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Comment by Xavdidtheshadow | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean this as an attack, but I'm guessing you haven't been harassed/given unwanted attention at a conference.

It's easy to see codes of conduct as draconian or unnecessary if you can't empathize with the people they're designed to protect. I'm not saying the CoC system is perfect or that there aren't false positives, but your statement here is _dramatically_ privileged.

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This kind of argument often comes up. Two implicit premises should be questioned:

1) Liberal values are associated with privilege.

2) Because of this association we should embrace authoritarianism.

Is authoritarianism any less privileged? It assumes that the authorities are on your side and protecting your interests... that seems right down the middle of privilege. A low privilege person would probably benefit from liberal governance/norms that limit the damage hostile authorities can do.

Having rules that are written down and apply to everyone is a liberal value, last I checked. It is far more authoritarian for the standards to be unwritten, because then instead of applying them to everyone, the people in charge can do whatever they want. Throwing out the whole concept of having agreed-upon rules because of one bad outcome seems like a major step backwards to me.

> Having rules that are written down and apply to everyone is a liberal value

A Liberal is anti-arbitrary power. In the context of formal governments and legal systems, that includes having written laws.

I would argue having a vague CoC which is designed to be interpreted and applied arbitrarily by power tripping bureaucrats actually increases arbitrary power.

Through the CoC, the committee here was empowered to persecute any action they didn't like. That's the opposite of Liberalism.

I'm not sure I agree. The CoC was written down, which means we can critique it and change it, and hold them accountable to following it (which they failed to do.) And as you see, they are responding to feedback about their handling of it, although I'd guess we'd agree that their response thus far is pretty inadequate. But I'd be inclined to continue to pressure them to step up.

If you advocate for getting rid of CoCs, IMO, you have to have an answer for how actual harassment should be dealt with. Many people I've spoken to did not feel safe at tech events of the past because of rampant harassment that would be swept under the rug. The tech industry of 2020 is not prepared to return to that world.

It seems like step one of dealing with harassment is to define it, which is the problem CoCs should solve. If you think they are failing, what is your alternative, if it's not to improve them?

They busted him for polite disagreement! Which the other party was totally cool with!

Here's an idea, limit CoCs to actual harassment, with a warning. It's not harassment, definitionally, unless you persist after being asked to stop.

And it should be actual harassment, targeted at a person, rather than "this person's views or public statements offend me".

This situation looks exactly like the people in charge doing whatever they want IMO.

Systems without a CoC are just as authoritarian, but the rules just are unwritten and favor the privileged.

Do you think it’s possible to empathize with people who are harassed, or experience harassment, and oppose codes of conduct? Assume that empathy includes caring about protecting people.

Sounds like "I empathize with them but I don't care about protecting them"

Thanks. I edited to clarify empathy includes caring about protecting them.

Not to me it doesn't.

I'm on the fence on this issue but it's sounds like you're willfully misreading that statement.

To me it sounds like: "I empathize and care, but I don't think CoCs are the best way to solve the problem because they i) don't solve the problem and ii) bring about harmful unintended consequences".

I think it is, but what alternative is there? CoCs were created for a reason, so simply getting rid of them feels like it would lead us back to where we started.

People don't want empathy. They want solutions that fix the existing and long-standing problems. Lacking a better solution, CoCs are here to stay. So if you really oppose CoCs, the burden of creating a better solution is on you.

If you’re referring to me personally, I agree with you. The groups I personally organized have arrived at that better resolution, as we of course did see our responsibility there. However, we have not arrived at a solution that can be quickly communicated to other groups, which is the strength of CoCs as they can be copied and adopted without much thought (not saying that pejoratively.)

Strongly disagree that empathy is unwanted, though; perhaps you are laboring under a narrow definition. Empathy cannot coexist with inaction.

If you need a CoC to get rid of someone who harasses others what you have is a deeper problem

How else would you codify what is and what isn't acceptable behaviour?

Is it just arbitrary? Do you just depend on more people enforcing their views out to stop harassment? If so, then why not codify it?

> Is it just arbitrary?

Yes. Just as "kind" is. To the reporters and the officials, "saying somebody is wrong" is unkind, so it's clearly arbitrary.

The worst thing is when nobody is actually offended or hurt, and someone says your behavior could be considered offensive or insulting or whatever and takes action based on that. That's just someone wanting to exert their power for the wrong reasons.

That reminds me of that event when a person with screen name "Christian", of all things, filed an issue at VS Code around the, ah, New Year festivities, demanding to remove the Santa hat from the status bar because it's offensive. And the VS Code team promptly reacted, by agreeing, changing it for a snowflake (I still have no idea if it was ironic, or not, and whether they've noticed it later) and pushing out an emergency hot fix.

That did piss off quite a number of people, who filed much more hard-pressing (in their opinion) issues (like, some useful editor functionality being broken) and received precisely zero feedback.

You don't get to be the arbiter of who is "actually offended." I agree that there are people who take any amount of power and want to expert it for the wrong reasons, but that isn't an indictment against CoCs, it's an indictment of bad behavior.

That bad behavior is enabled by CoCs though, isn't it? If you leave room for abuse, you'll get abuse.

