Revision history for comment 886

Edited by Steve Flammia May 23 2017 02:25 UTC

While I would never want to antagonize my peers or to allow myself to assume they were acting irrationally, I do share your concerns to an extent. I worry about the association of social justice and inclusivity with linguistic engineering, virtual lynching, censorship, etc. (the latter phenomena starkly distant from the principles of inclusion and tolerance). But the similarity to an Orwellian world is tenuous, given that our real-world situation is brought about not by a totalitarian state.

I wish the anonymous commenter had not been as bitter and insulting, but I do "feel them". I sincerely believed that practicing and aspiring scientists could carry on with their study of science without getting carried away by historical associations of the words used, especially if the discipline of their study was as apolitical as physics. But I know that my own experience bears heavily on my thinking, and that others' experiences can be vastly different. Therefore I am sincerely curious to learn about, and to hear from, those of my peers whose careers or lives have suffered observable changes due to the technical terms used in physics.

Varun Narasimhachar commented on The careless use of language in quantum information May 23 2017 02:14 UTC

While I would never want to antagonize my peers or to allow myself to assume they were acting irrationally, I do share your concerns to an extent. I worry about the association of social justice and inclusivity with linguistic engineering, virtual lynching, censorship, etc. (the latter phenomena starkly distant from the principles of inclusion and tolerance). Butt the similarity to an Orwellian world is tenuous, given that our real-world situation is brought about not by a totalitarian state.

I wish the anonymous commenter had not been as bitter and insulting, but I do "feel them". I sincerely believed that practicing and aspiring scientists could carry on with their study of science without getting carried away by historical associations of the words used, especially if the discipline of their study was as apolitical as physics. But I know that my own experience bears heavily on my thinking, and that others' experiences can be vastly different. Therefore I am sincerely curious to learn about, and to hear from, those of my peers whose careers or lives have suffered observable changes due to the technical terms used in physics.