This site gives me such major deja vu that I’m genuinely beginning to question my memory seeing shit like this.
I swear I read this exact same thread yesterday about the repost, I swear I read this exact same fucking comment yesterday but it says coolspot posted it 10 minutes ago.
> Maybe a moderator renewed it or something? Is that possible?
Yes, but I would have expected that they sent you an email about that. (the post ID in the url is also clearly out of order compared to other submissions from today - which is exactly what happens if mods bump it)
Now this one has disappeared off the front page too.
I think it's being removed by automod because most of the comments are turning into downvote-heavy low-quality bickering over use of the terms allowlist/denylist vs whitelist/blacklist. Automod tends to disfavor posts with comment sections that turn into bickering (which is roughly approximated by ratio of downvotes to upvotes).
EDIT: Aaaaand now it's flagged. I don't know it automod does that too, or if that's explicitly a user thing, or even a mod thing. I wonder if users who don't like the terms are flagging it?
Charitably, it's been flagged by users who don't like the terms and/or don't like the quality of the discussion of the terms. I think it's a shame that so many simple disagreements have to be so bitterly socio-political.
Yeah, that too. I just wish we could get past the transitional reactionary phase already, wherein the mere use of these new phrases triggers endless arguments, and people (who clearly know what the terms mean) can just get over it and let them pass without content.
Maybe the mods should step in with some guidance. They already don't like extended discussions of politics because it devolves into flame wars too easily; maybe they should enforce the same on discussions of whitelist/blacklist/master/slave/etc terminology? Like, just let people use the new terms, no arguing about it?
I think that rule would be pretty widely considered unacceptable, since it would also prohibit comments like "hey, you should use 'allowlist' rather than 'whitelist'". It's not an issue that many people are willing to accept neutrality on these days.
The asterisk is often used to mince profane words, and I guess wh* te and bl* ck are profane now... Or at least that's what the parent comment is implying. (Personally I disagree.)
I think allowlist and denylist are better alternatives to whitelist and blacklist. Allow and Deny are more literally what this is about. White and Black are just old metaphors that aren’t clear they are just familiar.
Whitelist and Blacklist don’t really have racists backgrounds but it they are part of a longstanding cultural bias that equates white=good and black=bad. Subverting those biases seems like a good idea.
Note well that the style of snarky attack in this post and the parent is how you drive people away from your "side" who normally didn't have strong feelings either way.
I am not on a ‘side’. In fact there are no sides here. There is reality where these are common words that mean specific things. And then there is a mass hallucination that the compound words consisting of “black” and “white” preceding the word “list” is somehow an underhanded racial slight.
Mind sharing which authority decided this, comrade? Was it the Central Committee or the General Secretary themselves? Спасибо. Hasta la victoria siempre!
>> If it's silly to be pedantic about it, isn't it also silly to leave a comment discussing a change to it?
Seriously commenting on the futility of a silly a comment raises the silly by an order of magnitude.
Atomic bits of maoism in a vacumn seem silly, but the long term effects on culture and discourse are toxic even if they were wrought by well meaning but ultimately silly people in an act of semantically and historically incorrect overreach.
Fortunately we have both dry erase boards and a chalkboards to keep track of such things.
>Fortunately we have both dry erase boards and a chalkboards to keep track of such things.
What an incredibly bad-faith argument.
Whiteboard and blackboard refer to the physical color of the board. The reason people don't like white/black list terminology is that it means white = good and black = bad.
Please do not straw-man legitimate criticism if you can avoid it.
And to be clear, allowlist and denylist are better terms because they are more descriptive. It's not obvious why a whitelist would be the list of what's accepted and a blacklist the list of what's denied; you just have to memorize them (and this causes confusion in CS 101 classes every year). So the new terms are flat-out better, and should be accepted on that merit alone regardless of any of the other connotations involved.
This is patently false. Anecdotally, I've never heard of CS students having trouble over figuring out what the terms mean, and furthermore, these are not strictly CS/software engineering terms. These terms appear in the dictionary (at least on Merriam Webster). If your students are having issue figuring them out, I'd encourage them to use a dictionary before arbitrarily and unnecessarily relating them to race.
Anecdotally I have heard of students having trouble figuring out what the terms mean. You're even admitting it yourself -- if you have to rely on looking them up in the dictionary then it's obvious they aren't obvious terms! No one has to look up "allowlist" and "denylist" because they do exactly what they say on the tin.
