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Lerc a day ago

>"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 a day 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 a day 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 a day 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 a day 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.