Inclusivity Is a Joke
medium.com
medium.com
I think more people would do well to practice the tolerance and acceptance that they preach. As a gay man, I've run into my fair share of loud mouthed, biggoted people, who say incredibly mean things about me without realizing that they're affecting someone in the same room. A good deal of my friends are Christians, and a good deal of my family is as well. At least in our churches, being gay is considered quite a heavy sin. Somewhat intuitively then, when I came out to my family, I was simultaneously declaring that I would no longer be a part of their religion.
And you know? We didn't fight about it. They understand my limitations, and I still love them. I'm still friends with my Christian friends, and I'm still on great terms with my family. We disagree on certain things but that's OK, because they've learned to see the good in my unique outlook on life, and I've learned to understand the love tolerance that their Jesus teaches, because I watch them practice it every day. We've learned to accept one another, despite our differences.
Inclusivity is not hard, but it starts with avoiding conflict. You're going to have to tolerate that which occasionally offends you, and learn to let it go. Learn to love people despite their flaws, because goodness do people have flaws. We're not perfect. Nowhere near it. But all people still have some good in them, and it's worth making the effort to see past that which you dislike to appreciate the human being underneath it all.
> Inclusivity is not hard, but it starts with avoiding conflict.
I think inclusivity is hard -- for all the reasons you mention in the following sentence, e.g. having the strength to let things go, and the open-mindedness to love someone despite their purported flaws. Not only is inclusivity hard, but it is important to recognize how hard it is to achieve and maintain. Because otherwise it becomes easy to trivialize people who genuinely fight for it but fail to achieve it.
I respect gays, I respect women, but they should try to attempt as speakers before asking why there's only male speakers on some event.
Gay men challenge what it means to be a "man", that's what can make people uncomfortable.
So they ask you, not because they want to know the truth, but because they want your assurance that nothing will change in the relationship between you.
i agree, marching under any banner makes me extremely uncomfortable.. even one of inclusivity
what should be talked about instead though is the exclusivity
i actively seek paradox
i think there are profound truths to be found therein
one that endeared to me long ago was 'exclude exclusion'
> I sincerely hope the irony of excluding this man in the name of inclusivity is not lost on the crowd.
you can easily exclude excluders without your noted irony.. just offer for thaem to exclude thaemself
for a while the posts and articles about this decision lacked any information as to the catalyst to this decision
now what i am seeing is a complete lack of any mention about what the talk was intended to be
what i want to see is this:
first, the topic for the individual's talk.. maybe offer slides or notes as more information will aide in preempting subsequent objections, also if requiring one, then require all speakers to do the same..
if it is purely technical, then great!
if it contains specific elements that people say make them feel excluded, especially that add little more than some intended humor.. see gonads'monads argument..
then offer the speaker an opportunity to either make changes, or to choose to keep the talk as is instead of giving it
why does this whole thing seem predicated on assumptions of universal knowledge and understanding?
what is even the message the conference organisers are trying to express here? progress comes from discourse intended to explicitly develop understanding, stead some assumed a priori posturing
trust is expected, respect is earned
i trust anyone can grow personally, but if someone wants to double down on an inconsequential element of their message that adversely affects others then i'll withhold my respect
that applies to both parties in this as yet farce
The part of this article that generally hand-waves towards "inclusivity" as a movement and dismisses them as people with "unicorn-colored hair" is frustrating. There's little here that actually discusses the issue. It points out a couple of things that Douglas said, trivializes the issues that the inclusivity group cares about, and seems to make its primary point by arguing semantics (oh, look, the inclusivity group excludes people, har har).
I get that its an opinion piece, but there's nothing of substance here that I could possibly disagree with, because it's not defined. If you want to get a bunch of people agree with you and give you internet points, it's spot on. But there's not a lot here that's interesting if you're not already on board with this point of view.
Any speakers who are made "uncomfortable" by Crockford's presence are pretty much guaranteed to be the sort of speakers who don't bring anything to your conference anyway.
"We are in over our heads."
Well, that's certainly the truth.
I also notice that while they apologized so unreservedly, they didn't go so far as to reinvite Crockford.
Actually, the article demonstrates that the group's aims are trivial. "Trivialize" implies that the group is actually trying to do something non-trivial, rather than, say, punish someone for making a few completely inoffensive jokes.
"Increasing inclusivity means making the Node.js project a safe and friendly place for people from diverse backgrounds."
That seems like a solid goal to me. Their tactics may be petty or ineffective (removing Crockford is a pretty bold step), but that's different the strategy.
Do you believe that that goal is not worthwhile? If it's not, why?
When you have people who have different opinions of what "safe" is, you can end up having a bit of friction.
Note that the opposite of "friendly" isn't just "hostile" or "animosity". It could also just be "respectful" or "professional".
Oh hey, if I am playing the twist-your-word game, that goal could be rewritten as: "Increasing inclusivity means making the Node.js project a safe and unprofessional place for people from diverse backgrounds."
When they are excluding someone (Crockford in this case), they are excluding people. And the onus is on them to prove that this will be more beneficial in the long run. The bigger problem is that for those feel-good org and goal, there is no accountability ever, and it seems like they are externalizing a lot of troubles to the larger community who doesn't care much about their cause.
Finally, I don't care about their stated goal: sounds like a witch hunt, acts like a witch hunt and you can't stop me from questioning your goal.
This incident reinforces my view - it appears that Mr. Crockford's keynote invitation was rescinded not because of any specific action on his part, but because "his presence would make some speakers uncomfortable to the point where they refused to attend or speak."[1]
That is completely subjective, and as such there is no rational means to judge whether your own words or actions will lead to such treatment or not.
