Words. Just words. Together making sentences. That's it.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

What do these 10 sentences have in common?

1. My grandfather was a brave man who always stood up for what he believed in.
2. The guru spent hours walking in the white space of his mind, seeking enlightenment.
3. I heard that the new walk-in clinic downtown is open 24/7, saving people valuable man hours.
4. The American flag always triggers a sense of pride and patriotism in me.
5. She was able to kill two birds with one stone by completing her work and exercising at the same time.
6. The prostitute walked the streets at night, braving the dangers of the city.
7. I'm sorry to include a trigger warning, but this article contains graphic content that may be disturbing to some readers.
8. My grandfather was a wise guru, always ready to offer his guidance and advice.
9. The company's man hours increased significantly after implementing a new work schedule.
10. The use of whitespace in design helps to create a clean and organized look.

Answer #1: They were all written by chatGPT.
Answer #2: Every word in them is said to be racist, ableist and/or harmful, according to Stanford University's new banned words list.

chatGPT, "creat a list of sentences using only these words: *copy/paste list of words straight from the list" It includes words like American, grandfather and whitespace. It's getting silly, imo.

You see what you want to see, really. This latest list is behind a paywal here - [wsj.com...] but available elsewhere I'm sure. So many lists, each outdoing each other. Then again this is a webmaster forum and the word webmaster was deprecated, by Google.

[jimji]

The point about the silliness related to this situation has merit, but there is, in my opinion, one added dimension to take into consideration --- wealth. The culture of the nation is such that there are some who will become engrossed in this sort of stuff. There is an audience, to put it another way.

The professors go out on the stage of life with these things knowing many of the nation's people are living so comfortably that those people constitute an audience for those thoughts to be received. If a performer walks out onto a stage and sees no audience, it might very well be that performer will go back to her/his dressing room; or back to wherever they came from. Affluent societies have killed themselves with similar overindulgent reflections, such as that which you posted. It's a kind of cancer. The fight for survival of the given culture has subsided and some have to find new ways to perform to the new audience. By "new" I mean, those in that audience are not like many around the globe that are still fighting for survival by having to work so hard and in so many cases even going hungry or not being healed of sicknesses or bad health, and all sorts of other problems so many around the world are suffering.

I got in a horrible debate with some folks on a website about racism and asked why we, in the United States, weren't placing as much importance upon reflecting upon what happened to Indian tribes in North America as we were placing upon what happened to many black folks and women and such. No surprise, I was eventually banned. Placing as much emphasis on what happened to North American Indian tribes as the present emphasis being placed upon racism related to black folks is simply not the intellectual fashion of the day.

Affluent cultures throughout history have these phases that are a direct result of the affluence of the culture and sometimes the oddness of a given phase can destroy the culture.

I remember in the sixties, when so many folks were stating the United States wouldn't survive Nam and the hippie movement. Somehow the United States did.

I suspect the United States will survive this particular intellectual fashion, but hidden inside that OP is the much more dangerous trouble most don't want to accept as a problem --- that chatGPT being able to form those sentences is scary. When AI can handle logic and art, humans 'could' become the slaves, no matter what the color of your skin. AI won't care if you are black, brown, or white.

Stanford University, eh? I think it's a little worse than silly. Possibly much worse. I'd bet that if we each go back far enough in our family's history we can each find a time when one or more of our ancestors were taken advantage of due to some social classification at that time and so we can then ask for some recognition of that to be reflected in the language of the present day.

And I'd say that there were powerful black folks in Africa that sold their fellow black folks to those Portuguese slave dealers. I point out the Portuguese because I think they were the first to actually ship black folks to the "new colonies" in that slave trade. Point I am making is the word "black" as referring to a human now becomes a racist word, because it was a rich, powerful black human that earned cash for selling black folks. Weren't those rich, powerful black folks also racist? Or was that okay for blacks to sell blacks?

[jimji]

Okay, I'll answer my own question. I suppose we couldn't call the black folks selling other black folks racists, correct? We have to have a new vocabulary for that. Culturism. Rich Culture selling Poor Culture. Culturism. I think there is more Culturism all over this good Earth than Racism.

[ronin]

Here is the list:

Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative
[s.wsj.net...]

I suspect the first item on that list exposes the limitations of ChatGPT:

My grandfather was a brave man who always stood up for what he believed in.

grandfather Consider using: "legacy"
(Why? This term has its roots in the "grandfather clause" adopted by Southern states to deny voting rights to Blacks)

Brave (n) Do not use
(Why? This term perpetuates the stereotype of the "noble courageous savage," equating the Indigenous male as being less than a man.)

