Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we all know a mob when we see one.
Clearly not, you'll need to be a bit more convincing than "I know it when I see it."
When confronted with a mob you won't have any questions or about whether is or is not.
Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
371–380 of 447 posts
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#372> Eric S Raymond: The fetishization of ‘nice’ behavior, where ‘nice’ ends up defined as being any behavior some self-appointed censor doesn't like. Usually (and in this case) accompanied by a lot of bafflegab about “inclusion” and “diversity” so thay anyone who isn't a fan of the new, censorious rules can be cast as some sort of bigot.
Pretty much represents HN community too.
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just a power grab and has gone on forever in many forms. Redefine language and classify certain language as non-compliant under the guise of whatever it is that works to your advantage. Then use this to create systemic policy to dictate towards your goals and ultimately control whatever resource it is you were trying to colonize or acquire. Language is power and can greatly influence and define what masses of pe…
Why do you consider it a power grab sooner than, say, people acting in good faith who really believe in their stated values?
From the description, this sounds like a permanent ban, which is a really blunt tool -- and overly convenient, given how controversial ESR is. Keep in mind that this is about a discussion that's not in a technical, but in a political forum. After all, the OSI is a political institution, not a technical one.
If people are acting in good faith, I would expect at most something temporary.
This points at what I consider the real problem with CoCs: they're too vague and typically allow people to feel righteous while making truly toxic decisions. This stems from overly-broad language being adopted without an actual "litigation" (in the informal, community sense) of individual cases.
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#374I’m torn on this. On one hand, esr has a point. There is a credible argument that cancel culture has gone too far, and that expressing disagreement itself is now becoming dangerous as those with whom you disagree will take the opportunity to play victim and attempt to defame you simply for disagreeing. Identity politics along these lines have lately become unproductive and distracting. I generally don’t participate i…
I don't mean to dispute that ESR may be a jerk, but I'd ask you to consider what his position is: > It's less bad that people sometimes got their feelings hurt than it is to institutionalize a means by which dissenting opinions are crushed under the rubric of “not nice”. His point, as I take it, is that a "cancel culture" is antithetical to an open culture. I agree. Excluding someone due to tone, without warning or c…
> a "cancel culture" is antithetical to an open culture. I agree. Excluding someone due to tone, without warning or clear explanation of the violation, especially when it appears the content is a contested opinion, is bigoted censorship.
Ever hear the expression "Your right to your fist only extends as far as my face?"
In order to express ideas openly, even firmly and directly, one does not need to be explicitly RUDE to others, and apply personal insults and attacks.
For people who seem to be deeply intellectual, ESR and Linus (though less these days) have an apalling inability to differentiate between "This is a stupid idea" and "You are a stupid person".
They seem to revel in additional personal attacks on other people rather than engaging in a free marketplace of open ideas, and their behaviour has been unchecked for decades because they are brilliant and their contributions are meaningful.
It turns out, history is full of examples of that.
It also turns out that you don't HAVE to be a jerk, and you can express your strong beliefs in an idea without calling someone a looneytune.
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about others, but personally, I find the overly politically correct "safe spaces" much less welcoming and counter to the spirit of the internet. It feels like you constantly need to tip-toe around with every word to avoid the risk of offending someone. I'm much more bothered by people trying to police the world than someone who is rude or that disagrees with me. In a properly functioning society, people…
Probably the best we can do is to have a variety of places to discuss things, with a variety of rules and norms and purposes -- and an acknowledgement that one person's safe space is another person's nightmare. https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/100561778176/safe-sp...
The issue seems to be that if something fun happens in a place that's not a safe space, other will come, demand to participate and then demand that it turns into a safe space so they can participate on their terms.
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't mean to dispute that ESR may be a jerk, but I'd ask you to consider what his position is: > It's less bad that people sometimes got their feelings hurt than it is to institutionalize a means by which dissenting opinions are crushed under the rubric of “not nice”. His point, as I take it, is that a "cancel culture" is antithetical to an open culture. I agree. Excluding someone due to tone, without warning or c…
> a "cancel culture" is antithetical to an open culture. I agree. Excluding someone due to tone, without warning or clear explanation of the violation, especially when it appears the content is a contested opinion, is bigoted censorship. Ever hear the expression "Your right to your fist only extends as far as my face?" In order to express ideas openly, even firmly and directly, one does not need to be explicitly RUDE…
> In order to express ideas openly, even firmly and directly, one does not need to be explicitly RUDE to others, and apply personal insults and attacks.
The issue is that "rude" is up to whoever feels treated rudely. If you tell someone they are wrong in no uncertain words, they might consider you rude. If you sugarcoat it, you're a) lying, b) doing the community a disservice by not opposing something that you consider wrong.
> For people who seem to be deeply intellectual, ESR and Linus (though less these days) have an apalling inability to differentiate between "This is a stupid idea" and "You are a stupid person".
Funny, it always struck me that it's people who are deeply emotional who have a problem with it. If you're emotional, you will feel personally attacked and aren't able to put that aside and deal with the issue at hand. If you're intellectual, you will notice the insult, but it will not dominate your take-away, and you will easily be able to address it if you think it's necessary (hint: it's not) and move on to the content. If you're playful, you might just add something similar in your response. If you just want to lighten the mood, you'll make a joke. And then you move on and address the issue they were talking about, because there's usually an issue in there, they aren't just saying "no, you're dumb" just because, they are saying "no, you're dumb, because you're doing xyz".
