I Violated a Code of Conduct

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q6sLbz37gk

The author reminds me of a character in The First Circle, Rubin, an avowed Marxist imprisoned in the USSR. Rubin sees his punishment as unjust but he believes this kind of judicial error is a small bump in the road to a communist utopia.

Towards the end of the article, the author accuses "the NumFOCUS policy" of failing to "consider the mental health of people that are accused". But if someone has a mental breakdown after being criticized that does not mean the critic did anything wrong. Legal and moral norms exist to allow us to answer questions like "did this person do anything wrong?" or "did this person cause this other person's mental breakdown?" I think it's naive to expect codes of conduct to improve on what we already have.

I suppose I think codes of conduct are as good as the people you get to enforce them. But that's the thing: the people willing to volunteer their time to be cops tend to be the last people you'd want in those roles. If codes of conduct are not a replacement for fair-minded people maybe they're more trouble than they're worth.

Also, while I did not find his presentation insulting, I do think he made a mistake by spending so much of it directly critiquing someone else's presentation. It was in bad taste though not -- of course -- the kind of thing that needs to be punished.

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.