So JupyterCon has been taken over by a bunch of Social Justice Warriors who seem to care less about content than about enforcing their standard for behavior.
My advice is to just stop attending JupyterCon. Maybe create an alternative.
One must be left wondering if the committee violated their own code of conduct by condemning Jeremy...
You clearly didn't read the article. The cited violations had nothing to do with "social justice", just with being (allegedly) "negative" and "insulting."
It sounds like the whole situation was handled poorly, but clearly it is within the role of a conference organizer to reject overly negative or outright insulting talks. I don't know the details of this case and it sounds like communication with the talk author was extraordinarily poor, but I'm not sure how this reflects on the notion of a code of conduct in general or the "social justice" movement in particular.
I absolutely read the entire article. It is wrong of you to assume otherwise. I also watched the YouTube of his presentation and did not find anything offensive.
Hand a committee opaque power with little oversight and no strict rules governing their own conduct. Populate it with probably well intentioned people who more than anything want to do something, anything about things in the world that are actually bad. You will, in general, find out how easy it is to find monsters under the bed and witches in the town next over, and you will do so very quickly. It is an extremely fast way to get an alignment check roll.
The findings have not been duplicated, but that doesn't mean the experiment did not produce the results described. I am very much aware of the controversy surrounding this experiment, but it has been cited MANY times over the past (almost) 50 years.
There are lots of widely cited, wrong, studies. It being widely cited should be more of a motivator to "not* cite it and object to it's use, to further inform people that it is bunk.
You should not continue to cite popular, wrong, studies.
Should literally _everything_ be an fully transparent democratic process (and good luck keeping it fair when bad actors show up en masse)?
Having a CoC is at least an improvement on the previous status quo, which was some group of individuals making arbitrary decisions in secret without any justification for their actions _at all_. CoC's don't give anyone more power than they already had; they just clearly express the principles that the group already in power will (ostensibly) use to make choices.
So are we stuck between a choice of democracy, dictatorship, or a politburo? Maybe the organizers of events like this should stick to organizing the event and not trying to regulate the behavior of presenters and attendees.
a COC as such is fine, but most implementations are godawful and that _must_ change. Most people are not trained to run them, but do so anyway, and that's clearly what's gone on here.
The committee that is responsible for judging COC violations must:
- operate transparently: no star chambers!
- have a real, actual, not-just-we-checked-a-box culture of engineering ethics where individuals on the committee can say "no, this complaint is obvious bullshit, let's move on" without fear of reprisal from the committee members themselves, or the organizational power structure they report to.
>CoC's don't give anyone more power than they already had
Nonsense. Formation of a committee as such is implicit power; formation of a committee to adjudicate politically sensitive and fraught matters is explicit power.
You are effectively reinventing a legal system with the CoC rules and its enforcement. But it's a "kangaroo court". In the real world, we realised that power needs checks and balances. Justice must be seen to have been served in a fair and proportionate manner. That's why we have public hearings, jury trials, the defendant has the right to put forward their side of the story with legal representation, evidence is submitted by both sides, we have cross-examination, sentences are passed with reference to established precedent, and there is also the right to appeal a judgement.
If organisations take it upon themselves to invent a faux legal system under which to operate, they can not omit the checks and balances without creating a system ripe for abuse and miscarriage of justice. The problem with CoC "enforcement" is that it is done behind closed doors with no oversight or accountability. The "defendant" has no right to properly hear the charges, or to present their case, or to appeal against it. It is manifestly unfair.
As for "not giving anyone more power than they already had", this is also untrue. Committees and individuals have been explicitly bestowed with the power to enforce CoCs by pronouncing judgements and inflicting their will upon the members of their organisations. They have great power, but not the corresponding requirement for accountability to their members.
While it is within the role of a conference organizer to choose what talks they will accept, in this particular case they seem to have grossly overstepped the acceptable bounds themselves. And this does not seem to be an error of fact or some misunderstanding, the actions of the CoC committee (at least as described) seem intentionally malicious without an acceptable justification - since the talk was simply obviously not outright insulting, the whole case was without merit.
What's sauce for goose is sauce for gander - perhaps the NumFOCUS individuals involved in that CoC committee should publicly stand by their decision, so that the community can evaluate whether we trust their judgement and are willing to allow those people to participate CoC enforcement in the future.
Enforcing communal norms requires that the community trusts that the enforcers actually do share these communal norms, and there should be a clear mechanism to remove them if they don't. Participants and speakers deserve protection and a fair judgement, but the 'political' positions of writing down and enforcing the norms should be able and required to substantiate and publicly defend their position and judgements - at least if they claim to represent the community instead their own unilateral position.
I feel like I am doing things "wrong" on an almost daily basis when writing code. It is probably a pretty universal feeling. Should I put my business logic in a database, application code, front end JavaScript, or even a notebook? There is no ideal solution. Tell me I am wrong and I will probably agree with you.
Why is this comment, and not the culture war nonsense, not at the top of the page?
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.
I agree that his talk was not in any way offensive. But I have to add that no matter if you think they where right or wrong about their judgement, it seems plainly true that they where horribly wrong in how they carried out the process.
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.
We're literally tearing ourselves apart, and I don't want to hold opinions about human beings anymore. Anyone can be an enemy or dislike you.
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.
This conference isn't a good example, but it is totally reasonable to run an event or a space with a norm of avoiding criticism. That's part of the job of a code of conduct: to establish those norms.
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 disagree. Each conference has their own goals, but I'd think that a general thread that underlies all of them is the exchange of ideas. If you can't criticize ideas ("Joe Schmoe is wrong about X"), then I'd say you're not doing a great job of exchanging ideas.
I think preventing attendees from criticizing people ("Joe Schmoe is dumb") is perfectly fine, but that's clearly not what happened here.
Like I said: it's a surprising norm for a conference. But if it's clearly communicated, it's fine. It's just that kind of event. Here, it wasn't clearly communicated; if the author had seen the norm, they'd have presented something else, or not at all.
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.
I have trouble imagining why anyone would want to go to a conference where any and all criticism is banned. Is it even possible to say something meaningful without implicitly criticizing the opposite of whatever you are saying?
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.
> 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.
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 been at conferences where the organizers strongly emphasize CoCs but have had presenters who were almost virulently critical of companies if maybe not explicitly individuals (though obviously execs by definition). And these were presentations that the same organizers consistently have praised. Maybe it's something about punching up vs. down.
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.
The 4th implies the 3rd. If I think you're wrong, I'll say you're wrong--with reasons. Adding some additional words like "in my oh so humble opinion I think" doesn't change the fundamental meaning. (And I have absolutely criticized well-known people's opinions on public stages.)
It absolutely changes the meaning. Perhaps, in some cultures or subcultures, showing humility has a weakening effect but I tend to avoid those places nowadays, or at least push back on them.
A subtle feature of language, at least in English, is that prefacing things with "I think" or "I feel", while displaying humility in personal conversations, has the effect of devaluing your own argument if done in excess. If you are perceived to be forever apologizing for your own opinion, nobody is going to take you seriously, because what you ultimately lack is confidence - and if you're not confident about what you're saying, why should I be?
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.
Do you forsee a circumstance where forthrightly saying "The state of the world is X" implies "The state of the world is X but I don't believe it"? That seems like a difficult state of mind to achieve.
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.
I often find myself using the phrase when something clearly is a matter of opinion rather than an absolute fact. I'm not going to say "I think the earth is a spheroid." But I might say "I think we're going to see more heterogeneous computing." But it's mostly an anti-pattern and I often edit them out when I'm writing.
I like the third one as well as the forth. Frankly the second is a bit edgy, but it could be used as a headline.
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.
"If you can't criticize ideas ("Joe Schmoe is wrong about X"), then I'd say you're not doing a great job of exchanging ideas."
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.
If Joe Schmoe is a very public proponent of X, then everyone will make that connection themselves.
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".
If your talk is in response to another talk by someone else, and you're taking slides and content from their talk and reacting to them, it's important that your audience know what the initial talk was. They have to have the context of the debate, including who is on each side, to fully investigate both sides and reach their own conclusions.
Well, maybe don't do that then. You could address the ideas from that talk instead of the talk specifically, and have a slide, like,
"My talk is a response to this other talk by this person and I encourage you to check it out".
