| ▲ | kentonv 2 days ago |
| Hey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them. It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was coming up. At the time, there was a team working on an experimental web app hosting platform code named Prometheus -- it was later released as App Engine. Using an early, internal build I put together a web site where people could submit "facts" about Jeff Dean, rate each other's facts on a five-star scale, and see the top-rated facts. Everything was anonymous. I had a few coworkers who are funnier than me populate some initial facts. I found a few bugs in Prometheus in the process, which the team rapidly fixed to meet my "launch date" of April 1st. :) On the day, which I think was a Sunday, early in the morning, I sent an email to the company-wide "misc" mailing list (or maybe it was eng-misc?) from a fake email address (a google group alias with private membership), and got the mailing list moderator to approve it. It only took Jeff an hour or two to hack his way through the back-end servers (using various internal-facing status pages, Borg logs, etc.) to figure out my identity. But everyone enjoyed it! My only regret is that I targeted the site specifically at Jeff and not Sanjay Ghemawat. Back then, Jeff & Sanjay did everything together, and were responsible for inventing a huge number of core technologies at Google (I have no idea to what extent they still work together today). The site was a joke, but I think it had the side effect of elevating Jeff above Sanjay, which is not what I intended. Really the only reason I targeted Jeff is because he's a bit easier to make fun of personality-wise, and because "Jeff Dean Facts" sort of rolls off the tongue easier that "Sanjay Ghemawat Facts" -- but in retrospect this feels a little racist. :( My personal favorite joke is: Jeff Dean puts his pants on one leg at a time, but if he had more than two legs, you'd see his approach is actually O(log n). |
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| ▲ | sghemawat 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Hi Kenton! No worries at all. I tend to be quieter than Jeff anyway (less public speaking etc.) and I am happy to not have a dedicated website. :-). -Sanjay |
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| ▲ | kentonv 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Hey Sanjay, long time no see. Thanks for the note! But I'm fully aware you wouldn't want a "Sanjay Facts", and that's not the point. ;) | |
| ▲ | Ozzie_osman a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You are both legends. Your original MapReduce paper is what inspired me to work for Google (2006-2009), narrowly dodging a career as a quant on Wall Street. | |
| ▲ | underdeserver a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | blink Legend. Popping up here after his last comment was 13 years ago. |
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| ▲ | ariwilson 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Hi Kenton! I was the recent grad you handed this web app off to after you built it, so I expanded Jeff Dean Facts so that anyone could create and rate facts about anyone at Google :). There were a ton of team in-jokes added before I stopped working on it - O(5k) IIRC! :) This web app was also how I learned the pain of maintaining a live web service with a lot of ever-changing dependencies. How I sighed when the AppEngine version changed and I had to fix things again... I handed it off again before I left Google but I have no memory of who that was to unfortunately :(. |
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| ▲ | kentonv 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Hi Ari, Thanks so much for falling for my trick and taking it over, I was getting pretty sick of dealing with the same issues you describe. :) One of the reasons Cloudflare Workers has a policy that we absolutely never break deployed code, ever. (Well... at least not intentionally...) | |
| ▲ | kridsdale3 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I just searched Moma, and your note about it going down is the most recent update on this front. Interestingly though, it looks like Moma itself has a custom SERP renderer for Jeff Dean facts that came up when I searched. The example fact that came up was hilarious, but I guess I shouldn't share it on public HN. | | |
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| ▲ | peddling-brink 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I’m no expert, but I certainly wouldn’t call that racism. Bias, absolutely. And it’s important that we acknowledge our biases. But in a more literal sense, the chance of your joke landing was likely higher due to the things that you stated and due to your audience and their biases. I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular. But if you try to calculate every second and third order consequence of everything that you do, let alone any moments of humor you might have.. Well, you might as well lock yourself in a cell now. |
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| ▲ | tczMUFlmoNk 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular I mean… yeah. When two people are peers and comparably well regarded, and one is elevated above the other and enjoys increased popularity, familiarity, and respect, and the elevation is because that person's name comes from a culture that is more aligned with the dominant culture and easier for them to engage with… that is a pretty textbook example of systemic racism. I'm not at all saying this to demonize Kenton. We can make mistakes and reflect on them later, and that's laudable. But it is important to recognize these systems for what they are, so that we can notice them when they happen all around us every day. | | |
