I support codes of conduct but this is EXACTLY the thing that opponents point to when they oppose them. I expected this post to be a rant against codes of conduct and instead it wound up leaving me wondering if NumFOCUS and JupyterCon was in the wrong here...this guy offered criticism and that is NOT a fucking violation of ANY CoC -- if you can't handle criticism, don't make public statements. The hilarious is that Joel Grus didn't care -- like what the hell...this is why sometimes I feel like proponents of CoCs are at times their own worst enemy when it comes to attaining wide support for them.
I Violated a Code of Conduct
101–110 of 971 posts
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
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.
Say more? I gave an example of what I meant: Show HN posts. Is that a phenomenon you perceive on Show HN posts?
I don't think it makes sense to ban criticism everywhere, or even most places.
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#103We'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 cri…
> 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 offe…
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.
Cancel culture has to stop.
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
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.
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.
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#105This 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…
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…
This instance is BS
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#106We'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 cri…
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.
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#107Okay, 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 al…
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.
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#108We'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 cri…
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 happ…
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.
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#109Yep, this is the logical conclusion of trying to solve all minor social conflicts with a complex and legalistic set of rules and processes.
Nothing got fixed. Everyone walks away angry. It would have been a lot simpler to ask the author to tone it down a bit next time.
Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 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".