Saying "Joe Schmoe is wrong about X" doesn't imply "Joe Schmoe is wrong about everything". In fact it helps advancing and encouraging debate when someone can say "Joe Schmoe is wrong about X" AND admit "Joe Schmoe is right about Y".
It isn't sensible to rebut an abstract that nobody claimed. He could claim that notebooks are wonderful, but that would be less intellectually useful because it puts the onus on the listener to find and compare alternative opinions. He is, as speakers really should be encouraged to do, providing an easy reference to strong competing ideas and also providing a specific case of why he thinks they are wrong.
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.
Leaving aside whether this'd be a good policy for a conference, this argument doesn't really check out for me.
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.
Some ideas have demonstratively poorer outcomes, or more succinctly: "bad". Some ideas are demonstratively at odds with the observed behavior of the world: "wrong". If you can't say "person X is wrong about idea Y" what kind of discussion can you have? How would you advise Galileo to present his paper on an experiment that demonstrated that the leading academic voice (Aristotle) was wrong?
Research is literally predicated on showing results that are better than the state of the art. Without that judgment on other work there can be no progress in research!
You can talk up your cool new thing without explicit criticism of the old thing. Like, that's probably not a good rule for every conference in general, but it's a rule you could have for a specific conference without immediately disqualifying all possible good talks.
I'm not sure it's possible to ban criticism without also banning opinions. If you give a presentation on how some new tool or technique is good, you're implicitly implying that the existing alternatives aren't as good. Many presentations will even explicitly call out weaknesses in existing things (criticising them!) in order to illustrate why some new thing is worthwhile. If you talk about how your research fills in gaps left by some previous person's research, or how your software is suitable for use cases that someone else's isn't, then you're criticising the completeness of their efforts. But those are good, useful things to have in your talk. Making it clear to people what you're interested in, and why they might be interested in it too, is important, and I don't think that's possible to do without at least implicitly criticising other people's work.
It feels like a serious stretch to talk about “implicitly implying” criticism of other options. If I say I love Chips Ahoy, I’m not “implicitly implying” criticism of Oreos.
I think you may have accidentally encountered a slippery slope.
But "I love Chips Ahoy" isn't really interesting except to the person in your household doing the shopping. "I prefer Chips Ahoy to Oreos" is what creates discussion and debate. The trick is for the discussion to be civil, playful, fruitful, constructive as opposed to antagonistic, disrespectful, in bad faith.
For the most part, communities asking their members to be vulnerable, in practice often results in criticizing individuals or entire groups who are not represented in the community, with no attempt to understand their viewpoints.
No, Hacker News encourages disagreement and well reasoned criticism.
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!).
It might be reasonable to have that norm, but the context here is a response to Joel Grus's "I don't like Jupyter Notebooks" which was both well-received and quite critical. Not of any particular person, but of technology, but personally I don't see how Jeremy Howard's talk was very different.
I’m reading about critical thinking right now. If we’re not challenging assumptions, then you’re just blindly accepting something that could be wrong. Should I accept what I read in the news as truth, or should I say “this sounds wrong and here’s why”?
You’re right that this is madness. This PC nonsense needs to end. Not everyone can simultaneously be correct
>We're literally tearing ourselves apart, and I don't want to hold opinions about human beings anymore. Anyone can be an enemy or dislike you.
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.
I encourage anyone who believes social media has divided our society like never before to read a small amount of history of the Vietnam war era. Here's a taste: in 1970, the national guard murdered four unarmed students at Kent State. A poll showed 58% of Americans blamed the students, who were widely smeared.
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.
I would also encourage reading about the press before the 20th century. Every random pamphleteer or newspaper churned up all kinds of despicable rumors or partisan rhetoric as bad or worse than Twitter. The idea of “objective press”
is pretty new...
The difference many less people had those newspapers or pamphleteers in their face all day long. The odds of people running into those stories in their personal lives were pretty small.
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
Another multiplier is that Facebook and others have data scientists and psychology PHDs that are working to maximize the addictiveness of these apps to suck more of our eyeballs attention
I wonder how the perception of who the writer is influences the people who read the 'message'.
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.
> I wonder how the perception of who the writer is influences the people who read the 'message'.
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.
If you want a real open society, you need to address as many people as possible and the best way to do that is by including the most perspectives as possible. Journalism evolved here until financial incentives drove us back to strong opinions.
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.
To be fair, the draft over a war was what really drove people apart in the 60's/70's. The youth of the country didn't want to die face down in the mud in a god forsaken jungle in vietnam to support the anti-communist narrative spouted by our political leaders.
In 2020, we no longer use the draft. What's our excuse for being so polarized?
> I encourage anyone who believes social media has divided our society like never before to read a small amount of history of the Vietnam war era.
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.
Fair enough it is possible that we have "industrialized" outrage and gotten good at mass producing it, but being real, Donald Trump would have fit in great with 18th century politics.
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.
Outrage spreads just fine without machine learning. All you need is a platform that makes mass signaling cheap. Maybe machine learning intensifies the effect a small amount, but I am not aware of evidence that it is decisive.
> Whatever manual interventions we had to make use of outrage before are like kids' play compared to the systems which automate this nowadays.
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.
I'd guess it's more that in that time, the amount of incrimination and accusation you could have in a society before you had a civil war on your hands was lower. So you had more civil wars, but it also pushed people to stay quiet more. I think the reason we have so much criticism nowadays is how relatively limited the consequences are.
Well also there's the notion of freedom of speech, which is a relatively new development in the West. We tolerate speech today that would have resulted in gruesome execution in the reign of, say, the Tudor Kings of England. [1] These were not democracies. (Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point.)
Even without Social Media, people will continue to view and subscribe to Youtube channels that fits their views. It is really the "Internet" as a whole, or the always connected tech. Not simply Social Media.
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?
People that blame it on social media maybe forgot that we once had a civil war that killed 2.5% of the population of the entire country.
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.
Social media has been doing a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to being a scapegoat for anything to do with people being shitty for a good few years now.
You're right, I was listening to a long podcast that covered parts of the 60s and 70s, and the same things were going on back then, they just didn't have "social media" so people don't remember. Rioting in cities over civil rights issues, "woke" college students creating oppression hierarchies that decided who was right when someone was offended, and the DNC rigging the presidential primaries which resulted in Nixon getting elected. It was really eye opening to see how history repeats itself, it's just more visible now because of technology.
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 underlying witch-hunt mentality has obviously existed since before the term witch-hunt.
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.
The Red Guards accomplished the national banding together thing, with the approval of the establishment, going from village to village, city to city, they burned and hanged witches, and destroyed problematic symbols too.
They were actually incredibly fractured and fought each other a lot, actual fights with weapons and casualties. But still, you're right, they only got off the ground initially due to a national infrastructure encouraging them.
Social Media is more of an accidental paper-clip-optimizer national encouragement.
> > [bamboozled] the war ended and people moved on
> [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.
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.
Media abuse is not a new thing. Understand that the current iteration is worse than the last one and that has resulted in worse polarization is probably a better way to put it.
> I don't like criticism. I was bullied a lot as a kid.
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).
Surely, it isn't a leap to imagine that someone who was bullied a lot as a child would have a difficult time constructively receiving criticism? I believe most people are not great at constructively giving it, so it doesn't seem like that should be a stretch at all.
I agree and I'd add that most of us aren't good at giving constructive feedback either, so it can be a double-edged sword (if I used that idiom correctly).
Not that this is a case of this, but in tech communities I see too many examples of "criticism" where in the critic doesn't want to actually provide anything useful to the person and instead uses the opportunity to show themselves and/or the other people involved how smart they are.
When I read that first part, I thought, yup, could have been me right here, even if that weren't your point. I think sometimes I reply online for many different reasons, typically emotional ones. I'll read something and I'll feel excited/confused/angry/annoyed/etc. about that topic or something related and will share it, often not being so aware of why I commented or how it was a mostly non-sequitur comment.
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.
This isn't a reason to refrain from (or worse, prohibit) commonly acceptable and valuable behavior just because a certain minority's state of mind might not be receptive to it (either through actual past trauma or just malicious intent to instigate drama).
We should fight to keep real bullying around. Turns out sticks and stones and broken bones are a major part of getting skin thick enough that you can accept people won't always like you and they have no obligation to.