You have yet to give one valid argument as to how "whitelist" and "blacklist" are better, and indeed, have unintentionally given one argument as to how they are worse.
And yes, they are strictly engineering terms. Merely appearing in a dictionary doesn't mean they aren't. Most technical words are in the dictionary despite not being used outside their fields, e.g. here's one: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stator
I think it's a misrepresentation of my argument to say that because I mentioned that they appear in the dictionary that I am conceding that they are not good terms (although by your exclamation point at the end I am reading that part as well-intended banter).
I'll say this to clarify since I do not believe you are making this argument but having to look up a word should not be the barrier to whether or not a word is used.
They are better because they are well understood and agreed upon terms. I'll also reiterate that the terms are not engineering specific; wikipedia has sources cited so hopefully this will suffice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting
You mean the parent is arguably false. Truth-keeping aside, you're saying that people working in contexts where blacklist/whitelist are used, after they have learned the terms, now know those terms, whereas they don't yet know the terms allowlist/blocklist, since they've never heard them. Of course this is obvious, and not what the parent is saying. The parent is saying that, given equal opportunity, one is more semantically explicit than the other. We see this argument often: Naming things, as it goes, is the hardest problem, and when somebody thinks of a better name, there is understandable friction against switching because the previous name is entrenched in practice. This is the argument being had (in this specific thread of a few comments), and you should attempt to have it.
Good summary, 100% agree with all of this. And I'd add that the friction of switching to allowlist/denylist, at least for new projects, is very low, because the terms are obvious on their face. Once you've seen them once you know what they mean.
but any linguist can tell you that is not how language works. words are NOT their etymology. and words are as much about their sound as any potential explicit connotations
It is arguably more bad faith to assume the criticism is legitimate.
Its at best intellectually dishonest and at worst condescending/arrogant to assume people can't not form racist views because they can't figure out the context when someone uses the name of a color.
Am I supposed to mince words with my doctor when I am trying to describe the appearance of my severe frost bite? I don't think any of my black friends would take offense to me saying "my toes are black, this isn't good."
>assume people can't not form racist views because they can't figure out the context when someone uses the name of a color.
The parent did not do this. It sounds like you've constructed an exaggerated version of a potential assumption somebody other than the parent could make: That a particular person may be feigning "not knowing" what the terms means, which frankly is not surprising, considering how incredibly bitter some people feel about these terms, but of course neither is it surprising to sincerely not know what they mean, since they are new terms, regardless of how explicit they are (you need at least a modicum of context if you've never heard them before). So the person you're attacking surely exists (a person who would make this accusation in every case, with no benefit of the doubt ever given), but that person is not here, nor could we know if they are here given the limited sample size of chances they have in this thread to express such an uncharity.
As for your frostbite example, obviously nobody seeks to control the reality of what color frostbite is. I feel like you may have jumped the gun on that analogy.
If not for the racial context, what other motivation would there be to change the terms? In what other context would someone object to arbitrarily assigning one color as good and one color as bad? Had they historically been called bluelist and purplelist, I do not think anyone would honestly argue that there would be such demand for changing the names.
It's also unproductive on your part to say that we can't make safe assumptions. The post that I replied to mentioned that people don't like the terminology because it relates white to good and black to bad. That is obviously a response to the racially charged times. To claim otherwise is to lie. I find it doubtful any major tech companies (or anyone for that matter) were discussing changes these terms because they are more "semantically explicit" before 2020 and were not doing so in response to some ill-assigned racial undertones that do not actually exist.
As far as jumping the gun, it is not as absurd an argument as you are characterizing it to be. People do seek control the context in which white and black can be used. The terms whitelist and blacklist are generally accepted and people have little trouble deducing their meaning. Colors do have cultural meaning outside of race - brides generally wear white dresses, people wear black to a funeral, black ties are considered formal, etc.
I'm not sure if it's about making them taboo. We're not "banning" the words white and black. We're not saying you can't use those words to describe color for instance (e.g. "the wall is white", "this car is black"). The way I tend to see it is that we reached a level of sensitivity that leads us to be more explicit about our choice of words. I would call myself somewhat socially progressive but now I have to admin that I've never questioned the terms whitelist and blacklist. Now that I do, it seems obvious to me that "black" and "white" prefixes aren't good terms to use in the first place. How is someone even supposed to know which one is "allow" and which one is "deny". "Allowlist" and "Denylist" or something like that would be way more descriptive AND would simply be more sensitive to what's going on in the world. Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum, we can't ignore social issues.