My personal opinion is roughly that, yes, that's potentially a failure mode, and one we should watch for, but that people are probably far more worried than they need to be about it - and also that the tendency to dismiss such worries with "but how can you be against inclusivity" is rather missing the point and just makes things worse.
The article makes this assumption and then shows how shitty things are based on that assumption. I like this reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12426199
But that is the important part though. He got removed because he used words like "promiscuous" and "weak" ? How can anyone think a group behind this kind of censoring is a good thing?
However, if this is all the evidence there is, then that points out that the issue rightfully should be considered as trivial and harmful, because it has real negative consequences (elimination of a speaker) with trivial benefits (as shown by those examples in article).
I'd expect the one of the following responses:
a) Examples that Douglas Crockford did something significantly worse than the examples given in the article;
b) Acknowledgement that there were no non-trivial grounds for cancelling his speech, and that "this 'inclusivity' is not the 'inclusivity'" but an accidental overreaction;
c) Acknowledgement that yes, you consider this particular case as something that should have rightfully been done.
Do note that if you answer (c) then I will consider your [interpretation of the] movement as something harmful and something that should be fought against, because it intentionally does bad things in the name of "good intentions". I'm quite expecting to hear that (a) actually is the case, but if it's not, then the current actions were not okay.
Groups and fake controversies like this distract from real issues of discrimination. They do more harm to inclusive movements than good.
It's a flaw in human psychology that is related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...
Another aspect is that as that any idealistic movement is prone to being taken over by it's most intractable members. There's a game theoretic spin on it by Nicholas Taleb if I remember correctly: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf
As the emotional tone of a debate is heightened, it's hard to argue for moderation. Anything that pushed emotional buttons forces people to the extremes and those arguing for compromise are often ridiculed by both sides.
Therefore we have the phenomenon that many debates end up being between over-the-top SJWs on one side and crazy racists and Red Pill types on the other.
And back in the real world, there is still indisputable injustice and discrimination that would be eminently tractable if everyone would come back down to earth.
EDIT - I'd like to point out that I'm aware of a major flaw in the above - everyone - myself included regards themselves as a reasonable moderate and others as dangerous extremists. I suppose I'd be quite content to be regarded as a flakey liberal by my friends on the right and a closet imperialist by those on the left. (Except - what happens if the sample of my social group is heavily skewed and my 'left/right' is off the scale? And down the rabbit hole we go...)
But in almost every case of people being chased up online for this sort of un-PC behavior, there are no examples of individual people who claim to have been directly hurt by them. There's just the group saying that they're "problematic" in some vague sense.
If we could de-legitimize any conversation about injustices that isn't couched in concrete terms of pain caused to non-hypothetical people by non-hypothetical actions, I think there wouldn't be any "tempest" left.
"In defence of Douglas Crockford" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12422420
"Crockford" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12425061
A step down from that big stuff, you have crass offensive behavior like sexual innuendo in conference talks and other things that can pretty readily be identified as going to make a lot of people uncomfortable. It makes sense for professional conferences to have policies against those things.
Then you have this long tail of ways that a person can be offended by subtle interpretations that are impossible to wholly avoid by premeditation except through sheer paranoid blandness. This is the bucket where it seems like this Crockford nonsense falls, and this is also where the movement loses my support. They've crossed the line from helping people to just reaching for the torches and pitchforks, and completely lost the thread that liberalism was once about tolerance.
I'm not even going to comment further on this, I have found that arguments, sanity and reason do nothing here.
> problematic language
> [a word] is very difficult for many others to stumble across in the codebase
> a word choice can be problematic/distracting/triggering/offensive
This isn't even something that might reasonably be considered "triggering" material, like a story that might plausibly give someone a PTSD flashback. If someone is so mentally unstable that just seeing a word in an API screws with their head, their problem is sufficiently serious that they ought to seek immediate psychological help.
It almost seems like child-like behavior. "I don't like this, so everyone has to change to fit my whims." Of course, there's almost certainly valid reasons for wanting change - it's probably not a good idea to make rape jokes or similar in your code[0] - but this seems over the top. Things in the world are going to be offensive, and if seeing a word causes that much trauma for someone, then they probably have bigger issues than just a symbol name or something.
[0] Not saying that anyone has done this
Sometimes that means enforcing certain standards of speech and behavior. Which you already agree with, if you are at all functional in society.
The question in this case is not whether inclusivity is a good thing, it's whether Crockford's speech/actions were "bad enough" in the context of a conference. I don't know (and don't care to know) about that, but it's vitally important not to throw the inclusivity baby out with the bathwater.
The person who opened the bug report asked about a process that's relevant to the purpose of the group (flagging inappropriate language early in places that can be hard to change later, like APIs). There was a previous case with a flag named "suicide", which was removed because it was deemed to be in bad taste. The flag was a honeypot for arguing about the tastemaking question, so once the process question was answered, the thread was closed and locked.
Seems reasonable to me. There's certainly distraction around politics-style questions of taste and language, but it's not a bad thing to address the concerns of the community in a formal and standardized way, which is what that thread was nominally about.
Refers to a long list of attempts by social justice warriors to join projects and organisations with the intent to subvert the organisation into a platform for there social activism. Which includes introducing extremely vague codes of conduct and then trying to use these vague guidelines to purge the organization of whomever they see as an obstacle of consolidating power and subverting resources. I am not going to drag in a bunch of links because anyone who has been observing this for the past few years has seen these people attempt this trojan horse tactic multiple times in multiple communities.
One of the most awful episodes was when the gnome foundation was essentially bankrupted by having there entire budget for developer outreach subverted to 'Outreach Program for Women' which essentially entailed giving checks for 5,000 to any women to wanted the money regardless of there qualifications talent or history in open source. Needless to say the director was forced to resign.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/gnome-bled-dry-by-outreach-prog...
