I Violated a Code of Conduct
fast.ai
fast.ai
I can imagine something like this or worse happening on social media groups, but an ostentatious “committee” that listens only to one side and never gives the other side the chance to get details on how things were perceived or why it’s a violation? And the chuckling in the call when someone has already said they’re not in a proper emotional state is just bullying.
I personally don’t think CoC or any other set of laws can be written to be precise and comprehensive. There will always be edge cases that need many hearings and re-hearings, with some discretion based on past precedence, nuances, etc., in the interpretation of written words in the code in an effort to make the code clearer for the future (this is how we improve laws, don’t we?).
This committee has, IMNSHO, been the opposite of kind and doesn’t deserve to hold the responsibility of handling CoC enforcement or violations. I’m sure this committee is not even capable of explaining clearly to a potential speaker what the CoC really means as per the written words and what’s expected.
This CoC needs to be torn apart and rebuilt, and the people in this particular committee must be sent to other areas where their expertise can be best used. Their proper place is certainly not in a CoC committee, for sure.
More often than not, these responsibilities emerge after onerous legal discourse, legal judgement, and promise of punishment.
I'm not sure what the constitution have to do with it? Inevitably, all it takes is a few court rulings in favor of defendants claiming that CoC enforcements have caused harm.
There's a dangerous trend where an accusation alone is enough to have people lose their jobs.
And any improper employment termination suit would be against the employer, not a conference organizer, because in a very direct sense, it's your employer that chooses whether to fire you or not.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/intentional_infliction_of_em...
Might be a stretch, but would likely survive summary judgment.
Ask a lawyer for a legal answer.
Do you read the code of conduct when you attend a conference? Personally, I haven't even read the code of conduct for my job, and certainly wouldn't read one if I was speaking at or attending a conference.
The CoCs are completely unnecessary and, as shown in this example, arbitrarily enforced. In the blog post I read that their CoC prohibits threats and assaults. Consider how silly that is. If someone's threatening you or sexually assaulting you you're going to go the police, not report them for a code of conduct violation.
Likewise, for more mundane stuff, it's all common sense. Don't be obnoxious, rude, make people uncomfortable, etc. If you are doing that, they'll ask you to leave and ban you from future attendance if it's severe. You shouldn't need a CoC to know that and they don't need one to do it.
Consider something that's not covered by their CoC. Maybe I bring my pet skunk with me and they don't have a provision about skunks in their CoC. Are they now powerless? No, they're going to do what's sensible and ask me to not have the skunk, and if I say "Your code of conduct doesn't prohibit skunks" they're going to ask me to leave.
Codes of conduct are silly. They create these dumb regulations and committees for no real reason and create the apparatus for mistakes like these.
I'm actually shocked that Jeremy supported and still supports codes of conduct. He seems like a smart guy and they're obviously a bad idea.
Where do you think they come from? The issues that people have to deal with at conferences aren't new [1] - and when the offender is a friend of the organizer, or works on their team, having a predefined process is good.
It also means that people can't say "I didn't know it wasn't ok to ____" or "XXX punishment is too harsh" - a common issue with poor actors. A CoC means you can take action with less effort and drama when someone is being a jerk.
As far as friends of the organizers, I assume that's not settled with CoCs either. I bet if Jeremy were good friends with the right people this wouldn't have happened at all. Maybe it's not solved either in the CoC-free case, but I don't think it's worse and I think it's a relatively rare thing anyway.
It's not just correct to say that "people can't say..." Of course they can. People don't read the codes of conduct and don't know that they say. Even if they did know, the language is bound to contain ambiguity. Jeremy, for example, didn't know he wasn't allowed to disagree with people.
Genuine question for you: do you read the code of conduct at conferences you go to?
Or quickly get you fired by shaming you employer. No one want to jeopardize their jobs.
I think the meta is we have to understand we are all *-ist at some level. This is the world we were born and raised in and it is incredibly silly for me to suggest that I am somehow above my nurture.
Of course, I will deny everything if you find my real name and attach it to this post because we can't really say this out loud but just between us I think the key is to understand that we all have inherent biases and actively try to fight ones that we consider not helpful.
Since it’s fairly unlikely for similar resistance to have any effect on my career, I kind of feel inclined to always respond according to what I think, instead of what people like to hear.
In this case it actually garnered downvotes, which I found fairly surprising, given, like you said, that we all have inherent biases.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120107141633/http://www.vaclav...
But that was always the point of them. Sure they have some nice words about equality and so on, but the purpose was always to give those who produce nothing themselves power over those that do. Look at the way long standing projects have had CoC’s forced on them by recently-arrived outsiders who have barely contributed a single line of code. Look at who the first targets of the CoC committee are. It’s just bullying.
What does anyone think happens when an organizer breaks the code of conduct? I can write the list of actions here:
Overall it's the same kind of people, authoritarian/social dominants; see https://theauthoritarians.org/
If there are multiple organisers of a conference then it makes sense for them to talk amongst themselves, decide what they disagree on, and document it.
Say I believe no swearing and no pink shirts and my co-organiser thinks no swearing and no blue shirts. It makes sense for us to sit down before the conference and document our official stance on those issues. Then when I see someone wearing a pink (or blue) shirt I know how to respond without starting a fight on the day with my co-organiser. That sort of CoC makes sense - one that the organisers use to settle their own disputes.
CoC implemented as part of some sort of rules-lawyering process are a waste of time. The as-written CoC is meaningless compared to what people organising the conference agree on.
The problem is that you'll never be able to write things down in a sufficient level of detail in a CoC to avoid this situation. Sure, your CoC details what to do when someone wears a pink shirt or a blue shirt. But what happens when someone comes in wearing a purple shirt, and you co-organizer kicks them out because "that shade of purple is too close to blue"?
I agree that conference and event organizers and moderators ought to sit down together and figure out how they resolve disputes among themselves. I disagree that a Code of Conduct is helpful in facilitating that.
I've never organised a conference, but people who have told me that there's a level of craziness that most attendees or speakers aren't exposed to. I don't know if a code of conduct makes their job easier or not, but your glib dismissal fails to take into account that conference organisers don't enjoy judicial immunity and enforcement of anything -- be it written in a code of conduct or just common sense -- can make them liable for damages. One way to protect yourself is with a system of due process, and some lawyers think that a written code is helpful in establishing due process while others disagree.
Usually one or more deaths behind each of those rules.
Stupid rules come about because someone somewhere got screwed over.
The law is complicated and expensive and painful. You need lawyers and judges and juries. People are, as you observe, severely hurt by the law.
These are reasons why we don't need some pseudo sub-law drafted quickly by amateurs. The real law still applies and the fake law is arbitrarily enforced.
You can in the UK: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-23128956
Why NOT formalize rules to some extent? Having a hidden set of implicit mores is far worse. In fact, you can easily read this post as a pro-COC argument.
After all, the author is able to make a really strong case that he didn't really infringe on any part of the COC, and that the COC was poorly constructed to begin with. With no COC, he'd have to just be saying "I think Numfocus exercised bad judgement," which is a much harder argument to make since it's so subjective.
We're professionals. Rules shouldn't be implicit in professional environments. Explicit rules are easier to use, and they make it easier to hold the authorities accountable for misusing them.
I think they're right on point with this. Law is incredibly complex and you're likely to end up with a very shitty sub-implementation of the law when building a code of conduct, be it in itself or the application & litigation procedure.
"Be nice to each other & follow the local official regulations" should probably be a valid c&c.
20 years professional work, first time Ive ever seen that.
Noped out of there as fast I could.
Now, As a white male, I’ve seen it going the other way much more lately. Walk into a place where it’s all about diversity and tolerance, but failing, because hiring for diversity means passing on experience. Or frankly interest in doing the job.
So spent months cleaning up messes. The entire time everyone is bashing white males, unless non-binary.
Besides the reams of examples of CoC's being abused and arbitrarily enforced like the one in the attached article you mean? I've never even heard of a CoC being applied in any way except a petty, bureaucratic way.
You don't hear about the system working right because it's inherently non-controversial.
The main difference I see is that the CoC also spells out enforcement actions and processes, while the enforcement process for the guidelines is whatever dang feels like it is. In other words from my perspective the CoC is less arbitrary.
An CoC on the other hand is exclusively about removal of members to achieve additional goals set by the CoC. It identify who is an "other" and gives power to a small group to opaquely remove the individual without constraints or liability. It also usually supersede any existing rules, goals and processes already existing in the community.
The distinction is thus in purpose, methods and results. If we imagine that we replaced the articles CoC with the HN guideline, we can read this: "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument". The Code of Conduct Enforcement Team could have talked to both Jeremy Howard and Joel Grus and steered the discussing on the factually arguments in favor or against the use of a Jupyter Notebook. They could have reminded both speakers to assume good faith, respond to the strongest plausible interpretation, and avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. It could remind them to focus on the purpose of the community, such as having a curious conversations with thoughtful and substantive comments.
Instead they exercised the power granted by the CoC.
Source? It seems like your assigning motives to others rather than listening to what they have to say.
> Instead they exercised the power granted by the CoC. If you actually read the parent you'd know they explicitly did not follow the CoC. The CoC sets out a process very much like the one you described in which the enforcement team is actually supposed to have a discussion with everyone involved and get all accounts of what happened. The fact they ignored the CoC isn't a problem with the CoC, it's a problem with the human beings not following the process.
Dang could start banning people at random, that wouldn't mean the HN guidelines are bad, it would mean dang decided not to follow the rules and has the power to do so.
The goal of conflict resolution is not about determining who is guilty and measuring out punishment, but rather to deescalate situation and fixing problems before there is a need for someone to be punished. The best moderation are those that are not seen because intervention occurred early and without escalating something small into something big.
The primary evidence for this exist in the names and words used in the CoC. A Enforcement Team is distinctly different than a Conflict Resolution team. A group full of mediators is different from a group full of enforcers. Enforcement is a different word from moderation.
If a CoC were focused on conflict resolution and had teams full of mediators, and where enforcement only came afterward when the mediators has failed and there exist documented proof of failed deescalation, only then would we have a situation where a CoC and a guideline would be much more similar in purpose, method and result. In which case the CoC enforcement would likely be called under a different name.
Whether the guidelines are used to punish people who act a certain way or just as a way to document how to act so as to avoid punishment is a fairly fine distinction IMO and maybe a distinction without a difference.
Sounds like a classic case of selection bias.
Or just get rid of them
Because, at least in the case of CoCs in open source, the sorts of people most vocally pushing to implement and enforce them are almost invariably of the sort most likely to use them as political weapons and enforce them lopsidedly.
The problem here is not the CoC, it's that the organisation doesn't enforce the CoC, violates it, and punishes people who didn't violate it. They might as well not have a CoC in that case.
"Boot this developer from your project because they made a remark on social media I was offended by."
--
Governance is the evergreen crisis. Was part of an org that had a constitutional crisis over conduct not covered by existing bylaws. HUGE drama. HUGE effort to resolve. Basically a mock trial.
Other orgs need more accessible, more lightweight ways to resolve their own slap fights.
In every arena I've operated this is always the case. Military, Big Company and on the streets. Not saying it's right, but it's extremely common (in my experience)
> Rules shouldn't be implicit in professional environments.
Totally agree. But again, everywhere I've been there are at least 2 sets of rules.
Maybe I am jaded by conforming to the 'It is what it is' mentality. In practice though, that has been my experience.
That's why it is more favorable in today's environment to have explicit rules like CoC. At least it brings people to the same understanding quicker.
It does carry risk though. When living in a world with more explicit rules, people tend to treat anything not in the rule to be OK, and ignore most implicit rules. That will rush more rules to be explicit, also, written poorly without broader debates and discussions during these rushes.
At least up to a point where some people clearly, but mostly not openly acted as if these unwritten rules don't apply to them. And these transgressions were not dealt with from management even when they became aware of it.
Was a shitty situation if one was trapped in such a bubble within the organisation.
Fast forward being acquired by a global corporation with an endless amount of rules and regulations. Nobody reads them. Everybody knows the important ones. Nonetheless nobody really cares in the global corp.
Exactly what I see happening in our part of this global org now starting. A sad situation.
Because they will be used to lawyerize innocent people out of the organization by entryist grifters. That's what they're for, that's what they're used for.
If OP had just been informally ostracized for whatever they actually did that made them not liked, they likely wouldn't be writing this blog post. They might find a different community, they might learn the unwritten social rules, or they might never learn. But they wouldn't need to write a blog post attempting to exonerate themselves from the black mark of a "COC violation" and rationalizing how the system attacked them.
> Let the attorneys do their job
The foundation of labor law in this country was built thanks to out-of-touch culture “warriors” and their lawyers going back to the early 1900s.
Because code of conducts makes it easier to harass people. If there are formal rules then all a harasser has to do is to find something out of context and then start harassing the person by starting a CoC breakage investigation. Doing stuff like that without a CoC would get you kicked out.
It just gives power to the accuser to say "Please refer to article 3 section 2 for compliant behavior. BANNED". But unlike a proper ruleset, the defense cannot do the same, because there's no actual definition of rude specified that I could say "In fact, I did none of those things, your honor"... and the accuser must iteratively prove his case. Instead I have to say "Im not being rude", and then it becomes a he said, she said, but with the accuser weilding "formal rules".
These are rules in the form of "don't be someone I don't like", and at best follows the fashion "the accused is presumed guilty until shown otherwise"
Good formalized set of rules and rule enforcement focus on conflict resolution and deescalation, assumes good faith and give benefit of the doubt. Most legal system does this, but also community rules like Wikipedia.
From the article I don't see any attempt of conflict resolution between Joel Grus and Jeremy Howard. I don't see any process by NumFOCUS towards deescalation and refocusing towards a common goal. The process seem to have been opaque, the accusation hidden, purpose unclear. The authorities (the Code of Conduct committee) not held accountable. As a result it seems that their explicit rules did not serve a purpose of creating a professional environment.
FTA: “I think Joel is great, and I know for a fact that he doesn’t mind being called “wrong” (since the call I checked with him).”
He's exhibiting Stockholm Syndrome. Being smart, in this case, just makes him very good at rationalizing it to himself.
If you're interested in making spaces more welcoming and existing legal structures aren't doing the job, codes of conduct are extremely valuable.
The whole point is that the legal system is very slow, very hard to report to, and in some cases actively discourages assault / rape claims. CoCs can do better because they don't require as involved of a process
I'm not too worried about someone being banned from an event on hearsay, but I am very concerned about serial harassers
The former, while unfortunate, is not career ending. It just means they can't go back to that event. The latter scars many people and will likely cause some of them to leave tech. Also none of them will ever come back to that event.
In another comment I elaborate on what the point of a CoC is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24930887
It makes sense to require something like 'beyond all doubt' to put someone behind bars for a few years.
It may make sense to have even stricter criteria (e.g. unanimous votes) to execute someone.
It makes sense to have lower criteria (e.g. 'preponderance of evidence') to impose a civil liability that takes all their money but does not put them in jail - there are cases of crime accusations where the level of evidence is so that were acquitted in the criminal court as the evidence was not sufficient for that, but the same evidence resulted in them being found responsible in civil court.
So it does also make sense to have a different (lower) standard of evidence and process to resolve CoC disputes, without bringing in all the heavyweight legal machinery designed for the high-stakes evaluation of whether someone's guilty of a felony. If the worst penalty that can be imposed is "our organization will consider you a baddy and won't deal with you ever again", then the accused does not need as much protection as if their life or liberty was at stake.
However, there still has to be some standard of evidence and at least some reasonable due process - in this particular case it seems that the bar has been set too low and this might need to be changed.
The whole point of CoCs is to avoid this arbitrary enforcement. The problem in this particular case seems to be that they ignored their own CoC and picked on someone who didn't violate their CoC, while the committee did violate the CoC.
That situation is indistinguishable from not having a CoC at all. If you've got a CoC, it needs to be clear, and you need to be consistent about how you enforce it.
It has been shown plenty of times that if you don't have a CoC, there will be some people who think that racist or sexist jokes, sexual harassment, etc., are okay. They are not, and a CoC can help to make that clear. But you have to take your own CoC seriously and follow it, and not use it as an arbitrary excuse to harass people, like what seems to have happened here.
But yeah, except in extreme cases, I would expect an organisation of such an event to indeed mildly tap the offender on the wrist and maybe help to prevent it in the future. Or tell the complainer that it's not actually a violation of the CoC when it isn't.
Not everything needs to be punished. Just informing people is often enough.
No resilient human system expects everything to be completely encoded in a written statement - it's entirely unreasonable, akin to asking one prove that unicorns don't exist.
The devil is in the implementation details and how the CoC is wielded.
I can’t speak to who this person was or why they did this, but I did just want to mention that there is at least one good faith explanation that isn’t straight up bullying.
When I am in uncomfortable situations, I have a nervous chuckle. If I were in this call, giving this feedback to this person, I probably would have done that at least once. Thanks to some great feedback I once received, I learned that people were interpreting my nervous laughter as me thinking that what they were saying was dumb or wrong, even though this was not the case—I was just feeling anxious. It’s possible that this person really was chuckling at the OP to bully them, but it’s also equally possible that they were just feeling super nervous in an emotionally charged situation and laughed because of that.
The OP is not alone in that, I also chuckle/grin when under huge stress (it sometimes also happened when I heard about the very bad health condition of people really close to me), and saying that "one should get this habit under control" is like saying to depressed people just to smile so that they won't be depressed anymore (and it's also like calling depression just a "habit", but I digress).
If you freeze up when you see fire, you can't be a fire fighter. If you faint when you see blood, don't be a surgeon. If you can't handle the stress of ganging up on someone, don't sign up for a CoC committee.
NumFOCUS should think about this. Someone in Jeremy's position could decide to sue them. They should think carefully about how these decisions are to be communicated to the putative violator and who should do it.
Especially when the CoC requires vague things like 'be kind'
For me, I think it's unlikely the generous interpretation is correct, for only one reason: a group of 4 of them needed to call him, rather than a 1-1 conversation. This is a group dynamic that is well understood and they knew what they were doing, using the safety and strength of a group to ensure he couldn't push back. In such a scenario, one of the participants in said group is unlikely to be nervous in that way, although it's certainly possible (especially if they know, deep down, they're being unfair and are battling heavily with that feeling -- even the group strength won't help them).
(You find zero tolerance in schools too. It's heartbreaking to see children doing innocuous things and responsible adults completely vacating any kind of responsibility or accountability.)
If you get a group of people together, everyone's going to have to put in at least a little effort to get along. If the code of conduct doesn't enshrine this then it's almost inevitably going to cause issues.
You may be able to argue that it's not a case of bullying in this narrow instance, but if the policies lead to a one-sided situation with no recourse, then it's bullying at a structural level.
In the case of both the imaginary school and the imaginary code-of-conduct committee, the task is to square the unsquarable circle of human diversity. That takes nuance, emotional intelligence and flexibility. You can never get that 100% right, and the mistake is thinking you can. That's where flexibility is important. Zero-tolerance is proudly anti-flexibility.
Either you put in the effort to construct a humane environment or you decide that it's OK to throw the out-group under a bus (easier when you can dehumanize them). The latter takes a lot less work.
My aunt was visiting and I wanted to show off, lost control and hit the asphalt with quite some speed. Hands and knee were all scratched up and hurt like hell and there she was, standing, laughing out loud. I recall thinking how mean that was.
While cleaning my wounds my mom explained the situation, and I've tried to keep this in mind whenever facing "inexplicable" reactions.
Not saying "This is how it is," but rather "It's possible." Also keep in mind that we're only getting (ironically) one side of it/one person's experience with this blog post, and will likely never know what was in the mind of the one who chuckled.
If this upsets you, definitely do not research Title IX tribunals.
The thing HN likes to do best with any story is to generalize it and find sweeping conclusions. Here, I think the story is pretty much just: people screw up, and if your project has a code of conduct (I think most professional ones should!), there are some easy pitfalls to avoid captured here.
The article explicitly argues CoC's should be done better, but it's also a story of collateral damage. The author might believe these issues are infrequent and a non-issue but not all the readers share this belief and I don't think there is anything wrong with that reaction.
I wouldn't call that an "invalid" opinion or critique, and again I would think it's an expected reaction. But it would be overly broad, based solely on that incident. Of course we don't exist in a vacuum, so I'd expect that other information would be brought in to support such an argument. Fair enough.
However, an argument that draws an isomorphic relationship between the ability to target a document and the ability to target a bomb is probably attempting to draw outside the lines.
(Particularly since in this case, it's equivalent to the victim of the bombing being the one who is reporting on the incident and quite clearly stating despite what they've been through "I support the thoughtful bombing of terrorists, but that is not what happened in this case.")
> It's more like if the U.S. accidentally bombs a civilian caravan and the response is "this shows why we should not have foreign policy.”
Heck, I once shared such a story and got labeled, with zero evidence, as someone “who like to casually throw around homophobic slurs”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21173970 Thankfully the community flagged that attack.
The piece is not balanced of thoughtful. The piece is crafted to present the case in a way that's immune or resilient to typical and expectable attacks. It underlined the core failings of the concept behind a CoC, and it provides a concrete example of how people use CoCs as an oppression tool that's leveraged to manipulate and condition groups to follow the leader's bidding.
> Here, I think the story is pretty much just: people screw up
It really isn't. This isn't a mere "whoopsie". This is a CoC working exactly as it's supposed to work. By design. This is exactly what they were created to achieve. A community member said something, some people didn't approved based on their personal tastes, and thus they proceeded to leverage their CoC to persecute and punish that individual to keep the community in line.
There is absolutely no other use for a CoC. This is precisely what they were created for. This is no accident or mistake.
Let's put it differently: without it's oppressive and persecutory function, what's the point of a CoC? To make it even simpler to you, what do you expect if someone in a community is deemed in direct violation of a CoC?
My take is that the problem with this code of conduct was that it was dumb. I want to recommend to you the degree to which it is easy and relaxing to just acknowledge that and move on, maybe with a note or two about what not to do in any code of conduct you write. It seems --- I could be wrong, I started today confidently wrong about bay leaves --- like the alternative is an exhausting vigilance about conspiracies to control and persecute. Even if you're right, nobody is going to believe you, so what's the point in letting your pulse quicken?
Bay leaves work their magic in stews, especially beans. Not much else. (I absolute hate licorice btw).
On the other hand, I had seen americans before to mistake bay leaves and cherry laurel. Specially when trying to harvest leaves in gardens. Don't do that. They look similar but cherry laurel contains cyanide.
Is this a widespread problem in software-related communities? I'm genuinely asking, because if it is maybe I am just not aware of it, but for example in the open-source projects I have been involved with the conversations tend to be extremely focused on the subject matter, and I'm not even aware of the race or gender of the people I'm conversing with.
20 years back (in Debian) there was some banter on the mailing lists, but never of that nature. It was mainly jokes about women. The community was primarily of young males, and that did stop as more women got involved. However, I should state for completeness that none of it was anything that anyone should have been banned over; sometimes a joke was just a joke, before humour was effectively outlawed lest anyone get even slightly offended.
The laziest of Google searches quickly found people being racist on GitHub (... to a GitHub employee! With their own, non anonymous accounts!): https://www.tinykat.cafe/on-all-that-fuckery
(This incident also made it to hn iirc, but maybe you didn't read it that day)
Seems like a very generous reading of what the person I'm specifically responding to said
If you are a woman or black or ... you will very likely experience sexism or racism. You will probably also see more, because you are used to identifying it.
If you say "a third [1] of the people in this group experience a bad thing" I would say that's pretty wide-spread.
The OP was specifically saying "it's not widespread, I've never seen it" [2]
I'm not trying to claim there's a nefarious subtext. I'm not saying the op is sexist or racist. I'm just trying to point out that a lot of people experience this, and one of the stated goals of CoCs in open source or at conferences is to help combat it. I think that's a good thing, and while you or perhaps others have pointed out that a community could combat such negative behavior without a CoC, the CoC does give some indication of how such behavior will be dealt with (before I join the community/attend the conference), which can increase my confidence recommending a conference or increase someone else's confidence attending (or participating in an open source community etc)
[1] https://psmag.com/news/sexism-in-the-tech-industry
[2] not a real quote so please correct me if it's way off, I'm being lazy
Also, I know they were referring to open source - maybe they've seen workplace sexism etc and were specifically excluding that. In that case I'm definitely misquoting and apologize
It's just hard to imagine how racism or sexism would enter into to a community like this because the race and sex of the participants is not known, and you're not even discussing races or genders at all, heck you're generally not discussing people at all.
It happens. People leave tech communities because of it. I don't know what else to tell you. I've provided citations to this effect in a bunch of other comments.
It's important to note, though, that people can do or say racist or sexist things without targeting it at someone. That would still impact someone's decision to stay in the community, even if the person who said it didn't mean to offend them.
However, they aren't. They require moderation because people are rude even when not anonymous.
Here's a quote from the vscode repo moderators:
> We deleted a handful of comments which we deemed too offensive to leave as-is (foul language, racist remarks, etc.). We also deleted a few issues that were overwhelmingly offensive. Unfortunately, that resulted in some non-offensive comments within those issues being deleted as well.
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87440
Surely you can't continue to claim that open source communities do not suffer from such issues, now, right?
> a way to assure newcomers that your project wasn't going to allow racist trolling on the mailing list
This is what seems a bit funny to me, because I would take it for granted that racist remarks would not be tolerated as a matter of course. It doesn't seem to me that you need a CoC to enforce this.
And I would repeat that in my personal experience, having been involved with OSS discussions for over 10 years, I have never personally encountered this.
What it does is sets expectations. It sets expectations for everyone involved in any interactions. In general, this should give you confidence that there will be some moderation or recourse if you experience rude behavior. That may allow some people who have been burned by ruder communities to be willing to give yours a try.
https://thephd.github.io/the-community#
[1] if you think this is "just a c++ problem" you're going to be very disappointed
Background:
The boost community has managed to lose a large number of very technically proficient people who were tired of dealing with racism/sexism
JeanHeyd came to prominence a few years ago with some stellar open source libraries and gave some pretty good conference talks & joined the c++ committee.
Throughout his continued work in the c++ community, he ran into a lot of... unnecessary, non-technical feedback.