Agreed. Criticism (of the kind we're discussing here) is attacking ideas. Bullying is attacking people. The former is an essential part of any healthy intellectual environment. The latter is not.
But criticism can be used as a tool for bullying and it can be tricky to identify the difference between "robust good faith criticism" and "bullying bad faith criticism".
I paused on that as well and took OP to be relating bullying to NumFOCUS' criticism of the article author; rather than simply saying that all criticism is bullying.
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.
> Everyone is so hostile and eager to end other people.
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!!!".
"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. "
A vocal minority is enough to dox you, to bother your workplace, your school/college, to get you fired/expelled, and alltogether, to make you "too hot" to hire, especially by large tech companies, who have whole departments of "vocal minority" people dealing with tiny stuff like that.
What do you concretely think should be done though?
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.
> Aside from that, "cancel culture" feels quite a vague topic
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.
> 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?
> Maybe people are objecting to a tiny % of critical theorists trying to seize control of acceptable language from the top down.
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.
Society is complicated and messy. Social change is uncomfortable. And yet for all the complaining of any given generation, they'd probably disagree with the ethics of three generations prior.
The thing is, you're not exactly ending segregation here.
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 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:
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.
My point is that its neither simple, nor one sided, nor well defined.
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.
So, should we make rape jokes (as is the main point of 40 days and 40 night movies)? Or are they ok, only when their targeted against men?
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).
News is totally fucked. Look at how most media reported on James Damore being fired from Google, and what they quoted him as having saying, vs what he actually said (1).
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)
Can someone give me specifics on who's affected by "cancel culture"? It's a meaningless label to me.
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?
I had a teacher in high school (black). He was an absolute favorite of students of all backgrounds. Extremely strict, very buttoned up. In the arts department. I think he literally was the advisor for like the multi-cultural club (that did somewhat lame lunch multi-cultural stuff).
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.
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
USC business communications professor Greg Patton was replaced after he used Chinese as an example for pause words that are used in many languages. Phonetically written, the Chinese "Um, um" is "ne ga ne ga", and The Black MBA Candidates Class of 2022 complained to the school, which then removed the professor. Despite counter-protest letters signed by many other students, including many Chinese alumni, who state that the normal usage of the Chinese language should not be viewed as a pejorative, the professor was not reinstated.
> According to the 1% rule, about 1% of Internet users are responsible for creating content [...]
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.
I'm guessing this is the same with everyone else, but if you check Twitter and Facebook, most of the people I follow never post anything and a tiny minority post all the time.
I wonder if it isn't even more lopsided today, since sharing content is the main activity in most popular social networks today, unlike when this "rule" was coined...
According to the linked article, it took only 2 reports to lead to an investigation and to the decision that the CoC was violated. So a vocal minority, when not ignored, can sometimes have a big impact.
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
There is a lot of division over political correctness, but I would not suggest that it is the cause, any more than a cough is the cause of a cold. There is something that is driving us apart on many, many issues, and political correctness just happens to be one of the more prominent ones.
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.
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.
I was cryptic in part because it is not completely clear. It's difficult even to pin down when we started on this path.
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.
> And HN is pretty friendly to discussion of big-media-tech censorship in general.
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.
I was talking in general , not just censorship. Despite of what some Americans may think the Nordic countries are not utopias, there is plenty to criticize about them.
This isn't anything new, people don't seem to make the connection very often, but this kind of behavior is ancient and just takes different forms from time to time.
The disease is the moral authority police & moral superiority complex.
Humans have this compulsion to be "right", to punish people for not being righteous enough, and generally to cultivate a feeling of their own moral superiority.
This is accomplished with rules, usually somewhat vague and needing the ability to be misinterpreted, overinterpred, or just somewhat related to "punishments". If your policy is "don't be a jerk" it's quite hard to misinterpret that into zealotry, but a complex code of conduct? That's the meat and potatoes of this human failing.
People rejected organized religions because they were full of this kind of person, pepperpots determined on punishing each other and everyone else. The failing logic is that this sort of behavior was caused by organized religion.
The self-righteous and overzealous young people (and not so young too) just changed topics, they aren't thumping their bibles of soap boxes about not loving Jesus the right way or following god's will (some still are, just fewer) the pepperpots of today are getting up on their social media soapboxes and doing their morality masturbation about their brand of justice.
The insidious thing, or why they are so widespread and successful is that their message and their sets of rules, on a quick glance, seems reasonable and rather supportable by most folks. The people disagreeing with this new justice are usually the ones yelling nonsense and that opposition draws battle lines where a lot of people pull themselves into the "justice" side to disassociate themselves from the vocal opposition because they can't quite figure out what is wrong with the justice crusaders.
It is very difficult to pinpoint exactly what is wrong with this new generation of moralists, so most people stay pretty silent about it.
It's not new, just the same old monster in a different costume.
Be aware that your comment unfortunately contributes to the current division. It's subtle, and you may not be aware of it, but the tone you use, the words "rotten" and "madness", the emphasis on "end other people" - they have the pathos and call to action of an "us vs them" atmosphere.
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'.
I, respectfully, very much disagree. A lot has been said about people not being able to handle criticism, about being "weak", or snowflakes, etc. I believe that is a misdiagnosis. Because when many people shriek the loudest about wanting to "cancel" others, or taking an unintended slight as a symbol of "vicious oppression", these people are usually speaking from a position of power, not a position of weakness.
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.
> This is why universities used to be small places with only highly interested intellectuals trained to handle that diversity.
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'd say that universities did contain only highly interested intellectuals. But they contained just a small subset of all highly interested intellectuals: those who had been able to go to university and pursue a doctorate. It's much easier to do this now - for example, if you are a woman. On the other hand, there are probably more networkers and grifters too.
You should read the book “The Coddling of The American Mind”. It’s largely about the cancel culture, over protection, and how the voice on college campuses has been changing. How we went from college being a safe place for open debate and discussion to an environment which is becoming less welcoming of differing opinions and perspectives. The authors try to identify the origins of the change and use data and statistics to back up their claims. I thought it was an interesting read.
IMHO, there's something to the push to change how we go about discourse. As an example - it's slight, but feel the difference between "You should read...", "You'd like reading...", "I think you'd really like...", "I got a lot out of reading...".
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.
> it's slight, but feel the difference between "You should read...", "You'd like reading...", "I think you'd really like...", "I got a lot out of reading...".
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.
It's true that you can't control the outcome. I do lean towards certain language in general, but more so I try to use each of the many options artistically, based on the circumstances. Who am I talking to? What are we talking about?
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?
> You don't sound like you've had much experience with these variations and their impacts.
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.
Added to my reading list, thanks! I'd wager that the "self esteem" movement, or more accurately, whatever caused it to gain traction in the American psyche, kicked off the downward spiral to where-we-are-now.
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.
The core problem with the self-esteem movement is that they try to promote high self-esteem disconnected from any true achievement or worth. High self-esteem certainly correlates with healthy, successful people (of course healthy successful people have good self esteem!) but trying to artificially inflate peoples' self esteem to create health and success is driving the causation backwards.
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.
> 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.
Dancing for leisure is practiced by anyone, and people can be good dancers because "good" is defined differently for something so universally practiced.
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).
> 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 first rule of social dancing is that you want to welcome new dancers.
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 don't have much experience, but two different dancing groups I attended started each night with an hour-long "lesson" with a teacher, after which the rest of the night was free dancing (well, one group charged an admission fee, but I mean no one was giving directions). Looking at a couple of other groups' websites, it seems like this is common.
I suppose you could use "whether someone attended the 'lesson' period" as a sign of whether they will take coaching well.
I do have a fair amount of experience (several years of social dancing, ballroom performance, competitive ballroom formation team, and ballroom teacher training), and, sure, the “lesson before social dance” pattern is common, but you'd be much better to take “did they specifically ask me for feedback or coaching” as a sign of whether they will take coaching well. (Unless you are identified as an instructor for the lesson — in which case they've asked by attending — the same rule applies in the lesson, too.)
Earlier this year I had the occasion to do some reading on self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-love. I think this critique is a bit divorced from what the psychologists are actually saying.
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.
> divorced from what the psychologists are actually saying
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.
Thanks for that link - I'd honestly not thought to read the wiki page on it but it looks quite comprehensive.
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.