Making certain uses of some words a taboo is exactly what's happening. Which, in some cases, just seems arbitrary and not related to a societal problem, let alone its solution. It's a good thing we are becoming more sensitive to these topics, and that they are beginning to get the attention to hopefully bring meaningful change. However, as is the case with any sufficiently big movement, subgroups will form that have their own interpretation of the goal, and some of those will end up being detrimental to the overall cause. For example, the few individuals rioting during the recent protests hurt the entire movement one way or another. This comparison is to be taken with a grain of salt, but my impression has been that the whole debate on certain words is somewhat similar to that, in much lesser form of course. There is language that needs changing. There is also language that I would argue doesn't, and arbitrarily creating artificial sensitivity just dilutes the original, important message.
When I hear the word camp, I don't immediately think of labour camps, the same way I don't think of race when I hear the word blacklist. That's not the case for everyone, so it does need addressing. What it boils down to is the question when and why it was concluded that deprecating those neutral uses was the better solution over deprecating their negative connotations. It mostly just seems counter-intuitive to me for the reason stated in my previous comment.
Except how is a blacklist "bad" and a whitelist "good" ? I've never thought of it this way; I dont think many people have but I could he wrong.
If there was some race related history to the words I could understand, but I thought they were called this way purely because the colours black and white are opposites, like how a blacklist is the opposite to a whitelist and vice versa.
I have always thought the analogizing of white to “good” and black to “bad” comes directly from absence of light (dark; black) or the presence of light (bright; white).
Because we are not nocturnal creatures, darkness == scary and daytime == security so therefore black == bad and white == good.
I can see how one who is hyper-focused on race might see that as problematic, but to me, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
It's a thing because there's a pandemic and another Black guy was murdered by police -- George Floyd. Because of the pandemic, people reacted uncharacteristically and raised hell instead of our usual reaction of sort of shrugging and making excuses.
So a lot of different things are being impacted by our uncharacteristic willingness to take action about systemic racism, including use of language.
But it's offensive to me as a grumpy white person to associate me with positivity or openness. It's fascinating to see 2/3 of the comments on this submission being about this PC terminology change though.
Looking forward to more acceptance for working at night, since it's clearly racist to make us work in bright daylight instead of darkness.
That’s one of the problems I have with some of the “productivity culture” blogs (and podcasts). They’re great for independents, very small businesses and executives who have that level of control. If I told my boss that I was only available during certain “office hours” to accept meetings, I’d quickly be out of a job.
No, the best that I can do that fits in the work culture is to block out a few “GTD” (actually I call them “GSD/Get Shit Done”)hours at strategic times during the week.
I want to point out that I do attempt Inbox Zero because it’s a method for dealing with a problem that’s within my control but also within “normal” working parameters.
Tools like Calendly do a reasonably good job of making an allowlist out of your calendar. Put them in your email sig and generally teach people to use it.
I wonder how to make that work in a larger organization where people would just see your Outlook calendar in the scheduling assistant. Does Calendly or any product block that off for you?
Calendly has Calendar integration so it checks your {Outlook,Google} calendar for free times (within the office hours specified in Calendly), and also adds an event to the configured {Outlook,Google} calendar to avoid double-booking.
> The solution should be office hours. You should be able to say say “I’m free for meetings from 2-5pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and if you want to talk to me then that’s when you can.” In most companies, doing that would make you an annoyance. Those companies don’t respect Deep Work.
No, the main reason would be that it becomes impossible to schedule meetings when everyone only has that few arbitrarily selected office hours.
It might work when everyone in the team agrees to the same office hours, but even then, how do you schedule meetings to align between teams with different office hours?
I permanently block off time for focused work, at least half a day each day, alternating mornings and afternoons, and one full day a week, meaning I have 4*4 = 16 hours available for meetings each week, and 24 hours available for work.
In those situations -- which happen maybe twice a year -- when a team meeting happens in the time blocked off, I flip it. So, if I have the morning blocked off for work and a meeting that I have to attend is in the morning, I block off the afternoon for work and cancel existing appointments, of course with apologies. That's pretty rare.