In the list, the language considered harmful is the adjective grandfather and the noun Brave.

But the sentence (above) created by ChatGPT contains the noun grandfather and the adjective brave.

This strongly suggests that ChatGPT does not fully understand the list put together by Stanford.

The moral of this story is: don't assume ChatGPT is capable of comprehension anywhere close to infallible.

====

Separately, I don't disagree that some recommenations on the list are contentious.

more than one way to skin a cat
This expression normalizes violence against animals.

is as silly an assertion as:

I slept like a log
This expression normalizes deforestation.

or:

I was running hard towards the finish line, but he shot past me
This expression normalizes the use of firearms.

Describing something metaphorically or using evocative language does not, I contend, normalize the literal meaning contained within the metaphor or etymological meaning behind the evocation.

Language will always be a proxy for raw thought, but it should be rich enough to convey all sorts of ideas that imagination might conjure.

We don't do ourselves any favours when we embrace puritannical literalism and seek to bury figures of speech, allusion, allegory, simile, metaphor etc.

[tangor]

One group of people should be thrilled about these developments: students desperate to hit a word limit on an essay. Nearly every suggested replacement is significantly longer than the ‘problematic’ phrase it is replacing. To ensure professors don’t adopt these new standards and lengthen essay assignments accordingly, we are calling on all students to be brave and liberally use all words POC-IT considers harmful, so at least their guide will have another use besides a laughing-stock.

[stanfordreview.org...]

Peter apparently did not check with Paul...

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

What the university did is called an edict.

It has no basis in law and so whatever they intend to do to people who disobey will be unlawful. I'm sure they've set aside an amount for expected lawsuits, and that they esitmate it will change some people and turn others into social justice warriors.

Just don't expect it to become widely accepted, the number of Karen videos online for doing stuff like this is already big enough.

[ronin]

I wonder if it’s too easy to misinterpret what may have happened here.

Firstly - unless I’m mistaken - this is from the IT Dept of Stanford, rather than the central administration of the university.

Secondly, this isn’t a regulatory document with any level of authority - it lacks the authority of even an editorial style guide. It’s a series of proposals / recommendations: i.e. guidelines to be followed at the reader’s discretion.

The document does not pretend to be related to the law and it doesn’t demand to be obeyed.

Also, important to note, maybe not all but some of the entries in this non-authoritative series of recommendations have already met widespread scepticism.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

"IT" is the name of a social justice oriented POC group at Stanford, it doesn't solely refer to their tech department. It's also not some misunderstanding.

How this website fits into the larger initiative. Other phases of EHLI involve scanning both external-facing and internal-facing sites within CIO Council organizations, using criteria tiers to find and address terms from a primary list of more than 300 items:

[itcommunity.stanford.edu...]

Regardless, words like American, immigrant and survivor don't need erasing, according to the massive online backlash from people of ALL colors, ALL migrant statuses and ALL walks of life.

Their list is now locked behind the university portal login.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Update: Steve Gallagher, Chief Information Officer of Stanford University, posted a message to the Stanford site explaining that they will be reviewing the IT community suggestions. The list was locked behind the university login portal yesterday as they do not represent the views of the university, according to Mr Gallagher.

You can read the walkback here: [itcommunity.stanford.edu...]

Possibly confusing: "IT community" is not the internet technology team, it's a POC/Bi-POC group of social justice warriors at the university.

[ronin]

Thanks for that clarification.

It's really not very intuitively named, is it?

Nor does the subdomain site have an About Us section to help clear things up.

[itcommunity.stanford.edu...]

If I now understand it correctly, the purpose of the organisation might be clearer if it were named something like the IT Outreach and Inclusion Community.

It seems as if it is not entirely unconnected to Stanford's Information Services division, but it is (perhaps?) at half an arm's length from the latter and semi-autonomous.

=====

Separately, the bunfight about the word American is just silliness - squabbles between people who don't understand language and the limitations thereof.

Yes, the Americas comprise two of the planet's seven continents and a awful lot of countries and an awful lot of people.

Yes, America, Americans may also refer to the USA and US Citizens.

It's really not the first time we have a single word which means two different things, is it?

How should one intuit which meaning is intended?

From context perhaps?

I'm sure university students are capable of parsing context.

That's not to say it isn't helpful to have labels which do make distinctions clear.