| ▲ | derangedHorse 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I find the assumption that Jeff Dean sounded better with these jokes because it sounds American to be a bigger issue than immediately acknowledging that it’s probably because it’s less syllables. These type of jokes are rapid fire and a lengthy name just fits better whether it’s ‘Jeff Dean’ or ‘Neel Patel’. | | | |
| ▲ | jrowen 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't think it's really fair to call it racism. That is such a loaded accusation to levy today that it should only be used if someone really wronged another person. We all have cultural biases and familiarities, is that wrong? By this definition, we're all racist. Maybe that's true but it kind of ceases to be a useful distinction at that point. I wholeheartedly agree with your last sentence, but I don't know if throwing around the r-word is helpful. | | |
| ▲ | istjohn 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > By this definition, we're all racist. Maybe that's true but it kind of ceases to be a useful distinction at that point. Does it? I would argue that recognizing that we all swim in a soup of cultural biases and familiarities that advantage some people and disadvantage others is a noteworthy insight, an insight with practical implications. After all, we aren't volitionless molecules bouncing off walls. What if we made an effort to observe these biases more closely, to study there effects, and to better understand the way they effect our own behaviour? Then, what if we made an effort to counteract these biases, first in our own behaviour and then in our communities? | | |
| ▲ | jrowen 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | > After all, we aren't volitionless molecules bouncing off walls. Are we not? The free will debate aside, I think what you said makes a lot of sense, and comes across as empathetic, and you didn't need to use that word. I just think it's too loaded, aggressive, and broad to be very useful as a shorthand for the more complex thought you expressed. |
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| ▲ | bummy_commenter 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I see. I hadn't thought of it from a perspective of dominant culture. Looking at it that way, it can appear racist. I looked at it from the perspective of syllable count. Jeff Dean is easier to say by that measure. If Jeff were instead named Alexander Chesterton, would he still be the obvious choice to head the facts? My takeaway from this is that a single-syllable name is perhaps a great boon. | | |
| ▲ | elijaht 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Sanjay is/was well known enough that you could have just used “Sanjay facts” |
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| ▲ | rayiner 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > that is a pretty textbook example of systemic racism. It’s not “racism.” There’s plenty of Indians with names that are easy for English speakers. Conversely, the same situations would’ve presented itself if the other person was any sort of white Eastern European. In fact, calling this “racist” is itself racist. I have close friends with family names from Poland or Croatia where we don’t even try to pronounce their names correctly. Nobody feels bad about that. But for some reason if it’s a “brown person” we’re suddenly super sensitive about it. That is differential treatment based on race. People get awkward about how to pronounce my name because I’m brown. But it’s hard to pronounce because it’s misspelled Germanic! They wouldn’t act that way if I was a white guy with the same name. | | |
| ▲ | kentonv 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Are we... arguing about what happened in my head? As the world's foremost expert about what happened in my head, do I get to, like, pick a winner here? If so I pick tczMUFlmoNk, I think their description is accurate. (I think you might want to re-read it as it feels like you are responding to something else.) If I don't get to pick, this is quite weird! "People on Hacker News tell me I'm wrong about my own thoughts." was not on my -- actually wait, that doesn't sound unexpected at all now that I write it out! OK, carry on. | | |
| ▲ | rayiner 2 days ago | parent [-] | | You wrote what your thoughts were. I’m just weighing in on whether your thoughts are “racist.” To the extent you feel sensitive about the issue because someone has darker skin, where you probably wouldn’t have written that part of the post if the other guy were Polish, that’s racist. It’s racist to treat people differently based on skin color, even if you’re well intentioned about it. | | |
| ▲ | refulgentis 2 days ago | parent [-] | | You're conflating two different things: 1. The original choice: Kenton picked "Jeff Dean" because the name was more familiar/rhythmic in English. This wasn't about skin color, it was about name patterns. You're right that a Polish surname could have the same issue, and in that, you're demonstrating complete understanding of the issue at hand. 2. The reflection afterward: Recognizing that name-familiarity advantages systematically correlate with certain cultural backgrounds more than others isn't "differential treatment based on skin color", it is observing a statistical pattern in outcomes. And here's the key point: given Kenton's explanation, they are indicating they would reflect the same way if Sanjay had been Polish with an unfamiliar surname. You're arguing with Kenton about what Kenton thinks and could think... while Kenton is right here. At some point you have to engage with what he's actually saying rather than insisting you understand his mind better than he does. | | |
