewhere in this discussion, or more directly from the "master's manuscript" all the other monks duplicated in a mediaeval monastery's scriptorium, who knows... But zero to do with slavery, AFAICS.
This is not to say it’s fine to make ad hominem attacks to anyone on its vocabulary. But telling people they should silently accept to use words rooted in a notion of social dominance, doesn’t seem any better. There is a difference on pointing every occurrence of social practices that favor the spread of a domination system, and blaming personally the people who instantiate these practices.
> But telling people they should silently accept to use words rooted in a notion of social dominance
The paradox I've observed people disagreeing with is you either believe in words having magic powers that, such that even if no one knew these connotations they would still have them, or you believe in keeping old connotations alive precisely so you can tell people to stop using them because of the old connotations.
Telling people what their vocabulary can imply is one thing. Telling to others which word they might consider instead is a separate step, that can certainly be fine, don’t we agree?
Unilaterally telling others what words they must use is a domination mechanism, whoever engage in such a practice, don’t we agree?
If we don’t listen to what our words inspire to others, how can we know if it matches our intended meaning? If we don’t continuously hone our habits, including our language habits but definitely not only that, how can we progress as human individuals, collectives and societies?
>believe in words having magic powers that, such that even if no one knew these connotations they would still have them
The trick is simple to explain, isn’t it? We can perfectly be healthy carrier, and yet people will die from this virus we contributed to spread.
Just because something is untroublesome in our own specific case doesn’t mean it won’t contribute in the diffusion of something awful at societal level. That is, the only scale level at which we can measure how much benign or hurtful this thing is for humanity.
> The trick is simple to explain, isn’t it? We can perfectly be healthy carrier, and yet people will die from this virus we contributed to spread.
Except words aren't pathogens. They aren't complex molecular nanomachines that actively avoid our bodies' defenses while incidentally doing damage to it. The only effect they have is in what connotations they trigger in people. In this case, even if the word has troublesome origin, if approximately no one knows about it, then the person bringing up that connotation is the pathogen causing harm to people by convincing them to get worked up over a word, where they wouldn't before.
Words aren’t pathogens, indeed, pathogens are not that great to produce analogies and parables.
We can’t know what words will actually have on people until we release them. But we know that words we use can make a significant and measurable difference:
How close to "approximately no one knows about" are we in an antonym association like master/slave?
>the person bringing up that connotation is the pathogen
Well, that is what we can call focusing on the person rather than the social mechanism at stake, isn’t it? Kind of an equivalent to the mechanism through which we produce reactions like "look this bird of ill omen that pretends that there is an invisible entity passing from one person to an other but whose malign effect only reveal randomly, clearly this person is the actual cause of the issue".
> How close to "approximately no one knows about" are we in an antonym association like master/slave?
For some in the US and those adopting this particular aspect of its culture. For everyone else... well, there's some hundred other antonyms that come to mind before:
Apprentice, amateur, loser, subordinate, subject, secondary, incompetent, inexperienced, junior - to list just a few. The only form of "master / slave" association people have - except for in the USA - is with the nomenclature used for IDE/SATA drive configuration in BIOS.
And that's in English alone. Other languages generally have their "master" equivalent disjoint from slavery or adjacent topics.
Instead the pattern seems to be a group of people on Twitter/Mastadon/social media de jur all taking a quote and sharing talking about how awful it is that someone use the word "blah" in this day and age and how they are a horrible person and we should call up their work and get them fired...
Sometimes even completely misunderstanding what the person is talking about; as one of the first examples of this rousing to cancel people was a guy telling his friend that he would fork that code and someone misunderstood it to be sexual....followed by much ado about dongles.
It wasn't on any platform - the guy got fired for saying something at a conference, and the woman who sent the photo and tweet of him also got fired as she was a "developer evangelist" and her employer didn't think that would fit.
> But telling people they should silently accept to use words rooted in a notion of social dominance, doesn’t seem any better
could be, but...
most words are rooted in a notion of social dominance and only carry a a notion of social dominance when used in the context of expressing social dominance (to oppress or abuse of other people).
words like reign or empire or dictator are absolutely rooted in a notion of social dominance, but we accept that it's completely fine if we use them as a metaphor or as an hyperbole. If someone gets offended, it's their fault.