> They seem to revel in additional personal attacks on other people rather than engaging in a free marketplace of open ideas, and their behaviour has been unchecked for decades because they are brilliant and their contributions are meaningful.
I believe you're putting way too much weight on the insults here. I don't think that Linus sits there and laughs all day because he "owned some noob". More likely, he fires of an email and moves on with his life, the insult not being something that brings him a lot of pleasure, but just a part of his communication style. Not a sadist that wants to see other people experience pain and emberrassement but somebody who has little concern for the feelings of the recipients of his outbursts, either because he himself doesn't mind being called an asshat or because he believes that the stakes are too high to hold back.
> It also turns out that you don't HAVE to be a jerk
I agree if what you're trying to say is "there are highly-productive people that are not jerks". I strongly disagree if you're trying to say "you can choose whether you are a jerk or not, and you don't have to choose being a jerk".
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Code of conducts" inherently drive power away from the contributors to some sort of moderator enforcing the CoC. Could we have both? e.g. CoC moderators elected by contributors from the ranks of contributors?
Isn't this what ultimately happens anyway? If the CoC moderators go against the will of the contributors, they can always fork the project.
The maintainers aren't likely to do that though, for a multitude of reasons. Why not let the CoC-people fork it and see how much better they can do it? Why would we need to oust the maintainers to see whether they are better at maintaining the project they built than some random person from Twitter that decided this is the project they're going to inject themselves into today?
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#378I've read a bunch of ESR's writing, and I disagree with him on an awful lot of political and social issues. Chances are we wouldn't get along very well. Tone-policing, cancel culture, and identity politics are a real problem though, and it seems like they're getting out of hand. This is happening everywhere though - it's not unique to the open source world at all. I don't know what the right solution is. ESR and RMS…
It's just a power grab and has gone on forever in many forms. Redefine language and classify certain language as non-compliant under the guise of whatever it is that works to your advantage. Then use this to create systemic policy to dictate towards your goals and ultimately control whatever resource it is you were trying to colonize or acquire. Language is power and can greatly influence and define what masses of pe…
More than that, once some entity is in power, language policing and other types of arbitrary rulemaking are widely-deployed to allow the power broker to quickly expose troublemakers and wrongthinkers.
Failure to adhere to arbitrary vocabulary blacklists shows at least that you aren't just totally mindlessly executing directives, which is a bad thing to show powerful people, and in many cases, it betrays your true loyalties to "not-them", because if you really believed the "them" were noble and great, well, you'd be happy to learn that WordX is naughty and WordY is approved.
Look for this in a company near you. It's used frequently.
Is it any surprise that the hackers who built the open-source movement fail tests explicitly designed to fail anyone whose default mode is not just mindless complicity? These guys spent most of their lives slinging rocks at the multi-billion-dollar proprietary OS juggernauts and generally completely obliterated them. I think it's safe to expect that "complicity" isn't very high in their value system.
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about others, but personally, I find the overly politically correct "safe spaces" much less welcoming and counter to the spirit of the internet. It feels like you constantly need to tip-toe around with every word to avoid the risk of offending someone. I'm much more bothered by people trying to police the world than someone who is rude or that disagrees with me. In a properly functioning society, people…
In my experience, a lot of these people say they want tolerance, but what they really mean is tolerance of the ideas (and people) they agree with.
Yeah, you see this everywhere -- "filter bubbles" and all that. People have been trained to expect protection from anything that even vaguely intrudes on their own sense of self-righteousness, and consider this breach the failing of Someone Else (TM), generally the platform operator (whether that's an employer, school, webmaster, mailop, etc.).
People expect a mechanism to first, punish the offending author (block, downvote, whatever), and then hide the offending content, and they refuse to engage on any platform that doesn't accommodate this. Not only that, but they often seem to try to destroy the platform for allowing the travesty of frank and honest discussion to take place.
There's a part of me that believes the restrictions of the physical world are really necessary for a productive dialogue. You can't stop anyone else from showing up, and the limits of dialogue are how far you can go before someone is throwing punches and you're both getting hauled off to jail. It seems to have a much better track record of producing acceptable middle-ground outcomes than "flag, block, ban".
Re: Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't know what the right solution is. This is a bit of a wild theory, which I definitely can't prove, but I am tempted to blame part of it on "zero tolerance" schools. Schools are meant to teach the material, but they're also meant to give students practice at working within a social framework. Being on time, speaking in turn, keeping track of assignments, relating to peers, etc. People have a lot of opinions on…
Authoritarianism in schools is very old; it definitely didn't begin with what are now called "zero tolerance" policies. I'm pretty sure we would have noticed if attending an authoritarian school gave you an authoritarian personality style, especially given the interest in the latter in post-WW2 psych studies.
The problem is exactly the opposite of authoritarianism. People don't believe that any person can be trusted with authority, so it was all transferred into the dead letter of a massively generalized district-wide policy which, of course, says "anything bad is bad and should be punished".
Administrators and teachers have very little leeway to ascertain circumstances, utilize context, or employ personal judgment. They feel obliged to follow the letter of the policy because they have no authority.
A little more "authoritarianism" -- trust that the authorities positioned to ascertain the facts will do so competently and shouldn't be trivially second-guessed -- would probably help a lot.