Blacklist: On the Rationality of Feelings

[MG <mg...@arscreat.com>]

Since feelings play a big part in this, and it was suggested that 
rationality cannot be applied to feelings:
You can of course reason about feelings, analyze where they come from, 
etc. It is also highly dangerous to just follow your feelings, that is 
what very young children do. Which is also the reason why no one should 
simply follow the feelings of another person, including in the case that 
the other person states feeling not welcome or included.

Feelings can also be influenced by rational thought. A classical example 
for this is for instance: You need to go to a pharmacy and are trying to 
get a parking space, but find none. Right in front of the pharmacy 
someone has parked his SUV without any consideration for other people, 
so that it blocks two parking spaces. You finally find a far away spot 
to park int, get to the pharmacy - just to see the SUV owner speed away. 
Now you are doubly mad at him, and you enter the pharmacy and complain 
about this to a sales person. To which teh sales person replies: "You 
mean the man that just drove away ? He picked up some important 
medication his kid urgently needs.". At which point, unless you are a 
psychopath, any anger towards the SUV driver will most likely subside, 
since you view the situation from a different angle.

This applies also to the example of "blacklist", or more generally 
"black<something>": If I point out to you that, while there exist 
contexts where black has a positive connotation, there is a very large 
number of cases where this is not the case, and in general black, i.e. 
the absence of light (in the physics sense) is generally speaking not a 
positive thing for a species that is not night active and has no way to 
orient itself in total darkness, as well as the fact that these meanings 
of "black" do not refer to you as a "black person", because they existed 
a long time before ther term "black person", I would expect you to a) 
either find a flaw in my reasoning and formulate that in a clear and 
concise manner, so we can discuss this further, or b) say "Alright, 
true, so there is actually no reason for me to be upset or feel 
offended. Cool.", or c) Conclude that identyfying with or calling 
yourself "black" is actually not a good choice (any more), and work 
towards finding a practical, better / more suitable term.

(There is of course the (for me theoretical) option d), where you demand 
that all negative usages and associations with the word "black" be 
removed from language/society/the human psyche. Not really doable, 
unless you simply force people to pretend things to be that way, and/or 
use reeducation camps and brainwashing - but no one can stop you to be 
as radical in your thinking/demands/actions as you like - unless you 
make someone feel uncomfortable by doing so, of course...)

I know all the people that voted +1 for this change mean well, and it is 
evidently not this one change in particular I find problematic, it is 
the question whether taking this step makes sense in the bigger picture, 
and I have imho given ample reason why it does not. So we can take that 
step, but, for the reasons given, it will achieve nothing in the end - 
this is simply a demand that cannot be fulfilled, and therefore a thirst 
that cannot be quenched...
mg

Re: Blacklist: On the Rationality of Feelings

[MG <mg...@arscreat.com>]

Hi Paul,

On 14/06/2020 03:37, Paul King wrote:
> Groovy tries to be as agnostic as it can on many points. Let users 
> choose between static or dynamic, functional or imperative, etc. Given 
> some users would like to avoid using blacklist/whitelist, isn't giving 
> them that option a useful thing?
>
> We are talking about a rarely used part of the API here and we are 
> talking about just aliases in the first instance. I am not sure it 
> follows that there is a bigger picture desire to continually change 
> APIs as users' individual naming preferences change over time.

it would make me happy if no bigger, inherently unattainable goal 
exists, so if that is the case, then, as I said, I have no problem with 
this change as currently proposed, so it would be +1 from me also G-)

PS: If we are on the topic of aliases and choice again: Maybe the people 
in the community who quickly rejected my proposal to introduce "bool" as 
an alias for the bulky "boolean" in Groovy might have had time to 
reconsider if it is really such a terrible idea* ? I do continue to use 
a lot of boolean parameters in my framework (whether a SQL command 
should throw on error, whether a SQL expression should be 
auto-bracketed, and so on), and it would therefore make the code more 
concise/readable - which is something that I think every day at work 
when I have to introduce a boolean, since I had used bool in C++ for 
many years before I became a Java (and then Groovy :-) ) dev.
(Apart from that, in my opinion, it is small, neat options like that, 
that give Groovy an edge, the same as the big, sweeping ones, and makes 
it the language that it is and which we all love)

mg

*I would not normally say this, but tbh, even if I value rational 
thinking and reasoning, I am not a robot, and it did feel to me like 
some people thought that proposing this in itself was outright stupid :-/

Re: Blacklist: On the Rationality of Feelings

[Paul King <pa...@asert.com.au>]

Hi mg, some good points.

Groovy tries to be as agnostic as it can on many points. Let users choose
between static or dynamic, functional or imperative, etc. Given some users
would like to avoid using blacklist/whitelist, isn't giving them that
option a useful thing?

We are talking about a rarely used part of the API here and we are talking
about just aliases in the first instance. I am not sure it follows that
there is a bigger picture desire to continually change APIs as users'
individual naming preferences change over time.

Cheers, Paul.


On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 10:10 AM MG <mg...@arscreat.com> wrote:

> Since feelings play a big part in this, and it was suggested that
> rationality cannot be applied to feelings:
> You can of course reason about feelings, analyze where they come from,
> etc. It is also highly dangerous to just follow your feelings, that is
> what very young children do. Which is also the reason why no one should
> simply follow the feelings of another person, including in the case that
> the other person states feeling not welcome or included.
>
> Feelings can also be influenced by rational thought. A classical example
> for this is for instance: You need to go to a pharmacy and are trying to
> get a parking space, but find none. Right in front of the pharmacy
> someone has parked his SUV without any consideration for other people,
> so that it blocks two parking spaces. You finally find a far away spot
> to park int, get to the pharmacy - just to see the SUV owner speed away.
> Now you are doubly mad at him, and you enter the pharmacy and complain
> about this to a sales person. To which teh sales person replies: "You
> mean the man that just drove away ? He picked up some important
> medication his kid urgently needs.". At which point, unless you are a
> psychopath, any anger towards the SUV driver will most likely subside,
> since you view the situation from a different angle.
>
> This applies also to the example of "blacklist", or more generally
> "black<something>": If I point out to you that, while there exist
> contexts where black has a positive connotation, there is a very large
> number of cases where this is not the case, and in general black, i.e.
> the absence of light (in the physics sense) is generally speaking not a
> positive thing for a species that is not night active and has no way to
> orient itself in total darkness, as well as the fact that these meanings
> of "black" do not refer to you as a "black person", because they existed
> a long time before ther term "black person", I would expect you to a)
> either find a flaw in my reasoning and formulate that in a clear and
> concise manner, so we can discuss this further, or b) say "Alright,
> true, so there is actually no reason for me to be upset or feel
> offended. Cool.", or c) Conclude that identyfying with or calling
> yourself "black" is actually not a good choice (any more), and work
> towards finding a practical, better / more suitable term.
>
> (There is of course the (for me theoretical) option d), where you demand
> that all negative usages and associations with the word "black" be
> removed from language/society/the human psyche. Not really doable,
> unless you simply force people to pretend things to be that way, and/or
> use reeducation camps and brainwashing - but no one can stop you to be
> as radical in your thinking/demands/actions as you like - unless you
> make someone feel uncomfortable by doing so, of course...)
>
> I know all the people that voted +1 for this change mean well, and it is
> evidently not this one change in particular I find problematic, it is
> the question whether taking this step makes sense in the bigger picture,
> and I have imho given ample reason why it does not. So we can take that
> step, but, for the reasons given, it will achieve nothing in the end -
> this is simply a demand that cannot be fulfilled, and therefore a thirst
> that cannot be quenched...
> mg
>
>
>