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Comment by google234123 | Hacker News Reader

One thing I dislike about our new moral arbiters is their view that intent doesn’t matter. They will use anything (e.g. a microaggression, a usually inadvertent tiny slight) to justify cancelling someone. Tolerance for them also only has only one meaning: tolerate us.

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Intent does matter but it’s only half the picture. The impact is the other half. If you don’t intend to run over someone with your car, but you do, you still get in trouble (assuming their intent want to get run over). You need to be more careful because your actions (even unintentional ones) impact others.

From the post, they say that they have a conversation with anyone that’s the subject of a complaint at which point if you express some interest and concern about the impact you’re having on the community, your intentions will probably be respected more than if you just want to focus 100% on your intent, impact be damned.

A better analogy is if you don't intend to run over someone with your car and they jump out in front of you, then you are not at fault, nor were you doing anything wrong.

Results do matter more than intentions, but sometimes results are out of your control or even disconnected from your actions. You may say something perfectly reasonable and yet someone takes unreasonable offense. Who is to define what is reasonable to say and what is reasonable to take offense to? In the past decades, the political left has taken us too far in the direction of giving a small minority tyrannical censorship power to silence by taking offense at whatever they dislike, and then cancelling the person who said it.

> if you don't intend to run over someone with your car and they jump out in front of you, then you are not at fault, nor were you doing anything wrong.

Not if you are in a pedestrian crossing (especially unsignalized one).

What? I can’t call someone a “f*** f*” anymore?

Every generation thinks the next generation’s rules are tyrannical. Speech and culture is messy and it’s not black and white. To say it’s all been bad is ignoring a lot of violent speech that is no longer acceptable and the benefit that has brought to the the same small minority groups you’re referencing, from being less subjected to verbal attacks.

>What? I can’t call someone a “f** f*” anymore?

If this is what you honestly think they're referring to then I feel like that says a LOT more about you then it does about them. They were very clear that they aren't talking about situations like this one you've just described.

Are you being disingenuous or do you honestly need someone to explain what they meant? They're talking about crybullies who will disingenuously misinterpret what someone says and take offense to it. Very much like you've just done.

Were you alive in the 80s? I literally heard this complaint multiple times from multiple people. The point is is that calling someone a “f_____ f__” would be considered a “micro aggression” by some in the 80s that only the “radical left” would get upset about.

The point is that if you’ve lived long enough you’ve seen people complain about culture changing enough times to know that it’s always changing and always uncomfortable for those that don’t like it.*

I'm pretty sure name calling with malicious intent has always been considered a macroaggression.

Even today, using that terminology in jest may be completely acceptable and benign with no malicious intent at all, depending on the social circle it's being used in. Cultural norms do not translate to universal cultural axioms.

Yes, and the 1970s. The expression "microagression" hadn't been invented, but nobody imagined it was anything but aggressive.

Things go too far in one direction, and the speech restrictions in the former Eastern Bloc were considered unacceptable for more than 20 years after its collapse.

Now some people are trying to reestablish the same control mechanisms.

P.S.: No one is asking to permit the slur you cited to make a point, it isn't a great example.

But this case is interesting. Because when you run someone over, you can physically observe the damage done to them. But when you communicate in a manner that upsets someone, it’s impossible to objectively observe the impact. And worse: it is strongly personal.

And that is where a truly ridiculous but also entirely reasonable question comes in: how much of someone being impacted by speech online is really kind of their responsibility? It can’t be zero because zero would be completely incompatible with free society; protected speech can necessarily cause discomfort or pain, and realistically with increasingly many perspectives you’re bound to find someone hurt by something. It probably shouldn’t be 100% either, because there’s no amount of thick skin that can’t ever be broken. Somewhere down the middle is a spot where people have to conduct themselves reasonably, but there is some expectation for personal resilience in the face of adversity in communication.

I suspect that a whole lot of conflict regarding CoC’s, moderation, etc. comes from people who believe more or less responsibility belongs with the person who is impacted by given speech. And it is not culturally universal, either. People may scoff at the concept but if your vernacular differs in a way that is upsetting to someone due purely to cultural differences, there may never be a position to stand in that is truly “inclusive to all.”