At some point, he got fed up with it all and created this.
Within the c++ community there are people who are known to be particularly toxic, fwiw, and some of this is calling them out specifically.
I think everyone who has attended a committee meeting knows who/what he is talking about.
There's also an additional bit, where he managed a discord server for one of his open source projects. When discussing Black Is Tech, he got racist pushback.
Hopefully this helps add a little bit of context. I don't think it's too important to understand the details. The tl;dr is that an extraordinary developer, speaker, committee member left the community because he found it to be hostile
That's a fact, and it's one engineers should be reckoning with. Your actions matter.
The implication being that every project without an established code of conduct is awash with racism?
Exhausting vigilance about conspiracies indeed.
Problems such as a plague of racist jokes aren't omnipresent, but they show up often enough in the world that a little signpost at the front door about expectations can help with first impressions and understanding the community.
The problem is the weaponization against random people for obscure reasons. The blog poster here didn't make a presentation full of racist jokes, it's not even clear what they did.
Lawful evil anti-social people exist in the world, we shouldn't let them bully people just because they're waving a rainbow flag while doing so.
Fun straw man though
Acknowledging that people come from different backgrounds or belief systems where norms and customs are different, a good code of conduct offers a concise and easy-to-understand set of core expectations that the participants in a community agree to follow, along with a mechanism for reporting and curing violations when they occur. Curing violations should typically involve helping members learn and adopt better ways to communicate their ideas and interact with others, rather than shaming or punishing them for lacking these skills or for having a bad day.
As a gross example, a functioning code of conduct should make the difference between someone saying “I don’t understand why anyone would believe X”, which is an open statement that invites thoughtful discussion, versus “X is stupid and anyone who believes it is an idiot”, which is a closed statement that triggers fighting instead. Or, it should make the difference between someone making sexual advances at a professional conference because they think it’s what the other person wants, versus someone not engaging in that behaviour—even if they still think that—because it’s outside of the norms listed in the code of conduct.
It is certainly the case that codes of conduct are sometimes abused to create cultural echo chambers[0]. This isn’t because the concept of a code of conduct is flawed; rather, it is often (in my experience) because people adopt CoCs without having the knowledge and skill necessary to administer them. When this happens, the CoC can become a mechanism for suppressing disagreement instead of a mechanism for creating a healthy environment where ideas and relationships can thrive despite disagreement.
[0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/10/idea-labs-echo-chambers.html
I think the challenge is in enforcement. A code of conduct should be a measure of last resort. In your example:
> a functioning code of conduct should make the difference between someone saying “I don’t understand why anyone would believe X”, which is an open statement that invites thoughtful discussion, versus “X is stupid and anyone who believes it is an idiot”, which is a closed statement that triggers fighting instead.
I don't think that the code of conduct should be invoked the first time someone steps a bit onto the side of expressing something in a hostile way. When collages are in the process of solving real problems, and getting real work done, it can be the case that disagreements occasionally get heated. If someone steps a bit over the line in terms of how they express themselves in such a disagreement, the first response should be for a colleague to put the metaphorical hand on the shoulder and invite the offender to reign it in a bit, equal-to-equal, rather than invoking the authority of the CoC right away. If someone repeatedly demonstrates abusive behavior, then it makes sense to escalate this to a matter of community governance.
It's certainly not ideal if people express themselves in a hurtful or inflammatory way, but if everyone is self-censoring for fear of punishment, it can negatively affect the quality of work that gets done.
Declaring that “X is stupid and anyone who believes it is an idiot” without any discriminatory intent is definitely in bad taste, but should _absolutely not_ be grounds for a CoC violation or any kind of punishment, other than "your talks are obnoxious and we're not going to be inviting you or accepting your papers anymore".
Certainly it is interesting to consider the set of circumstances that give victimhood and fragility such power to those who claim it.
That's quite the inversion. It is interesting that the people who focus so much on the analysis of hierarchies to the point where they see them everywhere and assert the unjustness of hierarchy qua hierarchy end up just inverting these hierarchies and using their power to tyrannize other people.
What does that say about the people that allow them to do that?
> There is absolutely no other use for a CoC. This is precisely what they were created for.
> There is absolutely no other use for a CoC. This is precisely what they were created for. This is no accident or mistake.
I run groups that use a CoC and I assure you that they aren't supposed to work like this, weren't created for this and it is a mistake if they are.
> There is absolutely no other use for a CoC.
Sure there is. It's a good way to keep racist and sexist trolling and harrassment out of talks.
This sounds terrible and I guess I'll have to modify our CoC to deal with it when it occurs.
OTOH, we've had frequent cases of sexual harassment (primarily men hitting on women at events) and a CoC has been extremely useful in dealing with those situations.
This seems like a pretty reasonable use for a CoC in my view--flirting isn't ubiquitously taboo (unlike racism, trolling, or overt sexual harassment) nor should it be, but it's understandable that a community would prefer to just prohibit it outright and set that expectation clearly up front.
CoCs should focus narrowly on this kind of thing (of course, without giving the impression that these are the only offenses that a person might be kicked out for), and proponents of CoCs should talk about this. Instead, much of this thread is talking about racist trolling, as though CoCs are necessary or sufficient for dissuading a racist troll (everyone understands racism is unacceptable; if you're motivated to cross that line anyway, a CoC isn't going to deter you).
Would you accept (or would one even send) an ad-hoc post-conference invite to 'talk about something you did wrong and how you should be punished' from a committee member?
Not sure if it's too soon to joke about this, but I find it funny that "I like Jupyter notebooks" was such a controversial opinion at JupyterCon.
(Yeah I know it was actually the mask advocacy and not the talk itself.)
Is that what actually caused the complaints?
Given that the complainers were anonymous (thanks to the CoC process), we'll never know. But it seems like a reasonable guess.
The question was: can we find out if hidden political vendettas against OP were the cause of complaints? You're implying that, yes, we can find out, because the complainers provided a bullet point list. If the complainers had hidden political vendettas against OP, do you actually think they would have listed them in the bullet points?
I recommend watching Stephen Colbert's or Trevor Noah's talk show skits to gain an idea of why a pro-mask position is controversial in the states.
That's understandable, but to me it also seems to illustrate the reason we're having this. He felt persecuted by their words. They were unkind to him, and it left him "shattered".
CoCs calling for "kindness" are put into place precisely because words have such power to harm. That vagueness makes them prone to abuse as well, but the sentiment on this thread seems to be, "Because this has the potential to harm me it must be stopped, but the kinds of harms that I could inflict on other people the same way are unimportant and do not need to be addressed."
I'm sorry he was treated this way; this doesn't seem to have been handled well. It's hard to deal with situations where multiple people are experiencing the "low emotional resilience" he cites (both himself and the apparent fragility of the person who reported him). But I think it's important to recognize that there are many "oppression tools", so it's worth reconsidering who has them even without a CoC, and how they can be countered.
This is what intelligent people do. They recognize patterns and extrapolate. At this point the vast majority of people have experienced variations of what this guy has gone through.
In my own experience I have seen the exact same pattern of behavior in a slack community set up for my town.
> This is one of those posts where the title is going to trigger a lot of unproductive subthreads,
They seem quite productive to me. This sort of pathological behavior is increasingly common and finally people are willing and able to talk about it in public.
As far as HN goes, I use the term "intelligent" quite loosely but one of the hallmarks of intelligence is pattern recognition.
This is the kind of rhetoric I'm referring to when I say Kafkaesque. These people derive power from being victims so if they are given this benefit of the doubt you are granting them where the onus is on some person to walk on eggshells lest that person upset the perpetually upset these perpetual victims will of course announce they are upset and victimized no matter what is said, thus fending off any attack.
Kafka would be proud.
Christ I wish.
Any level of intelligence does this. How well one extrapolates varies, and extrapolation is always eventually wrong.
http://www.securitybsides.com/w/page/35868077/BSidesSanFranc...
I don't know where I stand on CoCs in general, but saying "See this is why CoCs are bad" is like saying "See this is why we shouldn't punish someone for murder" when someone gets thrown in jail for murder and all parties agree that that the person did not kill anyone (though one side claims that what they did was still "murder").
That doesn't mean everything needs to go through the courts; it means that if your process allows something that Anglo common law does not allow, you should have a good answer for why that is. Does it allow anonymous accusations? Is the accused allowed to know the charges against them, before a finding of guilt is rendered? Is there a presumption of innocence? Is the accused allowed to have a trusted third party - one who knows the rules of the game - to advocate on their behalf? Who, exactly, is responsible for deciding matters of fact vs matters of "law"? Is there an appeals process to fix possibly incorrect decisions?
Going by the linked document by Valerie Aurora, a good Code of Conduct allows anonymous accusations, the accused does not get to know the charges against them before a finding is rendered, there is no presumption of innocence, the accused does not get a third party advocate, matters of fact are necessarily decided by the same committee that makes the rules, and there is no appeal process.
This doesn't mean that such a committee will always do wrong. But I think it's worth thinking about how people operating in bad faith (either on the committee, or reporters to it) can abuse those features to achieve goals that are not actually aligned with what the Code of Conduct is trying to do. Yes, it's true that people can't be put in jail for these sorts of things, but a poorly-run adjudication process can have significant negative personal and financial effects on people.
We've gone out of our way to encode into law the exceptions to that rule. We can talk all we want about "anglo-derived common law" in those cases.
[1] This gets nastier when "you" is something like a corporation, a university, or the well-funded host committee of a generally public event. Legally and ethically, your latitude to exclude people from a private party is much greater than is your latitude to exclude people from a public-ish gathering that any person could show up to.
More importantly, I take the parent's point to be, not that such an organization "owes" anything to anyone, but simply that anyone formalizing a Code of Conduct and a committee to enforce it would do well to understand why the protections of due process exist. If their intention is truly to create a safe space for interaction, setting up a process that can be easily abused is not going to help with that.
I feel like this is a very important classification: Inviting someone to an event with Byzantine rules and punishments should be frowned upon.
Nonetheless, if you invited a bunch of people to your party, then you and three others inexplicably ganged up on one of them, told them they were a bad person for claiming someone else was wrong, bullied them, made them cry and then banned them from future parties, then that sort of behaviour probably would get around and you'd soon develop a reputation for being an asshole.
Before today's post I had no views on JupyterCon, after today's post my view is that it seems to be run by assholes; that will certainly impact my future decisions around Jupyter and its community if I end up in a position to need to make them. That outcome could have been avoided by the advice to follow best practices from the legal system. This unfortunate blog post could have been avoided, and JupyterCon would have its reputation intact.
Unless your decision involves a protected group, in which case this is a little more nuanced.
> I can throw a party
Professional organizations putting together conferences do not get the same liberties as individuals organizing family events.
They very well might. When you exercise your judgment in any way, you are liable for damages. Due process might protect you from that.
We can all agree that everyone has the right to be arbitrary and capricious. Codes of conduct are a formalization of expectations and rules for behavior. The are often tied (explicitly or implicitly) to an adjudication and enforcement process much more complicated than the person in charge just saying "get the fuck out".
However when someone brings up the idea of improving that bureaucratic process by comparing and contrasting Codes of Conduct language and enforcement to our society's hard-fought experience in creating fair justice systems, you retreated right back to the right to be arbitrary and capricious.
This is why people can't help but wonder: what the fuck are we trying to accomplish here? All I know is I need to publish a specific flavor of bureaucratic boilerplate so I don't get my reputation attacked for not publicly promising to kick out people I would have kicked out anyway. And that I can use that document to dole out punishments with a larger air of legitimacy and seriousness than just telling someone not to come around my place anymore.
It's not a piece of legalese with which you can bludgeon people to get your way (I mean it can be, but that is not and should not be the point)
When an organization has a code of conduct, it makes clear how I can complain about actions or events that occur under their jurisdiction. This is important because if you have high friction to reporting issues, issues don't get reported. [1]
What happens then? People who have legitimate grievances are the ones who stop coming around and you're left surrounded by the assholes who chased them off
The code of conduct should be cheerfully received by everyone:
1. I know that my actions are above board, because I can read what is allowed
2. I know that any actions that aren't will be reported and processed not in public (eg on Twitter) but in some sort of well-defined process
3. I know what the range of penalties can be
4. If I experience a violation caused by someone else I know how to report it
Four is arguably the most important point. Otherwise you end up with would-be coc violations adjudicated on Twitter.
[1] I'll add that it should also describe how people who receive reports respond and how the issue will be mediated. All of these steps are important. It's important for conference volunteers to know what to do when they receive a report. It's important that you know how to make a report.
defen points out that when these constitutions tread into topics of justice, they would do well to consider how to set up a fair system and what common mistakes to avoid.
This is a reasonable point and should not be at all controversial. Do you want fair treatment?
I want to attend events with rules I like - I might like them because they're fair, I might like them because they ban symbols I find offensive.
Ultimately, it's up to the organization to define the rules, and it's up to me to decide if I want to attend an event with those rules.
>The code of conduct should be cheerfully received by everyone
I never cheerfully receive process. Process is valuable, process is important to have, but god-oh-god is it ever a massive pain in the ass.
Designing, drafting, implementing and refining process is HARD. I professionally maintain what I'll brazenly call "actually important" process so I don't get why everyone is so squeamish around the idea of maintaining the CoC process. (Well, I suspect that they're worried it will be corrupted by those nogoodnicks that they inartfully adopted this process to get rid of instead of growing some spine and just tossing them out on their ass in the first place.)
>legalese with which you can bludgeon people to get your way (I mean it can be, but that is not and should not be the point)
Understanding that this _will_ happen is just another part of designing process.
I think I agree with 99% of it.
I'll take the rest of this comment to note that elsewhere I'm lauding codes of conduct because they are lighter-weight than certain legal processes.
If you punish anyone who has a report filed against them without evaluating those reports or requesting any proof, then you will quickly be left with a small pool of very manipulative people looking to game the system.
I posit that those who write CoCs are _precisely_ the type of people who lie. The average person DOES NOT lie as a matter of course. Small lies, bigger lies occasionally when embarassed. People who write CoCs want to control others. People who want to control others are narcissists/social dominants. Narcissists lie ALL THE TIME.
If you "start a project and not allow [me] to contribute" then you're by definition starting a much more traditional, hierarchical, authoritarian community, with the forms of dispute resolution you would expect there. Now that's okay, but it means that you should probably be upfront about it from the onset. And it also means you should expect pushback and accusations (probably accurate ones) of bait and switch if you change directions midway. They will say "that doesn't sound very egalitarian to me" and they will probably be correct. It shouldn't be a problem if you don't want to court that segment, or power your community through their contributions. But if you do want to court that segment, then I think they will want you to play by their rules.
I also think this is why the idea of Anglo common law was brought up. It is a form of dispute resolution which is pretty amenable to egalitarian, decentralized dispute resolution. What I like about Anglo common law is that it minimizes the need for a fair authority figure in favor of a fair autonomous process operable by a majority of equal peers:
> Does it allow anonymous accusations?
> Is the accused allowed to know the charges against them, before a finding of guilt is rendered?
> Is there a presumption of innocence?
> Is the accused allowed to have a trusted third party - one who knows the rules of the game - to advocate on their behalf?
> Who, exactly, is responsible for deciding matters of fact vs matters of "law"?
> Is there an appeals process to fix possibly incorrect decisions?
All of these concerns must be addressed to create such a system. And I think that a lot of prospective contributors (such as myself) do not want to be part of a community unless it is run by such a system. I also think that such contributors will be particularly incensed about contributing to such communities that say they are run by such systems but which are actually oligarchies. In that case, I would feel like I had originally contributed to the community as an equal, but I am instead now just a cog helping build someone else's dream. This will not just discourage me from contributing to the community, but it will make me regret ever doing so in the first place, and resent the community's leaders for lying to me.
So going back to your original example, I think you are well within your rights to start a project and not allow me to contribute. But if you do that, I think you have to be honest about what kind of community you are really building. It is one thing to say you wish to build a community through benevolent dictatorship. It is another to say you wish to build a community through distributed consensus. It's not really a two-way door. Switching directions midway can cause collateral damage with an extremely high blast radius.
Any organization without democratic checks to redistribute power to its constituents is generally seeking to hold hierarchical power over those constituents and others, and should be distrusted.
You could argue that, if someone tells me to install a CoC or else (they will complain to my employer, and spread the message that I am a bad person), they are just exercising their right to free association and/or helping my employer and anyone who may see that messaging exercise theirs, but I think that this is very close to being a free association counterpart of the "free speech" defense of blatant slanderous misinformation, or people using a public list of businesses operated by members of a minority to inform their non-patronage.
Lately I've been actively avoiding giving my time to open source projects that have CoC's like the Contributor Covenant[1], mainly because - if my experience is anything to go by - they are a strong signal that the kind of people I wish to avoid will be involved. I want to contribute things that (hopefully) improve the world in objective ways, not be involved in the wrangling and petty politics of a fiefdom just so I can get something like a bug report considered.
If I had to choose one CoC to implement, it would be NCoc[2].
[1] https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/2/0/code_of_con... [2] https://github.com/domgetter/NCoC
Is this demand driven by good intentions? By a genuine desire to improve diversity? To attract those who might otherwise feel less safe?
Is this demand driven by a "fear of being left out" because big names in tech are setting an example?
Is this demand entirely artificial, driven by power hungry people wallowing in self importance?
I don't have any answers here. I'm just curious. I can certainly agree with wanting to help rid the world of sexism and racism. I'm not sure whether a tech conference or open source project is the best forum for that change.
If you can accept that a small portion of adults have judgement poor enough to cause big problems, then it doesn't seem like a big leap to accept that another larger portion of adults have judgement at a level which lacks confidence to trust assumptions in uncomfortable, high risk situations. Perhaps this is the group served by CoC?
As to their intentions, I'm not sure they're that relevant (I'm sure they'd believe they were good intentions anyway), but I think our intentions are. They say "we want to increase diversity" and "we want to end sexism and racism", so in comes a "kind" CoC, and because the majority do have good intentions and share these laudable goals there is agreement, forgetting that famous old adage "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions" and before you know it the definitions of racism and sexism have been changed to a point that vilifies the majority and a small group are wielding outsized power via terms and conditions that we all signed.
I've a feeling it mirrors the culture wars[1] on social media, and even contains some of the same members of the 12% minority cited there.
And then you start listing some of the issues that arise with these and defenders quickly respond that the problems are edge cases and usually the conversationd devolves from there.
It's coming from SJW's and similar far leftists who virtue signal. Yet people keep pandering to them, and now they're paying the price.
The actual CoC is fine, but the FAQ breaks things down.
Not to get all relativist, but "improve" and "objective" in the same sentence is quite the oxymoron. Ask any two randomly picked people in the world how to improve said world and you'll find they have very different, subjective, ideas of what that means.
I don't like notebooks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jiPeIFXb6U) by Joel Grus
I like notebooks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q6sLbz37gk) by Jeremy Howard
notebooks are a very interesting medium and they have both shortcomings as well as things they are great at and neither were totally obvious to me.
Having watched Howard's talk, clearly he's right and the conference was wrong. This was respectful and appropriate, period. Someone clearly had an axe to grind about a separate topic.
That said, some of the comments here are just off the wall paranoia, and really distasteful. I mean, look: while it was enforced badly it's certainly not innapropriate for a conference to demand, y'know, that it's speakers not be assholes. There was a real and pretty awful culture in the open source world about this stuff for a long time, and it's a good thing that we're cleaning that up.
Even in cases where someone was violating their CoC, they should have lived up to their own states process and held themselves to a much much higher standard.
Yes, trying to weed out “assholes” is a good objective, but that doesn’t mean you can go about it any which way without yourself being a monumental asshole. CoC’s very point is to be consistent and open about your process. If you throw out the outlines process the second someone sends a report and only use it for its waist ace so you can say “you violated CoC” without any mention to which parts, then it’s not worth 2 cents.
To me, that seems like a massive over-reaction or massively uncharitable interpretation of the talk focused on a single point of disagreement, which was done quite respectfully from what I watched.
Some people are power hungry and use words to get power. They are exposing themselves in the silliest ways. Pure vanity.
The big theme in all the most exasperating cases, whether to do with HOAs, CoC enforcement, or even the police seems to involve:
1. wide difference between rules as written and agreed to versus how they are applied
2. unchecked power for enforcers, who can flout punishment/scrutiny, as above, for reasons below
3. insufficient interest from parties not directly impacted
On the other hand, the whole CoC thing feels like it was created by people on a power trip, and/or as a virtue signalling instrument to appear "inclusive", and/or a convenient character assassination tool that can be selectively enforced. Keep in mind that "violation of the code of conduct" sounds much worse than "this person offended me/made me uncomfortable" even though in most cases they are used to refer to the same thing.
People for the most part know how to behave themselves, disagreements can be resolved in private between the involved parties and if someone keeps being a dick you just don't engage with them (note that a CoC will not change anything if the person intends to keep harassing their victim). We've been working fine like that, both online and in the real world without any CoC (the law is enough to deal with actually serious cases).
A CoC doesn't add anything to people already acting in good faith (other than being a thing they can be "cancelled" about), but does nothing against a dedicated malicious actor who couldn't care less about it anyway.
Someone wanting to instigate drama and intentionally get offended must've said something about "inclusivity", everyone jumped on it as a virtue-signalling tool and now here we are.
> We've been working fine like that, both online and in the real world without any CoC
I'm not sure what you consider "fine". Misogyny has been par for the course for a long time. Not to mention verbal degradation of e.g. ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. We have not suddenly removed these formerly accepted behaviors, even though things have gotten better.
It is possible that there really isn't a problem in communities you engage with, and that consequently their CoCs make little positive impact. But do you really know what kinds of inappropriate remarks e.g. women around you face? It is easy to dismiss anyone who had such negative experiences as a professional victim, but surely the world doesn't just consist of "perfectly reasonable and encompassing people that know better than to offend", "harassers that purposely ignore any community guidelines"?
In short: Yes, CoC creation and enforcement will naturally appeal to certain groups of people that have more personal motives than those of the community. The same is true of HOA, police, unions, workers' councils and so on. But please be careful to dismiss their usefulness due to this.
While I don't think this point is necessarily wrong, surely we can agree that in recent years there has been expansion of what is considered abuse. As with any push to change ideas, not everyone is on-board.
Is being subjected to a micro-aggression abuse? 20 years ago you'd only get a "yes" from a few activists / academics. Today you'll find a vocal (and growing) minority claiming it is a form of violence.
We don't all agree on the new rules, and CoCs are a method of making everyone follow them.
Indeed! See "Misogyny was par for the course". I understand that's not what you are getting at specifically, but the whole point is that just because it's been acceptable before doesn't mean that it's right.
> We don't all agree on the new rules, and CoCs are a method of making everyone follow them.
Exactly! The intent is to cause a change in behavior, and that's not going to happen if everybody has to sign off on it. Most people don't like having to change their behavior.
Again, CoC enforcement is not without its flaws, and policing interpersonal interaction is never going to be a hard and fast thing. But CoCs give everyone tools to nudge behavior away from what is objectively causing (subjective) distress.
But that's their only usecase, isn't it?
CoCs are just a convenient document aimed at helping out Cardinal Richelieus finding ways to hang you under the guise of breaking acceptable conduct.
I mean, CoCs aren't aimed at changing people and make everyone nice. CoCs are aimed at providing a basis to persecute those who arguably don't comply with a given notion of acceptable conduct, punish them for their sins, and turn them into examples to enforce a chilling effect on the community.
This example shows a CoC working exactly as it was intended to work.
People have turned a blind eye to the oppressive and abusive nature of the CoC concept because they tend to believe that it can only ever oppress those we deem undesirable. But unless you're the one doing the oppression, nothing ensures that the rules only apply to those you don't like.
I think part of the problem is that most CoCs are copy-paste jobs. They're put in place as a matter of fashion. What they really need to be is a statement on the commitments of the leadership. And they are meaningless if the leadership is not trained on those commitments.
They really have, because that's the sole reason they exist.
It's like arguing that a oppressive totalitarian regime doesn't have to oppress their citizens.
> (...) they can be tools to communicate to good-faith actors that they will be welcome and safe.
CoCs aren't welcoming letters. CoCs are designed with the express purpose of letting you know that you will be punished if you do or say anything that the leader's deem unacceptable, and to be used as the basis for persecuting and punishing you if you still fail to fall in line and comply with the leadership's will.
Hell, you don't need to communicate to anyone that they can and will be safe. Either that's already implied, or means nothing if you don't plan to act on it. In fact, it's patently wrong that the goal is safety. It is not. The goal is compliance and submissiveness.
A very large group of people have stated many times that that is not the case. They do not feel safe. It's continued assertions that bludgeoning people is the sole reason CoCs exist that make those people feel like they are being completely ignored.
> or means nothing if you don't plan to act on it
That is literally what I said. "And they are meaningless if the leadership is not trained on those commitments."
But what does that even mean in the context of an open source project? How is anyone actually “unsafe” from someone who may be on another continent and have no idea where they live? The word “unsafe” doesn’t mean anything any more, it’s just used to silence debate. “I feel unsafe so you should merge my PR without doing any code review” is what they mean.
It wasn't until PyCon that I considered anyone could be for for a joke(?) told to a friend next to you, overheard by someone who was supposed to be a developer advocate!.
But not a developer themselves. The industry is overrun with these “tech-adjacent” roles that add only marginal value, if any. Members of this group seem to be the driving force behind CoCs.
An alternate possibility is that you don't understand what people mean when they say they feel unsafe. Do you feel you have invested effort into empathizing with these concerns, or would you say your are more dismissive?
That is a possibility, but it’s unreasonable to expect that a person can redefine a common word in their own mind and expect everyone else to telepathically know what they “mean”. Especially in a primarily text based medium.
I mean, the word is used a lot. You even referenced it being commonly used. Have you tried to understand it?
It is enough now.
And this is coming from someone who wasn't allowed to play in the schoolyard as a child, someone who was knocked in the head by an older classmate, got beaten etc while teachers looked the other way. This went on until I learned to fight back and I got a teacher who didn't care that I was outgroup and stood up for me.
My mind and body knows a bit about this and I'm confident that what we are seing here isn't a solution rather than extremists making things worse.