For anyone else outside my team or group that I work with normally, I tell them my calendar is open and they can book a time whenever I'm free.
I also urge people to use email when they think it's possible, since a lot things can be handled more efficiently async via email than via a meeting. A meeting is sometimes required, but it shouldn't be the automatic first choice.
I went over this plan with my manager and he thought it a great idea. Personally, I've found it significantly increases my productivity. All of this is a function of the corporate culture where you work, and I am not suggesting that you adopt practices that go against your company's culture, but the fact of the matter is that long periods of focused work are required to make big contributions, and if your corporate culture doesn't allow it, you may want to look elsewhere to make a big impact.
I'm not necessarily against the idea, but I suspect that it would exacerbate existing issues with team members in different time zones. For example, I work on the US east coast and everyone else in my team is on the west coast - a difference of three hours. My coworkers already tend to be unreachable or uncommunicative in their mornings. If they were to follow the advice in this article, they would almost certainly formalize that by limiting their "allow" time to their afternoon. Since I already end my own "allow" time at dinner, that only leaves about two hours a day when the two overlap. Even if they didn't consistently fill those two hours with meetings among themselves within their own time zone, that wouldn't be enough. It's why I have a 6:30pm meeting this evening, which is super unwelcome but it's what I have to do. At least it's not on a Friday this time. This situation would be even worse with a five- or eight-hour time difference.
I don't think this system can work if everyone can just arbitrarily choose which hours to leave open, on a team distributed across time zones. There would have to be some kind of rules to ensure sufficient overlap. That means some people might not get the absolutely perfect schedule they wanted, but too bad. Be adults. Better for everyone to make some accommodation than to force everyone in the minority time zone to work majority-time-zone hours - which is basically what I see happening to everyone in my situation. We don't need to make that worse.
In my experience at least, it's never been that anyone can truly unilaterally schedule a meeting. Instead, it's that anyone can propose a meeting with anyone else at any time, which people end up feeling obligated to accept for a variety of social and political reasons.
I agree that there is a common tendency for folks to schedule more meetings than would be most efficient, and that there are a variety of reasons why this is the case.
I’m not so sure that having every employee in to set office hours outside of which no one else may invite them to a meeting is the correct solution. I could imagine it being fairly likely that you might end up in a scenario in which this system makes it impossible to schedule meetings with many groups of people.
Meeting time is expensive for both individuals and the company, but some amount of meetings can be worthwhile! Ideally both inviters and invitees attempt to consider as many of the trade-offs involved as possible, and are able to do all of send, receive, accept, and reject, and propose alternatives to invitations as needed.
> Does your company have a culture of letting everyone see each other’s calendars? Do people often schedule meetings whenever there are openings, without asking?
> If so, your calendar is a blocklist.
Sure, but what is this “schedule meetings, without asking”? Sending out meeting requests is asking. Having open calendars gives people a better first-glance idea of times that are likely to be acceptable and times that aren't.
I was also a bit puzzled that blocking out time for yourself to work at your desk as considered a "crappy workaround". But then apparently the solution is to have 2pm-5pm as "office hours", which is precisely equivalent to blocking 9am-2pm as "desk work".
Booking time for jobs in your own calendar is a simple solution. If someone tries to book over the top of it, you just click "propose new time" to your next available slot.
I do get frustrated when my slightly more senior managers just have a month ahead booked out in their calendar, and I just need a 15-minute chat to get approval for something to keep me moving along.
It probably depends on company culture, but I can definitely envision situations where the meeting "request" is less of an actual request and more of a "this meeting is scheduled whether you like it or not".
86 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadEDIT: Looks like this post is marked as [flagged] now.
Just lacks upvotes to be on the front page.
I swear I read this exact same thread yesterday about the repost, I swear I read this exact same fucking comment yesterday but it says coolspot posted it 10 minutes ago.
Am I going insane?
Maybe a moderator renewed it or something? Is that possible?
Yes, but I would have expected that they sent you an email about that. (the post ID in the url is also clearly out of order compared to other submissions from today - which is exactly what happens if mods bump it)
You can always see the original timestamp via URLs other than the front page and the /item page. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mcrittenden shows the comment you were talking about as "1 day ago", and https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=critter.blog (which you can get at by clicking on the domain in the title) shows the same for the submission.