| ▲ | kentonv 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes, I actually do think if Sanjay Ghemawat were instead Wojciech Przemysław Kościuszko-Wiśniewski, white European but otherwise an equal engineer, and I chose to elevate Jeff Dean over him, I would later feel equally bad about it. (Which again to be clear I'm am not riven with guilt here, I just think maybe given another chance I would have made it about both of them.) | | |
| ▲ | rayiner 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | What you said was “in retrospect this feels a little racist.” Obviously what’s in your head specifically is idiosyncratic to you. But the feeling you’re having certainly happens more generally, and is based on general social understandings. That’s what I’m commenting on. If I say, “this feels a little rude,” isn’t it fair for people to chime in as to whether it’s actually rude by reference to general social standards? | | |
| ▲ | kentonv 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If I said I'd done something rude and people then argued with as much fervor about whether I'd actually been rude as they are arguing here, I would actually find it pretty weird. | |
| ▲ | quadrifoliate 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I feel like most of us understand roughly what 'kentonv means. He unconsciously put Sanjay in an out-group and feels bad about it. I for one comment Kenton for owning up to it. It's a hard thing to do. For what it's worth, I personally regard Sanjay in just as much awe as Jeff and understand that the meme is just an Internet meme and nothing more. | | |
| ▲ | kentonv 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That's the ironic thing too... honestly, while I couldn't say that one or the other is a better engineer... I would say I personally identified more with Sanjay's approach and style. | |
| ▲ | rayiner 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I feel like most of us understand roughly what 'kentonv means. He unconsciously put Sanjay in an out-group and feels bad about it. But do you feel bad about it because he's brown and you wouldn't think twice about it if he were white? Frankly, the heightened sensitivity feels worse to me than actual racism. | | |
| ▲ | scott_w 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Yes, I actually do think if Sanjay Ghemawat were instead Wojciech Przemysław Kościuszko-Wiśniewski, white European but otherwise an equal engineer, and I chose to elevate Jeff Dean over him, I would later feel equally bad about it. You need to take a breath, read what people write, and stop trying to win the argument. | | |
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| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | kentonv 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Thanks, you explained this better than I could. I'm not calling myself Hitler here, I think it was a mild offense. But in retrospect the site could have been about both of them, with competing facts, and that could have been really cool. Oh well. |
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| ▲ | bigstrat2003 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not remotely racist. OP is being self critical for no good reason. |
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| ▲ | morley 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ah, I knew I recognized the friendship between Jeff and Sanjay -- they were the subject of a New Yorker article in 2018: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship... EDIT: And HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18588697 |
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| ▲ | vessenes 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Re Jeff and Sanjay - they recently were on Dwarkesh together I believe - so it looks like the partnership is still going strong. Regarding Dean over Ghemawat facts, the vibe from the convo is that Sanjay is the (very slightly) junior partner of the two, or at least he lets Jeff do more of the talking. Very, very nice vibes hearing them talk, and their war stories are clearly nuts. |
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| ▲ | dekhn 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The one thing I noticed when I worked near Jeff and Sanjay and talked to them over coffee is that Jeff is the smart one, but Sanjay is the wise one. Jeff always had an idea how to make something a bit faster using a clever trick, but Sanjay would respond by coming up with how to express the abstraction in a way that other mortals could comprehend, or just telling Jeff it wasn't a good idea because it would make things more difficult to maintain. Jeff was also prone to dad jokes, Sanjay's humor was far more subtle. Both were awesome to talk to and one of my proudest moments was when Jeff read a document proposal I wrote ("Google should get involved in Genomics Research and Drug Discovery") and took it seriously. | | |
| ▲ | ramraj07 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Should google have involved though? Calico, Verily, isomorphic etc seem like theyre destined to not succeed. | | |