>> You don't get to be the arbiter of who is "actually offended.

That is exactly my point. Some committee member doesn't get to say "that may be offensive to someone" either. They need to wait until someone actually reports being offended.

As this whole debacles shows codifying doesn't remove arbitrary standards. Human social interactions are far too complex to codify in a concise way without massive edge cases. So all too often it just gives people a tool with which to better force their own arbitrary standards onto others.

As this blog post [1] lays out, this seems like a case where the CoC was poorly authored exactly for this reason. But this isn't a reason to not have a CoC, it just means this particular one was not done well.

[1]: https://www.fast.ai/2020/10/28/code-of-conduct/

There is no way to author a set of rules such that it can't be abused by someone with the power to enforce it. That's why the law has judges, juries, courts of appeal, standards of evidence, disclosure rules, corpus delicti, habeas corpus, and so on.

The problem is not the CoC, but the lack of accountability, oversight, and transparency in enforcement.

I totally agree, but people don't generally claim we should get rid of the law for these reasons. I am responding to the claim that we should get rid of CoCs, which I disagree with. I am not arguing that CoCs are perfect, or that we don't need checks. In this case, it seems that the CoC was pretty poorly written, and the team didn't even follow their own procedure. I think we should fix those problems rather than throw the whole thing out.

Agreed, but I don't see it happening. There's very little chance of any conference organizer setting up some sort of quasi-legal institutions around CoCs.

It is happening before our eyes! The organizers have admitted they made mistakes and are working on improvements. I agree a full-on court system would be ridiculous, but what that means is that the CoC needs to better thought out to reduce ambiguity.

Those are all valuable tools to have in a system where the law can deprive a person of property, liberty, and life.

It's not necessarily the case that you have to spend nearly as much on a code of conduct system where the ultimate worst-case scenario is that an innocent person is denied a platform or has the reputation tarnished in a reversible way.

If you need a system of written laws that apply to everyone what you have is a deeper problem

Cue the cries of "I broke no rules!" when someone is "gotten rid of" without a CoC.

The task of making rules like that is never ending. This concept reminds me of when the head of GM rewrote their dress code. It went from several pages down to two words: "dress appropriately". What that means actually depends on context - who are you meeting with and what kind of work is going on. She realized that manager who needed a manual to figure that out had bigger problems.

I went to Cambridge University, UK from a working class background. Unwritten dress codes were one of the many things used to "other" anyone from the wrong background. These things aren't obvious.

Software developers, who are intimately familiar with the idea that software needs constant attention and maintenance, seem to often balk at the idea that communities also need constant attention and maintenance. The idea that a code of conduct is "never ending" does not seem like a bad thing to me.

As an example, the mozilla community participation guidelines (currently at version 3.1) are quite short and readable and many sections are essentially your "dress appropriately" example (i.e. "Be Respectful"), with quick a paragraph to clarify the idea.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/part...

>> The idea that a code of conduct is "never ending" does not seem like a bad thing to me.

So another area where that type of thing can happen is in union negotiations. Unions in the US started out fighting for basic decent treatment - reasonable hours and pay, safer working conditions, etc... Some years ago I was in a manufacturing plant and the break (lunch) room had a big television in it. Turns out the union had demanded the TV in their most recent contract. Someone I was speaking to berated the union "those idiots demand a TV, don't they have real concerns?" I realized the problem is that the adversarial nature had grown so bad - probably on both sides - that nothing could be had without a negotiation and putting it in writing. That goes for work from the union: "that's not my job" or worse - "you're getting written up for doing something that's someone else's job" to the management "no we're not giving you anything we don't have to by contract". Once you start writing things down and trying to nit-pick it can lead to a terrible place where nothing is easy for anyone.

> If you need a CoC to get rid of someone who harasses others what you have is a deeper problem

How many conferences did you run before CoC's became popular?

I think you're saying that people who harass should be able to be removed absent a code of conduct. I agree. However, harassment isn't always the overt act you may be picturing, it can be more subtle. Code of Conducts give a single canonical state for what's considered acceptable, but more importantly, give organizers something tangible to point to when there is a violation. In addition to that, they inform people (even the harassed, who may not have considered what's happening to them harassment!) of what I'd acceptable.

As a white, male engineer, I haven't ever found a need for codes of conduct because I've had the privilege of never having been harassed. This isn't the case for all groups, so it's best to have one.

> Code of Conducts give a single canonical state for what's considered acceptable

This is what they're supposed to do. In reality, this is impossible because so many of the rules in a CoC are subjective, and therefore are enforced based on the opinions of the people enforcing the CoC.

> but more importantly, give organizers something tangible to point to when there is a violation.

This just gives the enforcers a sense of moral authority to impose their opinions, nothing more. I don't see that as a benefit of what is inevitably an incomplete document, and frequently poorly thought out as well.

> Code of Conducts give a single canonical state for what's considered acceptable

Except... they don't.

They say things like (quoting from the NumFOCUS CoC):

> We will not accept harassment or other exclusionary behaviors, such as:

> ...