I think it's being removed by automod because most of the comments are turning into downvote-heavy low-quality bickering over use of the terms allowlist/denylist vs whitelist/blacklist. Automod tends to disfavor posts with comment sections that turn into bickering (which is roughly approximated by ratio of downvotes to upvotes).
EDIT: Aaaaand now it's flagged. I don't know it automod does that too, or if that's explicitly a user thing, or even a mod thing. I wonder if users who don't like the terms are flagging it?
Charitably, it's been flagged by users who don't like the terms and/or don't like the quality of the discussion of the terms. I think it's a shame that so many simple disagreements have to be so bitterly socio-political.
Maybe the mods should step in with some guidance. They already don't like extended discussions of politics because it devolves into flame wars too easily; maybe they should enforce the same on discussions of whitelist/blacklist/master/slave/etc terminology? Like, just let people use the new terms, no arguing about it?
Not everyone here is a deranged, neurotic leftist that can't handle the words "whitelist" and "blacklist".
Whitelist and Blacklist don’t really have racists backgrounds but it they are part of a longstanding cultural bias that equates white=good and black=bad. Subverting those biases seems like a good idea.
The generalized concept that white=good,black=bad is something that can easily disappear from all "industry" with more precise terms.
In the case of this topic, allow/deny is a much better set of names.
Seriously commenting on the futility of a silly a comment raises the silly by an order of magnitude.
Atomic bits of maoism in a vacumn seem silly, but the long term effects on culture and discourse are toxic even if they were wrought by well meaning but ultimately silly people in an act of semantically and historically incorrect overreach.
Fortunately we have both dry erase boards and a chalkboards to keep track of such things.
What an incredibly bad-faith argument.
Whiteboard and blackboard refer to the physical color of the board. The reason people don't like white/black list terminology is that it means white = good and black = bad.
Please do not straw-man legitimate criticism if you can avoid it.
You have yet to give one valid argument as to how "whitelist" and "blacklist" are better, and indeed, have unintentionally given one argument as to how they are worse.
And yes, they are strictly engineering terms. Merely appearing in a dictionary doesn't mean they aren't. Most technical words are in the dictionary despite not being used outside their fields, e.g. here's one: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stator
I'll say this to clarify since I do not believe you are making this argument but having to look up a word should not be the barrier to whether or not a word is used.
They are better because they are well understood and agreed upon terms. I'll also reiterate that the terms are not engineering specific; wikipedia has sources cited so hopefully this will suffice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting
Its at best intellectually dishonest and at worst condescending/arrogant to assume people can't not form racist views because they can't figure out the context when someone uses the name of a color.
Am I supposed to mince words with my doctor when I am trying to describe the appearance of my severe frost bite? I don't think any of my black friends would take offense to me saying "my toes are black, this isn't good."
The parent did not do this. It sounds like you've constructed an exaggerated version of a potential assumption somebody other than the parent could make: That a particular person may be feigning "not knowing" what the terms means, which frankly is not surprising, considering how incredibly bitter some people feel about these terms, but of course neither is it surprising to sincerely not know what they mean, since they are new terms, regardless of how explicit they are (you need at least a modicum of context if you've never heard them before). So the person you're attacking surely exists (a person who would make this accusation in every case, with no benefit of the doubt ever given), but that person is not here, nor could we know if they are here given the limited sample size of chances they have in this thread to express such an uncharity.
As for your frostbite example, obviously nobody seeks to control the reality of what color frostbite is. I feel like you may have jumped the gun on that analogy.
It's also unproductive on your part to say that we can't make safe assumptions. The post that I replied to mentioned that people don't like the terminology because it relates white to good and black to bad. That is obviously a response to the racially charged times. To claim otherwise is to lie. I find it doubtful any major tech companies (or anyone for that matter) were discussing changes these terms because they are more "semantically explicit" before 2020 and were not doing so in response to some ill-assigned racial undertones that do not actually exist.
As far as jumping the gun, it is not as absurd an argument as you are characterizing it to be. People do seek control the context in which white and black can be used. The terms whitelist and blacklist are generally accepted and people have little trouble deducing their meaning. Colors do have cultural meaning outside of race - brides generally wear white dresses, people wear black to a funeral, black ties are considered formal, etc.
Are people implicating it has something to do with race? Because it don't see the connection.
I don't think giving words more power to express hate, by making them taboo, benefits anyone. But a part of the internet has agreed on exactly that.