| ▲ | dekhn 2 days ago | parent [-] | | At the time I first got involved, Google Health was still a thing but it was clear it was not going to be successful. I felt that Google's ML (even early on, they had tons of ML, just most of it wasn't known externally) was going to be very useful for genomics and drug discovery. Verily was its own thing that was unrelated to my push in Research. I think Larry Page knew Andy Conrad and told him he could do what he wanted (which led to Verily focusing on medical devices, which is a terrible industry to be in). They've pivoted a few times without much real success. My hope is that Alphabet sheds Verily (they've been trying) or just admit it's a failure and shut it down. It was just never run with the right philosophy. Calico... that came out of Larry and Art Levinson- I guess Larry thought Art knew the secret to living forever and by giving him billions Art would come up with the solution to immortality and Larry would have first access to it. But they were ultra-secretive and tried to have the best of both worlds- full access to Google3 and borg, but without Googlers having any access to calico. That, combined with a number of other things, have led Calico to just be a quiet and not very interesting research group. I expect it to disband at some point. Isomorphic is more recent than any of the stuff I was involved in, and is DeepMind (specifically Demis's) attempt to commercialize their work with AlphaFold. However, everybody in the field knows the strategy of 1. solve protein structure prediction 2. ??? 3. design profitable drugs and get them approved... is not a great strategy because protein structure determine has not ever been the rate limiting step to identifying targets and developing leads. I agree I don't really see a future for it but Demis has at least 10-20 years of runway before he has to take off or bail. All of my suggestions were just for Google to do research with the community and publish it (especially the model code and weights, but also pipelines to prep data for learning) and turn a few of the ideas into products in Google Cloud(that's how Google Genomics was born... I was talking to Jeff, and he said "if we compress the genome enough, we can store it all on Flash, which would make search fast but cheap, and we'd have a useful product for genomics analysis companies"). IMHO Jeff's team substantially achieved their goals before the DeepMind stuff- DeepVariant was well-respected, but almost every person who worked on it and related systems got burned out and moved on. What is success, anyway, in biotech? Is it making a drug that makes a lot of money? What if you do that, but it costs so much that people go bankrupt taking it? Or is the goal to make substantial improvements to the technology, potentially discovering key biological details that truly improve people's lives? Many would say that becoming a successful real estate ownership company is the real destination of any successful pharma/biotech. | | |
| ▲ | ramraj07 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Whoa. Finally someone I relate with! Thanks for such amazing intel! In my opinion forays into biology by moonshot hopefuls fail for one of two reasons: either they completely ignore all the current wisdom from academia and industry, or they recruit the very academia people who are culturally responsible for the science rot we have at this time. Calico (and CZI, and im starting to fear, Arc) fell prey to the latter. Once you recruit one tenured professor IMO youre done. The level of tenure track trauma and academic rot they bring in can burn even a trillion dollars into dead-end initiatives. IMO (after decades of daydreaming about this scenario), the only plausible way to recreate a Bell labs for Biology is to start something behind a single radical person, and recruit the smartest undergrads into that place directly. Ensure that they never become experts at just one thing so they have no allegiance to a method or field. And then let that hoarde loose on a single problem and see what comes out. For better or worse neuralink seems to be doing that right. Just wish they didnt abuse the monkeys that much! To me success in biotechnology is if I measurably help make a drug that makes a person smile and breathe easy that would otherwise not have. Surprisingly easy and hard at the same time. |
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| ▲ | chrfrasco 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It was Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/jeff-dean-and-noam-shazeer | | |
| ▲ | vessenes a day ago | parent [-] | | Should have checked, thanks for the correction. I stand by my liking of how they talked to each-other |
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| ▲ | kentonv 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Having worked with them I would say Sanjay is certainly NOT the "junior" partner. Nor vice versa. They have different strengths but I couldn't say that one or the other is a better engineer overall. |
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| ▲ | scrame 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My further comment will be buried, but its a rip on Chuck Norris facts, and was pretty ... whatever ... "geek culture". That was only proved by Chuck Norris' endorsement of Mike Huckabee back in 2007:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--EGyU57efY |
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| ▲ | iambateman a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ah but it’s not racist. It can’t be. Jeff and Sanjay have never had race conditions. :) |