> I don't like criticism. I was bullied a lot as a kid.
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 quietly lower my expectations of people I talk to whenever they bring up any social media "stuff that happens". Twitter and Facebook mainly but I'm not going to leave Instagram out of this either.
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.
Frankly. Most people on HN and the tech community have asked for this, it's been years in the making. Slowly, anyone watching has seen this coming and it's not the end.
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
I find I'm a lot happier when I try to extend everyone compassion. (Mostly) doesn't matter who, or what, or why, or even if my story for how to be compassionate towards them is feasible ("well maybe if their life was like X then..."). I, myself, feel better and happier when I don't lean into the hostility and desire to "end other people", and instead lean into compassion.
>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.
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
Anecdotally, my karma here on HN used to be at least double of what it is now. But at some point there was a change in people’s moods, and now it has been slowly eroding over time. I suspect someday it will be zero, or worse.
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.
The solution to low karma — if, indeed, you care about such things, is to make productive comments. Most of us have heard all of the simple one-liner thoughts before, we want something that might be insightful and novel. And politics-adjacent threads like these are not the place to earn karma, because lots of people will always disagree. But it’s an excellent place to lose karma.
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!
> The solution to low karma — if, indeed, you care about such things, is to make productive comments.
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.
Yes, sometimes the quips work the best. But that's also harder. Comedy relies on a good sense of humor, timing, and making sure you read your audience. It can be done, but it's not easy, and no one wants HN to turn into Slashdot of yore. Sometimes I've written jokes that end up with 1 or 0 karma after a lot of votes -- you can only farm karma this way if you're good and lucky.
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!
I've never had a lot of karma as I don't comment that often and certainly haven't posted an article. But I suspect that my opinions would soon seen what little karma i do have, disappear.
"Unfortunately “anti-racism” has been weaponized as a shortcut for silencing anyone who may at one point have said something that could be interpreted as racist or even not anti-racist enough. No thanks.
Rather be labeled as a racist and keep my free speech than silenced by some mob authority."
This kind of comment was not surprising to find in your history's first page.
Some relevant statements from the author on this topic:
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
There's a good piece called the Tyranny of Structurelessness about radical feminist movements
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 is hitting this now. This is the agenda of Black Lives Matter.
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/
> You wouldn't advocate scrapping the entire criminal justice system, just because one innocent person was convicted
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
If I understand correctly, the idea is that the reports implicitly threaten the conference with attacks from social media if the conference does not quickly take an agreeable action.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the naïve to figure out bureaucracy, agreements and rules are a means of subduing their polity. Good enough for government work, but the operating principle is the same even for private organizations. Put a process in place, sprinkle some pretty words around to get people to agree that this undoubtedly good and just and will not be abused, and the people who are better at politics than you are will leverage that process to unjust means, and your best hope is that you’re not the one in the line of fire.
In the beginning there was 2 of them, but none of them (or both together) had the courage to try. Then they tried to recruit number 3. Number 3 was courageous and dumb. Snapped his pinky, no words spoken. None of them tried again for years. Was 13 at the time. Cancel culture is a tool for weak people
it is a luxury of modern times. Century and more ago only upper classes were having debates/arguments/discussions because only they had the option to try to control their fate by trying to win those debates (and those white males had less diverse set of opinions then we have in the society today). The rest of society was consumed in daily grit for survival, they had no impact on decisions and whatever decisions were taken it was for them akin to a weather or geological events. These days everybody can participate, thanks to economic development and communication tools and especially social media. Though not everybody has sufficiently trained mental toolset to handle it.
>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.
> Century and more ago only upper classes were having debates/arguments/discussions because only they had the option to try to control their fate by trying to win those debates.
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.
that is a systems theory question - is true mass debate possible giving so far observed half-life of mere milliseconds before it gets desintegrated into mass propaganda. Basically it calls for new Shannon - what is the maximum information (in particular - can it be more than simple slogan?) can be communicated (i.e. received/understood and meaningfully (it is key point here, ie. at the level comparable to the received information) responded) in some massively parallel and may be partially ordered (yet definitely not totally sequential) manner in a massive graph of very diverse nodes.
absolutely relevant. 1-2 centuries ago the deciding top of the society were mostly white males. That naturally leaded to the less diverse set of opinions held by them. Or do you think Jim Crow, etc. would have the same history if black people were part of the deciding elite 150-100 years ago?
I think the OP article is heartbreaking. Not because I think how they handled the case is wrong, but how they excluded him from a society he was embracing and trying to identify with.
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 issue, I sincerely believe, is a form of justice that goes beyond "eye for an eye". I call it "face for an eye": a beatdown in response to a sucker punch.
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.
> 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.
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.
This is one of those posts where the title is going to trigger a lot of unproductive subthreads, but the piece itself seems pretty balanced and thoughtful (and links to Valerie Aurora's excellent code-of-conduct training deck).
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.
agreed. it deserves a response of "this is true, code of conducts need to be done thoughtfully and well" but can expect a response of "this proves babies should be discarded with bath water"
If the U.S. accidentally bombs a civilian caravan when trying to bomb terrorists isn't the critique "we should stop trying to bomb terrorists" equally as valid as "we should be more careful where we drop bombs".
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 think extending the metaphor to bombs is a bit much. It's more like if the U.S. accidentally bombs a civilian caravan and the response is "we should stop trying to assassinate terrorists" in other countries.
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.")
This happens to be a case where the adsurdity of using CoC to silence criticism is quite clear, as no “minority” is involved (right?). If the exact same thing happened but the criticized party played the minority card, or someone played it for them — in this case the criticized party don’t even care, I dare say it would immediately become much more controversial.
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.
> but the piece itself seems pretty balanced and thoughtful
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.
It is not a take. It's an objective description of what a CoC is and how it is designed to be used. There is no way around it. At all. I'm surprised you feel the need to turn a blind eye to this fact.
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?
Hm, and me I thought most of them were just a way to assure newcomers that your project wasn't going to allow racist trolling on the mailing list.
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?
Someone asked on Twitter what, if any, flavor bay leaves had. I repeated advice I'd heard: supermarket bay leaves are bad, so just add a lot of them. Then I acted on another piece of advice: if you want to know what bay leaves taste like, steep them in water and taste the water. I did. Bay leaves are disgusting. Nobody should add more of them to anything.
What you're saying is true, but consider this also: America's Test Kitchen made identical versions of a bunch of recipes with identical ingredients on identical equipment simultaneously, and with no exceptions, the tasting panel preferred the ones containing bay leaves, but interestingly, they couldn't state exactly why.
This here is more interesting than everything else in the thread. IIRC ATK is a TV show so I presume the experiment wasnt particularly rigorous, but it's still neat to learn.
I wouldn't recommend making tea out of most herbs, including uncontroversial staples like basil and oregano. Doesn't mean they don't add useful flavors in the right dishes.
Ha. I saw the saw the start of that conversation on Twitter. I didn’t know you went ahead and ran an experiment. Hilarious. Good work. They definitely add bitter/dark tones.
i should object to this strenuously as someone with mediterranean heritage, but this is absolutely not the bay leaf take i was expecting and i have to admit that astrigency you hate is like the whole point and i would never eat one by itself so i am torn here.
Using more than one entire bay leaf is often too much. Is a strong spice. Is poisonous in big amounts but half a leaf here and there adds a nice flavor.
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.
I have never encountered this in 23 years of participating in open source projects of all kinds.
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.
If you've never seen racist trolling on GitHub, maybe it's because you're not looking rather than that it doesn't happen
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)
I don't think anyone was suggesting that it literally has never happened, so much as that it's very, very rare. Moreover, that kind of behavior would get you banned irrespective of any CoC, so the question remains: what does a CoC add here?
I don’t see how you can possibly think that. Saying that you’ve never experienced something is not a claim that no one has ever experienced that thing. Mine is not a generous interpretation, but rather I’m not going out of my way to infer some nefarious subtext.
I think the problem is essentially this: if you're a white male, you may essentially never experience or see racism / sexism in tech.
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)
[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
I'm just speaking for myself, but in terms of the open-source projects I have been a part of, communication either happens over a mailing list, or a discourse forum. A lot of the time you only know the people you're interacting with as a screen name, so you don't even know their race or gender. And 100% of the content of the discussion is either purely technical in nature (e.g. how do I use this API feature, what JSON structure is expected etc) or is something operational like the timelines and priorities of the project.