One aspect of this newfangled definition of safe is that women can feel confident existing in a space without fear of being sexually harassed. Is that worth considering? Is that a political game?
That the current approach is playing right into the hands of the bullies.
Or do you think it is the awkward ones who are sitting on the CoC tribunal?
As far as I can see this is yet another place for the socially and politically strong ones to get their way.
> One aspect of this newfangled definition of safe is that women can feel confident existing in a space without fear of being sexually harassed. Is that worth considering? Is that a political game?
I'm absolutely fine with women feeling safe. In fact there are at least a couple of women around who are thankful because I have fixed them a job or something. (To be clear, I help everyone, not only women.)
It is absolutely worth considering such things, which is why we (at least were I live) have laws against such things, and also why I am in favour of those laws.
What I am not in favour of is independent kangaroo courts popping up everywhere, making up rules as they go, combining the role of judge, jury and executioner etc.
Kangaroo courts are for war, and even then only when there's no other option.
Would it be fair to say that you believe the majority of CoC reports are due to a misunderstanding of a well-intentioned behavior on the part of an awkward individual? If so, where does this idea come from?
> It is absolutely worth considering such things, which is why we (at least were I live) have laws against such things, and also why I am in favour of those laws.
To pursue something legally requires a formal legal process, evidence, lawyers, etc., and has strict penal consequences. Would you consider there is a need for a more informal process where the consequences is being kicked out of an event?
> I'm absolutely fine with women feeling safe.
But you aren't fine with an organization creating rules to help women feel safe. Why is it an abuse of power, acting as "judge, jury and executioner," to remove someone from an event or organization who causes women to feel uncomfortable?
If you don't understand why it's necessary at times to clearly state what bigotry is, and why it's unacceptable, than you need to learn a bit more about diversity topics.
They (CoC)s shouldn't be used to play power games. It's totally appropriate to call out situations where a CoC is used incorrectly.
Oh really? This discussion is about someone that was persecuted and punished for violating a CoC. Do you see any bigotry involved in this story?
According to Wikipedia, No true Scotsman, or appeal to purity, is an informal fallacy in which one attempts to protect a universal generalization from counterexamples by changing the definition in an ad hoc fashion to exclude the counterexample.[1][2] Rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any new specific objective rule or criterion: "no true Scotsman would do such a thing"; i.e., those who perform that action are not part of our group and thus criticism of that action is not criticism of the group.
Now, with this definition in mind, let's review the context of this discussion:
> Using CoC's to backstab people is not going to end well.
> But that's their only usecase, isn't it?
> No, CoCs are meant to clearly state that bigotry is unacceptable.
> Oh really? This discussion is about someone that was persecuted and punished for violating a CoC. Do you see any bigotry involved in this story?
> This discussion is about someone being punished by a committee for something that wasn’t in the CoC, as you can read in the article.
So there was a debate about whether CoCs can be used as a weapon. gwbas1c rejected the idea that CoCs could be used as a weapon. barumi referenced OP article as a counter-example, to demonstrate an instance where a CoC was used as a weapon. pindab0ter then resorted to a "no true scotsman" fallacy to reject this counter-example. According to pindab0ter, this was not a "true" example of someone utilizing a CoC for attacking people, because the victim feels like they did not violate the CoC to an extent where such an attack was justified. This line of reasoning can be used to exclude all examples of people using a CoC as a weapon. After all, if someone feels like they violated a CoC and deserved their punishment, then they wouldn't characterize the situation as an "attack" in the first place.
barumi referenced OP article as an example of CoC as a weapon.
pindab0ter argues this not a fault in the CoC itself per se, but in how it was enforced.
That's a rather charitable interpretation.
The context here was weaponization of CoCs, and OP article was referenced as an example of this weaponization. It seems very clear to me that spindab0ter was arguing that this is not an example of weaponizing the CoC.
Your alternative interpretation doesn't really resonate for me, because it sounds like a "no no, guys, there was nothing at fault in the CoC itself" to a subthread where nobody claimed there was anything wrong with the contents of the CoC in the first place.
Edit: I'm not sure what is even meant by "weaponize." Is the implication that somebody at the conference had vendetta against OP? It's clear that CoCs give people more power, which is a weapon, in a sense. Would reporting someone for CoC violation for sexual misconduct at a conference be an example of weaponization?
I don't think pindab0ter would agree with this interpretation. @pindab0ter, if you are still following the thread, can you clarify this with a yes/no answer: do you count the OP article as an example of CoC weaponization?
> I'm not sure what is even meant by "weaponize." Is the implication that somebody at the conference had vendetta against OP?
Yes.
> It's clear that CoCs give people more power, which is a weapon, in a sense. Would reporting someone for CoC violation for sexual misconduct at a conference be an example of weaponization?
Well, if you dislike someone's political views, and then you hatch a plan to make up fraudulent sexual misconduct allegations with the hope of "canceling" someone, I would describe that as "weaponizing" the CoC. But if the allegations are genuine and without ulterior motives, then I would not use that terminology.
Really? I thought it was more people being overly sensitive, and the enforcement team not using their brains. I think pindab0ter would agree that it was improper enforcement of the CoC. I'm not sure anybody can speak to the intentions of the people that reported it with certainty.
> Well, if you dislike someone's political views, and then you hatch a plan to make up fraudulent sexual misconduct allegations with the hope of "canceling" someone, I would describe that as "weaponizing" the CoC
Is that consistent with the thread? Are you arguing that the majority of CoC reports are outright lies? I thought this thread was about the use of CoC to enforce a code of behavior, and if stringent enforcement counts as misuse.
Let's stop the speculation on what pindab0ter would or would not agree with. Clearly you and I interpret their message in completely different ways, so unless they want to come back to clarify their statement, let's just stop with the speculation.
> Is that consistent with the thread? Are you arguing that the majority of CoC reports are outright lies? I thought this thread was about the use of CoC to enforce a code of behavior, and if stringent enforcement counts as misuse.
Look, you asked me to define "weaponize" within a specific context. So I gave you 2 examples: one where I thought use of the term would be appropriate, and one where I thought the term would not be appropriate. I was trying to answer your question about the definition of a word, that's all. I have no idea what proportion of CoC reports are outright lies or half-truth motivated by hidden agendas.
Also, I don't like that you're trying to reframe OP's experience as "stringent enforcement". The case described in OP is clearly selective enforcement, which is pretty much the opposite of stringent.
> This discussion is about someone being punished by a committee for something that wasn’t in the CoC, as you can read in the article.
I said:
> I think pindab0ter would agree that it was improper enforcement of the CoC
Does that seem like speculation? This thread is getting a little disjointed. We can't seem to agree on anything.
We already went over this; you interpret pindab0ter's message in an entirely different way than I do. When pindab0ter says "punished by a committee for something that wasn’t in the CoC", you somehow interpret that as "improper enforcement of the CoC", whereas I interpret that as enforcement action unrelated to the CoC.
Anyway, there's no point continuing this. I think it's pretty clear what pindab0ter was trying to say, but you have a completely different interpretation. Unless pindab0ter wants to come back and clarify, let's just stop this here.
That's not what I said.
You seem to be focused on detailed differences in meaning but missing the thrust of these arguments. You claimed Scotsman fallacy to a perceived specific meaning of the sentence, but it didn't fit in context. In general you seem to be not aware of the contextual meaning of what anybody has said here.
> That's not what I said.
Yes it is, you literally just said "I think pindab0ter would agree that it was improper enforcement of the CoC". See, you said "enforcement of the CoC". As in, CoC was the thing that was being enforced. Now you're trying to claim that "enforcement" was not related to "the CoC" in that sentence? Wow.
If you took a random person off the street, showed them that sentence, and then asked "what was being enforced", any English speaking person would be able to identify "CoC" as the thing that was being enforced (albeit it was enforced improperly). So clearly, in that sentence, the enforcement action was in some way related to the CoC. I don't know what kind of mental gymnastics you're trying to pull by claiming that the sentence means something else.
> You seem to be focused on detailed differences in meaning but missing the thrust of these arguments. You claimed Scotsman fallacy to a perceived specific meaning of the sentence, but it didn't fit in context. In general you seem to be not aware of the contextual meaning of what anybody has said here.
Look, I was trying to be nice earlier when I said that you and I interpret pindab0ter's words in a different way, and that we should leave it at that. I don't actually think your interpretation is plausible. I think it's obvious to anyone who read the original comments in context, that pindab0ter didn't consider OP to be an example of "weaponizing a CoC". You can play word games all day long and talk down in a condescending tone, but I don't know what you're hoping to achieve with that.
I said "improper enforcement of the CoC". As an example, "improper enforcement of the law" might suggest that something was enforced which wasn't the law. Is there a reason you're set on this interpretation of my words?
In this, and the Scotsman case, you seem to have chosen an interpretation fits your argument. I'm not sure this is a good way to carry on a conversation, though. This whole discussion was about whether pindab0ter made a valid point. It's not clear to me you are interested in understanding the point made. Maybe it's easier for you to label it as a fallacy. I know that's something I do frequently when I don't understand something -- assume it's incorrect.
No, you can't keep making up new meanings for words. "Enforcement of the law" means that law was being enforced. When you add "improper" in the front of it, it means that law was being enforced improperly. For example, when a police officer harasses a person on the pretext of enforcing the law, that would be improper law enforcement.
> This whole discussion was about whether pindab0ter made a valid point. It's not clear to me you are interested in understanding the point made. Maybe it's easier for you to label it as a fallacy.
If pindab0ter wants to come here to clarify that they actually meant that OP is a valid example of enforcing a CoC, I will take their word for it. Otherwise, I'm not going to entertain "hidden meanings" for the words that they already spoke, I'm going to assume that they meant what they said.
To be clear, in this example, the officer is enforcing a law that doesn’t exist.
> Otherwise, I'm not going to entertain "hidden meanings" for the words that they already spoke, I'm going to assume that they meant what they said.
Be honest with yourself.
Maybe it's worth looking at this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24945750
Ordinary people still get in trouble because others enjoy being judge, jury and executioner.
Both are opinions, and I honestly don't see why one would be bigotry, but not the other. Hence the only thing I conclude is that CoCs are actually about politics, but framed in a very nice way, pretending to be based on empathy and inclusion, making them very hard to object to.
In the US, we've usually had reasonable parties in power, so it really didn't matter what your politics were.
Now... Not so much; and it goes both ways, too. There are loonies on both sides of the aisle.
I've always seen CoCs as needed for situations where a conference has a transgender person and a "poorly socialized conservative." Or a Christian proudly wearing a cross and a "poorly socialized liberal." Situations are even simpler; it could be a conference with a female speaker and a man who still believes in strict gender roles.
Unfortunately, the above situations come down to "political belief."
In general CoCs enforce a very American world view, one where I as a non-American do not feel welcome.
To use an extreme example for the sake of discussion, would you similarly feel that excluding a skinhead with Swastika face tattoos from a scientific conference constitutes an unacceptable example of political oppression? If not, is it because they cause minoritized people to feel unsafe and unwelcome? Where do you believe the line should be drawn?
Can you expand on this, explain the connection? In particular, why the former (belief) would influence the latter (behavior)?
I firmly believe, based on overwhelming evidence, that genetics makes most people perform terribly in technical roles. Fortunately, there are a few bright, above-average exceptions that perform amazingly. If someone proves they're competent, I'll treat them competently, but at the same time it doesn't make sense to assume that the average person could be anywhere near competent.
Edit: answer to your second question: I try to be inclusive, I don't believe in drawing lines, at least not when it comes to belief (only behavior).
It's not universally the case, to be sure. If you voice your belief that women are intellectually inferior, you will likely make them feel excluded. In general, there is a relationship between a person's beliefs and behaviors which I regard as self-evident.
> Edit: answer to your second question: I try to be inclusive, I don't believe in drawing lines, at least not when it comes to belief (only behavior).
People tend to act in accordance with their beliefs. I don't think I track your perspective. Do you really believe that, say, a person with white supremecist beliefs, again, as an extreme example, will generally act welcoming toward minorities? You seem to believe, well, as long as they don't explicitly disrespect someone, it's fine. But social behavior is a lot more subtle. People can tell if you hate them.
Professionals tend to act professionally. Just because most people are horny & sexual doesn't mean that they need to hump each other at work or at conferences. I expect professional behavior regardless of your personal beliefs. Now, personally I'd prefer people to also look professional (fully clothed, no religious symbols, ...) so I wouldn't necessarily disagree with such rules, but they're usually (as evidenced by this very OP) applied inconsistently, politically.
> but they're usually (as evidenced by this very OP) applied inconsistently, politically
Do you have the impression OP was a political disagreement?
> Professionals tend to act professionally.
Yes, but people aren't robots. These are still human interactions between people. You develop personal relationships at conferences, or fail to. People with a hostile attitude toward minoritized groups, whether explicitly expressed or not, are going to make these people feel less welcome, and as a result, they will have a worse outcome at the conference.
I thought they were used to codify acceptable and unacceptable conduct.
Rebelled against? By whom? If you want to speak at this conference, you have to play by their rules or you won't get invited. Even if you do get invited, and you're not nice, you'll get humiliated and driven to tears. If there's going to be a rebellion, it's by would-be speakers at the conference, but that would be against their own interest: they like to speak at conferences, so they won't. So anyone who wants to speak at this conference will be turning a blind eye to this. Would-be attendees also won't be making a fuss, conferences with interesting speakers tend to attract large crowds. A handful of would-be rebels won't make any difference.
It's probably not the case here, but imo it's a feature of CoCs that they protect people who can't publicly object themselves for whatever reason.
Like, for an extreme example, if I know I'm gonna get harassed if I make noise about someone's genuinely harmful behavior, then it's good that I can publicly be like "oh no it's fine don't worry" and there's still a process to stop them from harming more people.
There are probably tons of lectures on how to disagree with someone while phrasing it neutrally. For example "you are wrong" vs. "I disagree with your point" . I couldn't imagine using such a style constantly without slipping up every now and then but it is probably double plus good in an environment that forces you to walk on eggshells.
I understand the desire to protect specifically vulnerable accusers in unique situations, but we should be catering to those situations on a case-by-case basis.
In this case, isolating the accusers from the accused didn’t help anyone. The accusers weren’t even the direct victims of this imagined offense. They were simply using the CoC machinery to bring something negative upon someone else while knowing they would never suffer any negatives for what they did.
Specifically, I don't think we can assume that the people who were uncomfortable with the talk were like "this speaker should be banned from the conference". Maybe the initial message was closer to "hey, this seems a bit harsh and distracts from the actual content, maybe the speaker wouldn't mind toning it down for the next talk".
That’s the problem. The system is broken because it’s designed to give the accusers every benefit of the doubt, while giving the accused no recourse.
The accused is at the mercy of anonymous complaints. The accusers have zero accountability or downsides.
Why don't you come to to the dark side and oppose codes of conduct then?
I consider the purported goals of codes of conduct to be laudable. But this kind of thing becomes inevitable when SJWs aka political correctness police get power through trying to enforce codes of conduct.
It isn't that sometimes proponents of CoCs are their own worst enemies. It is that there are people seeking power through CoCs who are honestly bad actors. And we shouldn't be putting people we can't trust into a position to control the speech of others.
And people who curb their behavior unreasonably out of fear aren't going to advertise that either.
What you hear about is only the tip of the iceberg of what really happens.
Every conference doesn't need to go to the trouble of working out some flawless unambiguous list of rules and every attendee doesn't need to read them. If someone is causing a problem eject, ban, or call the police. No CoC needed.
Despite the increasing anonymity of the world (in that we don't physically live and interact in the same physical space), I think conferences are still small enough social groups that such approaches do work. I've been to some where despite the presence of thousands of people, noteworthy news takes less than a few minutes to travel throughout the conference.
First, there are people without common sense. Sooner or later someone will not adhere to the unwritten rules and ask "Who's going to stop me?". Even if you can eject/ban them, it will be quite a mess, as you now seem to enforce completely intransparent and artificial rules. People will (rightly) ask you to state the rules before you enforce them. Even if your rules are completely obvious to you and all the people in your peer group, they won't be to everyone.
On the other hand, a CoC signals to potential participants that you take these things seriously. Look at it from the point of view of someone who is used to sexist/racist/otherwise discriminating comments: If you see that a conference has a CoC, that means that they know of your problem and are prepared to combat it. This is more a more inviting conference and it will put you more at ease, because you can feel safer. Without a CoC, people will not attend because they're just tired of this.
So, yes, CoC should be unnecessary because we all know how to behave. Ideally, their content is suprising to no one. But experience shows that not everybody does, or that they in good faith behave in ways that are not acceptable to other people. With a CoC, you make it clear beforehand that "these are the rules", so everyone's on the same page, and you show that you mean it.
Will they? Lots of communities do just fine without spelling them out. If you go over the line, you get a warning by a moderator etc, or, if you've gone way past the line, you get kicked out. You don't need to know where exactly that line is drawn, because reasonable people don't come close to crossing it. And unreasonable people don't care about lines and rules.
If you do spell it out, you invite litigation of rules and endless "but you didn't punish that" and in the end you'll have to say "yeah well, I didn't find that offensive", so it's back to "there's a line, but there's also some rules that are meaningless, because in the end the line I draw on the spot is what matters".
Since those kinds of rules will always be vague, and will never be applied evenly, I doubt they are helpful. Maybe there's a small subset of people that would behave perfectly reasonable only if there's a guide book of rules that they can abide by, but I don't think that group is large enough to offset the problems CoCs bring.
I agree with this statement. Having or not having a CoC will not change their behavior, nor should it change your response. But the response to your response can differ: If you've been transparent from the start about your rules, there's less room to complain about you enforcing your rules. If you had no CoC beforehand, there will be some parts of the audience asking if that was really fair. And this behavior doesn't even have to be malicious, just that their line is somewhere else, and so they don't understand your arbitrary enforcement. With clear and transparent rules, they may not agree, but it's clear where the line is. We both think (at least, that's what I gather from your comment) that some rule is necessary, but I'm for being open about it and you want to keep them vague. I think it's easier for everybody to be transparent here, because you can decide beforehand if you agree to these rules. If they're too vague, I'm just hoping that, if push comes to shove, we see the world similarly.
And, again, having a CoC also signals that there is a line. Without it, who's to know that there will be behavior that you don't accept and what it looks like. Maybe you're fine with sexist comments, but not with racism. If I'm vulnerable, why should I gamble that your views are similar to mine? I'd rather not visit your conference if you can't make the rules clear.
Don't you do that with a CoC as well? Short of writing a long list of things that may and may not be said, you can only give a vague "please be kind to each other", but the concrete judgement what is and isn't kind depends on whether your views align with those in power.
My experience is that vague rules are both a recipe for corruption (where the enforcer's friends are exempt from the rules and the argument is "that wasn't rude, the person deserved to be called a shithead") and the troll's playground, because toxic people that want to cause trouble are great at figuring out the pain points that get to their targets but don't cross any lines.
I believe that enforcement is important, not rules. You can always have a more specific policy for the moderators to guide them and to develop the team's response, but that shouldn't be part of the rules.
It's true that it's not 100% fair that you might get kicked out for breaking a rule you didn't know existed, but to me that's collateral damage I'm more than happy to accept (and I've been on the receiving end of a "you crossed a line" talk).
However, I'm afraid I fail to see why avoiding vague rules means that there should be no CoC at all. Isn't having no written/open rules the vaguest of all? Even if there are rules that only the moderators can see, how is that an improvement for the participants? They can't know what is acceptable, so neither can the accused argue against an unfair response, nor can a potential victim demand enforcement.
And why not have more concrete rules? Surely, they cannot be complete and there will necessarily always be room for intepretation, but I think it is better the more concrete the rules are.
I used to help moderate a community. Spelling things out only helped us. Fewer incidents. More consistent moderation. Less litigation.
In my opinion, if the rules include value judgements, they're superfluous as rules, because accuser, accused and judge can easily come to vastly different results. If you try to get beyond that and formalize it, you end up with books, and by that time you've transformed your community into a rule-book-writing community.
We didn't end up with books.
Having a CoC doesn't mean that you get this benefit.
In the case in point, the rules being enforced from the CoC were not stated. After being ruled in violation, it was not made clear WHAT rule was violated. And certainly no rule in the actual CoC was violated.
Rather, this is a case of where do you draw the line when something/anything makes someone uncomfortable enough to complain. Do you apply a reasonable person standard and perhaps tell that person "We hear you but we can't agree and we're not going to do anything about it. Sorry."? Or do you say "We understand that we can't tell you how to feel so we accept your complaint and will take action."(And then do so.)?
In practice, for many situations, especially community events tend towards the latter.
For example we had the definition of racism changed. Racism wasn't attributing negative properties to skin color, it has extended to unfalsifiable bias. Also some skin colors are never racist while other always are. Disagreeing means you are racist.
You have a rule against racism in your COC and pretend someone is biased and you conjured an excuse to exclude someone without any sensible rationale.
It is not difficult to understand the objection.
edit: Other examples are behavioral expectations like having to bow before a cross, working in the kitchen, acknowledging your guilt....
Do you think racism has the same consequences for all races, for example, someone who is a member of a minority group vs someone who is not for a particular region?
No. I think I know where the original idea came from. Racism against the majority group is relatively benign compared to that against a minority. It is unlikely that racism can phase them to a relevant degree. But that stops to be the case when you have companies and media personalities starting to discriminate on the basis of skin color. Furthermore I think the most racist people are those that have no problem with being racist at all and those that believe there needs to be some compensatory justice. And this is far more pronounced racism than bias in any form.
first question:
Yes/No. I think there is an initial bias that is quickly overcome on contact because the other one is not you. Same prejudices can exist against unknown people in general. I doubt it is too relevant in exchanges. It can however be the reason for prejudices against people against other that they not ever been in contact with.
I also believe that you need different types of people in a functioning society. For disabled people it might be advantageous to have people ignoring their condition and just pretending that they belong just as everybody else. But you need also people that know that isn't always the case. Everyone wants to make things accessible but if you ask yourself if you always keep that promise the answer is probably 'no'. That is why the latter group is also needed, but there can be conflicts if a differing context isn't cleared up. The first group might have a problem with 'political correctness' in this context.
I have no problem accepting that I have subconscious biases around things like race and gender, but I work to recognise those biases and I do the best I can to mitigate them.
I don't think it's enough to pass a law and declare the that the war against racism has been won, society has to work clean up the mess and pay off the debt left behind. If that includes compensatory justice, so be it.
Political correctness pushes the idea that the whole world should be trying to create a safe space for those who have had any kind of past challenge. There is a time and place for safe spaces. However the act of encouraging people to figure out what problems they can complain about, then coddling them, makes people more fragile. This has long-lasting negative implications for their mental health.
For example https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/what-mentally-strong... explains what has actually been observed in children whose parents tended too closely to their perceived needs. Similarly therapists have found that encouraging people with PTSD to avoid any reminder of their past trauma actually makes the trauma worse. Instead it is more effective to desensitize them with controlled exposure to the trauma to teach them to be able to handle it.
This gives us some idea of how to create mental health. What are we doing instead? Well, we are teaching a whole generation that the world needs to take care of them due to a variety of past misdeeds. In the process we teach them to be sensitive to things that otherwise would not have bothered them very much. We then encourage them to demand that they not encounter reminders of what they don't like, and try to make the whole world a "safe space" for them. This is a recipe for systemically creating PTSD among people who otherwise would not develop it. Thereby creating the exact condition that we are trying to help. And, having created it, we have motivation to do more of the same so that more people become fragile.
I know, I know. This isn't a popular point of view. It suggests that a large portion of the SJW agenda is backwards. However I believe, and there is evidence from psychology to back me up, that it is right. We should not go overboard to protect people from encountering speech and ideas that they don't like. We should instead make people resilient to that experience. Both for their mental health, and so that they learn critical thinking.
Why do you think I asked for a concrete example? I notice that you didn't provide one either.
Censoring the OP for calling someone else wrong. (When the person called wrong is actually a friend and didn't object.)
Cisco firing employees for saying, "All lives matter."
Maya Forstater being fired for expressing the opinion that while she used people's preferred pronouns, she thought of trans people as their original gender if they still had their real genitalia.
Emmanuel Cafferty (a Mexican American) being fired for an alleged white supremacist hand gesture that he had never even HEARD of as a white supremacist hand gesture. (Also did I mention that he's not even white?)
Ongoing persecution of academics who dare research trans issues from any perspective that trans activists do not approve of. See https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/16/academics-ar... for more on that.
Is that enough examples for you?
Possibly because you expect people whose opinions you dislike to treat you like you would treat them if positions were reversed.
I don't mind being dead to you. But I don't want you, or people like you, to be in a position to make decisions about what I can say. Nor do I particularly want to be in a position to decide what you can say. What I want is called "freedom of speech".
As the old saying goes, "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me."
However when you open up the door to stopping other people from speaking, you have opened up the door to them stopping you from speaking. Are you sure that all of your opinions agree with that majority? Really? You think nothing that others might find controversial? If so, that's weird. And good luck if you ever change your mind about anything important.
If you don't believe me (and it would therefore be an innocent mistake), you can read the court ruling here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12P9zf82TicPs2cCxlTnm0TrNFDD...
If you've misrepresented this one, why would I trust any of your other examples?
A woman in question has a reasonably common belief that offends you and I think is not in accord with the facts. She is open about her belief, but also has apparently made an attempt to be polite in personal interactions with others. (See paragraph 41 for example.)
Despite the ruling coming down against her, I read this and think that she has a right to have and express that opinion. That when we suppress the expression of opinions like this, they don't go away. Instead they become stronger.
Some of her opinions I agree with, and some not.
Here is an example where I disagree. I don't think that female only spaces should exclude transwomen. I also don't think that my opinion on that should matter because such spaces should exclude me. However based on the fact that most women do not agree with her, they such spaces will include them. Hooray. She is free to make her own space that excludes though, and anyone who wants can join her. That's called free association.
Here is an example where I agree with her. People born male have a significant biological advantage in many sports. This is historically the reason why we separated men and women for sports such as tennis and running. As a result, trans and intersex women have a significant advantage in the same sports. See Caster Semenya for a famous example. I do not think it is at all unreasonable to ban people who retain that advantage from participating as women in such sports.