Effective inclusivity in a community without some degree of compromise by its members is probably impossible, and I worry the group dynamics of modern communities does not mesh terribly well with this concept, on an internet where everything is constantly decontextualized.

Another thing that often gets missed with online speech is that, if you're Millenial or older, you went from an Internet where the stakes were virtually zero and almost everyone was anonymous, to the Internet today, where the stakes (real or perceived) are higher than ever.

Socializing and doing business over the Internet used to be a punchline or a fictional conceit in the 1990-2005 era, but now many things that previously only mattered in meatspace are only realized online. Personally, I haven't really gotten my head around the social implications of this change.

The "you didn't mean to hit someone with your car" thing is certainly a fun way to look at it, but what about people only get tapped by the bumper and then act like they flipped through the air 500 times before slamming their head into the concrete? And before anybody pretends like these people don't exist, let's think about the football(soccer) players that act like their leg is broken when someone sneezes near them. And if ppl will be that petty and insincere in a professional sporting event, it's fair to say that ppl will do it on the internet.

> They will use anything (e.g. a microaggression, a usually inadvertent tiny slight) to justify cancelling someone.

Are there any examples of this happening in a prominent open source project? The debate over COCs is a few years old at this point, so if this type of abuse were a common problem I'd imagine there'd be some major examples right now. (I freely admit there may indeed be some, and I'm just not aware.)

> Are there any examples of this happening in a prominent open source project?

Open Source Initiative itself expelled Eric S. Raymond (a founding member) from their mailing list

ESR didn't get cancelled for microaggressions. It was because he has a long history of being utterly vile towards black people and women, amongst other very much not "just a microaggression" behaviors.

Whenever I hear this sort of second hand and third hand information, I assume it's a wild exaggeration, amplified through a whisper network.

If there is something concrete to point to, with evidence, people do. In the absence of that, I assume it's just malicious gossip.

Hasn't failed me yet.

I mean, have you bothered to look? It's not a secret nor in private.

Defending eugenics in the comments: https://web.archive.org/web/20210419141913/http://esr.ibibli...

Claiming black people have a lower IQ than everyone else (in an argument that black people shouldn't own guns as a result): https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816449724127608833

Claims LGBT people are making it up: https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/769730601872044032/photo/1

Lots of racist comments: https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/780839196231630848/photo/1

This is what I could find in less than 5 minutes of searching - the receipts are there, it is not "a wild exaggeration"

Huh. Nothing there is overt, it all hides behind some questionable statistics, but it definitely makes me not want to have a beer with the guy.

Well one of the people who helped draft this coc have themselves been banned from go spaces using it:

https://mobile.twitter.com/peterbourgon/status/1438597459383...

I don’t know all the drama in this case and don’t particularly care to know but the punishment seems excessive and arbitrary, and surprised quite a few people. They should drop this sort of heavy handed moderation - communities are governed by consent, not by fiat.

This coc seems excessively wordy to me, and subject to arbitrary interpretation and enforcement, and thus a waste of time for all involved, I don’t plan to read it or abide by it, but instead to use common sense. IMO community rules are enforced by example and gentle encouragement, not by encoding a long set of dos and don’ts.

There's always two sides to every story, though. I don't know anything about what's going on (and I don't write Go), but there's a mention in the Twitter replies about further discussion on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/ppluux/peter_bourgo...

which links this document:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1exmMfbgVCz3dRXOOlfUCYeiX...

which looks an entirely reasonable reason to formally ask someone to knock it off and take some time to chill. From the document, it seems that he has a policy of ignoring Slack moderators, took the fight to Twitter when his Slack account was temporarily deactivated, and has a pattern of such behavior.

If that document is to be believed, the punishment was not excessive and arbitrary. He got a temporary Slack ban, which was appropriate and measured, and then chose to continue escalating.

There's also this reply:

https://twitter.com/ahmetb/status/1438653799724294144

> @peterbourgon Many of us here have respect for u from a technical standpoint and learned from your talks/code. However it’s wrong to troll people on slack (because “this is internet”) and call them names on twitter for no apparent reason. I hope you can stand back and understand the mistake.