Some example:
- 2013 was the year in which the reign of Federer at the top of the men's game had supposedly come to an end
- Amazon empire: the rise and reign of Jeff Bezos
- Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, has been called a benevolent dictator for life
>most words are rooted in a notion of social dominance
Most, I don’t know really, that would need a lot of statistics, but we can certainly agree that a significant portion of the vocabulary pertaining to social matter do.
>words like reign or empire or dictator are absolutely rooted in a notion of social dominance, but we accept that it's completely fine if we use them as a metaphor or as an hyperbole.
Yes, sure, when the context is appropriate, we totally agree. We might lake enough proper bandwidth with flat text alone to discuss that properly though. :D
I’m confident it would be far easier to have a conversation on that topic topic around some drinks and laughs for example.
That said, in all example given here, the connection to the toxic social attitudes are obvious.
Every competition-focused sport is rooted in the parable of imposing one dominance on an other, carrying a supremacist perspective with it. That’s why for example yoga competitions will be controversial, while it tennis is not.
As for the two latter celebrities, they don’t really have a reputation of being paragons of empathy that we can point to and say "if everyone would act like this in its interpersonal relationships, humanity would live in gentle bliss and harmony." To be more precise, I don’t know them personally, this remark is really not about these individuals, but more on pointing that in these specific cases, the matching reputation doesn’t serve well the point of uses in metaphoric or hyperbolic ways.
> Most, I don’t know really, that would need a lot of statistics
Believe me.
You wanna know something funny?
The word used in Latin for betrayal (tradunt from which derives tradimento in Italian) at its origins meant "to give, transfer, deliver"
When the Christians came to be, they changed its meaning to something bad because Judas "gave Jesus away".
A simple innocent word has become the quintessence of being an awful person because of a stupid religious myth that also started one of the many persecutions of the Jews.
So beware of changing the meaning of words or advocating for their removal from the public discourse, you'll never know who's gonna be hurt by it.
> the connection to the toxic social attitudes are obvious
the only thing that is obvious is that they are only hyperboles, Amazon is not an Empire, Linus Torvalds is not a dictator and Federer did not actually reign over anything.
I would also argue that Linus has been seen as "benevolent" and I really wanna know from you where the connection to the toxic social attitudes lies when we talk about Federer's reign.
It's obvious to me that the sentence was referring to "the king of mens' tennis" (as a metaphor, do you know what they are?) to celebrate him and not to some literal evil ruler who should be dethroned, with the use of the force if necessary.
Your comment seems so extreme and ridiculous to the point of Poe's law (can't tell if it's satirical or sincere). We would have to make every language very dull indeed if that was the kind of critera for acceptability of words... And how far back in the etymology would somebody have to go to determine whether it's sufficiently non-domineering??
I fail to see what is extreme in it, in all sincerity.
It’s not like it’s a call to act in any extreme way. Actually, the comment doesn’t even mention anything that one should do.
We can listen to other feelings and interpretations of our words even with zero etymological consideration at stake. But if we try to deny their feeling that some word is derogative and back our perspective on lexical neutrality, maybe we might double check we are not missing some well documented semantics of the word and its history.
That said, given the number of downvotes, it looks like I miss some contextual clues about what it might make it feels as some call to extremist POV.
Our team was refactoring the codebase to follow ML pipeline best practices, but not enough attention had been paid to problem/task formulation, label quality etc.
Maybe we can all agree to adopt the equally apocryphal parable of the monkeys and the ladder[0] as a cute just-so story to criticize blindly following established practice without good reason.
The monkeys and the ladder are a valid metaphor for a different scenario. In the cargo-cult case, the ones who started it were copying others without understanding what they were doing and why is was not working. In the monkeys and the ladder case, the monkey did understand the problem and developed a valid solution for it, and then they keep applying it long after the problem had disappeared. So, the cargo-cult metaphor refers to stick to procedures and best practices as if they were religions precepts, while the monkeys-and-ladder metaphor is about maintaining unnecessary technical debt.
At the time, I was unaware of this term, and the explanation given to me was the "misunderstood" one, as explained in the article.
Since that incident, I, too, have pointed out patterns of "cargo culting" as/when I identified them. Not too many, but definitely more than a couple. More than once, I've repeated the same explanation. I've even used the "misunderstood" explanation as a fun anecdote to share at gatherings (both work, and social).
While I don't think less of the original person for referring to my team as a cargo cult (they were sincere in their criticism), the article will definitely stop me from using the misunderstood version of events as the "true" origin of the term. It will change the way I speak about it, even if I refer to this term in the future.
For that, I am grateful.