AFAICT, the whole point of using that term is as a tribal membership signal.
PG had an essay a while back about things you can't talk about.
I've found lately that there are many topics where you just can't mention them at all online. I will not list these topics. To do so would just invite the kinds of conversations that end in a death spiral.
I'm reminded of the old joke of accusing somebody that they are in denial. Once you do that? There's no way they can reply without agreeing with you. It's a semantic trap.
There are scads of topics like that today. People have taught themselves the appropriate kinds of wordplay such that they are able to declare certain areas off-limits.
Our society, world, and species depends on open and sometimes offensive civil dialogue. I find it depressing that so many people have paid so much money for an education and are not aware of this basic prerequisite for a modern world.
Consider that 100 years ago a picture was a novelty, there was no such thing as perfect recollection.
Today we have a perfect/accurate record of exactly what was said/done on social media; it's led to a culture of virtue signalling and often dishonest but politically correct dialogue.
Don't get me wrong, I love technology and the amazing things it's let us do, but I don't think this aspect is discussed enough.
Our day to day existence as a human being has completely/foundationally/fundamentally changed within the span of a couple generations.
Since recorded history, we've evolved a way of dealing and working with each other that assumes a certain physical world. That world no longer exists.
Couldn't agree with this more. It's going to be interesting to see how things play out.
E.g. how long can the US Federal government continue to borrow "a trillion dollars a year" to fund continuing operations? Not forever, I submit to you.
(And, yes, I know it's dropped to around half of that, but there's no plan to drop it further, and that's not counting things like the Fed keeping interest rates so low.)
In other words, it's politics as usual - just in this case, "left-leaning San Francisco" politics in the "technology" space. A pity, as when this happens, it becomes a groupthink exercise and critical thinking is most unwelcome (hampering the realization of real diversity and inclusivity). Instead we're left with the Vocabulary Police game and pluralism is dead.
(To say nothing the "this guy supports a political party I don't like; let's conspire to destroy his livelihood" witch hunts, which are rarer but even more vicious.)
I didn't get the whole PC crowd until I read this article. The obvious contradictions in the PC movement can't really be ascribed to any other reasoning then Antonio Gramsci's counter-hegemonic culture war strategy that Fonte chronicles the history of in this article. The strategy seeks to join together all coalitions of those who oppose "hegemonic" values such as meritocracy and other "common sense" in order to seek its overthrow and to pave the way for a utopian revolution.
Edit: I left out any examples of PC contradictions because anyone with critical thinking skills can identify many easily and I wanted to be kind and not inflict hurtful cognitive dissonance on those who are still PC true believers.
Perhaps you mean "no speech is totally banned". Because it sure as hell it IS banned from being part of the conference.
>Crockford can say whatever the fuck he wants.
Nobody said they established their own dictatorship across the country and prevented him from speaking everywhere, so this "correction" is beside the point.
He is totally not allowed to say what he wants as part of his presentation, because it was cancelled. And that was because some people couldn't accept him saying some things elsewhere either.
What if someone takes offence of your "whatever the fuck he wants" line as sexist? Should you be thrown our from HN?
You'd still be able to say "whatever you want" elsewhere, so no harm, right?
That's the problem though, isn't it?
It's clear from Nodevember's statement[1] that the action was taken because some member of the community felt uncomfortable, and explicitly not because of any specific speech or action on the part of Mr. Crockford.
If this were a movement to censor certain specific speech, I would likely be opposed to it on philosophical grounds but would support and empathize with the motivation. That's not what this movement is about. I see this as an example of a movement based on an extreme political ideology usurping power within a community by shaming its members into submission.
For the million, billionth time, this not about speech being banned. It has never been about speech being banned. Stop talking as if people are claiming his speech was banned.
I think it's striking how these people seem to be on a crusade, often they don't even seem to be users of the code in question and often barely developers at all.
These sort of social problems don't have unilateral solutions, so the sooner that is recognized by all parties, the better the end result can be.
"terminology sensitivity"
"host may be insensitive, use presenter, entertainer instead"
"disabled may be insensitive, use turned off, person with a disability, people with disabilities instead"
"psychotic may be insensitive, use person with a psychotic condition, person with psychosis instead"
F--- that.
You guys are psychotic....er, people with psychosis.
The female counterpart is hostess.
It's mostly pandering to individuals with an inflated sense of self importance (everybody change the language to cater for our particular use case and "offence"), and it's disgraceful and hypocritical because it leverages previous generations fights for actual discrimination and intolerance (e.g. against gays and lesbians) by taking to extremes from people that have it too easy today (or don't even belong to said minorities, but just "fight the good fight" in their name).
For centuries, "they" has been plural and "he" has been used for gender-neutral singular third-person.
Now, some find that situation unacceptable and are trying to make everyone else change the way they speak and write.
You probably use it daily without noticing.
It is at least a reasonable claim that could be investigated further, as opposed to the claim that singular "they" is always an error, which any corpus will show is false.
That's possible but I've never seen any historical example of this nor I have seen anyone do it (outside of a specific subculture) so I don't think it's true: after all it's usually easy to deduce the gender of someone you haven't met from their name and if you get it wrong nobody (outside of that same specific subculture) will get really angry because of that.
1. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/200700 Pastebin link for non-subscribers: http://pastebin.com/kZFpdTnV
"He" has been the _proper_ usage way back from its roots at the German "er", which has the same usage.
"Man" or "one" (German, "Mann" or "man") has been used in the indefinate case.
We are not talking about grammatical errors here. You're free to declare great speakers and writers through the centuries to be in error, but what are you even claiming at that point? You could declare that saying the word "bread" is a mistake and it would be just as meaningless.
As with most arguments against the singular "they", your argument from German etymology also precludes the singular "you". Do you say "thou" all the time?