Now let's compare her belief to one that is more obviously protected.
I'm an atheist and believe in science. I have worked with fundamentalist Christians who honestly believe that the world is 6000 years old, and that I'm going to Hell. And have told me such in as many words. As you can guess, I didn't enjoy it. But we were able to maintain cordial relations in the workplace, and I wouldn't ask them to be fired for expressing an opinion that they honestly held. Despite my opinions about their opinion.
As I said, I'm for free speech. Whether or not people agree with me, or I with them.
The free speech argument is a cop out frankly, and a lazy one at that.
This does not mean that CoCs are unequivocally the best solution. But fully ignoring their benefits due to the potential for abuse is not inherently sound.
If you're running a conference, you APPOINT who will be deciding whether the CoC has been violated. If you appoint people who are not trusted by activists, you will face criticism from said activists. If you appoint people who are trusted by activists, you've appointed people who likely got ahead by getting activists fired up in the past. What they did in the past they will do in the future, and you've just given them the platform on which they will do it.
That's a catch-22 for the organizer, and a set of perverse incentives that makes it easy for the people I don't want to see in that position to get in that position.
>I support codes of conduct but ...
CoCs are crap and you both know it
https://twitter.com/joelgrus/status/1321627567737069568?s=19 he said their decision was fucked up.
haha... 'Everyone else who gets accused of some transgression and is afforded no due-process is in fact guilty and deserving of punishment. Mine is the unique case of an opaque and capricious CoC process being applied unjustly.'
I find it funny that this fellow personally experienced the injustice of being caught up in an unfair CoC enforcement process run by some petty tyrants†, but refuses to believe that this may happen to other people, that his case may not be a wild aberration but a predictable norm, given the system and culture. I wonder what it would it take for Jeremy to say "Maybe this process has fundamental problems. Maybe a lot of the other people who have been burned by this have also been treated unfairly."
If someone can keep the faith even when they personally experience the injustice of a system like this, I don't what would change their mind.
† according to his account. As jpeloquin notes ITT, little is known to us third parties about the facts of the case.
I have seen many people in similar situations that just completely roll over in a prey response and just bow down to these people. So at least the author has that spark of dignity where he's willing to stand up for himself.
This is a community in and around programming; if anyone can accept that well-intentioned systems can explode in our faces spectacularly, it should be us.
This isn't close to what he's saying. He's saying that despite the fact that the CoC enforcement got it wrong in his case, they are still valuable. You know like laws are still valuable despite the fact that innocent people are sometimes convicted. In both cases the solution is to improve the process, not throw out the concept.
Here there seem to be two issues: 1. Too-vague rules & 2. Unfair enforcement.
If we punished people for murder by forming a posse and summarily executing them, the reaction should be "yes murder should be forbidden but this enforcement process is seriously unfair and needs to be overhauled."
If we punish people for "being unkind" the reaction should be "this rule is unfair because it's not clear how one can go about following it and it is likely to be enforced highly subjectively which is likely to lead to enforcement based on personal bias, favoritism etc.."
What I think the author might see if he examined the situation with an open mind is that "be kind" (a rule he doesn't like) and "don't be sexist" (a rule he likes) both suffer from the issue of being vague and susceptible to extremely subjective interpretation. Reasonable people can (and do!) disagree about what is "kind," what is "sexist," or what is "racist," but these rules ignore this fact and take an "I'll know it when I see it" approach to kindness, sexism, racism etc. that is subject to the problems of arbitrariness, bias, and favoritism in all cases. I'm "haha"ing at the fact that the author refuses to consider this aspect of the problem: that it goes beyond just his case (other people think he's bad) to the cases of people that he thinks are bad.
Even here where part of the problem in the vague requirement ("be kind"), the biggest problem is they didn't follow their own processes of having an actual dialog. It's a bit like if you walked into a US court and the Judge immediately says "I talked to the victim and your clearly guilty", it's not the process that's the problem, it's that the process wasn't followed. Maybe like the court system there should be an appeals process (not sure what that might look like).
As a society we have laws. CoC as extrajudicial rules get judged based on their benefit to extend existing laws and append additional law enforcement on top of already existing law enforcement. If the result is bad and the additional rules causes more problem than they solve then they should be discarded.
It does not mean all extrajudicial rules are bad but we need to ask if they are needed, serve a good purpose, measure the outcome, and be ready to discard them when the situation calls for it.
Anyways, to those people that believe there are a few minor slippages in what the CoC was intended for. I have been banned from a public slack group for a CoC:
It was from the Confluent slack group after they ran a contest/game for their Kafka Summit conference. They did the virtual points system which could be traded for branded swag. I earned the points needed. They informed people that the swag was limited first come first serve, and they said they'd announce the store.
Well at least half of the people didn't get the email notifying about the store, half did and made their orders. There was no formal communication from Confluent, other than "we're working on it." 2 days went by, people were asking on #kafka-summit, we were given bad suggestions (by Confluent) about how to auth into the store. Then I got a letter from the store that "sorry you didn't participate and you're not eligible."
No notice about this from Confluent, so I ended up posting "I just got this letter WTF, @conferenceorgs". That prompted them being more concerned about "me swearing at their staff". Also I mentioned "I figure I'm going to already get banned so I'll say it: This makes Confluent look sh_tty" ... a few minutes later CoC banned by Tim Berglund [the head of dev adv at confluent].
You post "WTF @conferenceorgs". They warn you about swearing at their staff (I probably wouldn't treat it this way, but we do all know what the F stands for). You respond by... swearing at their staff? When you get a warning, then respond to that warning by repeating the offense it's hard to be surprised or outraged you didn't get a second warning.
--
For the sake of conversion: What counts as harassment- is the org an individual? Does exclaiming frustration for a situation and getting the attention of someone count as an attack on the individuals notified?
--
Note: I believe that if an org can't communicate what's going on and why you may be seeing erroneous emails from a third party, what is going on with their virtual currency that is traded for real world value. Why should I trust that org with $30k a year for a dev server?
The only thing this has taught me, never advocate for or encourage the company to stay with them.
If you say "what the hell?" directly to a representative of that company, then you are literally using profanity at their staff.
Like, we can disagree about whether that's a sensible rule or if we should make allowances for non-abusive colloquial phrases ('wtf', 'what the hell?', etc.) or something, but how can you argue it's not breaking the black-and-white rule as written?
Because 'swear at' at specifically means using a swear _against_ somebody, not just in a statement while talking to them. If you look at e.g. any of the definitions in the free dictionary, you'll find that they're all about using abusive language towards someone, so the idea of 'non-abusive swearing' at somebody in itself is as absurd as say a 'non-abusive insult'.
It's the difference between swearing in front of your children and swearing at your children, one is possibly bad parenting, the other definitely is.
I'm just glad that this example of the phenomenon was over technical disagreement rather than politics, that makes it much more illustrative.
And how exactly are you drawing that conclusion? You think that people at JupyterCon were genuinely outraged over a presenter expressing his opinion that he likes Jupyter notebooks? I would imagine that liking Jupyter would be an acceptable opinion at a Jupyter convention.
Jeremy has been an outspoken advocate of mask use, which is a highly polarizing political issue in the U.S. at the moment. I think the most reasonable explanation for this attack is that people who disagreed with Jeremy's political opinions (mask use good) found a smokescreen to attack him with (liking notebooks, not being kind).
Is mask-use unpopular with the SJW crowd though? Because CoCs in general and "that was not kind" + the process they chose sounds very much like the SJW crowd, and I'm not aware that they are anti-mask.
We're on the same page here, what I'm saying is that the context makes this situation much more obviously pretextual. I'm not going to speculate on the actual reasoning behind it, though, it's likely no more informative than pissing off someone influential somehow at some point.
Edit: I feel that the author was bullied, or mistreated, so I was primed to be upset when seeing his own dismissal of cancel culture.
The real debate is over (a) what kind of conduct warrants "cancellation" and (b) over what standards of proof ought to be. If your response to the implication that some misdeeds merit being disgraced is to stop engaging, then you're part of the problem.
1) There are some incredibly wide-ranging disagreements on (a) at this point, with few people being willing to acknowledge gray areas. Witness incidents like https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-hounding-of-a-scotti... (and please ignore the somewhat-inflammatory title and do read the story). I think there are quite a few people who think it's not even debatable whether Jenny Lindsay's conduct warrants the treatment she received, though they don't actually agree with each other on whether it does.
2) There is a disturbing prevalence of double-standards for purposes of applying (a).
3) In practice the answer for (b) is often irrelevant, because the behavior at issue is something someone "said", typically in electronic form, and there are saved copies everywhere anyway.
4) Most of the engagement on the issue is not in good faith to start with.
I do think that there are multiple things people mean when they say "canceling", which is why I think various recent attempts to actually define what differentiates "canceling" from "criticism" or "social opprobrium" are useful.
If you haven't seen https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/opinion/cancel-culture-.h... it's a pretty decent good-faith attempt to wrestle with the issues that at least tried to draw a distinction between "criticism" and "canceling", in its point 1. In that sense, Weinstein _was_ in fact "cancelled", and per item 2 appropriately...
You're right in that there are multiple things that people mean when they say cancelling. Specifically, in the NYT article, the phrase "based on an opinion or an action" really struck me as capturing a common issue I have with use of the term, which is to lump together public shaming/pressure to fire/boycott based on e.g. sexual assault, with that based on an opinion. As you say, Weinstein was cancelled.
Of course, because I have one opinion, I read the original sentence saying that cancelling is often used to refer to simply facing consequences and immediately agree, because those examples are at the forefront of my mind. True, I can think of examples of canceling I thought were unjustified, like the case of Justine Sacco. But I know that someone else will read that sentence and have it immediately conjure up a glut of examples of canceling they consider to be outrageous, and they will take exception to the implication of the sentence if not the literal meaning.
I think that it can be legitimate to read an entire article and draw conclusions about the underlying message, motivation and mindset of the author. Individual sentences don't emerge immaculately from the void.
Which is what I find so disturbing about the Spectator article. Completely pervaded by a flagrant attempt to twist every possible detail to fit his narrative.
- It states "fake evidence was manufactured" but doesn't actually cite any fake evidence.
- It eventually states, in as obscurantist a manner as possible, that Lindsay doesn't believe that trans women should be called women. The author then writes "said her condemnations of violence were not the reason for her ostracism. What then? Perhaps she had committed a micro-aggression", when he had, as I’ve just described, previously given a clear reason for the criticism.
- He concedes that "Although the intolerant right dominates politics in Westminster, Washington, Warsaw, Budapest and New Delhi, and although the far right is a dangerous source of terrorism, the far left remains world beaters in the deployment of McCarthyism". This really captures the incredible asymmetry. Conservatives may hold all of the levers of power, dominate government, institutions, and the plutocratic class, but the vociferous criticism of a tiny number of fringe activists is treated as a social problem on a par with the discrimination faced by e.g. trans people, i.e. as if it were some serious social ill.
- The most sinister part of it is when he writes “The police warned her and staff at the library their physical safety may be in danger. Detectives had heard that an antifa group might target them.” This is a terrifying demonstration of what is so dangerous about this sort of rhetoric. Look up how much violence has been committed by people professing to be a part of antifa. It is vanishingly rare. Now compare it to violence committed against trans people. Compare it to violence committed by far-right groups. And now consider that the police, a vast arm of the state itself completely riddled with adherents of the far right, actually accords credence to these nebulous claims. It’s this sort of manufactured fear of persecution that leads to the pre-emptive violence and state brutality which have been so rampant this year.
To whoever did the downvoting: please stop downvoting respectful discussion. Thank you.
> which is to lump together public shaming/pressure to fire/boycott based on e.g. sexual assault, with that based on an opinion
I do think that "an action" can be something much more inoccuous than "sexual assault". Think https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/502975-cal... which was clearly an "action", not an "opinion".
> I think that it can be legitimate to read an entire article and draw conclusions about the underlying message, motivation and mindset of the author.
Absolutely agreed, and that should inform the way you interpret the events described in the article. That said, I think it's important to keep in mind that even if the author is biased that doesn't immediately make everything they say false...
> - It states "fake evidence was manufactured" but doesn't actually cite any fake evidence.
That's interesting, because in my reading the text immediately following this sentence (about using menstruation as a metaphor, etc) was the specific description of the evidence that was found and that the author considers "fake". I'm not sure whether your disagree with the "fake" characterization or whether in your reading this was simply disconnected from the previous sentence.
> It eventually states, in as obscurantist a manner as possible, that Lindsay doesn't believe that trans women should be called women
Again, interesting. My reading of the article was that this was the "extreme reading" of the specific poem "The Imagined We", and the views imputed to Lindsay by her accusers, not a statement about her actual views.
I don't know whether you watched the linked video with the poem's recitation; it's annoyingly slow compared to reading, of course. But the poem doesn't directly say anything remotely like "trans women are not women"; it does talk about menstruation as something "we" (women) experience. Which is of course not true for all women, just like the other things mentioned in the poem are not necessarily experienced by all women.
I admit that I could be wrong here, but I did do some searching both when I originally read the article and just now and have not been able to find any evidence of Lindsay actually explicitly saying that she does not believe trans women should be called women. I'd welcome correction on this point if I'm wrong!
> Conservatives may hold all of the levers of power, dominate government, institutions, and the plutocratic class
Again, interesting. I would not say that conservatives dominate either "institutions" or "the plutocratic class", for what it's worth. Certainly not in terms of social attitudes.
> i.e. as if it were some serious social ill.
I do think that a climate of fear in which people are afraid to say anything other than enthusiastically parroting what is perceived as "the party line" because it will be misconstrued and twisted in ways that get them fired _would_ be a serious social ill.
I think there's a good argument to be had about whether we are currently experiencing such a climate; it seems to me that in some social/professional circles we are and in most we are not, at least so far. Depending on which of these circles one belongs to, the seriousness is therefore perceived very differently.
> Look up how much violence has been committed by people professing to be a part of antifa.
Yes, the whole antifa angle seems pretty clearly to be bunk and the police response seems like self-serving lies to me.
And going back to the original issue that set off this whole series of events, I don't have any good evidence for how much _actual_ anti-feminist violence is committed by "trans activists" or anyone associated with them. That is, whether the belief in "violent action" in the original "Skinny" article is actually something that leads to "violent action" in practice or whether it's basically people venting in ways that I happen to think are crude and inappropriate but are apparently acceptable in a number of communities. My prior is that there is not much, if any, actual violence going on here.
That said, I can understand someone opposing the idea of normalizing threats of violence of any sort, on the belief that once threatening of a particular kind of violence is normalized, people will in fact start acting on those threats.... There is some historical support for that belief.
The common thing with both is that it has people make mountains out of molehills. How can you trust someone that is willing to damage someone's life for something that small or non-existent, especially if it is just an opinion. They could easily come for you if they don't like something you say or do.
But I think definitions of "cancel culture" differ widely... ;)
The best you can do when people are being stupid like this is ignore them. They hold no power over you unless you let them.
This whole CoC thing is sadly fraught with virtue signaling psycho-sadists who enjoy playing tribunal.
The people who actually cared about fostering inclusive human communities got bullied out of positions of power long ago, so that aforementioned people could run their own little Stasi.
I'm not sure whether he had to play along with their absurdist play, but next time maybe he will be able to laugh, hang up, and block future calls from their numbers.
The tribunals wielding CoCs have the power to hit speakers in the wallet. Outside of violence that's pretty much as much power as you can have over a person.
> I’ve tried to make myself available for public speaking events when I can, in order to support the community. However, the potential cost is too great, and there is no real upside for me personally, so I don’t expect to be accepting invitations in the future, at least not for quite a while.
Doesn't seem like he's in any way depended on giving these talks.
You can be shamed and fired over something as innocuous as a dongle joke told in private and overheard.
https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-spirale...
The only sure way not to lose is not to play. That, or be invincible like Bob Martin or Linus Torvalds.
I can only dream of giving a good enough talk that people want to give a talk explaining why I'm wrong, but if that did happen I'd really appreciate the concern that Jeremy (i think he's the OP) showed here.
People who get "canceled" don't just get a nastygram that they can throw in the trash. They are typically banned from speaking, fired / put on probation / "contract not renewed", their reputation is both privately and publicly tarnished such that #1 google result for your name will be that you were banned for CoC violation, damaging your career prospects etc.
Sure some people's lives are bullshit-proof but for many others witch hunts like this are nothing to laugh about.
The smart thing to do is to "respectfully" disagree and make sure you never speak or attend this or a related event now or in the future or to work with any of the individuals involved. Of course, personally I'd probably lose my temper and say some things I'd regret and tell way too many people about it.
If you just keep quiet, to a first approximation no one knows that you were chastised behind the scenes for something that, if they knew, most people would think was silly. It's not like you're being forced to wear a scarlet C.
Every single person who has claimed to have been "canceled" not only brought the entire situation upon themselves, but then immediately turned around and cry foul and try to become the victim in the situation.
Its pretty entertaining and bewildering to see these people –who almost universally bemoan "victim culture"–immediately fallback to those same "tropes" when they do something socially unacceptable.
Reminds me of this snippet from Nietzsche's essay, The Tarantulas:
In all their lamentations soundeth vengeance, in all their eulogies is maleficence; and being judge seemeth to them bliss.
But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!
It sounds like you include yourself in this group of people who care about building inclusive human communities?
Generalizing to whole groups of people who support an amorphous thing, calling them "psycho-sadists", and saying they want to "run their own little Stasi" is...not exactly how I would foster an inclusive human community.
Like, it sounds like you very much do not want "those people" in your community.
Just saying.
I think CoCs, while a great ideal, unfortunately tend to attract power-tripping, virtue-signalling bullies who seek to enforce it for the greater bad.
I'm still not sure why they doubled down on it, breaking long-standing traditions of how-moderation-is-done in the biggest possible way (defaming in the press) but (at least) some of the people involved (e.g. Sara Chipps, the face of the Big Bad… the person who introduced Jon Skeet to Stack Overflow) weren't sadistic abusers, so I'd prefer to assume ignorance than malice. (There might've been more than a little over-correcting for “we mustn't let ourselves defend the ones in the wrong, even if we like them”, but that's just speculation on my part.)
And that situation was complicated. A lot of people were telling themselves they were doing the right thing, but ended up hurting innocent bystanders all the more, e.g. whoever released that poorly-redacted list of which moderators were LGBTQ+ (presumably to try to get back at Stack Exchange in some way or other). We still don't know who that was, which is as it should be; you don't talk about moderation decisions on Stack Exchange unless their target is part of the conversation (and even then, only usually if they bring it up).
The whole thing goes to show (at least, to me) how important it is not to act how the story says you should; you might have the story wrong.
I absolutely do not want "those people" in any community I might be part of. They are the ones that forced RMS and Linus out of their roles. And RMS and Linus can be eccentric and unpleasant, but they have made my life much more easier through their contributions in a real and concrete way.
"Those people" are worse than the people they prey on. They are dementors, ghouls that suck life, intelligence and innovation out of every space in which they crawl.
Fortunately, most people care more about other human beings that about ideologies, so no, most people won't behave like that in any circumstance.
I do not want people who make no material contribution but merely sow strife and discord. Somehow we have allowed ourselves to be colonised by them and cowed into submission.
Please be mindful that chmod775 didn't talk about about everybody who is (at least publicly) in support of CoCs. But rather the very vocal minority of people who try to push CoCs everywhere, then viciously start insulting people who express dissent or even just some concerns about such CoCs, and once they get their way start abusing the CoCs to start witch trials and kangaroo courts seeking not to inform people of their (alleged) mistakes and give them opportunity and help correcting their behaviors (if correction is deemed necessary by the larger community), but seek to outright banish people without due process[1].
You saw some of those people act when you were at mozilla I'd think, when it came to Brendan Eich and gerv[2]. I am not talking about people rightfully disagreeing with or criticizing Brendan Eich and gerv, I am talking about people slinging mud and insults only and trying to banish them from public life at all cost.
And as you were mozilla at the time (right?), you probably remember the rift between mostly US and mostly European community parts over the proposed CoC at the time[5], with mostly the Europeans raising a lot of concerns about the CoC proposals and a CoC in general. Which is fine, and there were a lot of constructive discussions[6], except for the people who started accusing everybody who said a CoC (like that) is not necessary and could be actively harmful was a homophobic ass or sexist or whatever, trying to squash any discussion from the get go[7].
It's those latter people you do not want in your community. And a lot of them I'd describe as "psycho-sadists" as well, who become very giddy and outright ecstatic when they succeed in banishing people, instead of expressing dread that such steps had to be taken.
[1] Brendan Eich, Linus or RMS, or google Rod Vagg or Larry Garfield
[2] gerv was[3] another prominent member of the mozilla community from the UK. He also rejected "gay marriage", but from what I remember not the equal rights portion, "just" the terminology, arguing against it by saying it was a defined traditional religious term, and gay partnerships should have equal rights but should not be called "marriage". He was wrong on that one[4]. I remember people calling him every name in the book, and wishing him he'd die from cancer[3].
[3] Sadly he passed away after a long fight with cancer. I know at least one of the people who wished gerv to die from cancer was fully aware of his ongoing long battle with that disease.
[4] Yes, I said "wrong", don't CoC me please.
[5] Early proposals of the mozilla CoC e.g. suggested that to be compliant one has to endorse things like e.g. the right to be homosexual. Which sounds nice at first, until you realize that some of mozilla's community members are from countries that put people in jail for such endorsements.
[6] At least I for one thought I learned a lot about problems I wasn't even aware of both on the pro- and contra-CoC side.
[7] A lot of those not-very-nice people were not even mozillians, but people who just came to mozilla to "participate" in the CoC discussion.
Just as I wouldn't call Brendan or gerv a psycho-sadist, I also wouldn't call the people who called for their resignations names, nor group them all together.
I think name-calling, especially of a large group which shares only one thing in common is antithetical to building inclusive human communities. Literally we're excluding people and calling them Stasi members because we disagree with them.
If you want people to be kind to each other, and if you're against cancelling people for their opinions, it's got to start somewhere.
I also want to speak to your two other examples, Linus and RMS.
WRT Linus, I personally know many talented people who wouldn't touch Linux development specifically because of him. It's cool that Linus has made your life better. He's also made a lot of people's lives worse. Where's their due process?
WRT RMS, I take issue with the idea that he was not given due process. In fact he was allowed to stay for years, despite harassing women and acting inappropriately in his position. The Epstein email was a last straw. But also: What makes you think he wasn't given due process? He says he was "pressured" by MIT and resigned. Do you think he couldn't have fought it? It sounds like he decided not to fight it. That's different than not being given due process.
Again with RMS, it's clear that his behavior was deeply upsetting to a lot of people. https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix... Where's their due process? How do they factor into your calculus of who's worthy of our compassion?
Ah, thanks for clarifying. I wasn't sure about that timeline. I just remember you left early-ish.
>Just as I wouldn't call Brendan or gerv a psycho-sadist, I also wouldn't call the people who called for their resignations names, nor group them all together.
You must have skipped the comments from the community and outside then that included gems such a wall of "FUCK YOU"s or the literal wishes for gerv to die of cancer.
I also remember the side-dramas e.g. over the term "homozillians" which was claimed to be homophobic and prompted similar vitriol (nevermind that it was the name a group of LGBTQ+ people within mozilla gave themselves)
[Another edit: to be clear, not everybody who demanded or favored their resignation falls into the psycho-sadist stasi group, either.]
>I think name-calling, especially of a large group which shares only one thing in common is antithetical to building inclusive human communities. Literally we're excluding people and calling them Stasi members because we disagree with them.
No, we're excluding them and call them sadists and stasi because they act with the same mindset of stasi: observation, propaganda, demagogy, and the stated goal of "destroying" other people, and because they joyfully celebrate whenever one of their perceived enemies gets banished, not dreading the anguish that was caused (maybe unavoidably) but enjoying the pain and anger they caused. I've seen plenty such giddy stasi-sadists rummaging around in everything RMS ever wrote and celebrating victory when he resigned from the FSF (some going so far to publicly wishing him to become homeless and freezing to death in the next winter).
This is where we should draw the line and where the "paradox of tolerance" actually makes sense: at the extreme fringes, be it racists and white supremacists on one side, and yes, as hurtful at this truth is, the extremes of what we both probably would consider our side as well.
>WRT Linus, I personally know many talented people who wouldn't touch Linux development specifically because of him.
That's fine. Their decision. I know a lot of people I wouldn't want to work with either.
>[Linus has] also made a lot of people's lives worse.
Utter bullshit and baseless allegation. Why would you say such a thing without providing any shred of evidence?
>Where's their due process?
Due process? For what? Perceived offense? Unsettling remarks somebody made? "Wrong" opinions somebody holds? There is none and there won't be and there shouldn't be.
And as you may or may not know, people criticized him for his erratic behavior, and while it took quite some time, he tried to improve his manners (not just since the Sharp-thing). But no matter how much or little he has and/or will change, there will be always people who want his head.
The "due process" is (where we didn't cross into criminality): you criticize people for their behavior in a constructive way, if they listen and work on themselves great, if they don't then they don't and it's up to you to decide if you want to work with them or if their behavior is too much.
> In fact he was allowed to stay for years, despite harassing women and acting inappropriately in his position
Again bullshit. Even worse bullshit, as it perpetrated the lie he was a major harasser.
>But also: What makes you think he wasn't given due process? He says he was "pressured" by MIT and resigned. Do you think he couldn't have fought it? It sounds like he decided not to fight it. That's different than not being given due process.
Right, you go ahead and demand due process and stand your ground when the internet mob comes for you with pitchforks. This is naïve thinking. at best. It's outright victim-blaming at worst. "Why didn't he just answer long and public why he had a matress in his offide? Why didn't the rape victim answer long and public why she thought it was OK to wear sexy clothes and makeup?"
>The Epstein email was a last straw.
You mean the Minsky email, where he called Epstein a criminal, and suggested that Minsky himself might not have known what was going on?
[Edit: Yes it was an uneasy read, and maybe rather flawed thinking, and deserving of criticism (not his head) but many people claimed he defended child abuse, which he did not]
>Again with RMS, it's clear that his behavior was deeply upsetting to a lot of people.