For what it's worth, I actually think it's a good sign that the CoC is equally enforced against a drafter of the CoC - the alternative is that there's a group of people who are sufficiently in the in-crowd that their behavior is the definition of what's acceptable and they get to do what they want. It's absolutely possible to abuse the power of CoCs, but this seems like the exact opposite.

Lifetime bans from all spaces seem excessive and arbitrary to me for anything but the very worst hate, trolls and spam.

Imagine a society where people were regularly expelled permanently for annoying those in power.

The linked Google doc is not reasonable, it sounds reasonable because it is a one-sided depiction of the situation that is a) wordy b) completely omits the other side and c) is written in a style that resonates with CoC enforcers.

IOW, the most ruthless and stylistically talented person wins.

Here is the conversation that triggered the tribunal:

https://imgur.com/a/yPnWGXp

If that is a reason for a ban, you can ban 50% of people at Google and 100% of people at Google hired before 2010.

Evading a temporary ban is _universally_ reason for a permanent ban at any competently moderated venue.

No it isn't.

This channel is IRC or Slack. On IRC it is completely normal to log in under a different name. A new generation of "developers" is making up completely arbitrary rules to gain power and suppress productive persons.

It might be technically possible, but it certainly isn't socially acceptable or expected, and that hasn't changed in decades.

> For what it's worth, I actually think it's a good sign that the CoC is equally enforced against a drafter of the CoC

Agreed. The real issue I have with the way this was handled was it took the person who originally submitted the formal complaint to publish that formal complain for there to be any transparency into the process. Further, they updated the CoC hours after this event with language to cover what appears to be the reason he was banned. That's not very good optics. I don't know about you, but I don't like the idea of a committee being able to arbitrarily change and enforce rules post hoc.

I agree with you that that first bit is a problem. Though I don't know how to balance that with the desire for privacy / the desire to avoid publishing what amounts to a personal attack on the person, which can follow them into other communities, which is a penalty significantly beyond banning from a single community. In the case where the person was working in good faith but just had a spell of poor judgment, it seems ethical to allow them the "right to be forgotten," which implies not putting information anywhere that a search engine can index. And in the case where they're actually working in bad faith, they probably are going to be more than happy to make legal threats against everyone involved, which is a chilling effect on the submitter and the moderators. Even if they're correct and confident in everything they say, proving it in court is an unpleasant process.

Maybe a compromise is to say that complaints are private provided the person on the receiving end also agrees to keep the details private, and if they start to litigate it in public, it's permissible to publish the complaint. I'm not sure that helps you with the bad-faith participant, though, but in this case it seems like it's a good-faith contributor who just exercised a whole lot of bad judgment (and perhaps the implicit encouragement to not have this saga Googleable by future employers would have been good for everyone involved).

The other option is to have a strong community norm of contributing with pseudonyms, as e.g. Wikipedia does, and then your "right to be forgotten" is your right to pick a new pseudonym, and the whole moderation process can happen in public. But for something like Go, it's a norm to contribute with your real name as known to employers.

To your second point, the way I read it is not that they made an ex-post-facto change to the code of conduct for this incident, it's that this was already in the works (especially given his comment that he was involved in writing the CoC). If I'm misinterpreting that, then yes, I agree that it's a problem. I'm of the opinion that communities also need to state who can change the code of conduct and what process they'll use, and changing it in a way that surprises the community is bad.

(That said, as long as you specify it up front, I'm totally okay with the BDFL model for that, and I think it's the right model in most cases. A CoC is only as good or bad as the people who enforce it; its value is in setting expectations clearly.)

Plus the arbiters tend to be the least moderate, and most forthright in their views. It’s considered ridiculous when a small town dweller attempts to force their morality on the world, but apparently perfectly fine when it comes from the Californian chattering classes.

Having talked with enough hyper progressives on the subject, the answer I've gotten and am eternally frustrated with is that progressive-social-justice-california-politics are objectively right and small-town-rural-conservative-politics are objectively wrong, therefore it's completely fine for a ruling class to force the former down our throats because they are ultimately Correct.

I only dislike it when its asymmetric. Our policy says intent doesn't matter for you, but the policy itself is vague and only works if you trust the implementers intent.

I don't see anything obvious in this policy that would cause such an issue.