> Do you say "thou" all the time?
"You" was not only the plural second-person but also the formal singular second-person (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction#Englis...) -- similar to German "sie" and "Sie". So it was always correct.
Anyway, I'm sure the PC crowd will win. It's just an (in this case, innocuous) example how systemically they can change they way we speak and communicate.
The singular "they" has existed throughout modern English. Getting rid of it is an insurmountably awkward and drastic change. People have tried, and they can't even remove it from their own speech.
The generic "he" is a relatively newer affectation that has risen and fallen in popularity in formal writing. I guess you can find a "PC crowd" to blame for its current decline, but this decline supposedly started around the 1960s, so you're not really observing anything new.
The only thing that's recent is (as EdiX pointed out) that there are people speaking out to say that they, as individuals, would prefer to be referred to with the singular "they".
But both "y'all" and singular "they" usage has always been informal, and inappropriate/ungrammatical for more proper contexts, which should instead have the more formal, traditional equivalents.
> ...it has become common in speech and in informal writing to substitute the third-person plural pronouns they, them, their, and themselves, and the nonstandard singular themself. While this usage is accepted in casual context, it is still considered ungrammatical in formal writing.
- Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition
Do you remember flight stewards before they became attendants?
Better use "presenter" just to be safe.
It was really difficult for me to understand that nodejs (internal?) source code could be that offensive to anyone to require this level of PC commitment, and I am not even a WASP...
It is also quite ironic that they do it on GitHub.
This is intolerance. This is totalitarianism.
Criticizing speech is most definitely part of free speech, but it's the consequences of that speech that is worrying. In the east your professional opportunities dry up when people start accusing you of being an enemy of the state. In the west the same happens when you are declared an enemy of the minority.
Inclusion is fantastic, but not if it means excluding people for trivial examples of speech that people have to work hard to be offended by.
But your basic point is you like free speech so long as it agrees with your pov? And the second someone is criticized in a way you find unacceptable (free speech!) it's wrong?
And people shouldn't be excluded (freedom of association also means the freedom not to associate) if they produce speech xupybd doesn't find offensive (trivial examples blah blah blah)?
I reiterate you and gp are deeply confused.
I'll help: Nothing.
ps -- you are exactly free to associate with someone if they are removed from your professional circle for reasons you don't agree with. Doing so is itself free speech. Now others may disagree with you, or even shun you for doing so. Still free speech. You're free to never go to Nodevember or any conferences the Nodevember principles are involved with. You're free to go to the next conference that invites Crockford just because he's there, and to brag about that on twitter and hn. You're even free to attempt to create your own conference featuring 8 hours of Crockford making bad biceps jokes. More free speech!
> Now others may disagree with you, or even shun you for doing so.
I believe that is what is happening here. A portion of the tech community (of which I am a part) have begun to see this movement[1] as toxic, and are speaking out against it. The desired result is to either come to an equitable compromise, or eject the members of the movement from the community.
[1]: "this movement", meaning what others here have referred to as "SJW". I'm unaware of a term for it that is not implicitly biased, and while I oppose the movement as a whole I recognize that there are underlying issues that must be addressed and am loath to group everyone who would describe themselves as passionate about "social justice" into a single group. It's far more nuanced than that.
I can't tell if you're talking about the inclusivity crowd, or the people who are standing up against it.
I'm criticizing overgard, etc, for claiming that public criticism / not associating with Crockford is somehow anti-free speech on the basis that overgard etc disagree with it.
There's a mountain of tweets discussing this in replies to Nodevember's announcement, but nothing directly affirmed by Nodevember as the basis for their decision. Seems like a lot of outrage being stirred up over bullshit no one can substantiate.
[1]: http://atom-morgan.github.io/in-defense-of-douglas-crockford
[2]: http://nodevember.org/statement.html
[3]: https://medium.com/@nodebotanist/why-i-won-t-be-speaking-at-...
Granted, it still isn't official, but even one of the conference's founders said to look to twitter for more context for the disinvitation of Crockford, so it isn't too off base.
I don't see anything in this chat log that changes anything.
So, again, referencing the tweets & subjects preceding their announcement as context aren't unreasonable as Golden says there's more context on Twitter. Emily Rose, notably, unleashed a series of tweets at them until they capitulated. It's still not the official word you're seeking, but to ignore it seems willfully dismissive.
Moreover, in what manner would a direct affirmation or counterpoint by the Nodevember organizers be advantageous to them? I'm not trying to be conspiratorial about it; being quiet and vague is the far more diplomatic path. It's not in Nodevember's interests to be precise with the particularities of the disinvitation, nor are we, as outsiders, owed any sort of particular explaination. But neither were any details provided to Crockford for him to ameliorate. "It is a mystery to me too." per https://paulstraw.svbtle.com/crockford
1 - support free speech, which includes criticism, even public (maybe even virulent! or unhinged, as long as you don't incite violence!) criticism (free speech!). And the freedom to associate (or not!) Also free speech! Including this thread, which is criticism of the criticism.
or
2 - your idea of "free speech", where you certainly can't criticize someone in public, or not invite them / disinvite to your privately run privately owned conference speaking to individuals who have voluntarily chosen to associate with each other.
I have no problem with you and others criticizing nodevember; they seem incompetent. But you don't understand free speech if you think public criticism is anti free speech.
My point is that the SJW's often escalate a discussion from the realm of words to the realm of actions. It's an extremely passive aggressive style where the implicit threat is "if you don't tow the party line, we will go out of our way to create bad consequences for you". As an example of that happening, well, look right here. Douglas Crockford did not apparently do anything, but his views were deemed "problematic" by someone, and because of this he is now suffering in the actual real world.