So he is a weird guy and can put people in unease. He has had a mattress in his office, and he awkwardly hit on some women because he is a bit of a social retard. Big fucking whoopdie-doo. Some of the bullshit that blog post (and others) accuse him of isn't even first-hand experiences, just off remarks like the "if he hits on you, say you're a vi user" remark. What's the conclusion here? That because RMS is awkward in social interactions he better not try to date ever, he doesn't deserve relationships and a sex life because he might make people unwelcoming of his initial advanced uneasy?
>It's cool that Linus has made your life better.
> But also: What makes you think he wasn't given due process?
By the way, now you're putting words in my mouth I never spoke or wrote.
> Utter bullshit and baseless allegation. Why would you say such a thing without providing any shred of evidence?
Are you actually saying, without irony, that it's bullshit and baseless that Linus Torvalds, one of the most famously abusive OSS maintainers in history, had made people's lives worse by way of these actions?
Linus himself has said that he recognizes he hurt people.
> [RMS] awkwardly hit on some women because he is a bit of a social retard. Big fucking whoopdie-doo.
Not a big deal to you. Cool.
Suppose it was a huge deal to other people. I mean, it's not a hypothetical, I've provided citations.
Are the feelings of other people illegitimate when they disagree with you?
Yes, at least on any scale that matters. He might have (temporarily) upset some people, but that doesn't even come close to what I'd consider "made lives worse".
> one of the most famously abusive OSS maintainers in history
Nice ad hominem by the way. Also bullshit. He was outspoken to the point of being considered rude sometimes, and he was what I would consider abusive in his language on some occasions (like the infamous "abortion" rant; if you never had a bad day and said something regretful, feel free to cast the first stone).
You however make it sounds that he raped a lot of people. Or murdered his wife (hello Hans). Or at least was like this all the time (which he was not, he was mostly polite and professional if maybe a little to direct for some cultural backgrounds).
Get a grip. Some feelings were hurt, some egos got nicked, he crossed the line verbally on a few occasions, got criticized for it, learned from that it seems, some people - which, again, is perfectly fine - decided not to work with him. Linux lost some contributors maybe. In order words: life.
If you expect utter perfection from everybody always, you'll be in for a big surprise.
>Suppose it was a huge deal to other people. I mean, it's not a hypothetical, I've provided citations.
You provided some one-sided hearsay, from mostly anonymous stories, nothing that even amounts to harassment either, let alone sexual harassment. That's the evidential standard of a kangaroo court and the kind of "crime" dictators use to silence their most outspoken dissidents, not due process (which you seem really fond of by mentioning it all the time).
Regardless, that RMS made some people uneasy - while a bit problematic and surely something he could and should have improved - does by far not warrant the way people punch down on him, destroyed his reputation and negated his entire life's work, called him names, fabricated false allegations such as that he was defending Epstein. Where is your empathy for his humanity and plight? Or is that reserved to people who are slightly irked out and/or offended to see he had a mattress in his office (which he used to sleep on, because he was essentially living in his office, btw)?
>Are the feelings of other people illegitimate when they disagree with you?
Their feeling are legitimate - which by the way does not mean they always have legitimate cause to feel that way, nor does it mean they never have a legitimate cause - but matter a lot less than facts or actions.
That's what it actually seems to be: People that want to be sadistic aggressors can be sadistic aggressors in the name of "the law". I believe that's also part of why the USA has such a big problem with out of control power tripping cops. Who exactly is attracted by the possibility to legally put people in their place with guns and tasers?
This claim is made elsewhere in these comments. What is the actual story here? Who bullied who? When?
I’m not buying it. When the hell have solutions to deep-seated, complex social problems ever been as simple as a markdown document with some carefully written bullet points? I believe CoCs accomplish something, but some days I am left wondering what that is.
For what it’s worth, I don’t really care that much. Projects having CoCs does not bother me or anything like that. But the unquestioning acceptance that they “obviously” work has been a little unsettling despite the fact that I don’t think it’s obvious open source has become more welcoming at all.
The keynote speakers were all great and I'm excited for them to be posted live, I thought they were supposed to be available at the end of the week.
Jeremy's was a different keynote than the others- more technically oriented, but nothing struck me at the time as being a CoC violation. I could easily have missed something, clarity from NumFOCUS would be greatly appreciated here if only for future speakers.
This was my first virtual conference but the organizers' overabundance of caution detracted from the experience in some ways- the talks were all in WebEx rooms where only the presenters were visible and the chat messages could only be seen by the presenters. The effect of this was that it felt like you were in an empty room. The explanation for this setup was to prevent trolling, but this was quite a small conference and it seemed to really cut down on attendee chatter.
The organization's Code of Conduct was so broad-reaching, thorough, and explicit that it doesn't appear to have left any leeway for common sense. Why did they simply follow the explicit procedures of the CoC rather than stopping to question if what they were doing was the right thing to do?
I suspect they were afraid to deviate from their own Code of Conduct, for fear that the 2 complainants would use social media to criticize the event operators. No event organizers want to be publicly accused of ignoring their own Code of Conduct or denying that a CoC complaint was valid. Getting on the wrong side of this issue could be a death sentence for the organizers.
So instead, they used the Code of Conduct machinery to turn the complaints into a vague punishment for the speaker. In doing so, they washed their hands of responsibility and shielded themselves from criticism. It doesn't make any sense, but they upheld their end of the CoC and therefore are "safe" from being cancelled.
Did we read the same article?
The article says that he was pointed at two contradictory codes of conduct, and violated for violating unstated standards from an implicit code of conduct that wasn't revealed to him.
That's making shit up to be able to say you did something. It is exactly the opposite of rigidly following a code of conduct.
And, as the article points out, they managed to fail to follow their own official code of conduct in the process.
> I suspect they were afraid to deviate from their own Code of Conduct, for fear that the 2 complainants would use social media to criticize the event operators.
As described, they didn't follow the procedures as written, nor did they follow through on the procedure as suggested in their early communications.
They didn't seem to have a problem with deviating from their code of conduct.
It's good that they blindly applied their CoC in a case where it's clear-cut that it's bad, since it revealed the problems with the CoC. If they chose not to enforce it in this instance, then when a more political issue inevitably came up down the road, a similar bad result may have happened but without the backlash necessary to fix it.
The ability to voice a critique constructively is vital for a proper discourse. The ability to take a critique constructively is vital for a proper discourse.
If anyone thinks I am wrong in here, tell me and let’s duke it out.
I disagree, because the context is important. Sure, JupyterCon is free to set their own rules. But freedom does not make it right. It is not some kind of moral support group, not a Sunday book club, it is a conference, where sharing and discussing research is the whole point.
If communication had been better, I bet they could have talked this through without OP getting emotionally fucked up to the point of swearing off giving talks altogether. Like it could conceivably have been a chat like "oh no the other person is my friend and cool with this" "oh ok".
I remain confident that the JupyterCon people are in favor of critiquing ideas and that they would not have barred OP from doing so in the talk, even if the situation had been different and this had happened in advance of the conference, if productive communication had been possible.
And while I don't think it would be _fine_, I suspect OP would have preferred to be uninvited in advance for bad reasons instead of having this awful experience after the fact.
There's also the reality, or at least noted possibility that his opportunities or ability to give talks will greatly diminish as the result of this. Submit a talk to a conference, they search you, and oh, what's this, "Was keynote speaker at a conference that then removed his talk from the conference archive over a CoC violation"? No thanks, we can find another speaker.
I'm also uncertain if the investigative committee actually intended to impose any consequences. Jeremy expressed concern that the situation may prevent his talk from being available, but I don't see any talks posted on the JupyterCon site yet. The only definite action is the decision that a code of conduct violation had occurred and the notification thereof. The notification clearly caused Jeremy Howard significant distress, which should have been avoided. However this may have been unintentional on the part of the conference organizers. For all we know, the situation has also caused them similar distress. Hopefully the involved parties can still find some remediation despite the incident blowing up on social media.
My main take-aways are that (1) small technical organizations are often poor at community management and investigating potential misconduct, and (2) the public internet is worse, with a tendency to devolve into public shaming.
[0] https://cfp.jupytercon.com/2020/schedule/general-sessions/
Talks are available to attendees, apparently: https://twitter.com/LorenaABarba/status/1319252544091205632
> small technical organizations are often poor at community management
NumFOCUS is fact promoting their "Diverse & Inclusive Spaces and Conferences Cookbook" so they have presumably put a fair amount of time and effort into this:
People are so fragile nowadays on the internets. how come?
echo "Don't be a dickhead, or I'll block you from the repo until you stop." > CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
edit: A false sense of security if not actually security as the author of this article found out.
If people are idiots about enforcing the CoC, I'm willing to bet they'd have been idiots about enforcing the "don't be a dickhead" rule too.
Then people understand what the CoC is: the project owners just moderating the project as they see fit. This is basically what all open source projects have done since forever. If others read the public list of moderation actions and disagree with the project owners' enforcement behavior (it being too lax or too strict or otherwise unfair or wrong), they can choose not to participate.
Trying to codify every possible violation into a set of explicit rules, or, worse, trying to codify good behavior, just leads to this sort of "you technically violated this part here" bludgeoning.
I mean, that's basically a CoC-by-example. I don't really disagree with that modulo some surmountable reservations about giving too much attention to either bad actors or victims. Where I think this falls short is that, when spinning up a new project, you'd start with a blank page, so people _don't_ have the opportunity to determine whether they disagree with your moderation style until enough bad things have actually happened. Why not carry over your learnings from previous projects?
If every single project on GitHub right now removed its CoC, how much would really change over the next month or two? The vast majority of people know what's generally acceptable or unacceptable, and the vast majority of open source project owners share that sensibility. There may be a rare case of a project owner who thinks saying "hi, it might be better to do [X]" is offensive, or a contributor who thinks it's okay to say "this code is fucking terrible, you're a moron", but unless you're dealing with Linus Torvalds or someone else really unusual, it's almost never a concern.
When contributing to a project with such a blank page, you run the risk of encountering that odd project owner who seems to diverge from almost everyone else in the community, but I think the risk is so low and the impact so minor that it's not worth worrying about it much. And if it's truly a concern for some reason, you can just click on the owners' other projects or Google their names/monikers to see if anything concerning comes up.
I definitely think project owners should moderate shitty behavior, and I think for other sorts of communities (like message boards) there might be stronger requirements for somewhat more explicit rules, and if a particular project for some reason has had more than one instance of behavior the owner finds unacceptable but contributors don't then it makes sense to explicitly clarify some things, but in general I don't really understand all of the bureaucracy surrounding this.
(Sure, I can shrug off the judgement, but being blocked from their repo is still a hassle if it could have been avoided with better up-front communication.)
But knowing what's in the CoC doesn't actually tell you what kind of stuff the maintainer cares about. The maintainers will still block you if they consider you dickheadish, they'll just find a reading of their CoC that lets them declare you a racist (or whatever) first.
I don't think I'd use the wtfcoc, but it's just being explicit that the owner of the repo can block you if desired, which some people need to have said.
No, which is why I think the rule doesn't add any actionable information.
I don't need to see a person's behavior rulebook if I'm going to play D&D at a meetup, or jam on some music together or whatever. The vast majority of casual stuff like that doesn't need it and shouldn't need it. Neither does joe's casual github project either.
Jeremy Howard has done a LOT for the machine learning community and the world because he really has democratised machine learning and made it extremely accessible for people. Not just with free lecture videos, but by buiding and releasing tools that continue to give people an on ramp into a complex field.
Jeremy is also relatively high profile, in an "if you know you know" kind of way.
This really seems like a bit of an attempt for the confrence to do something slightly edgy and controversial to boost their own profile.
Edit: i should have said "enabling a whole community to build and release tools for free". Obviously a LOT of people are contributing to fastai so i dont want to take anything away from the community. Jeremy is clearly instrumental to that movement.
CoCs help prevent and deal with incidents of racism, sexism, homophobia, threats of violence, etc. Those aren't things I, and presumably you, don't want at conferences.
This was an example of CoC being poorly implemented in several ways; that does not mean that CoCs are inherently bad, anymore than corruption in some country's election should be taken to mean that democracy is bad.
There will never be a perfect CoC or CoC process, but there are definitely better and worse ones, and better and worse usages. Personally I'd rather go, or have colleagues go, to conferences which have one; if this conference didn't have a CoC then the critiques Jeremy offered couldn't have been as specific and pointed.
I've seen events and organizations ruled entirely by the organizer's arbitrary fiat and trust me, some of those have been horrible, much worse than they might have been had they had an organized standardized Code of Conduct.
They are too new and too different. Some can be written benign and others not. They are tools.
Most political structures have rules in them which work regardless of who weilds them, codes of conduct don't. Codes of conduct assume they will be used by good people (and most of them are!) real law or poltical processes assume they might be used by bad people.
There's a real good reason why we think in law that the accused should be treated as if they are innocent. Most codes assume the accused is guilty.
Can you give an example of a rule that "works" regardless of who wields it?
Him talking about supports a code of conduct was like listening to a shooting victim talking about how they support gun rights. It's like walking into his hospital room, him sitting up, and instantly going into a monologue about how the 2nd amendment protects us from tyranny. It reminds one of the the "Leopards eating faces" meme. If this post sold a code of conduct as a way to fight back against trumped up charges by being able to compare your behavior to stated rules, and expose arbitrariness, I think he might have actually made code of conducts sound like a great thing. Yet instead be defended CoC's by questioning the character of their critics with the line
>the anti-CoC crowd might jump on this as an example of problems with codes of conduct more generally, or might point at this as part of “cancel culture” (a concept I vehemently disagree with, since what is referred to as “cancellation” is often just “facing consequences”).
That's just such a bizarre and weird response given he did literally get cancelled regardless of if he likes it or not and is making a post arguing he's not just "facing consequences". He's like the person in the welfare lineup who thinks everybody around him is a lazy bum.
Why don't contributors openly reject this stupid system (not the rules themselves, which sound fine) and unseat these self-proclaimed procurators is beyond me.
There really is only ever one thing to say in a situation like this, and it is "Yes, I refuse to participate any further in this farce; good day!" and then hang up. Personally I would not have been so polite :)
CoC committees are breeding grounds for idiots who think you can legislate for common sense and basic decency; and in my book that is a bridge that's worth burning every time.
I really hope the author finds some peace in all this, nobody deserves to be treated they way they have. And I hope that others who have found - and will in future find - themselves in this same situation, will have the courage to stand up to this kind of bullying by refusing to engage.
A-Train's Law applies: You don't fuck with the money. You never fuck with the money.
How was that saying "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"?
Maybe FSF should have rebranded as Liberty not "Libre" software.
But here's the thing; if one of my devs made a gaffe at a conference, they'd have the full weight of myself and the company defending them, they definitely would not find themselves alone facing some kangaroo court that answers only to itself :)
In general, they're well meant. And in my experience issues arise not so much from the conference organizers but some attendee taking offence over something in a way that most would consider hypersensitive. And the organizers feeling they have to take their side even if they personally disagree.
Maybe you are right. But this seems very surprising, the company instinct would likely be to cut loses and have that person fired to avoid further bad publicity.
I imagine the transition from "side project" to "I might as well be working for a MegaCorp with all of this HR-esque CoC nonsense" would be most unpleasant. How many project founders bow out at that point?
if you get the actual payout and your project doesn't just get AWS-ified. :)
That's essentially a Kafka trap [1].
I have not seen the term "SJW" used so many times in proximity to Orwell and 1984 references before; well, at least not outside of a gamergate board
This whole thing seems reasonable until you step onto someone’s toe and a bunch of drama emerges.
I'm confused - are you saying that any group cannot set their own rules or guidelines unless they also create their own judiciary?
Indeed. It seems like the winning move is not to play, but I guess that applies to all cyber-bullying. Avoid the offending environment (in that case, JupyterCon) and contribute to a place where discourse is appreciated.
Have you tried doing that? How do you like being hounded out of your job, and probably your profession, by a braying mob?
Edit: I also find it bitterly ironic that the Progressive Bay Area-centric Hacker News is now saying how bad all of this is, after being the complicit champions of it.
I've long argued that the US should have lots of parties, and adopt pluralistic voting, but then I stopped when it seemed to me that countries that already have this system don't have demonstrably better political outcomes. But your comment pushes me back to the other side of the argument now. It occurs to me that if we didn't have only 2 sides, practically, maybe policy discussions wouldn't be so damnably acrimonious and win-lose.
For now yeah but the tides are changing everywhere. Europe (and the US) fought facism, so we had a period of time where politics where mostly shades of purple/blue/red. Now facism is on the rise again, and we're seeing that across Europe, from Spain with Vox to Sweden with "Sweden Democrats". With the rise of these parties, you're seeing more and more of excommunication, as being tolerant of intolerance will only lead to more intolerance, not tolerance.
Even the "Black Lives Matter" movement is distracted from the goal of making black lives matter with a laundry list of progressive demands like dismantling the "Western-prescribed nuclear family structure" that are tangentially related at best. (Indeed, the entire premise of contemporary intersectionality demands one surrender the possibility of delivering meaningful reform on an incremental basis, in service of forming a bloc dedicated to seizing power wholesale.)
What we got was also predictable, though. If anyone can fight under any banner, if nobody owns the banner, there is no possibility to come to a compromise, to settle the differences. The proponents of a movement will pick the most benign shard as an example to defend and popularize their cause; the opponents of the movement will pick the most extremist shard as a justification to fight back. Everyone feels their survival is at stake.
It seems then we are not in disagreement over substantive matters, but over minor questions such as phrasing.
More specifically, by exploiting and weaponizing the good nature of others. This is why they went after geek hobbies specifically: science fiction, open source, comics, cartoons, video games, and tabletop RPGs -- because geeks are sensitive and accommodating, and shouting at them how racist and sexist they are is bound to make them stop and reflect -- leaving them wide open to further attack. Had they chosen to attack pastimes rife with actual racists and sexists -- tailgate parties in rural Georgia, say -- they'd be routed, because racists and sexists don't have the fucks to give about their behavior.
As I've said elsewhere, "SJWs" aren't really geeks. They are more like mentally deranged normies who long to sit at the cool kids' table, but don't stand a chance of ever sitting there, so they take over the geeks' table, because better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.
Edit: I should add, it's amusing while it doesn't affect me, but the ramifications are horrifying.
The president doesn't need to accept dissent from his staff. Just hypothetically, if Obama's health secretary said that being transgender was largely a mental illness, or his head of domestic policy said that we need to close the southern border, does he need to tolerate that? Just to be very clear - those are completely hypothetical - I am not sure what actual "dissent" caused Trump to fire his various staff members, but it is unrelated.
I keep saying: the paradox of tolerance applies recursively. To preserve tolerance, the intolerant must be removed from the community. However, if in the process of removing the intolerant, you cause collateral damage on innocent, tolerant people, then you become the intolerant that needs to be removed.
This is correct. Quite often, a group which is portrayed as hypocritical is not hypocritical at all: rather there are just many opinions within the group, and they conflict with each other. As you've said, the [group] is not monolith.
Because some people actually do act like jerks, and we want to be able to tell those people to either stop acting like jerks or go away.
> CoCs were doomed to this from the beginning.
Rather, Codes of Conduct are more difficult than you think. The article itself points to several ways in which the committee in question didn't follow their own guidelines. It also points to "Code of Conduct Best Practices" which aren't followed by the Code of Conduct in question.
> Any set of strict/influential laws should be supported by a proper set of institutions like courts, lawyers, arbitration, judging practice.
This is I think a big problem right now. Our community adopted a Code of Conduct proactively; we haven't yet had to deal with any issues. But I'm painfully aware that doing this sort of policing well takes time, skill, and training, which I don't think it's reasonable for normal community members to take.
On the one hand, I'd love to be able to (for instance) outsource all CoC engagement and enforcement to a specialized body, that could manage a whole investigation / accuser / defense / jury system for a number of different organizations.
On the other hand, there are an awful lot of decisions made that I very much disagree with. For example:
You know, that's a pretty good idea. And if there were actual laws backing it, then you already have a "working" system. Now I am starting to wonder, should CoCs even try to transcend the law, is that part of the problem, where we try to legislate for things that are in many cases subjective?
Yes? Companies do this all the time with codes of conduct and nobody really thinks twice about it.
Nobody would think it's bizarre that (hypothetically, I don't know what their actual rules are) Coca-Cola has a rule barring employees from wearing a "Pepsi > Coke" shirt to client meetings.
> where we try to legislate for things that are in many cases subjective?
We do this all the time, even in our actual legal system.
"Disturbing the Peace" is one example off the top of my head of something that's incredibly subjective that we consider the purview of the legal system.
That doesn't mean it's a good thing. Good laws (especially criminal laws) should be normative, i.e. it should be deducible for anyone which behavior is punishable. Laws not adhering to this principle are ripe for selective enforcement and have no place in a rule-of-law society.
> That doesn't mean it's a good thing.
I don't think this is a popular position, or even a necessarily logical one. There are a great deal of "I'm not touching you" type behaviors that society collectively despises and often falls under these catch-all categories.
Legal doctrine is rife with "reasonable person" standards as a result that would be impossible to codify thoroughly and properly. Obviously, the mythical "reasonable person" doesn't exist and is often a judge or jury left to subjectively decide.
For example, harassment laws sometimes rely on a "credible threat of violence" based on something that would "make a reasonable person afraid for their safety". Good luck enumerating all the possible definitions of that.
Codifying rules is meant to prevent that from happening, even though as we see it doesn't always work that way.
"you repeatedly did x and this is explicitly against our Code of Conduct that you said you'd read before your first contribution"
instead of
"you're being a jerk and as such we will be refusing any contributions from you going forward".
The second example is completely arbitrary, and is up to the whims of the core team - whomever they might be. With a Code of Conduct you're (ideally) told up front what you can and cannot do. This reduces ambiguity and arbitrary decision making.
I can also tell you that a Code of Conduct isn't a change to how I personally govern the projects and communities I'm in charge of. Instead, it's about writing down what I would already remove people for anyway.
It’s not as if a code of conduct ever contains anything that sane people don’t already know.
And like some other commenter said, it basically boils down to “don’t be an asshole”.
Breaking the Code of Conduct isn't a one-and-done thing. You talk to that person, and tell them that what they said was over the line. Be that using a slur, being increasingly insulting to another community member, or something else.
I, as an administrator, basically tell them "not cool". If their reaction is "yeah, alright" then nothing more comes of it. No citations. No three-strike rules. But if someone continually defies our reprimands we have the backing of saying "you've repeatedly been told... " and "this is written in ..." meaning nothing should come as a surprise.
It's also a way for normal users to understand what might be rule-breaking behavior. I can't observe everything happening in a community, as much as I like participating in them. Instead, I have to rely on other non-admin members reporting bad behavior. Making it clear to other users what kind of behavior they can report someone for is also super helpful - and for some people induces trust.
There are lots of reasons.
Ideally forces you to think ahead of time what kind of conduct you are OK with or not OK with, so you don't have to decide at the moment when someone you actually have a relationship with does something.
Ideally you think ahead of time how you would respond if someone did one of those things.
Ideally you think about a process for people to follow that balances several contrasting goals: Namely, to avoid doxxing or blaming the victim, but also to prevent the system from being used against innocent people (which it seems what happened here).
Ideally people who are prone to act like jerks decide not to act like jerks at all: Either they behave themselves, or they don't join your community.
If you don't do a Code of Conduct, and just "tell the jerk to stop, and if not take action", then it's a crap shoot whether you overreact (as happened here) or underreact (as has happened in many cases). If you deploy a Code of Conduct properly, there's at least a better chance that you'll respond constructively.
That's a bug when trying to apply a coherent standard, but it's a feature when using the document as cover for arbitrary mob action.
I hate to break it to you, but bad actors will use any available tool they can to gain power and do harm. If there's no Code of Conduct, some bad actor will take advantage of the ambiguity to do things they know make other people uncomfortable, just because they can. If there's an overly broad Code of Conduct, or one which doesn't protect the rights of the "accused" (either in how it's written or how it's enforced), then other bad actors will take advantage of it to exert power.
That's why laws have to be written "defensively", like code exposed to the open internet. You have to try to anticipate exploits by bad actors ahead of time; and fix the ones you didn't spot as they're exploited.
Of course they will. That's what makes them bad actors :)
But are the bad actors in the two scenarios (with/without Coc) the same kind of bad actors? Do they have the same set of motivations for being in the community, and the same ability to rally supporters? My perception is that the bad actors in the two scenarios are wildly different, and that they're different because Codes of Conduct tend to distort the core incentives for participation in the community.
Vague rules are meaningless.
Rules, policies, laws, Hammurabi's Code - they're all just leadership decisions made in advance. The problem here is that the leadership clearly doesn't really care. They got a complaint, they "investigated," and they moved on. Classic "governance" - totally ineffective.
After years, my favorite governance approach is still the one from a college club. It read in it's entirety: "No !ssholes." It makes clear the goal, who will be enforcing, and what to expect: The goal is no !ssholes, I will be enforcing, and I will do so by calling you an !sshole. It's just social pressure - and for anything outside of the judicial or corporate systems, that's all there is anyway.
I definitely don't have the experience you do, but the regular judicial system (in most countries that aren't kafka-esque throughout history) has adversarial parties that are incentivized to find if the other party is wrong. That's very different from all the corporate, university or open source "governance" systems. Maybe they can't bear that additional cost, but it's a huge difference.
A lot of the 1st generation open source CoCs were not hypotheticals, but "here's things we wish Richard Stallman would stop doing". As head of GNU/FSF, he had tremendous influence in shaping the culture of open source, and one result of that was that it ended up a lot more male-dominated than other areas of "tech": one figure I've seen was around 2% women in prestigious open-source projects vs. around 20% in programming as a whole.
Open source CoCs started as far as I can tell as a combination of a reaction to specific incidents and to address the general problem that women were [choosing to stay out of the community](https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/10/09/moat/). That link talks about CoCs specifically, but note that her argument is not "and therefore they should be shamed in public" but "and therefore I'm staying out". Hence, 2% vs. 20%.