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.
That fact that it's hard for you to imagine just means your imagination isn't very good
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.
To be fair, the article in question is not about a software project, it's about an individual who is using github as a food blog being trolled using the github collaboration features. It's an example of horrible online behavior, but I don't think it's relevant to OSS communities.
I can understand how you might think that code repos are different from other social media sites.
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.
I'm not saying that open source communities are not in need of moderation. Of course they are, like any online community. Basically every open online forum is vulnerable to vulgar, hateful and abusive content being posted. The point this sub-thread is referring to, is that CoC's are there as:
> 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.
Of course you don't need a CoC to enforce anything! You can moderate aggressively without one.
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.
What are the author's actual complaints about the C++ community? Maybe I am lacking context, but it's extremely difficult for me to understand it by reading this blog post.
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.
Did you skip over the word 'assure'? The implication is that other projects aren't performing that particular assurance.
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.
If this were a signpost along the lines of "employees must wash hands", then there would be no problem. Of course employees should wash their hands.
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.
Like any other system of laws, a code of conduct necessarily restricts the boundaries of what one individual is allowed to do in order to ensure there is a safe space for others. When used correctly, instead of inhibiting the free exchange of ideas, a CoC helps keep participants in an open and receptive mindset instead of a closed and defensive one.
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.
In general I agree with your point that communities often need some sort of guard rails to ensure that they can stay productive, especially as a community grows.
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.
You inadvertently proved a point here on misuse of code of conducts.
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".
It’s not a objective description. It’s a subjective one. You’re describing the intent of other people, which is really your interpretation of their intent.
Yes in some cases there are bad things in this world that are promulgated and promoted under the guise of being good. Learning to recognize those bad things for what they are instead of naively accepting their self-serving sanguine explanations is part of being a developed adult.
You write this as if it's insight, as if maybe it's the first time it's occurred to the reader that "good" things can be bad. We all know that. It's the sentences that come after that thought that have meaning.
I don't think it's particularly insightful. I'm just stating it since it doesn't seem to occur to most adults these days.
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?
Frankly, and you should be careful of not becoming too cynical about it, I think there are people that want to build their ego with fighting sexism and racism through penalizing others. And if there isn't anything obvious to be found, smaller and smaller infractions are used as an excuse to exclude other people. They want to play cop on the internet.
> And if there isn't anything obvious to be found, smaller and smaller infractions are used as an excuse to exclude other people. They want to play cop on the internet.
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.
> 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).
You realise conference organisers can do the very same thing without a code of conduct, right? That a code of conduct can be used as an "oppression tool" doesn't mean that its absence doesn't lead to even more "oppression". If you want to compare the relative merit of two things, like having a code or not, you need to consider both sides rather than just point out the perceived downsides of one.
I'm curious how you think they would achieve the same without a Code of Conduct, the acquired public support and the pseudo-court-system that comes with it.
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?
Exertion of power does not require a pseudo-court-system and it can be exerted in the furtherance of fairness just as much as in its hindrance (people are also punished because there's no enforcement of some behaviour). Again, to discuss whether something is worth doing or not, you have to consider all the upsides and all the downsides of doing it as well as those of not doing it.
It also makes it less likely to actually be personal. I don't think anyone claims that due process is always free of bias and error, but that doesn't make it more likely to be more biased.
> 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.
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.)
Why would we never know? Quoting from the blog post: "The specific reasons given were that [...]" followed by a bullet list. Your guess is unwarranted speculation.
> Why would we never know? Quoting from the blog post: "The specific reasons given were that [...]" followed by a bullet list. Your guess is unwarranted speculation.
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?
The author was one of the primary drivers of widespread mask adoption for Covid transmission suppression, by popularizing epidemiological and public health evidence.
Exactly what punishment was given here? I've read the piece several times, and couldn't figure it out. The most negative thing that was done to him was that they found him to have violated the Code. If there was a punishment, he seems to have found it less doleful than the finding itself and the process by which it came about.
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.
From what i can tell there was no punishment, he opted out of the process before the "next steps" phase. Or in other words, the process itself was the punishment-- being called in front of a tribunal and scolded by strangers.
> The thing HN likes to do best with any story is to generalize it and find sweeping conclusions.
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.
Consult the search bar below to disabuse yourself of the notion that "intelligent people" have had any trouble discussing their qualms about codes of conduct until now.
I can assure you that speaking out against CoCs under your real name in a professional context can be quite difficult. The people who tend to create, promote, and defend CoCs tend to engage in incredibly Kafkaesque and pathological behavior as a matter of course.
As far as HN goes, I use the term "intelligent" quite loosely but one of the hallmarks of intelligence is pattern recognition.
Maybe it's not what's being said but how it's being said. And, the irony of your bit about intelligence is that you're critiquing an instance of pattern recognition. ;)
> Maybe it's not what's being said but how it's being said.
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.
Yes of course but in this case you're just wrong. This is a very well documented pattern of behavior at this point. Fortunately you're not my boss or colleague and so you can continue to promulgate these structures that cause a lot of misery and distress and lost productivity and I will continue to avoid being subject to them.
"Agreeing to disagree" is the easy way out of an argumentation. I think the parent is right in that having to worry so much about how others see things is unproductive and toxic. There's such a diversity of sensitivities, having to cater to all of them is a fool's errand.
I've been scrolling through the comments, and this whole place seems like a mad house. Everyone's got their own theory on what's "Destroying society/America/the world/the Internet" and are foaming in the mouth convinced that their pet idea is the right one...
Without a CoC, this exact situation could have happened, but it just would be "your talk was removed for making people uncomfortable." The CoC just adds a layer of indirection, and in this case a rather non-sensical one, since "making people uncomfortable" isn't a CoC violation under the NumFOCUS CoC.
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").
I think the idea is that codes of conduct create the apparatus - meaning the committees and procedures, that caused this to happen. If this happened in a no-CoC universe, Jeremy gets the call that this talk made some people uncomfortable and they've taken down the talk and he reposts it on his website with a shrug.
I disagree. I think we should generalize more, beyond codes of conduct: If you are building an adjudication process for resolving non-criminal personal conflicts (whether that be a Code of Conduct, an HR department, a Title IX proceeding, a professional organization, or something else), you should take a look at Anglo-derived common law and the safeguards against abuse that have been evolved over the centuries.
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.
Your premise is that, rather than free association, every group of people owes a kind of due process to everyone else, presumptive of their right to associate. Sorry, I disagree: people can decide they don't want to associate with you or me for reasons we don't find justifiable. I can throw a party and not invite you simply for writing this comment; I can start a project and not allow you to contribute. You can relate to the rest of the world that I did that, and let them decide what that means to them.
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.
I think the problem arises when people want to have it both ways. If you want to say "we don't like you, please leave", you're probably [1] within your rights to do so, but then you don't also get to claim to have a fair and impartial process.
[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.
Yes the problem is giving the impression of a formal process and all that entails (i.e. fairness). If you want an informal process then the code of conduct should be informal: "Be nice, don't be a jerk".
It's not "every group of people" -- it's organizations that invite the participation of the public, or at least of others they don't know well, as long as they adhere to the mores of the community.
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.
Your party wouldn't have a formal written document that claims to set out specific rules, wouldn't be inviting arbitrary members of the public on the basis of a shared interest, would make no claim to be anything other than an arbitrary group of people picked by you on the basis of whatever, and generally differs from this situation in a lot of ways.
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.
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.
I think in your cynicism you've totally lost all meaning and purpose of the code of conduct
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.
These documents don't stop at describing the appropriate mechanism for reporting an incident, but rather they address topics of remediation and punishment: topics of justice.
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?
Oh, I think you underestimate my cynicism. I think some people adopted a piece of legalese without caring about the exact bounds and effects of implementing the terms of that legalese. It was vaguely in the direction of "stopping the bad stuff from happening" and was written with serious-sounding words so they just sort of assumed everything would work out fine. This blog post and HN thread are proof it has not.
>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 many of the people who write CoCs are oblivious to the fact that people lie, or may just be unreliable witnesses. Nor are the creators of a CoC trained or able to run an adjucation process.
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 think many of the people who write CoCs are oblivious to the fact that people lie,
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.