Personally, I think that's fucked up and I don't abide by that behavior. I view people that act in such a way as hypocritical cowards.
The legal concept of free speech is not a hammer to solve every problem, and neither is it an instruction manual for how to act in any situation. Free speach is a framework within which communication is implicitly encouraged and explicitly guaranteed, except in certain cases when it causes damage to others, defamation per se being one example.
Your right to say something does not always make it the right thing to say, this is not in any way nullified by the existence of legal protection for the speach in question.
I sincerely doubt one would find anything remotely similar in C++, Linux (C lang), or Assembly-programming communities.
The "harder" the language the less non-coding politics around.
The Linux world is full of commotion surrounding (written) language.
The necessity of Unicode is a great example of how a seemingly-straightforward technical design can prove inadequate once it needs to serve the full set of humanity.
Upvote this comment if you agree.
Upvote this comment if you think it's sarcasm.
That said, open source has been shaped by the people behind it. Entire forks have been created over nothing but internal politics regardless of "inclusivity." Large projects have rejected major features just because the maintainer didn't want it even though others did. Just because you have been insulated from this doesn't mean it isn't there.
To me this just sounds like some sort of "stranger danger" boogeyman. A problem that is much smaller than you make it out to be.
https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
https://github.com/kickstarter/rack-attack/pull/181
https://github.com/graphite-project/graphite-web/issues/1569
https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/pull/3507
https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code/pull/20
https://github.com/zendframework/zend-expressive/pull/340
https://github.com/assemble/assemble.io/issues/163
https://github.com/braydie/HowToBeAProgrammer/issues/68
https://github.com/airbnb/javascript/pull/698
https://github.com/lighthouse-labs/clock-tower/pull/87
https://github.com/smalltownheroes/bikini-girls-with-machine...
https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/27430
https://github.com/ardanlabs/gotraining/issues/75
https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/3185
https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/pull/3484
https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/issues/5889
https://github.com/twolfson/sexy-bash-prompt/issues/56
http://web.archive.org/web/20151030100136/https://github.com...
> People crawl through projects on github for certain words and open pull requests to try and get them changed
You've also failed to demonstrate in this thread instances of people being called out for using the "wrong" libraries (where "wrong" is defined as libraries that don't conform to the complainant's views). All of these examples are of people making direct changes to software. The idea that one should be scared that they may get called out over the transgressions of their software dependencies has yet to be demonstrated.
I have no idea what you're talking about with regards to wrong libraries and dependencies. I made no mention of such a thing.
> Nowadays I worry that I might be called out for using a piece of code (however good it might be) just because the person who wrote it does not use "inclusive" language
This is what I was originally responding to.
Judge for yourself:
And the majority of SJ-related requests I've seen are in effect just that; declarations that the existing society standards are suboptimal for the usecases of ethnic minorities, women, LGBTA+ people, etc., along with suggestions for revisions.
They are (in my mind) the same people that view Native Americans being offended at the existence of the Washington Redskins as people that are making "a bit fuss over nothing."
It seems that we're commenting on an article where just such a person materialized, and their impact can be quantified: a well-qualified speaker was dropped from a conference.
> They are (in my mind) the same people that view Native Americans being offended at the existence of the Washington Redskins as people that are making "a bit fuss over nothing."
I admit I don't follow sports enough to know the details of that brouhaha so I don't know if someone (or many someones) of American Indian descent were the ones calling for the change or if it was a "disinterested" third party. Either way, the opinions and preferences of the community at large must be weighed against those of the dissenters. In my opinion we already have an extremely effective means of recourse for those who take offense - the free market, which can be impacted by direct means (boycott) or indirect means (convincing others to support your view).
I can give other examples. For example, this past weekend saw an air show about downtown Toronto as part of the Canadian National Exhibition. There was talk of how the thundering of the jets flying over downtown wasn't necessarily "enjoyed" by people that have been in war-zones (e.g. Syrian refugees). I don't think that there was any suggestion that the air show should be scrapped on this basis, but still there were people claiming that the refugees should "just get over it" because they are not in a war zone anymore. This is incredibly insensitive. Someone in my own family expressed the view point that after a couple of years out of the war zone that they should "get over it."
That aside, I don't see where in this comment chain we're discussing a standards body. This type of commit to individual projects should, in my opinion, be strongly discouraged.
I didn't end up using the library.
What I haven't done is try to gin up a twit mob to have the author hounded from his job, no-platformed at conferences, and so on.
This lead to threats of boycott where the Flycheck maintainer said that he would actively discourage the contributors to his project from supporting Spacemacs because of this issue.
(+ bona fide opped ops, notwithstanding the Freenode "low channel temperature" guidelines)
I have seen people speculate that this is due to the lower barrier of entry in the JS community (as a whole), although I'm not certain how true this would be.
Generationally, these concepts of triggers and safe spaces are almost exclusively limited to younger generations.
Therefore, if younger people are choosing Node, and they're the people who believe in this nonsense, you're going to have some overlap there.
Like the one yesterday, it attempts to provide its own explanation for why Crockford was disinvited as the keynote speaker. However, none of these details are mentioned in the actual statement given by Nodevember[2], and there are no sources given for how this explanation was arrived at. The Nodevember statement claims he was disinvited based on some public and private feedback from speakers who felt uncomfortable attending with him as the keynote speaker. Why should we take it on face value that the circumstances documented here are actual set of circumstances that lead to him being disinvited? Where is this information even coming from?
One of the alleged sources is a blog post from Kas Perch[3]. The alleged slut shaming incident seems to be a minor note in a post otherwise focused on his negative and dismissive attitude towards some of the other speakers. Perhaps this is the more salient part of why this person felt uncomfortable attending with him? Perhaps there's more feedback being kept private to protect the witch hunt from targeting those coming forward?