So yes, CoCs can have downsides - what happened to Jeremy here could well be one of those - but the pre-CoC open source scene had a culture that ended up with 2% women compared to 20% in programming/tech in general. I don't think it's the right solution to simply roll back the change so we're not disadvantaging people like Jeremy any more, and return to disadvantaging people like Alice and Sarah and Rachel and Yasmin.
The reason many people oppose it is because it often leads to completely innocent people being harassed and/or ostracized (or worse). So, in that way, his situation makes a very fitting example of many of the things wrong with cancel culture and highlights a few of the reasons why detractors oppose this kind of attack.
Secondly, it's unfortunate that, despite buying into cancel culture and believing it is merely "facing consequences", he doesn't mention any names. If I were in favor of this kind of social retribution, I definitely would think that the members of this committee should "face consequences". At the very least, they should be removed from the committee, as clearly these people shouldn't have the authority to enforce any CoC, let alone a particularly nebulous one.
All in all, though, I feel very bad for him and, if nothing else, hopefully this doesn't bring him any more trouble.
Another example is this classic joke about the Soviet Union:
Q: What is the difference between the Constitutions of the US and USSR? Both of them guarantee freedom of speech.
A: Yes, but the Constitution of the USA also guarantees freedom after the speech.
In both countries you have freedom of speech, but in the USA you can use it more than once.
In America you can call the President an idiot. And in Soviet Russia, you can also call the American President an idiot.
A classic example of Stockholm Syndrome.
Social media has rotted us from within and from all sides. Left, right, it doesn't matter. Everyone is so hostile and eager to end other people.
This is madness.
Yes, I did read the article. We're cancelling people over criticism. Somebody needs to hide Linus.
I don't like criticism. I was bullied a lot as a kid. But I thought part of what made us American was our rich, diversity of opinions and our grit to withstand challenge. We're supposed to work together and see past the differences.
Here, the norms were surprising (a back-and-forth between two presentations is a perennial seat-filler at tech conferences) and poorly communicated. That's a problem. But "banning criticism" isn't necessarily a problem.
We have a shade of that norm here, in Show HN posts. Restricting criticism on generic HN posts would be stifling and unproductive, but in spaces where we ask community members to be vulnerable and where part of the point is to allow the community to be encouraging, it makes total sense.
I think preventing attendees from criticizing people ("Joe Schmoe is dumb") is perfectly fine, but that's clearly not what happened here.
What I reject is the idea that all spaces are somehow required to make space for criticism. There are spaces where that rule doesn't make sense.
We're unlikely to find people to argue that the conference handled this well, or that the author did anything wrong.
However I agree with you in as much as, if some folks who think its a good idea all get together and communicate it clearly, there's nothing wrong with that. I probably wouldn't go, but there's a lot of conferences in the world I don't "get" and have no desire to go to, and that's ok.
There are spaces where it doesn't make sense - for you -. Any forum where criticism is not acceptable should be classified as advertising or possibly propaganda.
I've also seen someone asked to cover up a company T with an IMO utterly innocuous joke on it (at a different event).
But, yeah, if you want to run a conference with a CoC that basically says we'll ask you to leave if anyone is offended by you for any reason, just please let me know so I can choose not to attend.
“Joe is dumb” .. “Joe is wrong” .. “Joe is wrong about X” .. “Why I think Joe is wrong about X”
...anything but the final one feels unduly confrontational. That’s how I felt, reading your comment.
...I think [and am willing to be proven wrong.]
It is, and should be, OK to actually strongly state a position you hold, especially if you can back it up, and especially if the person you are responding to is going to take your criticism well (which the author did know).
"Joe is an idiot" is very different from "Joe is wrong" especially when Joe is definitively and demonstrably wrong (which he was in this case, the author demonstrated clearly and succinctly how to do something Joel said was difficult to do).
Adults are (or should be) also capable of determining when a talk is a string of personal attacks, or a mature but critical response (critical meaning evaluation, not negative). If every other phrase was "Joel has his head in his ass" then NumFOCUS would have certainly had a case; that wasn't the case here.
I'd buy that there are subcultures where prefixing "I think..." is a gesture of respect. But the CoC's I'm familiar with generality don't demand that the speaker aligns with a specific culture. Often they encourage accepting multiple cultures.
Indeed, I'll go as far as saying that a big part of conferences is encouraging different subcultures to listen to each other.
None of it is rude, bullying, or any kind of -ism, or anything that needs to be fixed. It is in fact confrontation, which is a fine thing. And whether it needs to be so "unduly" direct or not should simply shape the reader/listeners opinion of the writer/speaker.
It shapes my opinions when I see/hear/read so many people who conflate directness or disagreement with bullying. If you cannot stand criticism, your really ought not try to say anything.
But, the example you give is one that criticizes Joe Schmoe, not X. How about just "X is wrong", and leave Joe out of it so that the discourse is about the rightness or wrongness of X.
Also, if Joe Schmoe and Alice Shclalice have different, but aligned, support of X, it can be useful to your audience to identify different parts of your criticism as "this is how I disagree with Joe" and "this is how I disagree with Alice".
It is a horrible mistake to bring people in and give them attributes they don't have (eg, "Joe Schmoe is an idiot who is wrong about X" is objectionable). It is good practice to reference where mistaken claims are being made (as in this case "Joe Schmoe said X and that is wrong" is helpful to the listeners).
I am very doubtful that Joel Grus' identity is so tied to his jupyter-scepticism that this talk represents a personal attack. It is completely routine debate and possibly quite fun for all involved.
You can exchange ideas without making judgements on other ideas. Like, let your ideas speak for themselves, marketplace of ideas etc, or even make comparisons without saying your ideas are _better or worse_ than other ideas.
I'm sure you wouldn't run out of useful and engaging conference content even with some hypothetical arbitrary rules like "don't say idea X is bad", "don't say person X is wrong about idea Y", like, at worst you'd have to make some minor edits to your slides and reword things to be less personal, unless your entire gimmick is that your presentation is a callout post.
I think you may have accidentally encountered a slippery slope.
I don't think it makes sense to ban criticism everywhere, or even most places.
I mean to say, communities that seek to institute blanket no-criticism policies, in practice tend to end up criticizing those outside of the community and allow any beliefs or statements of people inside the community to go unchallenged and unexamined.
In other words, it just leads to more tribalism and in-group vs. out-group bias.
I don't have any hard data to back this up, just my subjective perception (criticize away!).
So whoever pushes their opinion first wins, since they would not be able to be criticized by that logic.
You’re right that this is madness. This PC nonsense needs to end. Not everyone can simultaneously be correct
Basically not much difference functionally than the rest of human history? Seems the latter half of the 20th century lulled some people into a false sense of security.
Maybe the real rot of social media is how it erases in peoples' minds the idea that anything could have happened without social media. Here's a quote from the end of No Country for Old Men, because why not it's a great book & film:
What you got ain’t nothing new. This country is hard on people. You can’t stop what’s comin’. Ain’t all waitin’ on you. That’s vanity.
The analogy is like people complaining about A-Bombs and someone replying "300yrs ago people killed each other with swords. The world hasn't changed. People always killed other people".
In both cases the scale has changed by many orders of magnitude
When "the press" publishes something, you know it's "the media", since you're reading it in the paper.
On Twitter, the message presents itself as coming from "regular people, like you and me".
What I mean is that maybe people may have some kind of skepticism when reading a paper, such as I they know that this paper has rather this kind of views whereas that other paper will have that other kind. And also, this was written by some journalist and approved by the paper's editor, so it could very well be a fringe opinion since only few people were implicated. We don't know that this opinion is shared by many people. Contrast this with Twitter, where it appears that "a lot of different people" seem to be holding this or that opinion. People who aren't overtly belonging to the same group or organization. Which means the opinion isn't just some random group making things up, there must actually be something to it.
I'm not saying this works every time and "despicable rumors or partisan rhetoric" in the press never worked. I'm sure they did. But I think it worked on fewer people, and in order for those rumors to take hold in society they would have to spread through the people, not through newspapers, which must have been slower at the time.
Or the newspapers would have to be very convincing in order to influence many people directly, just writing a 140 character blurb wouldn't have done it.
Given e.g. the propensity for politicians to emphasise their "salt of the land, common folk" attributes whilst hiding their gold-plated toilets, etc., I suspect it's not inconsequential.
Propaganda undermines trust and it is actually far easier now to identify untruthful and biased news compared to the past. So a regression would be costly.
In 2020, we no longer use the draft. What's our excuse for being so polarized?
Besides, it's not just an American phenomenon. 68/69 were full of upheaval in the West as the postwar culture clash came to a head.
You are missing an important point though: with machine learning, you can make sure all social media will be optimized naturally to put the maximum amount of people's hair on fire, all the time.
Outrage create clicks, replies, and with recommendations engines it's served to your eyeballs as often as possible.
Whatever manual interventions we had to make use of outrage before are like kids' play compared to the systems which automate this nowadays.
This is my annual reminder to anyone who thinks politics has become uncivilized that Aaron Burr (a founding father) killed Alexander Hamilton (another founding father). Makes twitter jabs seem quaint.
I think you need to cite evidence for that view. There's a long history of terrible violence based on manipulation of religious animosity that predates the Internet. The Reformation movement in Germany triggered religious conflicts--incited by various secular powers--that lasted around 130 years and did not burn out until the end of the 30 Years War. Something like half the population of Germany died in that conflict. [1] That's just one example.
For example there are far greater amount of information flowing through Instant Messenger that is not accounted for.
I have now come to the conclusion it wasn't Social Media or Internet that divided the world. They act as an amplifier or solidify the viewer views. Simply because they spent more time on these media than ever before. So in reality, Social Media isn't really to blame, but it is currently a good use for politicians and other Press to target.
My new question for myself is, Before the amplifier or solidifier comes in, How did one get their view in the first place? What shapes it?
The things that divide people are slow and many. The creep along slowly until at some point the differences are so great people believe those differences are worthy of death.
With social media, there are no signs of stopping, it’s an endless stream of addictive outrage and one sided opinion.
That in my view is what’s new and worse about it and it’s only likely to get more integrated with us.
Imagine when you have a brain implant like Elon and Co are working on ? You won’t even have the luxury to put your phone in your pocket.
The Vietnam-era "culture war" did not, however. It continued for quite some time. Just like the Civil Rights era and McCarthyism beore it, both of which came with their share of lynch mobs, and sometimes literal rather than metaphorical ones.
>That in my view is what’s new and worse about it and it’s only likely to get more integrated with us.
Absolutely we should work to reduce this kind of behavior, but it is in no way something "new". Dragging people on Twitter is a significant improvement from dragging them in front of Congress on national TV, which is an improvement from dragging them... behind cars.
The new part is that social media arguably accelerates it. One wacko trying to burn the witches in a village full of level heads couldn't accomplish anything. Now they can band together nationally.
Social Media is more of an accidental paper-clip-optimizer national encouragement.
> [dralley] The Vietnam-era "culture war" did not, however. It continued for quite some time.
Evidence (anecdotal) in support: Jane Fonda is STILL referred to as “Hanoi Jane”; I think I've seen it used even more recently than, e.g, [1]. This is from 1972, i.e. almost fifty years ago. OK, half that time the Internet has been available, and half of that in turn, “social media”. But for the first ~twenty-five years of that, they weren't.
[1]: https://time.com/5116479/jane-fonda-hanoi-jane-nickname/
Hmm, why I am still saying tweets about BLM being violent and is aiming to disrupt social stability? I am stilling seeing a lot of people dont believe Covid19, and they also call it China Virus, and some are even attacking Asian people.
I don't like the idea of conflating "bullying" and "criticism". They're very different things. Even harsh criticism isn't really the same thing as bullying in my mind (Although it can be a part of bullying).
This part of human life fascinates me, where one person may assume the other posted something to show how smart they were, but the person who posted actually did so because they had an aha moment in their head and felt so excited to share it. The differing, sometimes even opposite, perspective on the person's intention.
Perhaps a bit too generous but you're right, the statement didn't make alot of sense without that moderating context. I certainly would see what NumFOCUS did here as bullying.
Aren't you just buying into the clickbait/hype here and adding to it? How many people is it really? How many people take this as seriously as media stories make it sound?
I think you're assuming a very loud vocal minority represents the opinions of everyone.
The problem to me is a single digit number of people can have an opinion that they find something is offensive (which is always going to happen when enough people are looking at it), and the news + social media + internet comments magnify and compound this with stories like "you'll never believe what people want to cancel next!!!" and comments like "omg these people are so stupid I hate cancel culture!!!".
Also see:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
"According to the 1% rule, about 1% of Internet users are responsible for creating content, while 99% are merely consumers of that content. For example, for every person who posts on a forum, generally about 99 other people view that forum but do not post. "
Cancel culture has to stop.
Aren't there already laws about harassing people?
I think the news should be more responsible by not reporting that someone was offended by something unless it has serious objective merit because it just gets everyone riled up on non-issues for no good reason.
Aside from that, "cancel culture" feels quite a vague topic that would be hard to police in any way because you aren't talking about specific people or specific ideas.
A good, frustrating point. A large proportion of complaints of cancel culture are coupled with implications of frustration that they feel they can't say unpleasant things that they would have gotten away with previously. Or people complaining about direct efforts to change social norms that they don't agree with, claiming that due to a status quo bias, change is cancellation and therefore baseless.
As with most ideologies, discussing the definition is a fairly pointless task because its subjective and ill-defined, especially by those who feel passionately about it. The term is pointless. What happened in this case sounds bad, at a glance. Let's not generalize it to other things. It'll get nowhere. Whether or not one believes something is a part of cancel culture has no bearing on whether a particular idea to squash something is good or not.
Yeah, that's how I feel. Arguing or getting outraged about ill-defined things that can't be attributed to specific people doesn't seem productive because there's no way to resolve it or learn anything.
Some people exist that get offended by some things other people aren't offended by. So what?
It's just noise.
Maybe people are objecting to a tiny % of critical theorists trying to seize control of acceptable language with no mandate.
The problem with that tiny % is, that they are loud, and that we give them attention. And by we, i include everyone, from a reddit upvter to mainstream media.
It's 2020, milk is racist, rice is racist, syrup is racist,... and all that because of a few loud people powered by the media, grabbing views from the offended few and utraged many.
What I see is an ever-shifting goalpost of harmless aphorisms that are newly considered 'offensive' by a bunch of upper-class people. What does that do for George Floyd's family, exactly? Did it prevent Jacob Blake from being shot in the back a few months later?
If you want to embrace critical theory, you should include the critical theorists in the analysis -- what's their power incentive? What do they stand to gain? Let's not just assume they're saints but everyone else needs an inquisition.
You have your usual bucket of nutcases, who get offended by everything, and everything is sexist (airconditioning), racist (milk) or *-phobic.
But then you have cases, where a mere accusation of anything even without proof) can destroy peoples lives, eg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case
You also have (somewhat) mainstream media spreading such fake news:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus
You also have individuals, eg. Johnny Depp getting acused by Amber Heard, losing his upcoming acting roles, and after a time (and 87 cctv videos), she's found to be the crazy/violent one.
You have people like Pewdiepie getting accused of being a racist many times:
https://www.vox.com/2018/12/13/18136253/pewdiepie-vs-tseries...
Pewdiepie has a special 'power', that he gets more views than Vox does, so he can atleast present his side of the story ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjCsOmDmjEU ).
Some people don't have that media presence, but the media atleast scewed up enough, so they're no settling multimillion dollar lawsuits (Nick Sandmann, the 'smirking guy').
Now imagine, you're not a famous person, and you're not in a position of being able to sue CNN. Just one mere accusation (whout proof, without anything), can totally destroy your life, and you have no way to fight back. No police report, no judge, no jury, just one "he said, she said", one complaint, and there's nothing you can do... you lose your job, maybe even your carreer, you might get thrown out of your college, or worse. The accuser can lie to the media, say you said something -ist, or -phobic, and there's literally nothing you can do.
Now combine the "nutcases" with accusations, and your code using master/slave terminology is racist (as a slav, i have no idea why 'slave' is considered racist), boy/girl in character selection screen and never after is transphobic, and i have no idea what "not implementing all the pronouns" is.
Now, we have two options... either we become sensitive to everytihing, and destroy normal human relations and comedy (although, we've gone most of the way there, because of so many protected groups and actions, not allowed to be joked about, the only group you can target your jokes at are white men (with movies like 40 days and 40 nights, where a rape of a man is a comedic high point, and many other examples)), or we can just grow up, not get offended by something someone somewhere said or did (especially if it was a joke), and not "cancel" people because of that.
In addition to all of the things you're pointing out, there's also people genuinely trying to change things for the better with good reasoning.
> Now, we have two options... either we become sensitive to everytihing, and destroy normal human relations and comedy (although, we've gone most of the way there, because of so many protected groups and actions, not allowed to be joked about, the only group you can target your jokes at are white men (with movies like 40 days and 40 nights, where a rape of a man is a comedic high point, and many other examples)), or we can just grow up, not get offended by something someone somewhere said or did (especially if it was a joke), and not "cancel" people because of that.
No, it's really fine for us to say that certain things are not acceptable. It's ok to make fun of something. It's generally not ok to joke that, say, a race is intrinsically inferior to another, or that women are sexual objects, or that white dudes are just there to earn money or whatever antagonism floats your boat. It's shouldn't be illegal to make such jokes, but it should be shamed out of the mainstream.
You being triggered by other people being triggered is the height of irony.
I support all jokes, if they're funny (if not, nobody is going to watch that comedian, and the market will regulate itself). You say that we should shame the jokes you personally don't like out of the mainstream, but leave the ones you don't mind. "you slav you lose" is a joke.... slavs are also always shown as stereotypical people in tracksuits, drunk and killing people... mostly eachother... and yes, i know it's a stereotype, but as a slav, it's not far from truth (we're looking at caricatures here), and videos on youtube joking out of that are well.. funny (to me personally, and the like/dislike ratio shows that others find them funny too). Should we shame those jokes? Should we shame people laughing at those jokes? Should we shame slavs laughing at funny stereotipical representatives of our own people? Now replace slavs with some other group of people, and you get called a bunch of "-ist"s, "anti-"s, etc.
So, we either kill comedy for all ( https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/70390/a_politically... ), or we let people joke out of everything and not be sensitive about it (this is the option i prefer... especially since we live in a time, where just showing a picture of a religious figure can get you beheaded in france).
According to the media, Damore called women "neurotic" and said they were "biologically unfit to be software engineers". Nothing close whatsoever to what was actually said (1).
Meanwhile there are university professors willing to defend the memo (2). For example, "For what it’s worth, I think that almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate. Moreover, they are stated quite carefully and dispassionately. Its key claims about sex differences are especially well-supported by large volumes of research across species, cultures, and history." (Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychology professor at University of New Mexico)
(1) https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
(2) https://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists...
I mean, I think Bill Cosby has been cancelled. Colin Kaepernick was for kneeling. And the lady who called the police on the black man in central park. Some of those may be unjustified. Is this really the biggest problem in society?
He put on a performance that turned out was racist or sexist or something. Think les miserable - we were always doing stuff like that, so the stories were very varied.
Bam, he was gone. Even the students in the group that should have been offended were like, he's great. But there was a very very vocal very small set of more activist parents (white BTW!) with one or two students who were after him. Reminds me of the (white again) liberals in Portland or Seattle going after the police chief to cut her pay etc (black women).
I was like, who cares what two parents and their kids think. But they got in the paper talking about the racist (I think?) environment he created / messages being sent / cultural appropriation etc. This is theatre - people dress up as different characters so no question an identity politics issue was there most likely.
And yes - he was gone the next year after something like 12 years of building up this amazing program. His performances were sold out for multiple showings (literally everyone in school, every parent, every relative, randos went). The shows were major. All the context was overlooked (this guy was so formal he was never crude / rude or insulting). He'd spent all these extra hours doing all these things to bring different groups together - through music and more (he was an immigrant).
Two to three people, a scared / sensitive admin team, and boom, thousands of folks the worse for his going.
Everyone is worse for this. A lot of the categories of offense are extremely broad or very subtle and penalties are very severe.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/us/usc-chinese-professor-raci...
SDG&E Worker Fired Over Alleged Racist Gesture Says He Was Cracking Knuckles
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
Professors mobbed, stripped of teaching positions and residential life functions after suggesting students should establish their own social norms rather than having them enforced by administration
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-per...
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/08/professor-sus...
I wonder how true this is now? Even if we don't count social media as "content" (and some of it certainly is) most web content is participatory in some way and I'd wager a decent percentage of web users (if not internet users) are now contributing.
Political correctness is killing this country, inside out.
The media and big-tech are now the big brothers. The network did not bring people together, it drove us apart.
Even this post will be downvoted, because it does not sound "kind and nice", because it complained about big-media-tech's censorship, thus it must be censored at HN
And HN is pretty friendly to discussion of big-media-tech censorship in general. It's when a post veers too far into conspiracy or persecution territory that downvotes flow in.
I must say I am too curious not to ask, this quite cryptic. What would you say is driving us apart?
People write paragraphs, someone takes an issue with a word or a sentence, and writes a divergent post on just that word/sentence. Then that post gets the same treatment by another participant.. again and again, in multiplying ways. Take a submission 3 threads removed from the originating post and see what relation exists among the ideas. I lurk and observe this in online discourse with some bemusement.
It’s not how to speak at work or with friends. There are convergent and divergent modes of discourse, to be sure, but look here at HN, or Twitter, and see how the dialogue cuts on words and sentences. It’s the divergent discourse without any of the convergent discourse.
That said, one surprisingly important influence seems to be the rise of image posts + eternal scrolling. It's the ideal method for delivering a continuous stream of entertaining "the other side is bad" outrage content.
As long as you blame the "correct" people. You can blame politicians, rich executives, Russia, China and you will be lauded here.
You blame the hypocrisy of certain social movements, FAANG employees, Nordic countries, in general anything that can impact the POV of the average HN user and you will be downvoted swiftly. Most websites, this included, do not work to amplify the spectrum of opinions presented but to concentrate it in a tiny, fiercely regulated window. In that sense, old forums, usenet and even the daily mail comment section were more egalitarian.
What is destroying society is anger, emotion, and tribalism. Our best hope of saving it is deliberation, consideration, and the dreary slog of rational understanding debate. Strong views expressed dispassionately and all that.
There is a time and a place to coddle people. There is _also_ a time and a place for people's whose ideas are garbage to be declared as such and thrown into the bin.
There was a time when people could discuss ideas without having those ideas be internalized within an individual. It is entire possible to attack an idea or way of thinking to break it down and see how it works without involving a single person.
If you want to have constructive dialog about these kinds of things, people being "offended" will only shut down conversation instead of fostering it. Thicken up your skin, decouple yourself from these ideas, and talk about them like adults.
Individual people and groups of people get to decide for themselves what these times and places are, even if you think their decisions are wrong. It seems odd to demand this be done to your liking in the interests of 'adulthood'.
Being able to whip a Twitter frenzy of many thousands of people into a scarlet-letter stamping mob doesn't sound very "weak" to me. At the end of the day, what this really is is a power struggle, and understanding why many feel the need to engage so passionately in this power struggle will get you closer to the heart of the issue IMO.
As someone who was bullied growing up, when I discovered that I could ignore those people, it was a powerful moment in my life. I suddenly had total control over them because they couldn't control me. My ability to ignore them and to not respond to them in kind was a new kind of power. They couldn't get what they wanted, so they eventually found new people to mess with.
When we lash out at people, when we "whip up a Twitter frenzy", that is not resilience or strength. That is being blown around by whatever wind happens to be hitting you at the time. When your self-worth or mental state can be disrupted by someone who said something that offends you, then you will perpetually be the victim and the only way you "win" is when others do exactly like you want them to do whenever you are around. That's not strength—that's manipulation.
It takes a level of maturity that most people never reach to handle real diversity of opinions. This is why universities used to be small places with only highly interested intellectuals trained to handle that diversity. And even they weren't great at it. Modern universities are a joke, and they are better than most organizations.
Which time period, and where? Universities used to be more exclusive, but I somehow doubt that exclusivity was for "intellectuals trained to handle that diversity" and not just "well-connected people".
I see it as pretty similar to how some people see removal of spanking your kids as being coddling, versus making sure your kids are wearing pads when they're learning to rollerblade, versus wearing a helmet everywhere.
I used to obsess about things like this and then someone pointed out to me, "You'll never, ever get it right. You will word something some way, attempting to be gentle, and they will still be offended. You will NEVER win. So the only thing you can do is be sincere, without intention to harm, and you can sleep soundly knowing that how someone CHOSE to receive what you said is their own business, not yours."
Obviously we have a responsibility for the message we send. But how it is ultimately received is not up to us, and attempts to micro-manage language, like the above, will never result in the intended outcome.
Another thing that I am not a fan of is when people ask to always mention that it's only one's opinion.
Well duh, unless obviously supported by verifiable evidence, it is only my opinion. In my opinion!
Well I mean yes, it has... but we're discussing it because we're considering the option that maybe there's another way, right?
Same with "it's just an opinion". Well, yes, that's kinda the point. Let's discuss the idea, not where in my head it came from.
You're correct that ultimately, I'm not responsible for how someone takes things that I say when I'm being sincere... but I'm still one of the people that lives with the outcome. Might as well try for positives.
Personally? I do get pretty solid results with these kinds of micro-adjustments. Or, rather, since these are toy examples, what these kinds of micro-adjustments do when they're applied in larger situations. One mechanism for this is that I'm making an internal choice in how I'm thinking and framing something in my own mind, and that "vibe" impacts body language, conversational flow, attentiveness, how I understand and receive what they're saying, etc.
I find that the starkest and simplest is whether I start sentences with "I", "you", or neither. Flat statements have one impact. You don't sound like you've had much experience with these variations and their impacts. Am I putting the conversational pivot in myself, in your self, or between/outside of us? How do you find yourself responding to the various options?
Lol... I have had tons. In more than one language. My point was, that despite your best efforts, you will still offend someone eventually and that that's the point at which you can't take responsibility for how they feel.
For a time I did competitive speech and one of the precepts I operated on (and still do to this day) is "know your audience". It's always beneficial to frame your message to the intended recipients.
But what happens when an unintended recipient receives it?