> Your premise is that, rather than free association, every group of people owes a kind of due process to everyone else, presumptive of their right to associate
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.
Individuals might have the right to disassociate, but organizations have more power then individuals, and concentrate power in the hands of a small number of people, and thus should have some democratic checks on that power. Elections are one form of democratic check on power, but a randomized selection of peers works as a statistically sampled approximation, which is why the concept of a jury exists.
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.
There's a disconnect here in that your argument presumes that we are talking about groups of people which organically and unanimously decided to install a CoC as a guideline or explanation on how exactly they are going to exercise their right to free association. However, the scenery that opponents of the CoC-associated culture typically see, and consider the modal scenario to be opposed, is that CoC proponents demand that groups of people that do not initially include them (or at least that they are a fairly marginal minority in) institute CoCs. Quite often, this also includes an implicit or explicit demand to install an outsider belonging to the "CoC proponent" group in a position that has wide-ranging powers to interpret the CoC. (After all, someone not properly trained might commit a rookie mistake such as thinking that in the story this thread is about, the enforcers were actually the ones who violated the CoC!) Consider the now-famous example of the person who first wanted to impose a CoC on Ruby canvassing/thinking out loud about removing Matz from his BDFL position.
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.
I agree with the top-voted reply: you want Code-of-Conducts for the cover it gives to organizations, and not for the protection it offers to the victims of organizations.
People also have the right to associate, like a person could crash your party if it’s a public place and not against the law. You can also be a dick and find ways to actively ruin other people’s events. What I’m saying is that your comment doesn’t make sense since no one is owed anything, not even the right to disassociate. He’s within his “right” to complain about them dissociating themselves with him and pointing out things he thinks might help someone’s decision when it comes to associating with them
A key part of "implemented well" is the interpretation and execution by whoever is in charge. Unfortunately, there isn't really a way to know, or ensure, that a group of people will act in good faith and accordance with a document that they say they adhere to. That seems to have been part of the problem here -- Mr. Howard notes several ways in which the committee acted against their own code.
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.
You can have the most flawlessly written, beautiful and well-meaning CoC, yet it won't do any good if it's interpreted by little despots.
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.
As I see it, a CoC is a tool for those in power to better exert their influence and control. If those in power are just and competent then it's a tool for good. If those in power are selfish or unskilled then it's a tool for ill. Unfortunately, I suspect the latter is much more often the case than the former.
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.
I'm referring to your use of the dress code. Unlike the clearly written "No shoes, No Shirt - No Service" sign, the "sign" in this case is the relative offensiveness of ones behaviour.
You just have to be offensive to "any single person" to trigger the "no service" condition.
It's a matter of degree, isn't it? At some point there's clearly a threshold of unacceptable behavior right?
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.
Indeed. I think CoC is kind of like any other form of "justice". One thing I dislike about them, is most seem to emphasize secrecy (To protect the accuser, and the accused). And they aren't wrong to worry about protecting those parties. However, in the real world, having transparency in court cases, is one the core checks on the power of the judiciary that prevent it from being abused.
Citation needed. What is the differential improvement a CoC can provide over a good implementation without a CoC? Code of conducts are not codifying anything mysterious or disputed that a good common sense judgement cannot arrive.
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.
> when implemented well, they can be hugely beneficial to communities.
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.
Using CoC's to backstab people is not going to end well. Using CoC's to institute a heirarchy of 'who can criticize who' is going to be rebelled against.
Some people are power hungry and use words to get power. They are exposing themselves in the silliest ways. Pure vanity.
This new CoC trend is similar to some HOA (homeowners associations) horror stories where the people in charge of the HOA do so for the power trip as opposed to actually providing value.
Over the years, HN's userbase has made it clear most are unfamiliar with Wikipedia beyond surface level details. Folks on this site would probably be surprised how often this happens in the sausage factory there, too.
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
At least in the cases you mention (HOA or police) there is value in the service they provide and it only becomes a problem when they get overrun by people on a power trip.
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.
To some degree, you are correct. But I believe you underestimate the amount of abuse and harassment that certain groups of people face in reality.
> 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.
> you underestimate the amount of abuse and harassment that certain groups of people face
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.
> surely we can agree that in recent years there has been expansion of what is considered abuse.
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.
Exactly this. It's abuse (both of people, and of "the system"), pure and simple. This is exactly why each passing day brings me a little bit more hatred of this entire "SJW" mentality and the people who support it. Can't go even one full day anymore without seeing some instance in the news of someone abusing these exact sorta "rules" to straight-up harass people. It's just the latest form of socially acceptable bullying is all it is...
> Using CoC's to backstab people is not going to end well.
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.
They don't have to be that way. I admit that many of them are just that sort of thing. But they can be tools to communicate to good-faith actors that they will be welcome and safe.
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."
A very large group of people have stated many times that that is not the case. They do not feel safe
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.
Really, finding out where someone lives is not that hard, especially if they have a professional or social life. And you can do significant damage to someone's career without knowing where they live.
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!.
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.
> The word “unsafe” doesn’t mean anything any more
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?
An alternate possibility is that you don't understand what people mean when they say they feel unsafe.
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 for one refuse to play this game anymore. I don't want to be part of a game where words can be arbitrarily redefined by one party to mean exactly what they want it to mean now.
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.
It's clear you've had experiences that have caused you to feel unsafe at times in your life. What's stopping you from having empathy for people that feel that way currently?
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?
> It's clear you've had experiences that have caused you to feel unsafe at times in your life. What's stopping you from having empathy for people that feel that way currently?
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.
> Or do you think it is the awkward ones who are sitting on the CoC tribunal?
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?
No, CoCs are meant to clearly state that bigotry is unacceptable.
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.
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.
> 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.
pindab0ter's idea, as I read it, is that no, CoCs are not inherently weapons to exclude people for no reason. They typically language about what constitutes bigotry. In the OP, yes, the CoC was weaponized, but it doesn't reflect a necessary fault in CoCs in general.
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?
> pindab0ter's idea, as I read it, is that no, CoCs are not inherently weapons to exclude people for no reason. They typically language about what constitutes bigotry. In the OP, yes, the CoC was weaponized, but it doesn't reflect a necessary fault in CoCs in general.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yes, you are speculating that pindab0ter would think the enforcement action was related to the CoC, even though pindab0ter clearly said that the enforcement action was not related to the CoC.
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.
> Yes, you are speculating that pindab0ter would think the enforcement action was related to the CoC
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.
> > Yes, you are speculating that pindab0ter would think the enforcement action was related to the CoC
> 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.
> As an example, "improper enforcement of the law" might suggest that something was enforced which wasn't the law.
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.
And yet they don't. I've never seen a CoC serve to effectively clarify what is or isn't bigotry. In fact they serve to make things murkier: people find it much easier to agree on whether someone's conduct was a priori acceptable than on whether it was or wasn't a CoC violation.
Most CoCs state that discrimination based on religion is not acceptable, but don't mention political belief.
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."
That is such an American PoV. Plenty of places in the world have or have had political persecution. It is a very real issue in large parts of the world.
In general CoCs enforce a very American world view, one where I as a non-American do not feel welcome.
CoCs are about politics to the extent that politics affects one's ability to be empathetic. If you believe that genetics cause women to perform worse in technical roles, that will be reflected in your social behavior.
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?
> If you believe that genetics cause women to perform worse in technical roles, that will be reflected in your social behavior.
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).
> Can you expand on this, explain the connection? In particular, why the former (belief) would influence the latter (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.
> People tend to act in accordance with their beliefs.
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.
I think we're talking past each other. Would you be able to answer any of the questions I posed earlier?
> 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.
> Using CoC's to institute a heirarchy of 'who can criticize who' is going to be rebelled against.
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.
I read the article but either missed it or perhaps it was not included, but what is the result of the violation? Just not being invited back in future years? Does it only apply if the same sponsor puts on the conference?
Out of interest what do you do with exploits for projects you don’t want to contribute to? I assume you’re not reporting them or fixing them because that’s contributing. Do you sell them or something?
Its pretty common for people to assume that exploit writing is a negative thing. It does sound particularly nasty. No harm is done.
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.
Ok JupyterCon people. You are wrong. You are wrong, you are wrong, you are wrong.
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 think you're wrong: This isn't about whether voicing critique is acceptable, it's that a breakdown in communication caused a relatively harmless situation to cause much anguish.