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| ▲ | xnx a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I have no idea to what extent they still work together today They just got their own (unofficial) Lego set: https://x.com/JeffDean/status/2006581022666928415 |
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| ▲ | oncallthrow 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > but in retrospect this feels a little racist. :( It’s not racist. It’s just to do with name length. |
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| ▲ | omoikane 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > My only regret is that I targeted the site specifically at Jeff and not Sanjay Ghemawat. Later version of the site was generalized so that people can submit facts for any user. I think Jeff Dean still has all the funniest fact though. |
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| ▲ | swyx 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Jeff & Sanjay did everything together, my nonexpert impression is jeff keeps much more of a public profile. hence the natural celebrity goes to him. was this not true way back in the day? |
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| ▲ | kentonv 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I feel like Jeff's public profile has grown quite a bit since then. Note that in 2008 he wasn't doing anything related to AI yet -- none of that had even started. That has since given him somewhat of a more public role, whereas Sanjay has stayed on infrastructure which is more internal-facing. I do think Jeff Dean Facts in itself has played some part in enhancing his celebrity status, too. With that said, I suppose it's hard for me to say what the public perception of the two was in 2008 as I only knew of either of them from working there. |
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| ▲ | liquidgecka 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That meme started in early 2007 I believe. I started in 2006 and was in ZRH by 2008 and it was around long before I made that move. |
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| ▲ | ctxc a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Why do you pick on Protocol Buffers so much? Because it’s easy to pick on myself. :)" Damn! |
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| ▲ | rramadass 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Your job is unfinished :-) You still have to create a Youtube channel for Jeff Dean/Sanjay Ghemawat (slayers of code!) like "Entertaining AI" did for "Chuck Norris" - https://www.youtube.com/@Entertaining_AI |
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| ▲ | westurner 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Maybe both in the URL? You could add a meme generator that's like the Django docs tutorial with the internet web-poll |
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| ▲ | bummy_commenter 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| What makes it feel a little racist? |
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| ▲ | Lerc 2 days ago | parent [-] | | >"Jeff Dean Facts" sort of rolls off the tongue easier that "Sanjay Ghemawat Facts" The reason it rolls off the tongue easier is because of the familiarity with names of that form. It is making a choice to favour a personal cultural similarity. It clearly wasn't done with malice, but being reflective about it and noticing that it happened is a good thing. When people talk about privilege, this is a large part of what people mean. There's no intended bias, it is just an honest choice, but all of our choices are based upon our opinions that will inherently have biases of some sort. One factor of privilege is when those choices disproportionately fall your way because decisions end up being made by people who you share a cultural upbringing with. Their intuitive decisions value what you value. Sometimes the only way you can deal with that is by acknowledging your intuitions contain that implicit bias and dispassionately try and balance them as best you can. | | |
| ▲ | oncallthrow 2 days ago | parent [-] | | It’s to do with the length of the name. My own name is polysyllabic and also wouldn’t work as a “Fact”, and I’m as white as they come. | | |
| ▲ | Lerc 2 days ago | parent [-] | | That's kind of the point. In a culture where names commonly have a lot of syllables, the length of the name is much less of an issue. That tiny discomfort of the extra effort to process more syllables disappears when it's not considered 'extra' | | |
| ▲ | oncallthrow 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I’m not sure I agree. I expect that an Indian would similarly be more likely to coin the term “Krish Singh Facts” than they would “Sanjay Ghemawat Facts”, in exactly the same way we do. I’d be interested to hear from someone from a different culture to verify whether this is true or not. | | |
| ▲ | Lerc 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I don't know how such things are considered in India either (and would also be interested to hear from someone). The salient point is that you do value fewer syllables in a comedy context. All it takes for someone to feel that it might be racist is to recognise that fewer syllables in comedy names may not be universal across cultures, and that taking an action that elevated one person and not another may have inadvertently selected someone of one race because of that preference. It's not an absolute claim being made here. It's just a consideration that what we intuitively feel may not be an expression of a universally held value. |
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