Notably I haven't even seen a statement from Crockford crying foul over this incident. It seems to be coming entirely from other Node developers upset about the fact that he was removed as the keynote speaker. It seems like this is an argument being played out as a proxy over political stances about diversity and inclusion tactics, without a lot of consideration for the actual circumstances. Furthermore I find it very disappointing that this poorly substantiated argument is being used to demonize inclusivity and diversity overall, which is something badly needed in developer communities.
[1]: http://atom-morgan.github.io/in-defense-of-douglas-crockford
[2]: http://nodevember.org/statement.html
[3]: https://medium.com/@nodebotanist/why-i-won-t-be-speaking-at-...
So you want to say, that there doesn't need to be a real reason anyway, it is just enough that a few other speakers have a problem with him. It doesn't even have to be made transparent what the problems actually is.
And you believe that this kind of closed door denunciation will result in a better, more inclusive world?
And that Crockford doesn't respond to this hypocritical nonsense is a kind of confession of guilt?
No, what I'm saying is you (and everyone else) aren't owed an explanation, and furthermore there are good reasons for not offering a public explanation.
> And that Crockford doesn't respond to this hypocritical nonsense is a kind of confession of guilt?
No, I'm acknowledging that this is a lot of frenzy being whipped up when the party directly affected by the decision hasn't released a statement questioning their motivation. He may have been given an explanation and has chosen not to make an issue of it for all you know. The only people seemingly angered by this decision are people who aren't affected.
Conferences are for-profit things, yes? Companies don't owe their customers anything, but if they don't give their customers anything, then customers don't have any reason to give the company their money.
Or, to put that another way: a conference about Javascript that kicks out Douglas Crockford is pretty much in a default state from the moment they decide to do so of "so why should anyone attend this?" until they provide an explanation that serves to ameliorate the bozo-bit they just seemingly flipped.
The Nodevember statement seems reasonable on its face:
"[...] his presence would make some speakers uncomfortable to the point where they refused to attend or speak.
We reacted to this feedback. Nothing else. Any other speculation around his past behavior was not taken into account.
This conference was started by a group of friends to gather around the love of a shared language and community.
We are in over our heads. The conference has grown to something we never anticipated. We aren't professional organizers or PR people. We are still learning, and will make mistakes. We don't do this as a full time job. We do this because we love the community."
OK, they're just a group of friends doing their thing, and it's their club, their rules.
On the other hand: they're charging $350 a ticket, so can hardly be complete amateurs. It sounds like they're trying to downplay any political angle, when excluding such a speaker would inevitably be seen as a political move in the current climate.
(Conference for an extremely hip, progressive community (Node) excludes old-school elitist greybeard. Only reasons cited publicly are mildly condescending remarks in Crawford's public talks and unelaborated backchannel complaints).
So, though I don't know enough and so withhold firm judgement, it does appear that the Nodevember organisers thought they could deliver a public slap to Crockford by ostracising him, proving some political point, and are now downplaying their own behaviour to avoid the PR backlash.
Either way, it is their club, their rules. The real solution to this is for those closer to Crockford's philosophy of life to assert their right to free association, and host an elitist conference for Real Programmers where noobs are flamed, idiocy is excluded, truth and justice reigns supreme, etc.
Edit: I've just seen this https://twitter.com/nexxylove/status/771503661956501504 which makes it look as though the Nodevember organisers were bullied into excluding Crockford to deflect a PR s...storm about their insufficiently diverse keynote speakers.
Instead of inserting your own narrative into how and why this occurred and pouring gasoline on the fire, how about let cooler heads prevail. If Crockford feels wronged by this exchange, he's free to come forward with his side of things (and other parties with theirs) if a public debate needs to occur. Until then, this is a lot of people being roped into proxy battle of "SJWs" vs "un-PC enthusiasts" that frankly has little to do with an actual set of circumstances.
This is only speculation if you ignore the last few years of speaker exclusions and anti-"brogrammer" activism.
All the evidence points to this being a proxy battle of "SJWs" vs "un-PC enthusiasts". Nodevember were told that having Crockford speak "sent a message that women are unwelcome".
> Instead of inserting your own narrative
This is a roundabout way of saying that I'm making things up.
> If Crockford feels wronged by this exchange, he's free to come forward with his side of things
Crockford doesn't need to do anything. You're implying that he's the only one who should be bothered.
But the whole point of incidents like this is to show that people like Crockford aren't welcome. Linus Torvalds gets the same s... from the same people for the same reasons.
(A side note, but it's weird that TDD-enthusiasts are very condescending to non-TDD followers, but this isn't seen as "exclusive").
I saw the tweet, my point here is that's a single tweet raising a red flag about what is undoubtedly an issue that was talked about to a greater extent behind closed doors with relevant parties. If you find that justification to be insufficient irregardless of whatever the backing details may be, then feel free to outrage on, but I think that's pretty lamentable.
The fervor over this issue seems to be predicated on the belief that what appears on twitter is the only set of events that lead up to him being disinvited, which cannot be demonstrated and conflicts with Nodevember's statement on the issue.
> This is a roundabout way of saying that I'm making things up.
Yes, I think anyone who has come to the conclusion that the only reason for this is liberal virtue signaling instead of an actual aspiration to create an inclusive environment is actually making things up, since there isn't enough evidence to draw that conclusion.
> Crockford doesn't need to do anything. You're implying that he's the only one who should be bothered.
I'm implying he should at least be the first person to be bothered, unless the full details come to light. Otherwise this is a lot of rage stoking over absolute bullshit.
> But the whole point of incidents like this is to show that people like Crockford aren't welcome. Linus Torvalds gets the same s... from the same people for the same reasons.