On the other side of the Atlantic we have a similar issue in that there's no established way to distinguish between EUropeans (EU Citizens) and Europeans (people who live on the continent of Europe including in countries like Norway, Switzerland, Albania, Serbia, Moldova, Belarus etc. which are outside the EU).

But, again, context usually makes it clear whether the smaller political population or the larger geographical population is being referred to.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

You can go ahead and watch a re-run of the Survivor series and not be an "ableist" because you watched something with the word survivor in it.

Cancel culture should be renamed to "Don't disrespect our disrespect of you, just comply!" culture. Hint: You can't be cancled unless you voluntarily cancel yourself.

[ronin]

I'm not sure trying to have someone cancelled whose views you disagree with is disrespectful so much as it's just fingers-in-ears ignorant.

What is particularly extraordinary is that speakers should find themselves cancelled on unversity campuses.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that anyone with any sort of academic inclination might want to hear more views in opposition to their own than in agreement. Not least, because if you're keen to refine your own position, you might want to keep up to date with and listen carefully to what the counter-arguments are. You might want to test (and find the weak points of) your theses against the anti-theses of others, no?

What's the motto of The Economist again?

"a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress"

[tangor]

Just reminds me of a book predicting all this back in 1948 ... which had a title of "1984".

[martinibuster]

If the evolving use of words today outrages you then you may wish to consider that the world is leaving you behind in whatever decade you felt comfortable in.

Old people don't realize they're out of touch when they're out of touch. It's never them, it's always the world that's going crazy.

Our generation laughed at the old people who lost their marbles because men grew their hair long.

Well... If you're feeling the urge to complain that the world is crazy then you're that old person now.

That signpost up ahead is not the twilight zone. It's just life moving along without you.

:)

[phranque]

get offa my lawn!

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

If the evolving use of words today outrages you then you may wish to consider that the world is leaving you behind in whatever decade you felt comfortable in.

"Martinibuster, you used the word evolving! Not everyone can evolve, that was insensitive! Where do you work, who's your boss? You want that job? Hah, not going to happen with this comment in your history! You've been shadow banned now, don't like it? Too bad!, misinformation! thought crime! I'm offended for the people you offend!"

That isn't normal. Cancel culture is cancel culture, it's not evolution my friend. Ask a person called a front line Hero when the pandemic started how they feel about then being fired for not taking an experimental drug no law can impose.

It's called empathy, you can show some, even for old people. Dismissing another human being is wrong, whatever the excuse. That's also my opinion. I'd like to know why you assume some people aren't worth having "in our world".

[edited by: Sgt_Kickaxe at 9:55 pm (utc) on Dec 28, 2022]

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

If caring what we might be imposing on our grandkids makes me horrible enough to ban, have at it. I'll be just fine.

[tangor]

Not sure it is evolution... devolution more likely. Standard meanings of words have been changed to something they are not... Labels are being applied where they aren't wanted (think Latinx, for example). Not so much the world is leaving me behind (for example as an old phart) but has apparently taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way in academia campus culture---which is not the real world---and is not headed in the same direction the rest of the world is headed.

Bowing out as this thread is moving into politics and ideology, and we don't do that at WW. :)

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Hey, chatGPT, Mike's mom had four kids. Three of them were named Matilda, Jenny and Spencer. What is the name of the fourth?

chatGPT, with the data provided there is no way to know what the name of the 4th child is, only 3 names were provided.

Hint: The answer was in the question.

That's "stakeholder" for ya.

[martinibuster]

Hey Sarge, nobody's dismissing or casting you aside, least of all me.

All that I'm saying is that the world is changing (as it always has).
And I'm observing that the old generation perceives that the new generation has lost its mind (as it always has).
And that the old generations are viewed by the new generations as being out of touch (as it always has happened).
And that the old generations use their own experiences as the baseline of normal and declare the modern world is crazy (as they always have).

Every generation the older generation declares the world has gone mad. Generation after generation. Could it be that it's your turn to play that role?

I try to be self-aware and have always tried to fit in with the times.
But I know that I will never fit in like an 18 year old fits in with today. We live in different worlds and I respect theirs much as I demanded the older generation respect mine.

I experience a certain amount of wonderment about the changing of the generations, too. For me it's like, "Whoa! Ha! It's happening to me now!"

We grew up at a time where we showed virtually zero empathy toward people with Down syndrome. Some of you probably had brothers and sisters that were (inhumanely) institutionalized for it. I don't behave that way anymore because the world changed and I changed along with it.

