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In defence of Douglas Crockford

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Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#341

Post by kedean »

nkurz wrote: post #45
danso wrote: post #13

I've only seen Crockford once in person, years ago [0], and though I never heard of him and his curmudgeonly-approach to JavaScript, I came away with a very favorable impression of him (and JS in general). So I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, out of sentimentality. At the same time, I know that one speech and/or book is not enough (if anything ever is) to judge whether someone has or hasn't been harm…

Saying, "Back in the day, you could browse the web like a whore, not caring what your computer connected to. But with the new web..." But that's not what he says at all. For sake of argument, let's assume that he had said exactly this. Even so, I still don't see the claims being met. First, even though the metaphor may be "sexual", I don't see anything that would make it "sexist". Promiscuity as a behavior is far fro…

I think it's also worth noting that the word 'promiscuous' already has a history in computers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promiscuous_mode

And this version exactly fits what he was trying to get across.

Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#342

Post by tptacek »

mzw_mzw wrote: post #334
tptacek wrote: post #299

Unlike the controversies about Strangeloop (which uninvited Curtis Yarvin) and Lambdaconf (which lost the overwhelming majority of its sponsors due to accepting Yarvin), this --- based on the evidence at hand --- seems entirely stupid. Unfortunately, there's no rulebook conference organizers (or their Greek choruses on message boards) can consult to say when rejecting a speaker is a good idea or not. It's a judgement…

Unfortunately this all started with the decision that it was okay to ostracize some people for their unrelated political views. It's a little late to say "wait, wait, I just meant those guys!" now that you've given this unstoppable superweapon to every grasping, sociopathic political activist in the industry.

No, it's not.

This Manichaean view of intolerance to overt racism, sexism, classism, whatever --- it's bogus, and deserves to be challenged. When spelled out: "opposition at private events to (say) racism requires that event to make common cause with the evil, gathering forces of political repression", it doesn't even sound credible.

But that view in fact appeals superficially to message board nerds because it triggers the circuit in our brain that wants social problems to be solvable with simple boolean logic, and that recoils from subjective, contextual, or situational judgement calls. It's easy to invoke it and conjure an argument that will garner upvotes and spproval.

The real world is usually not describable in an if statement that fits neatly into 80 columns. Some judgements even require iteration! That's what "judgement" is about.

Schools. Hospitals. Academic conferences. Political office. Probably even jobs. These are places where the bar for exclusion is much harder to clear. If Curtis Yarvin gets accepted to a postdoc program at Berkeley and leftist programmers picket, I'll be right there with you. But events like Nodevember, Strange Loop, and Lambdaconf are not academic conferences, they're not a serious part of the citation record for their field, they're put on by private citizens with their own objectives, they're fundamentally about entertainment, and they can make whatever calls they want.

From what I can tell, it looks like Strange Loop handled their problem pretty OK, that LambdaConf probably made a mistake, and that this Node.js conference in Tennessee is also probably making a mistake.

But, again, we don't know all the details here. We knew a lot more in the previous two conference cases.

Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#343

Post by Natsu »

stdbrouw wrote: post #162
Natsu wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That said, from your very link I find this: " douglascrockford commented on Feb 21, 2011 I am sorry I hurt your feelings." I'll take someone who realizes they made a mistake and apologizes for it any day over someone who seeks to get rid of all the people they don't like.

That's pretty clearly ironic, though.

I disagree. I can only read it that way if I make bad assumptions about him, which is circular reasoning.

In my experience, you should always give people the benefit of the doubt in such things. I've honestly thought otherwise in many other occasions, only to be proven wrong.

Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#345

Post by tptacek »

ajamesm wrote: post #308
tptacek wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtually every code of conduct will prohibit misogyny. But that's part of what Crockford seems to have been accused of. The problem isn't judging the underlying issues; the problem is judging whether they're really manifest in a particular speaker, or whether (instead) that speaker just happened to piss someone off with a grudge. Again: there could be stuff going on here that we don't get to know about.

"misogyny" meaning... being a misogynist? being labeled a misogynist? a documented history of sexual harassment? being a man raised in Western society? using misogynist language? the "B-word" or the "C-word"? talking over another panelist? forcible rape? eating miso soup? being socially awkward? getting called out on Twitter? having pictures of half-naked women in your slide deck, as a build-up to a joke? trying to p…

I can't tell whether we agree or not. The idea that misogyny is such a third-rail issue that anything you can six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon connect to it is lethal? That's (to me) repellant, and if Crockford is being uninvited from this conference because of his "strong stuff in programs" bit, that's ridiculous --- in the sense of, "worthy of ridicule".