I think there's a legitemate reason to disinvite people like Torvalds who have a long history of being brutally condescending. And more importantly has been asked ad nauseam to please be kinder to people and has been firmly obstinate. Disinventing a personality like his works precisely towards the goal of being more inclusive. Hell I see a blog post every other week on HN about "imposter syndrome" and how that debilitates people in our community, so it makes complete sense to me that people who are dramatically negative towards others are toxic and harmful to the goal of creating an inclusive environment. This notion that we have to accept egotism and profound condescension in this community is extremely backwards.
My point, which you've ignored, is that we need to take into account the wider context, i.e. "the last few years of speaker exclusions and anti-"brogrammer" activism" I mentioned.
> the conclusion that the only reason for this is liberal virtue signaling instead of an actual aspiration to create an inclusive environment
That isn't my conclusion. I do believe these people aspire to "create an inclusive environment". That means inclusive for people like them, and exclusive of people not like them.
They do not seem to particularly care about being inclusive of minorities, who are just a smokescreen (see, e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/50u77r/douglas_...). They appear to be guided by an intuitive sense of "our sort of people".
> And more importantly has been asked ad nauseam to please be kinder to people and has been firmly obstinate.
Don't you think he might be obstinate for a reason? He's responsible for one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the world: bugs in the Linux kernel could cause life-or-death situations.
The world needs more programmers, and we shouldn't care what they look like, but inclusivity is not an end-in-itself. "Egotism and profound condescension" is terrible if you think the tech community exists to provide a weird social club, but it's essential if the goal is to help programmers write better software - the master programmers have earned their big egos because they know how important it is not to f... certain things up.
What does this even mean? It's impossible for me to reply to this unless you're more specific about what you're talking about and how it involves the organizers for Nodevember. Also "taking a wider context" is useful for understanding something only once the specifics of what actually happened become apparent. Otherwise its impossible to understand what the context even is.
The last controversy like this I can remember was Curtis Yarvin being disinvited from LambdaConf, and even then people were bizarrely claiming that disallowing a white sepremacist from speaking was uninclusive. I'm not trying to link these events (there's no evidence to claim that the circumstances are the same... though bizarrely the guy who wrote the blog yesterday is trying to link them in some way favorable to Crockford[1]), only pointing out how completely counter-productive it is to attempt to place something "in a larger context" before anything is really known about the details.
> That means inclusive for people like them, and exclusive of people not like them.
This is just a slightly stronger form of what I said above. You have no evidence with which to draw this conclusion.
> They do not seem to particularly care about being inclusive of minorities, who are just a smokescreen (see, e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/50u77r/douglas_...). They appear to be guided by an intuitive sense of "our sort of people".
Again, on what basis? This comment is from a person saying they'd be in favor of uninviting Crockford if he was responsible for being toxic or inappropriate. They seem to be concerned with accusations about one of the persons involved with calling for him to be replaced as the keynote speaker.
> Don't you think he might be obstinate for a reason? He's responsible for one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the world: bugs in the Linux kernel could cause life-or-death situations.
I'm so sick of seeing software engineers justify arrogance or invective as though they somehow make maintaining critical software feasible. This is indefensible macho bullshit that needs to dropped. Maintainers have plenty of tools at their disposal for when code doesn't meet their criteria: the primary of which is to not accept change sets. Belittling contributors or engaging in childish invective isn't a valid tool for turning down code. At best it turns away people who could be guided to making productive contributions (and yes, there are plenty of people in the linux kernel community responsible for this), and at worst it scares away other potential contributors who are concerned with their own fallibility and the prospect of being publicly humiliated for making a mistake. Sorry, but no. I don't think he has a legitimate reason for being obstinate.
> The world needs more programmers, and we shouldn't care what they look like, but inclusivity is not an end-in-itself. "Egotism and profound condescension" is terrible if you think the tech community exists to provide a weird social club, but it's essential if the goal is to help programmers write better software - the master programmers have earned their big egos because they know how important it is not to f... certain things up.
Sorry, but I don't buy this "programmer bootcamp" model of teaching developers. There's plenty of psychology and management research out there showing that ostracism and negativity increases stress[2], decreases social cohesion[3], decreases performance[4], etc. In short, this is complete bullshit.
[1]: http://atom-morgan.github.io/in-defense-of-douglas-crockford
[2]: http://webuser.bus.umich.edu/janedut/POS/Heaphy%20and%20Dutt...
[3]: http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&uid=2009...
[4]: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278431911...
- "[Mexican immigrants are] bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists."
- "Rosie [O'Donnell] is just disgusting --- she's fat, she's a loser. She's a farm animal pig. She's a beast, ok. She's just a loser. She's no good."
RESULT: Just might get elected US President in November!
Obscure JavaScript geek:
- "blah blah ... promiscuous ... blah blah ..."
RESULT: Removed from speaking at some JavaScript conference in November.
These inclusivity people need to look around a little and have a reality check. Their incredibly narrow standard for what is acceptable is not even remotely shared by the American society they live in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promiscuous_mode
This causes it to disappear all night and crawl home at 11 in the morning with a hangover.
If someone has something to teach me, I don't care what he does outside of the conference -- if he uses gender biased words or votes for evil bunnies, I'm not there to talk to him about those things.
It was better when people knew how to comparatamentalize work and politics and religion and all the other stuff that's personal and not relevant to the discussion at hand.
everyone has to be more diligent to protect there projects and communities form these corrosive people.
> "We will also be removing Douglas Crockford from our keynote speakers list to help make the conference a comfortable environment for all." - Nodevember Tweet
The implication is he creates an uncomfortable environment.
Libel?
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/50u77r/douglas_...
The problem with "inclusivity groups" is that they have to find work for themselves -- even if that means busywork.
Seems like it's trending towards the latter.