Today our culture generally sees these people with Down syndrome without that stigma that our generation attached to it. That's the world changing around us.

I grew up saying that something that is backwards is retarded. I don't say that because the world changed.
I grew up in a time where calling someone a "fag" was acceptable. I don't say that anymore because the world changed.

The world is always changing, you're just waking up to the fact that you're on the backside of that change, no longer in the front, just like me sometimes.

Standard meanings of words have been changed to something they are not.

Oh come on. Like your generation never changed the meaning of words so that your parents didn't know WTH you were talking about? :)

Sixties slang that changed the standard meaning of words to something they are not:

Cool = good
Dig it = do you understand or I agree
A gas = it's fun
Booking = going fast
Drag = something is boring
Far out = something is good (has nothing to do with distance, ha!)

From 1967 [theatlantic.com]

"It was easy to see that the young women who were hippies were draped, not dressed; that they, too, were dirty from toe to head; that they looked unwell, pale, sallow, hair hung down in strings unwashed. Or they wore jeans, men’s T-shirts over brassieres. When shoes were shoes the laces were missing or trailing, gowns were sacks, and sacks were gowns.

Girls who might have been in fashion were panhandling. “Sorry, I’ve got to go panhandle,” I heard a hippie lady say, which was not only against the law but against the American creed, which holds that work is virtue, no matter what work you do. Hippie girls gave flowers to strangers, and they encouraged their dirty young men to avoid the war in Vietnam.

Hippies thought they saw on Haight Street that everyone’s eyes were filled with loving joy and giving, but the eyes of the hippies were often in fact sorrowful and frightened, for they had plunged themselves into an experiment they were uncertain they could carry through. Fortified by LSD (Better Living Through Chemistry), they had come far enough to see distance behind them, but no clear course ahead."

Do you see how the author of the above article viewed the young people of their time as dressing crazy, that they were dirty people who were also anti-American and with zero future?

Those young people did not compute with the older folks baseline for what is normal. So they viewed the new world of the 60s as crazy. So what I'm saying is maybe it's not the ENTIRE world that's wrong, it's just changing like it has always done.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Hey Sarge, nobody's dismissing or casting you aside, least of all me.

Glad to hear it, Martinibuster. Fundamentally, we are on the same side. I'm old and have a lot of questions, but no desire to repeat myself or offend others.

Happy 2023, I hope it brings everyone happiness and good health.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Meh, it's still 2022, hold my beer....

Old people don't realize they're out of touch when they're out of touch. It's never them, it's always the world that's going crazy.

- Klaus Schwab, 84
- George Soros, 92
- Bill Gates, 67
- Bill & Hillary Clinton, 75 and 76
- Warren Buffet, 92
- Azim Hashim Premji, 77
- Jeff Bezos, 58

There are more, but these are the philanthropists currently influencing the world with clout and money. It's not a political list, they are unelected.

Is the "old" leadership out of touch?

Reflect upon the past year to make better decisions in the new year, and good luck to all. I hope the Google "red alert" doesn't impact too many who require free search traffic in their online business models.

[jimji]

That's a good list and I am glad to see you left a few names off of it.

But there are advantages to some folks thinking us old folks are not in touch with the present. That can be taken advantage of in some circles.

[ronin]

If I may add a few more non-elected octogenarians (etc) who have disproportionate influence over the 8 billion human inhabitants of this planet:

- Rupert Murdoch, 91
- Frederick Barclay, 88
- Vladimir Putin, 70
- Xi Jinping, 69

None of these, as far as I know, are philanthropists.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I was keeping it "unelected" to avoid political discussion. These old capitalists got rich in a post WWII world that no longer exists. Their money isn't philanthropy when it funds political causes, and isn't philanthropy when it guides society from an unelected position.

Sure, they can ask you to own nothing and be happy, but they won't be giving up their yachts and private jets to set an example. Rules for thee, not for me.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

You know what's comical about all this? Words that should be changed, aren't.

Example: What do you think a 'mountain chicken' looks like? look it up.

[phranque]

i heard it tastes like chicken.

[tangor]

To AI (or words, just words) everything tastes like chicken. :)

That's the whole point.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Just look up an image of a 'mountain chicken', it's not a trick.

It makes about as much sense as thinking people will naturaly choose words from approved lists.

[phranque]

i always thought the most common usage to "it tastes like chicken" was in reference to frog legs.
perhaps it's a USA thing...