Hacker News Reader

Comment by tachyonbeam | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me like the people actually forcing these superficial changes through shaming and bullying are actually, for the most part, privileged upper middle class white people. That was definitely the case with the NIPS => NeurIPS conference renaming. That whole thing got started by some white dude on twitter.

View on HN

So, let's apply the process. Suppose Person A says something, and Person B thinks another colleague, Person C, might find offensive.

That alone may be enough to offend Person B. They feel Person A may be creating an uncomfortable environment, intentional or not. Person C may not even be actually offended, but other people of Person C's {race,sex,etc} have been offended by similar statements. How people apply judgment is an individual process.

Should we care about how any of these people feel? Is Person {A,B,C} right or wrong to feel how they do? We can't control how other people feel about things, but we can try our best as individuals to promote welcoming environments, but recognize we are human and won't always get it right.

The problem (IMO) is a growing distrust of Person B, because that guy keeps policing everything and everyone such that he appears to be using Person C's {race,sex,etc} to prop up and brandish his own moral authority in a way that Person C finds to be annoying and perhaps even actually offensive. Person B doesn't even care about the real issues affecting Person C or even the collective as a whole, and every time these issues are talked about Person B interrupts to speak on behalf of Person C or perhaps even accusing Person A (or whomever) of racism/sexism/etc for bringing up these issues which distract from Person B's personal crusade with respect to Person C's identity. By all appearances, Person B isn't acting in good faith, and his behavior in aggregate is causing a lot of problems and certainly isn't advancing his purported goal of "promoting a welcoming environment".

I’ve seen a lot of the following: Person B is mildly competent, but keeps having their bad ideas shot down. Person D is not, but uses their diverse identity as a crutch. Person C ends up a bystander, blamed for the bad deeds of Person D because B+D have formed an unholy alliance with B providing the technical cover and D providing the outrage, making the bad technical decision about identity instead, despite them not speaking for all of identity. Between the two of them, the are able to wield power for mediocre ideas, and mediocre ideas are often much worse than bad ones. Bad ideas get thrown out or die. Mediocre ones gum up the works for ages to come.

Master vs Main is not a big deal. Changing the default without any technical advantage is a pain in the ass. Had they bundled it with Git V3 when moving to sha256 and everyone having to rebuild their repositories anyway (another mediocre technical idea), it would be palatable.

> we can try our best as individuals to promote welcoming environments

I think what's often missed is that this creates an unwelcoming environment for minorities who don't share your ideology.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com