If I understand correctly what you are saying, you imply that applying this to Jeremy would be fine if only it was communicated properly and in advance.
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.
No, that's not what I'm getting at. I'm trying to say that what happened _wouldn't_ have been fine _even if_ OP had committed a grave misdeed.
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.
> I bet they could have talked this through without OP getting emotionally fucked up to the point of swearing off giving talks altogether.
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.
There are two categories of rules: ones that are designed to be followed, and ones that are designed to bludgeon people with. Much like how a lot of knife law enforcement is mostly about having a convenient excuse for the police to harass minorities for being at the wrong place and the wrong time, a lot of Code of Conducts seem to me to be mostly about having a convenient excuse to punish and exclude people for having the wrong opinion.
I'm just glad that this example of the phenomenon was over technical disagreement rather than politics, that makes it much more illustrative.
> 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).
> 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.
> You think that people at JupyterCon were genuinely outraged over a presenter expressing his opinion that he likes Jupyter notebooks?
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.
Ironic considering the author supports the same code for rebuking other people talking in ways he/she doesn't approve. Free speech is an either or, the moment you introduce conditions, be prepared for that to be used against you one day. Sad part is that the author still doesn't seem to understand this fact.
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.
Basic principles of free expression are fine, as is conducting yourself in an expected manner at a private gathering. Which is why the author, very correctly, does not throw out the code of conduct wholesale which would be a giant strawman.
The issue here is absolute mistreatment of the person in question and horrible leadership on behalf of the people who organise this conference.
Okay, forget the CoC for a second, can we evaluate this talk with just regular human empathy? Because I think he’s being somewhat of a dick. Like it’s a little rude and not in the best taste.
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.
What, exactly, do your personal feelings and values have to do with the question of whether Jeremy was "a dick" to Joel? Isn't that between Jeremy and Joel? Joel didn't have a problem with Jeremy's talk. Why do you think you know better than Joel whether it was appropriate to criticize Joel in the way that Jeremy did?
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.
I disagree in principle. The "victim" doesn't have to be offended for the behaviour to potentially be inappropriate. Behaviour has second order effects beyond the direct "victim" (e.g. people watch and think its ok, so more people do it, and it becomes "normal"). Its also entirely possible for the victim to be hurt, without him admitting it for a variety of reasons (E.g. social pressure, not wanting to be seen as weak or a crybaby, etc).
To be clear, I'm speaking in principle. I don't agree in the particular case that the behaviour was inappropriate.
That's fair. I would hope we can recognize that some things just can't be done in public, while other "offenses" are more subjective and their validity can depend on the relationship of the individuals involved as well as how the supposed target/victim took it. For example, whether it's OK to hug someone in public depends on things like whether it was your life partner or a stranger, and whether the recipient was OK with it.
This is a very good point. I worked with a group (when we were a very small team at a startup) where we would say terrible things about each others code/ideas more or less for fun, as we had a long-running relationship and understood that everyone respected everyone else.
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.
Yes yes, these are all fine points, but to apply them in a one-size-fits-all universal way is inhuman. Curse words might be considered inappropriate at work regardless of the people involved, but things like hugs or negative feedback aren't that simple. However well-intentioned, aggressively universalized conduct rules become a boot stamping on the face of perfectly normal human relationships and communication styles.
Even if OP were to have committed a horrible sin in the talk, this isn't the outcome anyone was hoping for. Hence the actual talk is very much a side issue.
So i only skimmed the presentation (It is an hour long).
> 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.
If the 'target' is OK with a more-critical, even a hyperbolically- or teasingly- critical tone, why not allow it?
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 the 'target' is OK with a more-critical, even a hyperbolically- or teasingly- critical tone, why not allow it?
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.
Sure, but your Musk hypothetical isn't like this case.
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.
I disagree with you completely. Presentations are a public dialogue about topics; that's literally their purpose. By presenting on a topic, you are putting your ideas and viewpoints into the public sphere for discussion, sharing, critique, criticism and further development.
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.
There are a lot of words defending CoCs and the culture around them in this article, despite the author having been screwed over by one.
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.
I do think it’s a bit odd that a notebook can hold intermediate state.
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.
I stopped reading when he said he's fine with cancel culture: since what is referred to as “cancellation” is often just “facing consequences”. No, cancel culture is bullying.
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.
It has always been the case that certain behaviors incur social opprobrium. I assume that you don't literally think that shaming or punishing someone for their actions is categorically wrong, regardless of the situation. I've seen Harvey Weinstein's conviction for multiple assaults referred to as "cancelling". Are you suggesting that we should totally refrain from judgment?
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.
You are of course right about (a) and (b) being the real issues for people actually engaging on a good-faith basis. That said:
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.
> 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-ser...
I always thought of cancel culture as people facing "consequences" for their opinions, rather than their actions. Although I guess the can also be applied fairly innocuous actions that don't cause much (or any) harm.
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.
The purpose of many opinions is to gather support for some kind of sociopolitical state, and changes or maintenence of the political status quo cause harm or maintain harm respectively. For example, if I lived in 1800 and stated the opinion that "black people deserve equal rights", it would be dangerous to and greatly financially threatening to southern landowners. The added effect of these opinions would be proven out by history. And while that opinion would turn out to help far more then it harms, other opinions like "jews undermined our army in the great war" would turn out disastrous. I would say that opinions are some of the greatest powers in the world, and calling them harmless is dishonest.
That is because he is a real person using his real name. He might have believed in this nonsense and is only now seeing CoCs for what they really are. He might not be comfortable publicly rebelling against the new orthodoxy. These tribunals are no joke.
Or we can take the author at his word and understand that he is part of the problem. He's still in favor of CoCs after all this, and the only example we have of a CoC he isn't in favor of is one which got applied to him... in the same way CoCs are always applied.
Or we can take what the author writes the way he writes it: CoCs are not bad, not following your own process for enforcement of CoC (which also has problems in this specific case) is bad.
The answer to "this type of enforcement is bad" is not "no enforcement".
I would say "cancel culture" means going to the employer of someone you don't like and getting them fired, and ideally blacklisted from working in their field again. If it were just yelling, it wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue.
But I think definitions of "cancel culture" differ widely... ;)
I think in new projects from now on I'll start running
echo "Don't be a dickhead, or I'll block you from the repo until you stop." > CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
Not needlessly aggressive, gets the point across, short, covers everything someone could do wrong, provides consequences and a pathway to reconciliation.
It doesn't communicate what you consider to be dickhead behavior, so it invites fear, uncertainty and doubt both in whether my behavior is okay, and in what behavior of other participants I can expect to be "protected" from.
Codifying all expected social norms among an arbitrarily diverse group of people in a concise but fully understandable form is impossible. Attempts to do so just leave loopholes, edge cases and personal interpretations the size of jumbo jets which will be abused. This doesn't try to do so and leaves it up to you to observe the social norms of the group. Like has been done by humans since the dawn of our species.
edit: A false sense of security if not actually security as the author of this article found out.
You don't need to codify all expected social norms because the CoC is applied by and for people, who can extrapolate to fill the gaps. You do need to give them a starting point, and since there is no obvious universal definition of "don't be a dickhead", you probably want to list some concrete examples.
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.
Even the "CoC experts" in the post say that trying to codify acceptable behavior is the wrong way to do it. You just end up with overly broad rules like "be nice" because there is no way to write a CoC that covers what is acceptable behavior of every person in attendance.
I'd prefer to make the implicitness explicit, in that case: "if the project owners consider your behavior overly assholish, you may be blocked from contributing, and the owners will add a notice to a page documenting the sanction and rationale". This makes it clear upfront that it's inherently and deliberately subjective.
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.
> and the owners will add a notice to a page documenting the sanction and rationale
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?
>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.
There's local consensus but it absolutely does differ between projects. I don't know what people feel particularly strongly about, or have particularly bad experiences with. I don't know how people want problems to be reported/addressed. I don't know whether to expect the community leaders' support when there are problems, or whether it'll be blamed on me for having the wrong values. All of these distract from trying to get technical work done. Writing things down is useful.