Or, due to local differences (and this specifically happened to me), the use of a word was received differently than you intended - than it was elsewhere in the same language?
There's only so much control you have. Thus, what you truly control is your intentions, and people must make an effort to expect you are acting in good faith. So much of good communication simply comes down to that simple point. An expectation of good faith.
I expect that in the modern world this is where much of the breakdown in communication is coming from, really: everyone seems to be expecting "HAHA GOTCHA!" rather than a good faith conversation, and more worryingly, are more recently probably right.
"[when] there's an assumption of competency, the faults born of ignorance are seen as faults born of malice."
And/or what's being sought is conflict, not conversation.
> Lol... I have had tons.
Yeah ;) Notice that that paragraph has an "I"-statement, a "You"-statement, and a neither?
In a nutshell, several generations of American children were taught, systematically, to ignore social signals that conflicted with their self-image, and were thus deprived of a very critical part of their childhood: in where they learn to moderate their behavior in order to get along with other people.
Self-esteem education was based on the (correct!) observation that people with high self-esteem are healthier and more successful.
Given my extensive experience with educators, I am not in any way surprised that the conclusion they reached was that high self-esteem must cause health and success, rather than health and success resulting in high self-esteem. Educators seem to have this anti-Newtonian view on the world, in which reactions cause actions. But I digress.
I was subjected to this as a child, and it took something on the order of a decade of living abroad -- mostly in Japan, a country which, lacking any concept of "self", offers no affordance for "self-esteem" -- to fully realize the sheer horror of what I had been steeped in as a child.
As to why this has come to a head since the advent of social media, well, we're at the point where an entire generation which socializes primarily through virtual means has come of age.
When your social interactions are driven by proximity -- e.g., you are limited to people that physically exist near you -- then you are forced to learn some degree of moderation. Because if you can't get along with others, you find yourself rather in deficit of friends.
But now, it doesn't matter how crazy you are. If you worship Mao or Hitler or Stalin or whatever, there is a community for people like you.
No amount of ostracism will remedy this. That worked when your ability to make friendships had real, physical constraints. In the fully-connected schizophrenic hivemind world of 2020, casting people out of your tribe will, at best, only deprive them of a moderating influence.
Still not sure where this goes, but I am fairly certain it's got at least thirty-one flavors of ugly.
Self esteem devoid of any underlying achievement is hollow. In the end you're basically manufacturing narcissists, with a fragile falsely inflated self image covering a chasm of insecurity.
Precisely.
At the same time, I think that social connections divorced from physical reality -- as is on the Internet -- compound this to the nth degree.
I can pretend to be an amazing dancer or boxer or chef on Facebook, but it's a very different thing when I need to demonstrate those skills as part of a community that actually Does That Thing.
To provide an example, I recall a few years back, at a dance social, meeting some kid from the Air Force that was an excellent case-study. He showed up, started dancing with partners, and it was obvious from the first (music) sentence in the first song that he simply did not know how to dance.
At all.
Like, when experienced dancers come from other styles, you can tell that they know how to dance. Maybe not this specific style, but they've got fundamentals. Ballerinas are particularly graceful, Latin dancers have a really specific flavor, ballroom people have really great structure, etc.
This dude was not a dancer.
Now, this is okay! The first rule of social dancing is that you want to welcome new dancers. But he was rude to every person that tried to help him out with picking up the basics, insisting that he was already a great dancer and that he didn't need the help.
Falsely inflated self-image, meet room full of follows that aren't interested in having their feet crushed.
Don't know what happened to him after that, but imagine if his bubble had never faced critique -- and this was from a community that bent over backwards to be nice to newcomers.
Like, is your mom or grandma a good cook? How many Michelin stars would her kitchen get? :)
Not saying this person wasn't a prick, just that dancing is hard to get an idea of how good you are at without already accepting that you suck at it while being repeatedly told how you are a good dancer (and if you are simply willing to let go on a dance floor as a male, you were likely to be termed a good dancer in my youth).
Can confirm. My strategy for single dancing was quite literally "do arbitrarily chosen motions in rhythm to the music with a straight face", and even when I chose motions I thought were silly (like pantomiming scooping ingredients into a bowl and stirring them), I never got the impression that anyone thought it was silly, and I started getting lots of people telling me that I'm a good or even a really good dancer.
My experience is that, if you move a lot, do it with an approximately correct rhythm, and do it with energy and enthusiasm, and you don't actually bump into people or fall over, then people will be pleased. It is possible that I've developed actual skill, but I think the above is most of it.
It does not translate into being good at dancing with a partner, except by implying basic proficiency with movement and rhythm.
The second rule (which, really, overlaps a lot with the first rule) of social dancing is that you don’t, ever, offer unsolicited coaching in the context of social dance. And part of that is because almost no one is in the mental place in that context to take it well.
I suppose you could use "whether someone attended the 'lesson' period" as a sign of whether they will take coaching well.
For starters, the "movement" is definitely aware of your dichotomy. The terms of art are contingent and non-contingent. It considers contingent self-esteem to be fragile because real lives contain setbacks. Its position is basically Stoicism: prefer an inner well-being, unperturbed by circumstances. Don't get overwhelmed by the ups and downs. It also contains echoes of Christianity: inherent dignity of all life, unconditional acceptance and love of all God's creatures.
Narcissism is in your relationship to how people perceive you... that would be squarely in the "contingent" category.
We might argue that of course a highly successful person feels inadequate; if he could be satisfied at all he would have been satisfied many achievements ago, and stopped there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-esteem#Contingent_vs._non...
Let me throw out the possibility that what the psychologists are saying, and the nth-hand version that teachers pick up and teach to the kids, may differ on key details. I don't think it's even rare for high-minded ideas to be garbled by the time they trickle down into classrooms. Feynman had amusing/dismaying stories about what made it into science textbooks, for example (and textbooks are theoretically written by the experts): https://rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html
The psychology and underlaying theory looks sound, and is indeed very aligned with the Stoic approach. Problem is that the classroom implementation ended up almost a full 180 degrees out of phase.
The discussion of narcissism on that page is a bit different to the one I'd been working with (which was based on a lot of reading about cluster-B personality disorders including Narcissistic Personality Disorder) which might explain the discrepancy. But then, I'm not a professional so I'm happy to be corrected. (Edit: Of course as a professional I'm even more happy to be corrected, that's how you become less wrong!)
Edit: I was basing my understanding of "what psychologists are actually saying" on a bunch of kids books we have which have a page at the back written by psychologists (I haven't checked their credentials) which lines up with my 'unfounded optimism' definition of 'good self esteem'. I know there are other interpretations once you get to legitimate psychology and stoicism actually seems fairly effective.
It is sad what happened to you, and/but these are two different things.
Bullying is being applied but a mindless person/group who don't understand what-is-what and are just being mean because they don't know better/they haven't been taught better. Kinda like a kid acting like an ass, just because its parents/teachers never taught them better.
Criticism is a process applied by people with knowledge on the matter that are trying to improve you/something (like a parent who will criticize/assess/judge the actions of their kids to make them become better/greater humans)(great in the meaning of greatness/richness/betterment, not Alexander the 'Great').
I realize there are exceptions. I think "Social Media" is what would happen if we gave every dog on the planet a microphone to bark at every other dog in the world. It would quickly devolve into constant and senseless barking. This is what its come to.
There's a reason we (the tech community) used to be and generally do lean libertarian. It's because we had to think ahead as we program, develop, we used to be innovators. We had to accepted people like Richard Stallman or Steve Jobs for that matter, because despite their faults, they contributed and drove things to a new level.
There may have been more of a "frat" style attitude, maybe. But from my experience the "old guard" was more nerds who didn't know how to communicate well. Often this was off putting, there were inappropriate jokes, etc. That definitely needed to be redressed.
HOWEVER, the solution has been not been merely education and punishing those who are abusive, but a propaganda and indoctrination campaign. I've witnessed men being forced to apologize to an audience of their peers, literally saying "I am sorry for being a white male of privilege." I've seen this at University and now it's coming to corporations.
I've been in meeting and trainings where I've been ordered to only target minorities during hiring. When asked, "why are we not recruiting from the ACM or IEEE clubs?" I was told, diversity is a more important target, everyone graduating will have roughly the same skill level anyway. These are the now corporate entities running NumFOCUS.
The reality is now everyone wants a "safe space". Which is not a "safe space" for discussion, but a "safe space" from feeling uncomfortable.
Today, we're more concerned about the petty politics than building a future. For looking the most "diverse" or "inclusive". The sacrifice has been a robust society or organization. We can't have differing opinions without being excommunicated.
I'm done being silent.
I want to build a future I'm proud of and this isn't it.
I wrote about it in my blog post titled "On Committing Suicide"[1], titled as such because saying any of this can get me fired. It can get me banned on social media. It's eventually going to kill the United States. In the words of John Adams,
> Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty. When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never. - John Adams, 2nd President of the United States
Just wanted to be positive in a thread where there seems to be lots of negative.
Give it a go!
Surely though, you recognize that this statement (and most of the rest of your comment) is perhaps a little ironic?
> We're literally tearing ourselves apart ... Anyone can be an enemy or dislike you ... Everyone is so hostile and eager to end other people.
* Civil rights era * McCarthyism * Vietnam-era culture wars
None of this is anything particularly new
My writing style and sharp criticisms of damn near everything hasn’t changed much, except perhaps knowing I’m going to be downvoted makes my wording more bitter. I suspect it is the HN crowd which has changed, and has an axe to grind. I will not be allowed to hold certain opinions anymore without being punished.
A lot of us go to places like HN, Ars, TechCrunch because they’re something of a refuge from intractable boring political dilemmas. Solving technical problems, old war stories, discussing software and language features, sharing historical curiosities: those sorts of things earn karma.
That’s not to say politics is unwelcome here, but these threads make it so much easier to accidentally offend another. I’m highly involved in a US political party, but I rarely bring it up here because it’s unproductive. That said, go vote!
Fwiw my most upvoted comments are typically my lowest effort comments. Typically either low effort "me too" type confirmations or sarcastic quips that happened to be in favor of whoever was browsing the thread. [What I beleive to be] my more productive, thoughtful, on topic comments tend to mostly get ignored. This has been the case everytime I've tried to use this site. I beleive the the best way to get karma is a mix of proper timing / estimating what the popular opinion / point / etc. will be in a given thread. There are also certain topics and subjects that no matter how well you approach them will typically get you trashed.
I think people have a tendency to confuse productive comments with long comments, which isn't helpful either. I find I am most convincing to other people when I speak three to five sentences. If people truly wanted the essay format, they would have actually read the OP!
The moods and necessity for sugar coating everything has only gotten worse - exponentially so, if you ask me - in the last decade.
Karma is a reflection of that. I don't care about fake internet points.
This kind of comment was not surprising to find in your history's first page.
Did you have something of substance to add?
> Code of Conducts can be a useful tool, when thoughtfully created and thoughtfully enforced, to address sexism, racism, and harassment, all of which have been problems at tech conferences. Given the diversity issues in the tech industry, it is important that we continue the work of making conferences more inclusive, particularly to those from marginalized backgrounds
> In particular, I was concerned that if only partial information became available, the anti-CoC crowd might jump on this as an example of problems with codes of conduct more generally, or might point at this as part of “cancel culture” (a concept I vehemently disagree with, since what is referred to as “cancellation” is often just “facing consequences”)
You wouldn't advocate scrapping the entire criminal justice system, just because one innocent person was convicted. A little more nuance is useful here as well.
Every community has its set of guidelines, either explicit of implicit, intended to foster the community's purpose. If I go to my neighbor's party and behave like a jerk, and insult the other guests, there's a very good chance that I won't be invited back. If I start posting "dank memes" continuously on HN, I'm eventually going to find myself banned. As the author himself said, what is referred to as “cancellation” is often just “facing consequences”.
In this case, I have no idea why the committee came down hard on the author. I saw the relevant portions of his talk, and didn't hear anything rude or objectionable. I think the committee got it wrong in this instance, but that doesn't mean everyone in future should be allowed to be a jerk, and not face any consequences.
I've seen positive outcomes from the criminal justice system. I have literally never seen a CoC lead to a better dispute-handling process than the absence of a CoC.
> Every community has its set of guidelines, either explicit of implicit, intended to foster the community's purpose. If I go to my neighbor's party and behave like a jerk, and insult the other guests, there's a very good chance that I won't be invited back.
Sure - but it will be clear who's responsible for that decision. Most likely someone will tell you to your face what you did wrong and give you a chance to defend yourself.
> In this case, I have no idea why the committee came down hard on the author. I saw the relevant portions of his talk, and didn't hear anything rude or objectionable. I think the committee got it wrong in this instance, but that doesn't mean everyone in future should be allowed to be a jerk, and not face any consequences.
You don't need a CoC to exclude jerks. You need a moderator (not a committee; a clearly accountable individual, who will bear ultimate responsibility even for those parts of the job that they delegate) who will apply good judgement in a visible way. Not only must justice be done; it must also be seen to be done.
Based on what I've seen of them in action a CoC is not only useless, it should be a red flag that the organisers have not thought seriously about their dispute resolution process.
while that's very evident in this case this is actually what CoCs or written rules in general are for. Of course when you don't have a committee or a CoC however is in charge can still treat people arbitrarily, in fact much more so than when you actually have agreed on conduct and have a process to resolve things.
There's a good piece called the Tyranny of Structurelessness about radical feminist movements, where wanting to ditch all formal rules actually lead to even worse informal treatment, because officially leaders don't even exist, so there's nobody to blame.
You can look at this case also another way, at least there is an actual committee the author can blame and a CoC that he can argue he wasn't treated fairly by.
> There's a good piece called the Tyranny of Structurelessness about radical feminist movements, where wanting to ditch all formal rules actually lead to even worse informal treatment, because officially leaders don't even exist, so there's nobody to blame.
I actually think it's the opposite: codes and committees make the structurelessness worse. The code creates the illusion that the rules are impartial and their application is a detail. The (usually secret) committee diffuses responsibility so that no-one's actually accountable for their decisions. It gives the veneer of process and objectivity when actually there's nothing of the sort.
Formalising the process - who makes the decisions, on what grounds, with what oversight - is important. Formalising the code without a good process is putting the cart before the horse.
That's from 1970: "The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do something more specific. At this point they usually foundered because most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed their tasks."
That's not just a problem with feminist groups. It's made other protest groups ineffective. Most notably, Occupy Wall Street. They got national attention, but then had no process for deciding what they wanted and pushing for it. The Portland protestors ran into that, too.
"Rules for Radicals", by Saul Alinsky: RULE 11: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”
Black Lives Matter is hitting this now. This is the agenda of Black Lives Matter.[1] "Page Not Found". The "Toolkit for Social Media", though, is available. The result has been way too much focus on PR, statues, and renaming stuff. Not enough about how to stop cops from killing people. (There's a straightforward solution: have the FBI investigate all killings by cops, immediately. There are about 1000 a year. The FBI has the authority to do this under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but does so only about once a year. They usually wait until the local authorities haven't done much, and by then the case is cold. Requiring an investigation by an outside agency is a basic first step. This doesn't require new legislation; that battle was won over half a century ago. So that's something to push for.)
What goes wrong when your group doesn't focus is that eventually you either fail, or end up with a Strong Leader, which creates the usual problems. These are the usual failure modes of revolutions.
Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation LLC, the organization you link, isn't the central organization of the movement, and certainly isn't the central policy organization of the movement. That's the Movement For Black Lives (M4BL). Here's their platform page: https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/
[1] https://breatheact.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/The-BREATH...
Yes, actually, I WOULD. At the very least, I would consider whether that system needs deep structural reform to prevent it from happening again.
Punishing someone wrongly is one of the absolute worst offenses a group can make against an individual.
It is the worst form of failure of a justice system. But in case of COC I would need to compare the previous situation, which was more peaceful and tolerant with fewer casualties.
Sure, but following Blackstone's ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio if one innocent person is convicted we should probably look at if things need changing.
on edit: I see a couple others made the same point.
The entire western criminal justice system is FOUNDED on the idea that it should let guilty go free if that avoids convicting the innocent. Criminal justice system which convicts innocent people is by its own foundational definition something that needs to be scrapped and reworked.
IIRC Linus had a public mea culpa and took some time off to reflect on his communication style.
What does this particular incident have to do with social media? This was a presentation at a conference, and the "canceling" was convicting the presenter of a Code of Conduct violation on what look like egregiously inadequate grounds. They didn't block his Twitter feed or spam his Facebook page.
"Bullying" usually refers to actual criminal activities by children. Such as stealing objects, harassing, hitting, beating etc. Which happened to me.
Criticism is something completely different.
That has NEVER happened before and is clearly a tragedy of epic proportions.
>Everyone is so hostile and eager to end other people.
Couple centuries ago disagreement could easily end up as a duel resulting in a death and losing a political fight may have had more severe consequences than just losing an elected office. These days usually only ego is damaged. And even that - in the current environment criticism is equaled with harassment (so egos are safe and happily growing large and larger...) Thus as a result in particular proliferation of alternative facts, etc. Kind of multiverse of quantum mechanics.
It still is.
The working class footsoldiers aren't engaging in debates/arguments/discussions, they are being deployed as weapons, largely of intimidation, whose purpose isn't to convince others of what is true or right to believe, but what is safe to express. They may be relaying slogans, but its not about debate or discussion, and there is essentially no engagement.
how's skin color relevant here?
Pro tip: If you can't figure out that Jeremy freaking Howard is a good person that you are lucky to have around, the problem is you.
For my own project I was considering to include a code of conduct. But currently decided against it because I do not think the purpose of a code of conduct should be written down as potential punishments as consequences.
A lot of people have a variety of backgrounds, a variety of perspectives and values that thet have been taught. If someone isn't even aware of what they did to offend another member, how is that someone supposed to learn from it if they are just punished for it?
I want to create a culture of welcoming, and a safe space for everyone. Not a dystopian regime that punishes first and acknowledges their mistakes later. We've got a broken justice system already, and I think it is built in the opposite manner of what we're trying to achieve.
If you punish and exclude as consequences, the logical conclusion is alienation and isolation.
The cause, frankly, comes from severe psychological trauma that breaks sensible thinking [1]. But, it's no excuse.
The solution? I believe it requires making people more moral, thus making them more just. How to do that is, effectively, something I believe is beyond the scope of my understanding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice https://savethekidsgroup.org/defining-transformative-justice...
I believe that it would be a good thing if you could write it down, but you can't, or you'll spend your time writing down what is and isn't allowed. What's bad about the CoCs of today is that they are vague and are built for selective enforcement. There's no definition of "kind" that includes "don't say other people are wrong", but the people who love to wield power will simply read into it whatever they please and hang you with it. At the same time, they will say that much worse acts aren't "unkind" because the target deserved it.
Don't do a CoC, just kick out people who are actually assholes. You don't need a CoC to do that, and somebody who is an asshole won't stop being an asshole because you've written that they can't contribute if they are.
I consider CoCs harmful and they're a negative indicator for projects to me. Not because I'm not kind, but because it hints that the maintainers are easily swayed by outside forces and will bend to pressure.
I will cancel any service that protects or promotes xenophobic views. If history has teach anything is that "tearing ourselves apart" damages everybody in society. If your company promotes xenophobia, if your company promotes behaviors of users that damage society, I will stop paying for your services and look for an alternative.
To denounce fair criticism as "Cancel culture" misses the point. I do not need to pay for your private company service if I disagree with your views.
The moral think to do, the right thing to do, is to not fund the people that seeking to increase economic profits are tearing our society apart.
> diversity of opinions
What make your country great is the diversity of cultures and people. And that is what many are attacking, believing that only "one culture", "one religion" should be allowed in the USA. My money should not go to fund that ideology, you may have your opinion, but I do not have to pay to spread it.
"I didn't think the leopard would eat my face".
Jeremy seems like a very kind, passionate, driven, smart guy. Unfortunately I think his innate kindness and sense that people should follow the rules has failed him here. CoCs are so often wielded in this way that I'm honestly surprised that anyone believes that they'll be used otherwise.
Nothing got fixed. Everyone walks away angry. It would have been a lot simpler to ask the author to tone it down a bit next time.
Or not. Unless you're personally attacking someone, a spirited debate/talk/opinion should be welcomed. We shouldn't tone it down unless it's venturing into ad hominem territory.
"I attack ideas, I don't attack people - and some very good people have some very bad ideas." -- Antonin Scalia
We should be thicker skinned and not so g-damned fragile that a tech talk leads to an apparent need to "recover." I would never tolerate someone making fun of a person or attacking their humanity/personality -- however, ideas should be fair game, assuming the "attack" is supported by a robust argument. If someone disagrees with an idea, there shouldn't be a ballroom of eggshells one must navigate in order to disagree.
It's not even "I violated the Code of Conduct, so I got banned from the conference", we didn't even get that far because just communicating the "I violated the Code of Conduct" part was already a debacle.
The post isn't about being cancelled, it's about an awful experience that caused the OP to burn out on conferences, to put it mildly.
Not even in the worst straw-person SJW interpretation of CoCs would this be the intended outcome.
Why do you say that? I absolutely think this is intended by some of the people involved.
Any political movement that is trying to gain power by creating taboos needs high profile examples to scare people into following their agenda. Incidents like these therefore become something to brag about.
It is a basic power play. No different than having a new leader in an organization singling out someone trusted by the previous leadership to target. Which forces the rest of the organization to choose sides, and thereby cements the power of the new leader.
You might not know exactly what you have to do to succeed, but you will be certain that failing to hit any checklist item on the SJW agenda is going to get you into trouble. And therefore you have a good reason to proactively try to meet that agenda.
I _do_ hope you reconsider on barring your speaking engagements however. Bad gigs will happen. But you are stronger than that. =)
I've stopped contributing to projects that enforce a CoC, these days I just write exploits for them.
Finding and reporting security flaws means I don't have to worry about offending people because its purely code. There is no debate if an exploit works when its working right in front of you. Either it gets fixed or it doesn't.
I have below average interpersonal skills, I have been told that I offend people without trying, this was never my intent. This is a method where I can focus on the purely technical and not have to worry about the 'Conduct' side of the problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dNbWGaaxWM (more relevant parts to the article begin from ~5:00, but it's worth watching everything)
I know Slavoj is a polarizing figure, but somehow that video nailed it for me, and IMHO it fits the article.
From my point of view I find it extremely ridiculous that this "cancelling" was decided without the supposed victim's involvement by some third party:
> Joel (who I greatly respect, and consider an asset to the data science community) was not involved in NumFOCUS’s action, was not told about it, and did not support it.
Actual case from a Silicon Valley company: person X admiringly notes that a transgender fashion model (shown in a picture in a news article, not employed at the company or otherwise involved in any way) passes so well that she looks like a "real woman". Person Y, who is not transgender, takes this to imply that transgender women are not "real women" and reports the remark to HR, and X is very nearly fired as a result.
The far right will tell you about their intolerance to your face, the individualistic version of intolerance. Like an asshole neighbor. The far left will make endless laws and rules, using the power of group norms to attack you. Like a shitty HOA.
Both I find insufferable. I wish US politics would turn back towards the center. I blame social media AI bubbles for segregating everyone into their own world where there's nobody with an opposite opinion to temper absolutism
This happens by design. The whole idea of wokeness is to feign victimhood, use it to usurp power by appealing to people’s emotions and bypassing reason, then strike back in an arbitrary ways to feel powerful, humiliate your “opponent”, and strike fear in observers/bystanders, further consolidating your power.
Wokeness is intellectual cancer. Power-tripping, virtue-signalling, bullying cancer. It must be fought back!
In a post decrying the consequences of his actions, the author condemns those who criticise the same.
Cancel culture is specifically about “cancelling” people over completely asinine comments regardless of whether anyone was actually offended.
I don’t understand why the author defends the principals by which he was abused. You’d think he’d see some fundamental flaw in there.
Somehow most of my generation has been taught that their feelings must be protected at all costs. In 20 more years this generation will be senior lawmakers and we will be sending people to prison or worse for "transgressions" like OP's.
This is embarrassing. I can empathize with the arguments against lockdown because it can affect economy. But masking? The barrier of entry is so low. It's not hard to wear a mask. The cost is so low.
Sometimes people have power over you that you can't just ignore, but more often than we realize they simply don't beyond what we create by not walking when they don't treat us with respect.
https://github.com/gnab/remark/pull/398#issuecomment-2693399...
When people see some things as good, other things become bad.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
[0]: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-cruel-moraliser-uses-a-halo-t...
This is an amazing example of cognitive dissonance. The guy gets cancelled for basically nothing by a self appointed jury, which is exactly what is referred to when talking about cancel culture, and will still disagree about the concept. Maybe he thinks he's the only one being wrongly accused? Or maybe he considers himself "facing consequences" too?
I think this is (part of) why many people are against CoCs. They are a tool that good leadership can use to be better, but a tool that bad leadership does use to be worse.
I do agree Codes of Conduct are a tool like any other, but it's a tool that I've personally seen being misused so many times, it admittedly starts raising red flags. And if there's something human beings excel at, it's in finding patterns, no matter if they're poorly justified or not.
Subconsciously, I'm already avoiding contributing directly to projects with strict CoCs, and it's a bit painful when I do realize it, even if I've never willingly (or unwillingly, by virtue of keeping most communication with maintainers short, polite, straight to the point and erring on the side of caution) broken any.
It's a tool for communicating expectations of behavior. There's nothing wrong about managing expectations. Think of it as the next level "no shoes, no shirt, no service".
Unfortunately, tools can be abused, and this case was no exception. It doesn't mean that the tool should be discarded, it should be refined.
This requires a fashion sense that keeps 100% of people happy enough not to report you.
Interesting. I didn't see that example in the article -- could you cite such an example or are you just making something up?
You just have to be offensive to "any single person" to trigger the "no service" condition.
The trick is to have that threshold be at a "reasonable" level. That's tricky and has room for error, but it doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
Note that my original response was to this statement: "As I see it, a CoC is a tool for those in power to better exert their influence and control."
We need guidelines for group activities, and they need to evolve as we learn more about the world, and framing this as a tool for power tripping is "the elites".
From the article, it appears that the "rules" were not well communicated and/or were poorly enforced. Blaming it on having a CoC vs. a person making poor choices is what I'm pushing back against.
