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Comment by lhnz | Hacker News Reader

An interesting titbit of information from LambdaConf's organiser: "In the past few days, we’ve also seen a huge bump in the number of people applying for our diversity scholarship program (49 applications so far), and we’re doing everything in our power to give out as many scholarships as possible." [0]

It's good of Julie and Chris to continue supporting the conference, and (I think) a real shame how quick the other sponsors were to bow out. Hopefully in future people will try to think more about the positive work they can do and less about how they look. (Obviously, for those that really have strong moral reasons to exit, it's a shame but completely understandable.)

I guess one of the positives is that we now have two conferences [1], so those that can't stand the idea of being in the same room as Yarvin can be around other people that think exactly the same.

[0] http://degoes.net/articles/lambdaconf-controversy

[1] http://moonconf.org/

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Anyone thinking about attending moonconf should take a quick look at their Code of Conduct:

No one at any events associated with Maitria, may speak to, touch, stare at, follow, or otherwise engage someone without their consent. Making jokes within earshot of someone you know (or even think) is upset by them is a violation of consent. Acting as though someone's gender is other than what they say it is is also a violation of consent. Doing things that people feel shitty about is often a violation of consent. Doing them more than once is even more likely a violation of consent.

http://maitria.com/coc

Given that Orwellian monster, I'd feel a lot safer at LambdaConf than Moonconf.

> No one at any events associated with Maitria, may speak to [snip] someone without their consent.

Taken literally, that means that nobody can ever initiate a conversation there.

Taken just slightly less literally, though, it means that if you go up to someone and ask "Can I talk to you?" and they say "No", then you can't talk to them. That seems like the way reasonable human beings ought to behave.

I agree that the last two sentences seem easy to abuse.

This also requires a pretty extreme degree of a priori self-censorship just to be safe: "Making jokes within earshot of someone you know (or even think) is upset by them is a violation of consent"

There seems to be a signal of intent there; some people are accidentally senseless jerks (including yours truly), and a simple reprimand is enough to tone it back. By contrast, the sort this seems to be aimed at would likely scoff it off. I guess like "Hey man, don't be a jerk" followed by either "Oh sorry, didn't mean any offense" or "Hey! I'm not a jerk!"

Like many moderation policies, I guess we can just hope the moderators are, well, moderate.

This sounds like a recipe for politics.

The rule of law was created because prosecutorial discretion is awful.

Can I respond to a statement you made? So that you are properly informed of what you would be consenting my response of, it is the following statement:

>That seems like the way reasonable human beings ought to behave.

I give consent for you to reply only to the above question and nothing else.

To the two people [0] who downvoted, would you care to explain why being a reasonable person asking for consent before communication was a problem? I didn't consent to the downvotes (a non-verbal form of communication and a microaggression, might I add) but I will consent to listening to your explanation. If you'd like to discuss it like a reasonable person.

[0] Or one person on two accounts, given the time frame of both downvotes happening almost immediately one after the other nearly 20 hours after the original post.

You are trolling, right?

That's just nuts.

I'd rather go to a conference where I can just tell the racist to go pound sand than have that bizarre attitude over my head.

Parsed apart, that's:

* Don't be a creep or stalker * Don't tell sexist / racist jokes * Don't tell a trans man he's really a woman, or a trans woman she's really a man * Be a grown up * No, seriously

which seems pretty reasonable.

The arguments against a conference having a code of conduct aren't really that different from the arguments against the Constitution having a Bill of Rights back in the day, and now in these latter days I think we can see how that all worked out.

I'm eating the downvotes on this one, but compare quotes like "the people surrender nothing, and as the retain every thing they have no need of particular reservations"[0] versus "codes of conduct are not necessary because harassment is already illegal."

[0] Alexander Hamilton, as seen here: http://blogs.dickinson.edu/hist-404pinsker/2010/09/29/the-ne...

if you can't speak to someone without consent, how do you get consent?

It's usually pretty easy to tell if someone wants to / is willing to talk to you or not, and if you can't tell that should be answer enough.

so we're going on implicit nonverbal body language sorts of things? how does this account for diversity? people from different backgrounds, different socializations, etc give and receive signals differently.

this is like communications 101.

this legit seems kind of insensitive, ableist and elitist.

In other words, "if you're autistic and can't read body language, assume that nobody wants to talk to you."

Real inclusive there, pal.

> if you're autistic and can't read body language, assume that nobody wants to talk to you

This is a good point, which is why we exercise judgment. Pretty much all laws are written for an imaginary "average individual" because they cannot possibly account for all the wide diversity of people's mental and physical abilities, but that's why determining whether there's been a violation of the law is entrusted with a person, not an algorithm, who can consider whether there have been extenuating circumstances, and being autistic qualifies. Obviously, many laws aren't meant for people who are unable to comply with them, and every law recognizes that there may be valid reasons for breaking it.

That may be what's meant, but it's not what it actually says. If your Code of Conduct is worded so poorly that it's literally impossible to avoid breaking it, then it's unclear to me what the purpose is. You're left with discretionary enforcement, which is what you already had before you sat down to write a CoC.

> You're left with discretionary enforcement

I think that's the point.

> Making jokes within earshot of someone you know (or even think) is upset by them is a violation of consent

Was that added after some event that happened at Pycon?

Whats funny about this is that by pulling out as protest for Moldbug they are making it harder for the conference to subsidize diversity.

Yes, it's very sad. Hopefully the community will be able to band together to ensure that any difficulties are overcome.

Principles > Politics

None of those people was going to go anyway, so the point is moot. This conference is pretty much dead.

> This conference is pretty much dead.

What makes you think that?

'Fraid not. The conference is still having three concurrent tracks for three days, nigh 80 speakers. Our training and everything else we're doing (I'm Chris) is still happening too.

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