This Enola Gay business is reminding me of a virtual meeting I attended during the pandemic. [View all]

[cab67]

Most of you probably know this, but - efforts to scrub "objectionable" language from the federal government's web sites led to deletion of information about the B-29 that dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima (the Enola Gay) and Ensign George Gay, who was the only survivor of his squadron of TBD Devastator torpedo bombers during the Battle of Midway. He ended up treading water in the middle of the Japanese fleet, watching events unfold before he was rescued.

Something similar happened in my field.

I want to preface by acknowledging that what Twinklesphincter's people are doing with "woke" language is an insult to every literate person in the world. What I'm going to describe was an amusing annoyance - not the serious effort to remove the visibility of whole groups of people this represents.

Anyway -

The primary professional meeting I attend pretty much every year is the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting. It's always a blast - my students and I present some of our research, we see others present really cool research, and I get to see friends I haven't seen for a while. I've attended almost every meeting since 1989.

When the Pandemic hit, it quickly became clear that in-person professional meetings weren't going to happen. Or if they did, smart people wouldn't be attending. This being an organization of scientists who generally understand how the germ theory of disease works, SVP's leadership moved the meeting to virtual.

A lot of my colleagues groused about the virtual format. I strongly prefer in-person, but I still got a lot out of the virtual meeting. It was virtual again the following year. Those opposed to it were loud, but very small in number.

SVP hired a company that runs online meetings to run ours. And they did a really good job, except for one thing - the language filter that was intended to prevent abuse during the meeting.

Among the words screened by their system? Bone! This was an organization dedicated largely to the study of bones, but the word "bone" was being censored. So were words like "pubis/pubic," "erect," and "hell."

There was a symposium on the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, which is famous mostly for dinosaur discoveries. Dinosaurs are known for their erect posture. Suddenly, anyone giving a talk at that symposium on the pubic bone of an erect-walking dinosaur from the Hell Creek Formation was instead speaking of the anteroventral hip ossification of a vertically-postured dinosaur from the Heck Creek Formation.

Naughtier words related to scatology or reproductive behavior were presumably censored as well, though except for people talking about coprolites, this would not have been a big issue.

The problem was caught and fixed early, so it didn't really cause any serious disruption. We basically chuckled about it. But it drove home the importance of context. The company that ran our meeting had never run a vertebrate paleontology meeting before. In fact, they'd never run any sort of scientific meeting before. I suppose it's OK to look askance at anyone using words like "pubic" at a real estate conference, but again, context is everything.

This even made it into the news media: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/16/profanity-filter-bones-paleontologists-conference


Thought some of you might get a chuckle out of it.