On the flip side, a CoCs can give bad implementations a veneer of legitimacy. And whenever humans relinquish their best judgement to an inanimate piece of text written by enthusiastic people, bad things happen. It makes the way to say "It is the policy", "That's what it writes there", "I didn't make the rules" and get away with not taking responsibility for the complexity of adjudicating over human affairs.
Law is complicated enough that it took millennia of iterations to arrive its current form and we still have to employ tons of dedicated professionals to apply it while having a reasonable false positive rate. I can't understand the hubris of the author or enforcer of a CoC thinking that they can possibly be just, fair and overall improve the state of things by making and using their own piece of text at the expense of good human judgement.
Does anyone have them implemented well? CoC enforcement is punishment-based social structure and like other such structures (e.g. law enforcement) it is a terrible weapon that requires proper counterbalances to not end as a tool of oppressive tyranny.
Society developed such counterbalances for thousands of years so we ended with current rights of accused for fair trial. Unfortunately people who reinvent these social wheels (as CoC) often reinvent them poorly, with much emphasis on punishment and minimal emphasis on rights of accused.
Please supply an example or two if you don't mind?
What that indicates to me first and foremost is that this is a poorly organized conference. I would expect that every single speaker is asked for at least a draft of their slides a few weeks before the presentation. Either ignoring the keynote speaker or not supporting them in such a bizarre case speaks volumes about the organizers. They simply don't seem to care about the content of the conference that much.
Disclaimer: I watched some of the talk and I do think Jeremy Howard appears largely accurate and right, and I empathise with his feelings. But I wouldn't get to a definitive conclusion until NumFOCUS has had a chance to present their side.
That seems to be what most people have been saying since day 1.
I personally applaud the idea of a COC, much like software licenses. It's just a bummer that a lot of people out there in a leadership position don't know how to fairly enforce them. It also doesn't help that many COCs are poorly written, much like when an engineer without legal experience tries to write a license. Hopefully this will get better with time.
Or to put it another way: why isn’t “restart and clear output” the default and in fact only thing you can do? When would you want your notebook to ever look different to how it would look if you did a clean build?
...which leads to the observation that Jupyter combines text editor design, build system architecture, and programming language choice under one roof. It’s not surprising some people get hot under the collar about it, but anonymous accusations of CoC violatioN as a battlefront feels like a new low.
Maybe the earlier cells are pulling down large files over the internet or, more commonly, doing intensive computations such as model training.
That said Joel made strong and judgemental opinions on social media , so he should expect nothing less than strong and emotional responses.
In all being a nerd enough to be passionate about some technology is cool, but taking things personally probably calls for a break. It's just never that serious.
That said -- outlawing mere expressions of disagreement would be a very serious mistake. Nor is it workable to require that we never make anyone uncomfortable. That would go too far towards shutting down the open expression of ideas.
I don't know what the solution is, but when you do stuff for free, try to make sure there is a mutual giving of some sort, otherwise disasters like this have a way of creeping up on you.
It's almost as if the scales of Themis need to be rebalanced somehow, with good or with bad, she doesn't care.
This is especially true if the criticism is of an idea or an opinion and not of a person.
Pretending as though everyone is so fragile and delicate is going to make it worse for everyone.
Mr. Howard's experience is refreshing
Here's a sample of another 'sur'real example:
Expected behavior: Participate in an authentic and active way.
Unacceptable Behavior: Harassment includes: minimizing other people’s experiences
and yeah, i had to sign it or i don't get to play with the other kids
A conference organizer needs you more than you need them, with you they have a conference, without you they have an empty hall with some bad food and they don't even have the foresight to realize that themselves seen as they found your suffering funny.
I find this absurd and just a way to get at someone. Anything you say can be bent and twisted by a group of lawyers and the CoC committee here seems to be filled with such folks.
Here we have people throwing a fit over... nothing and then we have a speaker that calls himself „shattered“ after those ridiculous accusations? We need more Linus Torvalds.
To make one thing clear: The speaker is the victim in this interaction. Being unhappy about the accusation is understandable, feeling "shattered" makes me worried for them.
I think around 2016 in USA(?)
Why? I'd also want to know.
The author has a classic Australian style of speaking, and he knows this is American PC nonsense.
Yet he agrees/promotes all these new woke rituals. It’s can’t possible be me they are after!
2. Dick in point 1. is gender neutral term
There, the only CoC you will ever need.
Is the best option just to not engage with an authoritarian organisation?
We have to take his word on this, but if true this sadly confirms my stereotype of these CoC SJWs. They are like that horrible corrupted cop standing above the law, treating those people breaking their laws worse than what they are accused of.
Until now this has mostly been a US thing, but it's slowly making its way to Europe too, unfortunately.
As an event or community organizer, a lot will depend on how you think of your CoC. You can either think of it as a list of rules by which you will adjudicate conflicts, or you can think of it as a communication tool.
I see the former thought process in our Slack group's CoC, and in most of the CoCs that get mentioned in articles like this. It suggests a moral absolutist approach, that all conduct in all situations can be correctly binned into "good" vs "bad". Not even logic is complete, so I don't see how codes of ethics and morals can be complete.
Such thinking also denies the concept of mens rea, whether or not the person intended to do harm. I haven't watch the talk to know how the criticism was worded, but we have had other scenarios described where the mere usage of certain words can lead to adjudication of "CoC violation", because the word had a different denotation to the listener than the speaker. In such cases, there is clearly a lack of ill intent. Where the line should fall is how the "speaker" reacts to the correction, not on the gaff itself.
Being authored by a singular entity, any CoC is always going to fail to match everyone's cultural norms. What we're talking about here is attempting to codify how we behave in social groups, how we show respect to other people, and hopefully how we avoid conflict, rather than just accepting that conflict is inevitable and must be smote with great prejudice. Those are all issues of manners, which are infinitely evolved and evolving and flexible and untestable and often unspoken rules.
Maybe it's because I'm older and grew up on a much more diverse Internet, before Facebook and Twitter and Google bubbles took over, when online interaction took place on topic-oriented message boards and chatrooms, leading to frequent and sustained interactions with people from multiple nationalities and walks of life. Maybe it's my recent work in the foreign language instruction industry, where social faux pas is the inevitable result of students stretching their wings and flying too close to the sun. Maybe it's my upbringing in which my parents emphasized honor and always doing the right thing. When dealing with social conflict, there absolutely must be consideration for the intent of the action, a willingness to use it as a teaching moment, and not one of punishment.
These are the problems I have with "enumerated behavior" CoCs as myself, an actor in good faith. But I can technically get over it. Far more troubling is that bad-faith actors use these lists to stand just over the line on the safe side and use it against good-faith actors. An overheard, off-color joke, told in bad taste, is a literal violation of the CoC, but it lacked ill intent to the person who was offended by the joke. Tell the person, "hey, people can hear you, this is not cool". 9 times out of 10, the person says, "oh, I'm so sorry" and is on their best behavior the rest of the time. That other 1 time, they double down, creating a pattern of behavior and a clear demonstration of ill-intent. But using the CoC to then blacklist people, and then amplifying the furor through social media in attempt to get the person fired from their job, is engaging in a form of harassment, but one that is protected under the guise of "protecting victims". It comes from a "zero-tolerance" mentality, one that is itself a social harm.
Where I took the CoC for my tech meetup was to use it as a communication tool. I talked with a lot of people about why they wanted a CoC and the message was singular, "to know that I will be safe". I wrote a CoC that focused on communicating the commitment of the organizers to proactively guiding behavior patterns towards ones of good manners, to reassure attendees that they can communicate with us about their concerns in any way that is comfortable for them, and that we will immediately prioritize said issues.
I tell people, "you don't know who heard you, you don't know how they heard it, and you don't know what they took from it." Most people don't make complaints. The "enumerated behavior" CoC is a reactionary document, one that assumes that no smoke equals no fire. It's not enough to have a good fire department. You also need to build your structures to fire code and not store oily rags in a pile in the corner of your garage.
Our CoC has no enumeration of bad behavior. It mostly just says that attendees are expected to be polite to each other, with the addendum that politeness will not be defined. In this way, it puts the issue of behavior and intent at the forefront. A polite person apologizes if they accidentally offend someone. A polite person informs someone they have been offended without making it into a crusade, in the hopes that they will be apologized to. And the boundaries of politeness is free to flex with the boundaries of the group.
I also semi-regularly remind people that the authority they assume I have is only because they give it to me. The group exists soley for the benefit of the people within the group. If there is some way in which the group is not meeting the needs of the people within it, there is no point in talking about "the integrity of the group", as "the group" is not an entity unto itself, with some notion of rights or feelings that need to be protected. It's just the people.
I feel it is because of this that we've only had to ban 2 people in the last 6 years. While those moments were certainly tense, we came away from them with no disagreement that they were handled correctly. I still stand by those decisions. There's almost always some moment to make a comment about, "hey, that thing you just said could be taken in this other way", and it usually ends with the person whole-heartedly apologizing. Our group is diverse and lively. It feels like a real community. Folks are able to disagree with each other without fear.
As for the Slack group, I just keep to the technical channels and don't engage in anything that comes even close to conflict. My speech has been chilled, so to speak.
[0] Incidentally, one of my thoughts was "how did the group of people who came up with these not think of how the acronymn sounds?" I also am not too keen on the usage of the term "conduct", as it evokes images in my mind the Military Code of Justice and "Conduct Unbecoming", which in turn evokes images of command authority structures, which I dislike greatly. But whatever you want to call it, I'm going to continue to use the apparently accepted term of art.
Cancelling others is "facing consequences". Cancelling you is unfair and a great injustice. Is it maybe possible that others who have been cancelled did, in fact, not just face consequences, but were treated just as unfair as you?
Well, too bad. The authors idea of thoughtful enforcement doesn't align with reality. Harassment in the context of CoCs is in the eye of the beholder.
Them continuing to support something that they've experienced being unjust first hand, what is there more to say? They should suck it up and accept the violation.
> One the call, I was surprised to find myself facing four people. The previous call had been with just one, and suddenly being so greatly outnumbered made me feel very intimidated.
Isn't this basically what cancel culture is too? To some extent, anyway.
Be excellent to each other, don't police each other.
The point I wish to make is that Jeremy is either experiencing some cognitive dissonance, or his frustration is overriding his fear with regards to his position on CoCs in general.
Whether he intends for it or not, his article taken as a whole aligns much more closely with the gripes from the "anti-CoC crowd" than one in support of CoCs; despite him stating that he is attempting to deter the anti-CoC crowd. Why? Well his argument is that the CoC committee is essentially a capricious entity. This is evidenced by his expected experience versus reality, among other things:
> I was also heartened that the manual has a section “Communicate with the Reported Person about the Incident” which says they will “Let the reported person tell someone on the CoC response team their side of the story; the person who receives their side of the story should be prepared to convey it at the response team meeting”.
but then the actual experience did not go quite as planned:
> I was stunned. The representative could not even commit to a time when they would get back to me, or tell me what would be happening next. I told them that I thought that telling someone that they had a violation report, but then not saying what it is, or when or whether they would be able to provide their side of the story, or providing any time-frame for any next step was cruel.
> The next call did not happen for another week (I had made myself available to meet any time). I was shocked to read that the purpose of the call would be to “discuss the results of our investigation”. I could not understand how they could have completed their investigation and have results, without any input from me.
And Jeremy's true feelings about the situation were laid out at the top of the article:
> The process has left me shattered, and I won’t be able to accept any speaking requests for the foreseeable future.
And directly following it is his dissonance/fear kicking in: > ... for the foreseeable future. I support the thoughtful enforcement of Code of Conducts to address sexist, racist, and harassing behavior, but that is not what happened in this case.
Throughout the article, we find Jeremy constantly defending the ideas behind CoCs. Despite that, the entire article serves to show how those ideas utterly failed in practice; and as such, serves as an example against CoCs. As such, I hypothesize that this is either because Jeremy does not actually agree with CoCs, but is too fearful that he feels it's necessary to consistently defend their ideas. Or he still hasn't come to terms with the fact that CoCs aren't all he's made them up to be, and now that he's gone through the other end of it and been left feeling "shattered" is struggling to reconcile his emotions and experience from his ideology regarding CoCs.
In the event Jeremy's defense of CoCs is fear based, then I am saddened about the current state of affairs. On the other hand, if it's the case that he is experiencing cognitive dissonance, I wish him the best of luck finding clarity.
Does any else have other ideas on the author feels compelled to defend CoCs while at the same time damaging their reputation via example?
The whole point of a conference is to present, so it makes someone else angry, they were shown they were wrong and it was not personal attack(s) based on "protected" statuses.
I think there is a bit of stockholm syndrome around these things. I know this is cliche, but despite mass famines under communism, you still hear people defending it saying "yes, but if implemented correctly...". At some point you need to admit that the repeated poor implementation of CoCs is fundamental to the concept.
You can't just hand power to people and expect it to work out. Especially people with a permanent chip on their shoulders, who are not neutral parties in let's say the "culture war", who are the exact people most likely to adopt them.
All CoCs are doing is allowing people in charge to exercise power without paying the social cost of having to look like they're using their judgement reasonably. Without a CoC, you were always allowed to kick someone out who was misbehaving, it's just you might look bad if people around you don't think you're being reasonable by doing so. Leaders of e.g. software projects were always dictators, but they still wanted people to like them and so there are natural limits on how much on an asshole you can be kicking people out who are misbehaving.
All a CoC does is give these people a document they can point to to justify their actions on paper, so that they don't need to justify that it was a judgement call. Now they can kick people out more easily because all that's happened is that their accountability has been reduced. This can be used for good and for evil, it depends on the person. The actual contents of the document are nearly irrelevant, you'll find something in there to pin on someone you don't like.
Then again, if I were writing this article I would pepper it with pro-social-justice shibboleths too, just because I wouldn't want people to write me off as alt-right or whatever and stop reading.
They are tools like anything else and can be misused.
Everything else is for children.
Why take a functioning OSS project and turn it into a failing commune?
Extremists generally eat their own to further advance their own extremism and their individual position within the group. I wonder, how many did they come for, before him and how many times did he not speak out?
The author reminds me of a character in The First Circle, Rubin, an avowed Marxist imprisoned in the USSR. Rubin sees his punishment as unjust but he believes this kind of judicial error is a small bump in the road to a communist utopia.
Towards the end of the article, the author accuses "the NumFOCUS policy" of failing to "consider the mental health of people that are accused". But if someone has a mental breakdown after being criticized that does not mean the critic did anything wrong. Legal and moral norms exist to allow us to answer questions like "did this person do anything wrong?" or "did this person cause this other person's mental breakdown?" I think it's naive to expect codes of conduct to improve on what we already have.
I suppose I think codes of conduct are as good as the people you get to enforce them. But that's the thing: the people willing to volunteer their time to be cops tend to be the last people you'd want in those roles. If codes of conduct are not a replacement for fair-minded people maybe they're more trouble than they're worth.
Also, while I did not find his presentation insulting, I do think he made a mistake by spending so much of it directly critiquing someone else's presentation. It was in bad taste though not -- of course -- the kind of thing that needs to be punished.
Pointing this out to them has usually resulted in them shrugging it off, in the manner of "it's not meant to be taken that seriously, it's so we have something to point at when we have to discipline someone".
Well, I sympathise with having something with which to discipline someone. But I think it's a bit rich when people egregiously violate their own advocated CoC.
I don't mean extremely subtle examples. I mean easy, blatant ones.
Like the time some people advocated for a CoC that said it's important not to view sexual images in a room without other people's consent as they may not wish to be exposed to them. Who then on a later date did exactly that themselves, with explicit vagina images, on the assumption that "we" all knew each other so assumed it was fine.
Ok, so people make mistakes. I have a lot of respect for the person who pointed out that we should adopt a CoC and then hold ourselves to it. Fine.
But did pointing out the sexual images go down well? No, they carried on, assuming I was being prissy. Leaving me wondering, why did you advocate for the CoC then?
I've seen plenty of others. People advocating for CoCs that say you mustn't derail other people's conversations, that's fun to watch as they do exactly that.
What I found, mostly, from discussing CoCs with people is:
1. Some regard them as "we need something to point to in sufficiently egregious cases that we have to discipline someone".
2. Some regard them as "pointing people to this will tell them our expectations".
Trouble with 1 is two things. First, selective enforcement. If you're not serious about the CoC, only using it to point to when you decided someone has done something bad, that's like having laws where everyone breaks some law all the time, and what determines your fate is whether the police like you or don't. Some judgement calls are necessary, but blatant selective enforcement is a problem.
Second, a list can't cover everything bad, it's not possible. If your judges believe in rules too much, sticking to the list, they will fail to judge some bad behaviours that should be disciplined. So you must have a fallback to "we decided your behaviour is bad even though it's not on the list", and if that's available, you don't really need the list at all for reason 1.
Trouble with 2 is, that might work if the prime advocates follow it. But if they are as I've seen sometimes (and it sounds like the judges in the article were), prime advocates of a CoC may be the ones visibly breaking it in front of everyone else. That sorts the group into an "in group" who set the real standard for what is expected, visibly; and an "out group" who are new, believe the CoC, and are afraid to act according to the social standard being visibly set by the in group. That's not fair and it can be quite harsh on someone conscienscious, inducing some fear of putting a foot wrong against the CoC, yet knowing they have to to fit in to the in group social norm.
So do I believe in CoCs?
Reluctantly, yes, because of the asshole problem. From time to time there's an asshole, making someone's life miserable, or many lives miserable. In a group there's often some kind of duty for organisers to care for those present, at least against serious abuse. I've seen people have a really awful time in groups being abused, where some power to intervene and a bit of guidance and authority to back it up would have avoided lasting trauma. In that situation you really need the abused person to know that someone "has their back", socially speaking.
A well crafted and fairly applied CoC, applied through gradual escalation (ie. talking to the person first to remind them it's a problem and please stop, etc) can, sometimes, prevent a minor or accidental asshole problem from growing unchecked. The article suggests gradual escalation didn't happen, and the consequences of serving judgement in the way they did, over a low level infringement, seems to have caused unnecessary emotional harm.
I think it's important the CoC is something that in-group people or leaders of some kind are genuinely willing to follow themselves. Not lip service, but actually visibly adhering to its ideas. Perhaps not strictly to every letter, but enough that most people will generally agree the spirit is being followed and treated with respect.
And having the CoC written out does set a tone. What kind of tone depends on how it's written of course, and there are a number of ways to do that. Some quite positive and constructive, others will set up polarisation. Having a CoC makes some people feel safer, comforted, better looked after from the beginning. If nothing else, it signals that organisers are aware of the asshole problem. But a CoC also makes some people feel less safe, if they think they're at risk of being found in violation if they dare to relax and be socially normal, especially if there's an apparent contradiction between encouraged in-group behaviour and what the CoC says.
When you are on the side of evil, bad things happen.
I just wish the reverse wasn't true, this is what we need to work on.
A society that separates these bad people off and lets them destruct themselves. So good people are not getting hurt. Work on the rest later.
The stories of bullying, religious discrimination (or turning a blind eye to religious discrimination) and general unprofessional and poor behavior are staggering.
Considering how Anaconda took money from In-Q-Tel and mostly functions as a consultant to big banks, it’s a really sad chapter of Python history considering some of the amazing technical achievements the engineers have produced (conda, numba, pyarrow, dask, etc.).
The Python data and numerical ecosystem would be much healthier if Travis and Peter would just step down from their variety of positions and leave the community in peace.
I'm not particularly interested in litigating the whole idea of CoCs based on a single example at this time. It appeared (to me) that the author meant to highlight what he felt was a failure of one group, at one convention, in one instance. While the idea of CoCs is an absolutely worthwhile thing to discuss along with adjacent topics and social context, broad arguments about this area haven't done much to enlighten me as to "What actually happened here amongst these individuals in this instance?"
No need to dwell on your emotional state, just say that they are being idiots and tell them to fuck off- publicly. Enough with this crap.
Please watch Linus talks.
If that's not enough for you to grow some thick skin, go watch Bill Burr and ultimately Donald Trump.
Stop living your life in fear what others think of you. My wife is blaming me because, finally, after more then a decade and a half she started to care less of what neighbors and/or extended family members think of her. For me personally I care only what 3 people think of me and that's her and our kids. Everybody else, parents and siblings included get a mouthful from me and I could not care less if I offended them.I always tell them "My money, my life - who doesn't like me stop interacting with me"
As for guys like Linus, his straight up brutally, abusively honest take on things has probably been good for the linux kernel, but I wouldn't say it should apply to your day-to-day life (interactions with family, extended-family, neighbors, etc).
And I understand that free speech guarantees in the law are concerning the government. But I believe private citizens and organizations must also uphold the basic principles of free expression, otherwise it doesn't work.
The issue here is absolute mistreatment of the person in question and horrible leadership on behalf of the people who organise this conference.
Like it was totally possible to give this talk in a positive manner talking about all the reasons you think notebooks are good and demonstrating the use-cases.
* You don’t have to call out or reference the original speaker at all and say they’re wrong. Even if they are objectively wrong don’t be a dick and call them out publicly. Just shoot them a message and they can post the correction themselves. Were taking a professional peer, not someone intentionally trying to mislead and arguing in bad faith.
* Talking over their original slides gives a super adversarial tone. You can give your reasons why notebooks are good and even tackle common criticisms without picking apart their talk specifically. It’s the conference version of the gross “name and shame pattern” you see all over the internet.
* Why would you say something negative about a peer’s work on stage? Like it’s fine to have an impassioned rant at the bar afterwords if you want but this is the spiritual equivalent of saying something negative about a coworker in front of them and their boss. If it were me it would certainly leave a bad taste in my mouth.
Your belief that, whatever Joel may have thought, your perspective is the one of "regular human empathy" is indicative of a certain narcissism about the superiority about your own moral sentiments. The same narcissism that motivated this farcical CoC accusation and persecution mess to begin with.
To be clear, I'm speaking in principle. I don't agree in the particular case that the behaviour was inappropriate.
Once we were in a bigger company, we had to stop talking like that (at least in venues where others could hear us) as the perception that we were "ripping each other apart" could be perceived as very threatening to people who didn't have that rapport nor the understanding of the background. The perception would be that we were mean people who might turn on them at any moment.
The argument that "oh, X can both dish it out and take it (with respect to criticism from Y)" often ignores the fact that somewhere, "Z" is quietly watching this interaction and deciding that they don't want to participate in this apparently hostile environment.
> You don’t have to call out or reference the original speaker at all and say they’re wrong
I disagree. His talk is essentially a direct response to the other presentation. He is assuming context from the original presentation (A very famous one in this space from what I can pick up). Without explaining the context, his presentation would make less sense to those not as familiar with this particular tech scene.
Its not like he's saying the other person is an idiot or something. He actually compliments the other speaker multiple times.
> You can give your reasons why notebooks are good and even tackle common criticisms without picking apart their talk specifically
If your goal is to talk up notebooks sure. If your goal is to respectfully disagree with the widely accepted dogma, then you should make direct reference to the work you are responding to.
> Why would you say something negative about a peer’s work on stage
Making provocative statements challenging widely held beliefs is literally the job of a keynote speaker.
Not that anyone should really consider constructive criticism of an argument the same as saying something negative about the person making them. Personally, I think it'd be pretty passive-aggressive to demolish someone's work without doing the courtesy of referencing the work you are arguing against.
Edit: At the same time, I'm very sad to see you being downvoted. You make a reasonable argument that deserves to be debated on its merit, not downvoted imo.
The author was responding to a talk made by a friend and he let him know ahead of time he would be using some of his slides and the friend was ok with that.
Lots of big personalities carry on 'feuds' that are largely acts, to their mutual. The back-and-forth, even with campy insults, creates a framework for understanding the key points and evolution of the disagreement.
Using more forceful, even facetiously disrespectful language expands the range of imagery/metaphor/emotion that can be deployed, often to humorous or insightful effect. It makes conversations, whether live in person or slowly over months of counter-performances, more memorable.
If such talk rubs a few people the wrong way, out of some expansive concern for targets who do not themselves find the tone/language objectionable, I'd love to find a place where those people can be comfortable.
But I don't want to sabotage the value of the free-to-all discourse for the much larger group of people who find vibrant, disputative, raw communication – even to the point of prickliness – more efficient and preferable.
We're losing something if we require all speech to be sanitized for maximal gentility under new secular Sunday School rules.
if it's between two people who stand on the same level roughly as is in this case and it's all in good fun it's no issue. However in general this is a horrible idea, because someone with outsized influence can bully in ways that the victim will simply have to take if the imbalance is too large.
Imagine Elon Musk gives a talk and absolutely drags someone with awful criticism, the person couldn't stand up against his twitter mob if they tried and would probably defer to keep their sanity even if they're right. Even in literal bullying this is kind of how the victim responds, just pretending it wasn't an issue as to not get bullied even more. So one has to be careful on this one.
And, in cases of massive power/following imbalance like your hypothetical, it's unlikely any community CoC like this would even apply. The nasty person would just use any of their outlets that don't try to enforce a hyper-genteel environment.
Hiding one side of that conversation makes no sense whatsoever. You can disagree respectfully with someone in public. That's pretty fundamental to progressing the dialogue. Hiding it means people don't then get to evaluate opposing viewpoints and understand the relative merits of each.
My colleagues and I disagree about our work - in public, in front of each other - all the time. The trick is to do it politely and respectfully, which is overwhelmingly the case. This is how we all learn from each other and develop a higher overall standard of output.
And all that considered, in this particular case why not just ask the original presenter how they feel about it? Surely that is the authoritive answer to whether there's even an issue here.
It is an okay idea but it seems taken too far. People in tech often seem hopelessly socially inept. We all need to learn to do better. Yes in this case the original author of the slides was okay with it, but not everyone will be. The author seems completely unaware of this. They should have it explained to them.
So I do agree it was probably handled poorly. There would have been a better way to resolve this.
But for everyone complaining about how social media/hate groups cancelling people etc etc, think a bit more. This person wrote a blog post which is obviously going to be taken and used as fuel. The title is definitely provocative. The lack of awareness is exactly why we need a code of conduct in the first place.