> Other unethical or unprofessional conduct

That leaves things wide open -- whatever the committee decides is "unprofessional" is hereby banned. How am I supposed to guess their mind?

They're meant as a reminder for people who actually read them, but otherwise they're meant as a list for enforcement. They're something to point to as "you knew the rules - that's why we're removing that person". That's why in this case the affected person complained about the CoC using very ambiguous rules that were up for personal interpretation.

This is certainly true, but how else would you propose solving the deeper problem?

One option is to designate someone or some group as arbiters / benevolent dictators, and have the rule of "If so-and-so decides you're making the place worse, you're not welcome." It's certainly effective. But it exacerbates Jeremy Howard's complaint - which is not so much about CoCs per se as about the group of people who enforced them and the way in which they did so. I don't think getting rid of CoCs will really solve that problem.

One option is to have a closed or invitation-only group - but that's at odds with the goals of many communities. (And it doesn't reliably solve the problem, it just makes it less likely you'd run into it.)

And, indeed, the tech industry has had and continues to have a deeper problem.

> I don't mean this as an attack,

You actually do mean this as an attack - you quite literally accused me of being "_dramatically_ privileged"

Maybe you meant it as an attack and maybe you didn't. If there was a HN CoC, maybe I'm the kind of asshole that would try to accuse you of abuse. See how easy it is to abuse the system?

Er, how is saying that someone is "_dramatically_ privileged" an attack? It's a judgment-neutral observation. When I say that sshd runs a privileged process, I don't mean to say that sshd is morally bad (or whatever), just that it needs to be more careful than less-privileged code and that it can do things more easily than less-privileged code can. It's the same meaning of "privileged" here.

(And yes, you could bring up to the moderators that this is an attack, but you could do that in the absence of any written rules, too, and if the moderators are the sort of people who would agree with that argument, then neither having nor not having written rules would save this forum.)

You can observe whether sshd is running a privileged process because you have all of the information available to make that judgement. You can't observe whether a random person is privileged because it's relative and related to your opinion and biases.

True, but then it's at most a false claim. It's still not an attack. If I say ping is privileged and you say you're on a distro with unprivileged ping, I haven't in any way denounced ping.

That's a false analogy. Saying something incorrect about a computer is different from using an incorrect/biased statement to try to shut a person down.

> it's at most a false claim

In your opinion. As the recipient of said 'claim' I took it as an attack. Maybe I'm an overly sensitive person, maybe it's the end of a long week and I'm just feeling cranky, either way it offended me. So in this fictional world I feel that I have been attacked, and the HN CoC frowns upon members hurting other members' feelings. What should be done?

Fair enough - I think that in this fictional world where the CoC frowns on hurting others' feelings, you'd have a valid complaint, and I think that such a CoC would quickly break apart a community (especially an open community, where anyone can show up and then proclaim their feelings have been hurt).

I think the NumFOCUS CoC doesn't say that though (although it's ambiguous because it includes "Be kind" in the normative text, and I'd agree that's a problem), and other CoCs are more interested in the objective (or, at least, more objective) question of whether a personal attack actually happened than the question of whether a participant felt attacked. The Contributor Covenant, for instance, prohibits "Trolling, insulting or derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks," to which 'I'm sorry you felt insulted, but this was not an insult' would be an adequate defense.

It does appear that the relevant sections of the NumFOCUS CoC aren't unique to them, though I can't tell exactly where they came from, and you have convinced me that this is a problem. (Geez, this is license proliferation all over again.) Thank you!

Attached is an implicit "and thus your opinion only perpetuates the issue", due to the inherent problem with phrasing basic rights in terms of "privilege" - the paradigm directs attention towards the people whose rights aren't being infringed as the exceptional cases, and away from the specific people responsible for the infringements.

I too dislike code of conduct type of stuff, but more along the reasoning you mentioned. I dislike that they are even needed in the first place. The fact that you have to be told to not belittle, harass, abuse, etc another user/participant/person is just difficult to understand.

It shouldn't be that hard to to follow the "Don't be an asshole" rule, unfortunately for the rest of us, 0.001% can't figure out how to get along with other humans.

I think CoCs just become a new tool for a different subset of assholes to abuse. Yes it does suck for those who have a legitimate issue. I've yet to see how CoCs solve that problem in practice.

As I see it, a CoC gives good leadership a way to punish people who are assholes without causing too much of a backlash. Without it people would argue about fair process, not knowing it was wrong, cultural differences, etc, etc. It's hard to enforce a don't be an asshole rule when you mostly have soft power at your disposal. Of course, it also gives bad leadership a tool with which to punish people without causing too much backlash.

Your statement presumes that:

1) a Code of Conduct is necessary to enforce order 2) a Code of Conduct will prevent or discourage disorder

I think that 1) and 2) are both demonstrably false.

> [...] but your statement here is _dramatically_ privileged.

I don't like this personal attack and I feel less safe on this board because of it. Will someone go after this poster on my behalf please?

I agree that some conduct guidelines are justified, but should be minimal. The feeling against them is due to overreach, where they stray away from codifying generally acceptable behaviour and move into territory that the general population would find incomprehensible, such as not being able to say that someone with the opposite opinion is wrong.

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