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Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines
311–320 of 412 posts
Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree. I'm fan of Nonviolent Communication a.k.a Collaborative Communication. NVC acknowledges that moralistic judgments and demands make communication harder, not easier. Still it's important that people should be able to communicate the feelings, needs and make requests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication
NVC is great and has improved my speaking and listening skills. However, I have to take issue with the name. Co-opting the word violence, is great marketing but dishonest.
Before you claim 'dishonesty', you might want to spend 30 seconds on reading about the origins of the term.
NVC was firmly rooted in mediating between rioting students and college administrators. The explicit goal of it was to foster non-violent desegregation. (And if you look at e.g. Kent State, that was a very necessary goal)
Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines
#313Is it really this complicated to treat other people with respect?
Respect is earned not given. Treating others with common decency is expected in a professional environment, and that's a two way street where both parties need to have a common understanding of what decency is. Finding that commonality becomes harder the more "diverse" the community involved is. People's cultural, religious and political beliefs clash and have for thousands of years, and no we're not going to be the…
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Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines
#314A code of conduct states rules, with punishments for anyone that violates them. It is the heavy-handed way of teaching people to behave differently, and since it only comes into action when people do something against the rules, it doesn't try to teach people to do better than what the rules require. To be sure, the appointed maintainer(s) of a GNU package can, if necessary, tell a contributor to go away; but we do n…
teaching each other to be awesome to each other My experience is this lasts about five minutes before someone starts using quibbles about the precise definition of "be awesome to each other" to suggest they should be allowed to be non-awesome to people and suffer no consequences for it. Sooner or later you have to actually set down some more specific guidelines and a mechanism for enforcing them.
https://abstrusegoose.com/302
I think a modern case around the Babylonian language confusion can be built around the fact that before you agreed on a common vocabulary, you may not at all be sure whether your exchange of ideas is actually being successful. A bit like talking about latitude and longitude coordinates, but later you find out the receiver was a flat earther.
See also: RFC 2119
Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feels like you might not know the meaning of the word "objectively".
Systemd breaks fundamental Unix principles. Those principles have been around since the 1990s at the latest. So yes the use of objectively does fit...
Systemd objectively breaks Unix principles. That makes it subjectively "crap", because in your eyes (not in everybody's, and not in a demonstrated superior or inferior way) that's a bad thing. I'm not too sure what's complicated.
And as I was saying to the other poster, calling something "objectively crap" isn't just most of the time wrong, it's almost always inflammatory. "Don't do it" feels like a good rule of thumb here.
Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines
#316As co-maintainer of GNU Guix, I want to point out that the views expressed in Richard Stallman's message are his and not those of the Guix maintainers. In particular, by writing that codes of conduct are "punitive spirit", RMS shows a misunderstanding of how these texts came into existence. More importantly, by writing that he disagrees with "making diversity a goal", RMS seems to deny the role we free software peopl…
You're not the only GNU maintainer who is unsatisfied with Stallman's response. GNU Octave also stands with Guix here, and I think I speak on behalf of at least of a few other co-maintainers. Maybe we should be drafting our own CoC.
Good to hear; I know of other GNU maintainers who feel the same, I don't think we're isolated. FWIW, Guix adopted the Contributor Covenant and it's worked great for us—our reaction to incidents is firm but it has never been "punitive" contrary to what RMS suggests.
Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree strongly with your interpretation of my comment, which I made in good faith. I apologize for sounding rude or aggressive, but I'm confident that I haven't broken any guidelines. I've asserted that the OP is preaching what is essentially religious ideology, and that he or she is engaging in virtue signaling. I think it's a very uncharitable interpretation of what I've written to label it as "name calling".…
I'm not sure what the difference is between sounding rude or aggressive and being rude or aggressive, which certainly the site guidelines are asking you not to do. Swipey phrases like "preaching of a religious person" count as name-calling in HN's sense. Your comment was clearly written in the flamewar style. ("Your virtue signaling is unimpressive. Please take it elsewhere.") That's very much what we're trying to av…
Fair enough. I appreciate your feedback and will take it to heart.
Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
> correcting the biases, conscious or not This insipid attitude was destructive when it first appeared during the academic "culture wars" of the 1980s. It's also extremely authoritarian--everyone is already guilty, not merely of incorrect conscious thoughts, but also unconscious thoughts!
I think it's important to understand that while everyone has conscious and unconscious biases, it's not true that recognizing that fact is the same as assigning blame. The idea is to better know one's self, to try and understand one's own bias (to the best of one's ability, that is) in order to try and apply correctives when making decisions involving people who are different than we are. It's when we actively press…
This is fine as an ethics or description of good manners.
The problem is that it is often turned into a politics.
The logic of this kind of identitarian social critique, insofar as it becomes political, is decidedly illiberal.
It is authoritarian.
But all of this is nothing new! In fact it's about 30+ years old.
It originates in the aftermath of the failed revolution of the 1960s--in other words, it appeared as a phenomenon of the dissolution of the New Left in the 1970s-1980s.
Some see its origins in the Maoist practice of self-critique. I think it's better understood as the response to the realization that the New Left's politics was no longer viable--that its historical potential was completely exhausted.
Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines
#319When people are arguing for "diversity" what they are meaning, generally, is "there is already an enormous thumb on the scales, this can be shown empirically by outcomes". So to the extent Stallman's intent is to take the thumb off the scales and make everyone welcome, it is very reasonable. That said, I think he's wrong to devalue quota type approaches, because in some circumstances, particularly institutional ones…
Actively recruiting a group of people that are underrepresented in a community seems like a good way to solve the problem. If there really aren't people pushing people away, then the ratios will quickly correct and you can rest assured it was a recruiting problem. If people start to drop out you can follow up and discover the problems. It may not even be the communication of existing contributors. It could just be friction in the contribution process that is preventing the community from growing.
Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines
#320On the one hand, I'm glad that he's at least acknowledging that this is a problem. It's disappointing to me that he talks about the problem as if people first noticed it in August, when I've heard it discussed for a decade or more. But still, baby steps. There's also a crashing lack of self-awareness here. This bit sounds great: "The only political positions that the GNU Project endorses are (1) that users should hav…
> E.g., it was only in May he declared it important to keep a stale joke about American politics in the code Given Kavanaugh in the Supreme Court and the ever more massive fight of "pro lifers" and other religious hardcore bigots to ban abortions and thus invade the right of womens' bodily autonomy, that joke is everything but stale, and not even restricted to the USA! As a matter of fact, in Germany a doctor (Kristi…
Please remain civil when discussing certain groups of people who identify with certain beliefs.