That's my point: these things are judgement calls. There aren't simple rules. To me, sound judgement suggests that making allusions to physical strength as part of a metaphor about code is perfectly all right (you might not like the metaphor, but you might not like lots of things Crockford says).

Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#346

Post by protomyth »

erpellan wrote: post #197
rdtsc wrote: post #34

> We will also be removing Douglas Crockford from our keynote speakers list to help make the conference a comfortable environment for all. If they are going to insinuate things about what he said, they should mention exactly what he said or did. The fact that they don't somehow tells me there is not much there to go on. To put it another way, if they have the guts to remove Crockford that should have enough guts to c…

I certainly wouldn't feel 'comfortable' speaking at a conference with a reputation for publicly character-assassinating their invited speakers. Especially as the worst accusation I could find on twitter was that he used the word 'stupid'. Several times! Throw away the key...

I might also be a bit worried as a speaker that people looking over the speaker list might think I was one of those that lead to the disinvite and thus be a poor person to invite if for no other reason than further hassle.

Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#347

Post by mgkimsal »

From nodevember CoC:

"Be careful in the words that you choose. Remember that sexist, racist, and other exclusionary jokes can be offensive to those around you. Excessive swearing and offensive jokes are not appropriate for Nodevember."

Now... I'm no expert in humor, but aren't nearly all jokes partly "exclusionary" by definition? Maybe not - maybe I'm thinking of just a certain type of 'joke', but almost every sort of humorous observation I can think of could be "exclusionary" at some level, because there's some sort of external 'thing' which is the object of the joke.

But I may be way off base here.

Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#348

Post by wglb »

mgkimsal wrote: post #347

From nodevember CoC: "Be careful in the words that you choose. Remember that sexist, racist, and other exclusionary jokes can be offensive to those around you. Excessive swearing and offensive jokes are not appropriate for Nodevember." Now... I'm no expert in humor, but aren't nearly all jokes partly "exclusionary" by definition? Maybe not - maybe I'm thinking of just a certain type of 'joke', but almost every sort o…

Consider self-deprecating humor. Or jokes about the perversity of the universe. Jokes about the weather.

So I don't think that all jokes are exclusionary (with reference to those around us).

Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#349

Post by vidarh »

DonHopkins wrote: post #68
vidarh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it even more confusing on the basis that regardless of gender , calling the second case slut-shaming is bizarre in a context where Crockford is painting the "old web promiscuity" in a positive light for the most part, but pointing out that it has one specific problem in the case where what you want is commitment. To me it reads as part nostalgia for the old "promiscuity" and lack of need for complex network se…

There are perfectly legitimate reasons to put a network interface controller into promiscuous mode [1], and it's nothing to be ashamed of, and perfectly acceptable to discuss at conferences. Back in the "bad old days" of the simplex NCP protocol [2], before the duplex TCP/IP protocol legalized same-sex network connections, connect and listen sockets had gender defined by their parity, and all connections were require…

I guess you'll never be allowed to speak at this conference after a comment like this...

> There are perfectly legitimate reasons to put a network interface controller into promiscuous mode

Absolutely - for a long time it was the only way of adding multiple IP address aliases on a single network card in Linux for example (might hav been the same on other OS's - I don't know).

I once had someone imply we were trying to hack because our web servers had the network cards in promiscuous mode for that reason (of course this was a genuine concern - they could not verify the difference between someone innocently adding IP aliases and someone listening in on the mostly unencrypted traffic intended for the other servers connected to the same hub (I don't miss hubs...)

Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#350

Post by thescribe »

minusSeven wrote: post #306
rtpg wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? The talk organizers were faced with a dilemma: either keep Crawford and lose a bunch of other speakers or lose Crawford but keep others I do think clarification is needed, but I could see "being a jerk " as a legit reason to not want to associate with someone. People do the same with people like Torvalds Being unliked is also a reason that people won't want to associate with you.

Why can't we all just be a professional and move on ?

Because we all adopted codes of conduct that assume we're easily agitated children, and then took them seriously.
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