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  • There are many problems and many solutions. We don't need to focus on one problem and pick only one solution.

    My entire point here was that there is concern that industry jargon can be accidentally exclusionary to some demographics, interest and research on it isn't new, and the effect is usually a "death by a thousand cuts" type thing, like migroaggressions are.

    I didn't specialize in this, so my knowledge on it is from one part of one class I took like 15 years ago, but I can absolutely see how it could matter.

    People aren't rational and society doesn't raise us rationally. We can be perfectly ok with something in one context but not ok with it in another context. We can be ok with one thing, but not ok with another similar thing.

    I agree there are deeper societal issues about how we raise boys and the incentives/traumas we put on kids. That doesn't mean we cant pick off this low hanging fruit at no cost.
    \ It's important to meet people where they are, not where we think they should be.

    • it's certainly possible it matters, but ultimately in the field of engineering, if you're designing a bike, it's probably more important to fix that problem where the bike crumples in half impaling the rider on the way down rather than the fact that the water bottle mounting holes need de-burring off the factory line to help prevent them from cutting people slightly.

      Dealing with microaggressions is definitely one of the problems at all times, there is a question of whether it even exists to any significant degree, considering a lot of people make jokes about other things at the sarcastic expense of something. Is self deprecating humor a self microaggression that we should stamp out because it subconsciously influences people to be a worse person?

      You see what i'm getting at here? I feel like it's just a really hard problem, with a really hard solution, and i feel like the best solution is to treat it like a moderately insignificant problem, while being consciously aware of it. In fact one could probably argue being consciously aware of microaggressions is going to make you immune to them from the get go.

      I also feel like it's probably effort needlessly spent relative to other issues as well, like for example we could move to stop microaggressions, or we could like, move to stop racial bias hiring practices, which are probably going to be more beneficial. Or like, make an AI less racist, or like, don't use AI for crime detection and stopping at all probably.

      like it's a death by thousand cuts sure, but i feel like we're ignoring the missing leg and the dislocated and fractured jaw here as well.

      It’s important to meet people where they are, not where we think they should be.

      yeah, absolutely a great stop gap measure here would be doing this on a person by person basis, if X doesn't like Y using Z term, they can mutually come to the agreement to not do that.

      Another thing we need to consider, is that we can't expect everyone to meet us where we are, because a lot of people (me included as a neurodivergent individual) i do not have normal behaviors, i just ghost friends for long periods of time, i don't hold that against them if they don't like that. That's just a thing i do, and if they don't like it, it's fine, i won't talk to them, and they don't have to talk to me. Anything other than that would be an aggressive overstepping of my personal boundary lines. As well as theirs.

      I think this is ironically, a shooting yourself in the foot problem, from the broader context, because we're doing this "insignificant" thing to "marginally improve things for others" when in reality, we may actually just be making things more complicated for people who do not function inside of the bubble of normality.

      I think ultimately, the best thing we can do is to simply prime people to not care. Things are shitty, shitty people say shitty things, just don't worry about it and you don't have a problem, at the end of the day, 90% of this shit is relatively minor, and thinking about it is only going to cause unnecessary anguish.

457 comments