I have no inherent strong opinions on terminology, so I'll roll with it. But I am concerned that this might be a symptom of a larger trend toward whimsically inventive "solutions" that have ill defined or undefined MOEs.
What does this get us? Is there any evidence that these terms are harmful to racial minorities? Do fMRIs or glucocorticoid sampling indicate that the use of these terms causes a stress response? I'm skeptical, but I don't know.
By all means, we should question conventions that might be ill suited to an enlightened society. However, every change costs political capital, and we should be spending that political capital on actual change rather than self-congratulatory tinkering.
This kind of change does more harm than good to the society. It’s a distraction to what really matters. Big corp just wants more brownie points. It’s just gimmicks and it’s rather pointless.
I think this is a good change for an entirely unrelated reason though.
Blacklist and Whitelist aren't intuitive terms. Blocklist and Allowlist make way more sense from the user friendliness perspective, particularly so when it comes to usability for non-native speakers.
I think generally this type of change makes sense so that meanings can easily be determined from the terms' etymology.
I thought blacklist was related to 'black out' meaning to censor something by blacking it out. I don't know, it's a cool word, words with colors in the names feel richer. Banlist/allowlist is simpler I guess, which is still nice.
All this speech-policing is only empowering the wrong kind of people. Personally I never even made a connection to race when using words like 'blacklist'. Allowing activists to decide which words are improper or not-inclusive makes communication like walking through a minefield. I live in Germany, public communication in Academia has become unreadable at times with application of 'inclusive' speech and 'proper' pronouns.
It won't stop with 'blacklist' or 'whitelist'. How many people stopped contributing to open source projects because the "Code of Conduct"-politicos (on a powertrip) started to politicize everything and harassing anyone that is not 100% politically aligned until they left?
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 12.8 ms ] threadWhat does this get us? Is there any evidence that these terms are harmful to racial minorities? Do fMRIs or glucocorticoid sampling indicate that the use of these terms causes a stress response? I'm skeptical, but I don't know.
By all means, we should question conventions that might be ill suited to an enlightened society. However, every change costs political capital, and we should be spending that political capital on actual change rather than self-congratulatory tinkering.
Blacklist and Whitelist aren't intuitive terms. Blocklist and Allowlist make way more sense from the user friendliness perspective, particularly so when it comes to usability for non-native speakers.
I think generally this type of change makes sense so that meanings can easily be determined from the terms' etymology.
Remember this story?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes...
It won't stop with 'blacklist' or 'whitelist'. How many people stopped contributing to open source projects because the "Code of Conduct"-politicos (on a powertrip) started to politicize everything and harassing anyone that is not 100% politically aligned until they left?