When I hear the word camp, I don't immediately think of labour camps, the same way I don't think of race when I hear the word blacklist. That's not the case for everyone, so it does need addressing. What it boils down to is the question when and why it was concluded that deprecating those neutral uses was the better solution over deprecating their negative connotations. It mostly just seems counter-intuitive to me for the reason stated in my previous comment.
If there was some race related history to the words I could understand, but I thought they were called this way purely because the colours black and white are opposites, like how a blacklist is the opposite to a whitelist and vice versa.
Because we are not nocturnal creatures, darkness == scary and daytime == security so therefore black == bad and white == good.
I can see how one who is hyper-focused on race might see that as problematic, but to me, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
The lack of light = black, and light which includes literally all colours = white.
When light is "blocked" from passing, black. When light is "allowed" to pass, white.
I look forward to seeing what other concepts can be mutated to make a point on unrelated topics.
So a lot of different things are being impacted by our uncharacteristic willingness to take action about systemic racism, including use of language.
Looking forward to more acceptance for working at night, since it's clearly racist to make us work in bright daylight instead of darkness.
No, the best that I can do that fits in the work culture is to block out a few “GTD” (actually I call them “GSD/Get Shit Done”)hours at strategic times during the week.
I want to point out that I do attempt Inbox Zero because it’s a method for dealing with a problem that’s within my control but also within “normal” working parameters.
I had the same issue in my last job at a large enterprise. What I found out was that many people actually didn't know how to use that feature.
If so, I do not bother to decline such a meeting, I just do not show up.
No, the main reason would be that it becomes impossible to schedule meetings when everyone only has that few arbitrarily selected office hours.
It might work when everyone in the team agrees to the same office hours, but even then, how do you schedule meetings to align between teams with different office hours?
In those situations -- which happen maybe twice a year -- when a team meeting happens in the time blocked off, I flip it. So, if I have the morning blocked off for work and a meeting that I have to attend is in the morning, I block off the afternoon for work and cancel existing appointments, of course with apologies. That's pretty rare.
For anyone else outside my team or group that I work with normally, I tell them my calendar is open and they can book a time whenever I'm free.
I also urge people to use email when they think it's possible, since a lot things can be handled more efficiently async via email than via a meeting. A meeting is sometimes required, but it shouldn't be the automatic first choice.
I went over this plan with my manager and he thought it a great idea. Personally, I've found it significantly increases my productivity. All of this is a function of the corporate culture where you work, and I am not suggesting that you adopt practices that go against your company's culture, but the fact of the matter is that long periods of focused work are required to make big contributions, and if your corporate culture doesn't allow it, you may want to look elsewhere to make a big impact.
I don't think this system can work if everyone can just arbitrarily choose which hours to leave open, on a team distributed across time zones. There would have to be some kind of rules to ensure sufficient overlap. That means some people might not get the absolutely perfect schedule they wanted, but too bad. Be adults. Better for everyone to make some accommodation than to force everyone in the minority time zone to work majority-time-zone hours - which is basically what I see happening to everyone in my situation. We don't need to make that worse.
whitelist blacklist master slave sane healthy father
How common is the phenomenon that the blog is posting about? Where everyone in a company can unilaterally block off a meeting with anyone else?
I'm astonished that anyone would put up with this. Maybe I should count myself lucky.
I agree that there is a common tendency for folks to schedule more meetings than would be most efficient, and that there are a variety of reasons why this is the case.
I’m not so sure that having every employee in to set office hours outside of which no one else may invite them to a meeting is the correct solution. I could imagine it being fairly likely that you might end up in a scenario in which this system makes it impossible to schedule meetings with many groups of people.
Meeting time is expensive for both individuals and the company, but some amount of meetings can be worthwhile! Ideally both inviters and invitees attempt to consider as many of the trade-offs involved as possible, and are able to do all of send, receive, accept, and reject, and propose alternatives to invitations as needed.
> If so, your calendar is a blocklist.
Sure, but what is this “schedule meetings, without asking”? Sending out meeting requests is asking. Having open calendars gives people a better first-glance idea of times that are likely to be acceptable and times that aren't.
Booking time for jobs in your own calendar is a simple solution. If someone tries to book over the top of it, you just click "propose new time" to your next available slot.
I do get frustrated when my slightly more senior managers just have a month ahead booked out in their calendar, and I just need a 15-minute chat to get approval for something to keep me moving along.