It's the paradox of tolerance. If you tolerate intolerance (regardless of intent), you pave the way for intolerance to take hold.

Of course, no one has ever felt to be the intolerant one in the story.

Oh, that's not true. I lived in a town, briefly fortunately, where the folks did, in fact, know they were intolerant when they ran off black families that dared to move in through various harassment tactics (horribly, mostly directed at the children since the adults had thicker skin). They just didn't care.

>If you tolerate intolerance (regardless of intent)

So should people tolerate people who don't tolerate the intolerant? And should other people tolerate them?

I feel like Mr. Garrison's take on it sums it up really well. Tolerating someone doesn't mean you like them or support their views. It just means you have to live with them. And you kind of do, or you have to be willing to remove them from society by any means necessary. And at that point, you're kind of worse than the intolerant people so long as they aren't actively trying to remove people from society by any means necessary.

I guess it all depends on how you define intolerant. When I hear the word I take it as "refuses to tolerate and will not allow coexistence". If that's the case, and that form of intolerance is what cannot be tolerated, then it's a full-circle mind fuck that makes no sense unless you put yourself on a pedestal where you're brand of intolerance is the only intolerance that must be tolerated.

And yeah, I don't think that kind of intolerance should be tolerated, however I don't think it's as common as people make it seem, and I feel like people conflate too many things with the genocidal form of intolerance than they do with someone who might think something is morally wrong but doesn't actually do anything about it. For instance, I know some religious people think being gay is morally wrong but they don't care what people do or if they can get married. I think they're morally wrong for having those beliefs but so long as they don't violate the rights of gay ppl I don't see why it matters. I mean, I can judge them as much as they can judge me.

I agree, that is exactly what I think people always misunderstand about tolerance: You cannot tolerate something you agree with. That is called agreeing, not tolerance, by definition.

Tolerance is the wise behavior you should have, reserved for things you don't agree with, or even detest.

You should read Michael Knowles' Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds. Political radicals have explicitly defined tolerance to mean "don't tolerate dissenting views". I don't have the exact quote on hand at the moment or I would share it, but they were very explicit about their censorship goals.

The book also discusses how there has never been unbridled free speech. There has always been a standard of speech that allows some things said and disallows other things said. What's changed over time is the standards themselves, and many would argue they have changed for the far worse in recent years.

Popper (the source of the "paradox of tolerance") was very close to a free speech maximalist. His footnote containing this often cited paragraph was a small limited acknowledgment that in some extreme circumstances we as a society must place limits on intolerance.

Who defines intolerance?

Doesn't this address inadvertent slights and micro aggressions?

The concept of micro aggressions is based on teaching people to feel harmed by inadvertent slights

> our new moral arbiters

Can you be specific about who you are referring to and what your concern is?

I agree that cancelling someone over an accidental transgression is a vengeful overreaction. Separately, let me ask you this: If I step on your foot, does it hurt less if I didn't mean to?

that depends if you are wearing high heels or not

If you say you meant to, I will exclude you from my dancing events to protect the other dancers' feet. If you say you didn't mean to, you know, my foot still hurts but you're still welcome to my dancing events because it probably won't happen again.

My foot hurting actually has no bearing on whether or not you're welcome.

Conversely, if you say it's an accident but somehow you have a conspicuously high foot-stomping incidence among many dance partners, I probably will exclude you because I will stop believing the foot-stomping is accidental (or you're just very unfortunately clumsy, terribly sorry, but I still have to protect the other dancers' feet).

> My foot hurting actually has no bearing on whether or not you're welcome.

Of course - that was my point about cancelling being an overreaction to accidental transgressions. I think the thing that gets missed is that an accidental transgression still causes harm, and harm warrants the making of amends. "You break it, you buy it" applies whether or not you meant to knock that lamp over. If I step on your foot I apologize. Etc.

> and harm warrants the making of amends

Generally, yes, of course. Though once we leave the realm of hypothetical foot-stomping for politics, things can get more complicated.

For example, we might look at the John Cena incident where he "acknowledged Taiwan as a country", which somehow led to him later making an apology video (in Chinese?) for this "offense" against mainland China.

So sometimes accusations of "harm" are merely manipulation. It can take discernment to judge when amends are actually warranted.

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