> Sometimes that means enforcing certain standards of speech
Do you hear yourself? The cognitive dissonance is incredible.
Enforcing a certain level of civility in a given place of discourse isn't "banning" and it isn't a free speech issue. It's a basic prerequisite for human interaction.
The "inclusivity" movement is just trying to extend that concept to be sensitive to groups of people that historically have not felt comfortable in certain technical environments.
Argue about the implementation if you like, but please don't assume bad faith on the part of everyone who tries to make tech a more welcoming place.
In small social groups, the group norms around certain behaviors. That's normal. It's also normal that different small social groups will have different norms.
As a personal matter, don't be an asshole. You shouldn't say things to others to deliberately hurt them. The principle of charity is valid here as well, by the way. Sometimes people are hurt because even though you mean well, they take things the wrong way.
In larger groups, probably somewhere around Dunbar's Number, it becomes inevitable that norming will not work -- nor should it work. That's because larger groups of people naturally become echo chambers full of groupthink. It's imperative to have voices and opinions that some find harsh. c.f. On Liberty
These are three separate issues. They are related, yes, but one doesn't trump the others. Society needs all of this to function well.
ADD: One of the interesting things that happened with the invention of the television was that there was no more adult talk anymore. Adults said that in the past, there was plenty of time when the kids ran off and the grown-ups talked about more mature topics.
The TV took every kind of conversation and threw it into the middle of the living room with your 4-year-old. (Or 15-year-old, for that matter). Adult talk radically changed.
Perhaps the net is doing the same thing with small social groups -- eliminating them as a place where local norms can be far outside what most people would find polite. Everything now is just in one big bucket. If so, it promises a more radical change to human society than anything we've seen so far.
I can make "offensive" jokes all day with a couple friends over beers, because nobody is going to actually be offended. If I'm speaking at a large conference, I need to be more careful, make sure I'm not inadvertently hurting people without even thinking about it.
What we see with the SJW purges is the opposite of inclusion. There is a very narrow ideological purity test being applied to anyone who wants to be in the group or be a speaker.
You end up with a group that is an intellectual and cultural monoculture with a strict power hierarchy and 'punishment' for anyone who does not agree with the gospel handed down by the authority.
The community eventually falls apart because they rightly see that the organisation has been taken over by a power hungry clique who wants to impose there one true way to participate on everyone else.
Its a really corrosive dynamic. Just because the people doing this have some clever rhetorical devices and use 'inclusion' and 'equally' does not make them any less self serving and power hungry. And they really are trying to make exclusive monoculture with only the 'right' kind of people allowed in.
We've evolved to function in small tribal groups, and that we instinctively want to do so in all sorts of contexts, be they political, economic, etc. But the fact is that the incentives that allow this to work on a tribal scale break down when we try to apply them so broadly. F.A. Hayek argues that this is a big part of the "Fatal Conceit" through which socialists wrongly believe that they can successfully manage an economy (and thus a society).
I feel like mankind is having final exams and although we were given all the answers, none of us have studied very much. Whether it's the efficient allocation of resources, the nature of public versus private discourse, the necessity of reproducibility in science, or the overuse of aggregate data and correlation as a proxy for causation -- there are a bunch of fundamental topics we all need to be on the same page about. This is because they're all converging together as we as a species converge together online.
Apparently it was not obvious. Rhetorical trick much?
Enforcing civility should be a tactic used for individuals, not language. For instance, insults to friends/acquaintances are fine, insults to strangers are not.
You need to enforce this at a user level, not a language/speech/code level. There are plenty of things that change in acceptability level based on context.
For example, having read my post, one might actually try to understand the point I was trying to make OR one might imply that I was incapable of understanding the concept of logical contradiction, for the sake of making a point. I was calling out wyager for that behavior.
I invite you to step back and think about which party is using "rhetorical tricks" in bad faith, here. And think about your own post while you're at it.
I'm not accusing you of trolling. I'm saying it is now the most charitable interpretation of your behavior.
I believe that speech should be moderated to make the tech community more welcoming. Not as a matter of law, but as a matter of civility and culture.
I believe that we can and should have a discussion about this without implying that the other person is mentally incompetent.
So if that's how you define a troll, then I'm proud to be one.
People called you out for being religious, and you respond with a list of things you "believe" using fuzzy logic, with appeals to emotion, and imprecise language.
So you're proud to be religious. Fine. Be religious somewhere else.
For instance, should hackernews be welcoming to you? When you don't respect the community norms by responding in a logical way and refuting arguments?
The case in question is manifestly ridiculous. It'll be a while before anything can unseat this snafu as the poster child for inclusivity-gone-too-far. The last one perhaps being the Brendan Eich affair, although I think that case is at least debatable (by "reasonable" people).
But—and this is the point—there still is still a "line" (the baby), even though some people will always draw it way too tight (the bathwater). Line crossed (IMHO): https://statement-on-lambdaconf.github.io/ (edit To clarify, I agree with the signatories that the line was crossed by inviting the speaker in question.)
My own post said that you used the term "Obviously" when it was clear it was not obvious, as multiple people took it the wrong way.
That is a rhetorical trick. Once you say "Obviously", the implication is that since the reader didn't understand the meaning of the post, the reader is either trolling or stupid.
I also like how you ask me to step back and ask who's using rhetorical tricks, and ask me to think about my own post, thereby associating them together, implying that my own post used rhetorical tricks. Nice scare quotes btw.
Why should I think about my own post? I made a point and backed it up, without rhetorical tricks. I just stated that you said something was obvious, when empirically it was not obvious at all to other observers.
You did not address the second part of my post, where I stated that policing should be applied to individuals, not language.
I don't know about you, but I've experienced a lot of successful human interaction that was not subject to externally enforced speech codes.