I certainly may just be biased by my own experience from maintaining and contributing to some projects. I don't believe I've ever encountered any situation where something like this has come up, personally. It might be more common than I think it is, and if someone feels harassed in some way related to a a project I'm responsible for, I definitely want to provide them a private way to voice their concerns. I'm just ambivalent about it all due to stories like the one described in this post.
So like every other CoC, except with significantly less fear? (being branded a "dickhead" is something you can shrug off; being branded a bigot far less so).
I'd say it's more fear? If I don't get any hint as to what kind of behavior the individual maintainers consider dickheadish, I have to worry about that with every interaction. If you have a CoC with even very vague and subjective rules, I at least know what kind of stuff you care about and then at worst I can be extra careful around that.
(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.)
> I'd say it's more fear? If I don't get any hint as to what kind of behavior the individual maintainers consider dickheadish, I have to worry about that with every interaction. If you have a CoC with even very vague and subjective rules, I at least know what kind of stuff you care about and then at worst I can be extra careful around that.
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.
The maintainer can write(/adopt) a CoC as a tool to make it easy for me to not be a dickhead. The effectiveness of that is gonna vary, communication is hard. Still better than nothing.
Publishing informal thoughts or a semi-formal moderation policy is effective communication. Publishing a pseudo-legal code sends the message that you will be making legalistic judgements and pronouncements.
Did you think it was cool to be a dickhead when there wasn't an explicit no dickheads allowed rule?
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.
Writing down behaviour rulebooks that resemble law, complete with tribunals or HR employee handbooks is like adopting big company policies for your small 3 person startup. It's a bad idea because it slows you down and is unnecessary because your project isn't at a size yet where normal social management techniques break down due to scale. The vast majority of projects don't need a statement-of-the-obvious CoC until it gets to a scale past dunbar's number IMO.
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.
I wonder how the CFP committee selected the talk without realizing it would be discussing someone else’s talk? It would seem that there’s fault there if indeed this supposed standard exists as the described talk clearly sounds like a rebuttal to another one.
It really seems this is overwhelmingly about communication, not about CoCs or the norms specified in a given CoC.
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.
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.
What exactly about this incident would scare someone into following the "SJW Agenda", when you can't even guarantee that following the "SJW Agenda" in the CoC would actually protect you?
The fact that you will be held to the standards of the most easily offended member of your audience will be motivation to try to figure out what might offend that member and proactively try to cater to their wishes.
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.
This kind of post reminds me of some of the essays in "The God That Failed" (edited by Crossman).[1] When one is tried in this fashion, acknowledging that the 'institution' has any legitimacy is basically giving up, and the 'court' will not compromise or accept anything less than penance. The only option is to walk away, and try to avoid similar people and situations in the future.
It's not about whether people sitting in the "committee meetings" of the "Code of Conduct Enforcement Team" are dickheads but it's about how you deal with it. Not acknowledging their legitimacy and walking away is a wise advise.
As someone who has taken the very good and free Fast AI course, and used that to help me land a job, I just wanted to voice support for the author. Creators create and critics criticize. I hope the author doesn’t let this meaningless ding slow down their awesome mission.
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[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 370 ms ] threadMy advice is to just stop attending JupyterCon. Maybe create an alternative.
One must be left wondering if the committee violated their own code of conduct by condemning Jeremy...
It sounds like the whole situation was handled poorly, but clearly it is within the role of a conference organizer to reject overly negative or outright insulting talks. I don't know the details of this case and it sounds like communication with the talk author was extraordinarily poor, but I'm not sure how this reflects on the notion of a code of conduct in general or the "social justice" movement in particular.
It just, uh, has side effects.
https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-exper...
You should not continue to cite popular, wrong, studies.
Should literally _everything_ be an fully transparent democratic process (and good luck keeping it fair when bad actors show up en masse)?
Having a CoC is at least an improvement on the previous status quo, which was some group of individuals making arbitrary decisions in secret without any justification for their actions _at all_. CoC's don't give anyone more power than they already had; they just clearly express the principles that the group already in power will (ostensibly) use to make choices.
So are we stuck between a choice of democracy, dictatorship, or a politburo? Maybe the organizers of events like this should stick to organizing the event and not trying to regulate the behavior of presenters and attendees.
I'm not sure what you're actually advocating here.
The committee that is responsible for judging COC violations must:
- operate transparently: no star chambers!
- have a real, actual, not-just-we-checked-a-box culture of engineering ethics where individuals on the committee can say "no, this complaint is obvious bullshit, let's move on" without fear of reprisal from the committee members themselves, or the organizational power structure they report to.
>CoC's don't give anyone more power than they already had
Nonsense. Formation of a committee as such is implicit power; formation of a committee to adjudicate politically sensitive and fraught matters is explicit power.
You are effectively reinventing a legal system with the CoC rules and its enforcement. But it's a "kangaroo court". In the real world, we realised that power needs checks and balances. Justice must be seen to have been served in a fair and proportionate manner. That's why we have public hearings, jury trials, the defendant has the right to put forward their side of the story with legal representation, evidence is submitted by both sides, we have cross-examination, sentences are passed with reference to established precedent, and there is also the right to appeal a judgement.
If organisations take it upon themselves to invent a faux legal system under which to operate, they can not omit the checks and balances without creating a system ripe for abuse and miscarriage of justice. The problem with CoC "enforcement" is that it is done behind closed doors with no oversight or accountability. The "defendant" has no right to properly hear the charges, or to present their case, or to appeal against it. It is manifestly unfair.
As for "not giving anyone more power than they already had", this is also untrue. Committees and individuals have been explicitly bestowed with the power to enforce CoCs by pronouncing judgements and inflicting their will upon the members of their organisations. They have great power, but not the corresponding requirement for accountability to their members.
What's sauce for goose is sauce for gander - perhaps the NumFOCUS individuals involved in that CoC committee should publicly stand by their decision, so that the community can evaluate whether we trust their judgement and are willing to allow those people to participate CoC enforcement in the future.
Enforcing communal norms requires that the community trusts that the enforcers actually do share these communal norms, and there should be a clear mechanism to remove them if they don't. Participants and speakers deserve protection and a fair judgement, but the 'political' positions of writing down and enforcing the norms should be able and required to substantiate and publicly defend their position and judgements - at least if they claim to represent the community instead their own unilateral position.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason_Act_1351
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.
The disease is the moral authority police & moral superiority complex.
Humans have this compulsion to be "right", to punish people for not being righteous enough, and generally to cultivate a feeling of their own moral superiority.
This is accomplished with rules, usually somewhat vague and needing the ability to be misinterpreted, overinterpred, or just somewhat related to "punishments". If your policy is "don't be a jerk" it's quite hard to misinterpret that into zealotry, but a complex code of conduct? That's the meat and potatoes of this human failing.
People rejected organized religions because they were full of this kind of person, pepperpots determined on punishing each other and everyone else. The failing logic is that this sort of behavior was caused by organized religion.
The self-righteous and overzealous young people (and not so young too) just changed topics, they aren't thumping their bibles of soap boxes about not loving Jesus the right way or following god's will (some still are, just fewer) the pepperpots of today are getting up on their social media soapboxes and doing their morality masturbation about their brand of justice.
The insidious thing, or why they are so widespread and successful is that their message and their sets of rules, on a quick glance, seems reasonable and rather supportable by most folks. The people disagreeing with this new justice are usually the ones yelling nonsense and that opposition draws battle lines where a lot of people pull themselves into the "justice" side to disassociate themselves from the vocal opposition because they can't quite figure out what is wrong with the justice crusaders.
It is very difficult to pinpoint exactly what is wrong with this new generation of moralists, so most people stay pretty silent about it.
It's not new, just the same old monster in a different costume.
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
[1] https://austingwalters.com/on-committing-suicide/
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.
[1] https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe
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.
[1] http://gainedin.site/ptsd/
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.
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.
So, like reddit?
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?
That's the kind of comment to which dang would usually say something like:
"Your comment would be fine without the snark. Would you mind reading the guidelines before commenting again? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html"
But, of course, Mr. Ptacek has 330,000 karma points. Every community has its elite. (Funny that this happens on a thread about rules and enforcement.)
> 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.
See: https://masks4all.co/about-us/
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.
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?
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.
Or maybe that's the naive explanation, and it's just to exercise power.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q6sLbz37gk
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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-ser...
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... ;)
People are so fragile nowadays on the internets. how come?
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_that_Failed