291–300 of 971 posts
Disclaimer: I watched some of the talk and I do think Jeremy Howard appears largely accurate and right, and I empathise with his feelings. But I wouldn't get to a definitive conclusion until NumFOCUS has had a chance to present their side.
It was clearly a mistake for him to even play along, especially if he was emotionally exhausted already. The best you can do when people are being stupid like this is ignore them. They hold no power over you unless you let them. This whole CoC thing is sadly fraught with virtue signaling psycho-sadists who enjoy playing tribunal. The people who actually cared about fostering inclusive human communities got bullied ou…
People who get "canceled" don't just get a nastygram that they can throw in the trash. They are typically banned from speaking, fired / put on probation / "contract not renewed", their reputation is both privately and publicly tarnished such that #1 google result for your name will be that you were banned for CoC violation, damaging your career prospects etc.
Sure some people's lives are bullshit-proof but for many others witch hunts like this are nothing to laugh about.
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 J…
I support codes of conduct but this is EXACTLY the thing that opponents point to when they oppose them. Why don't you come to to the dark side and oppose codes of conduct then? I consider the purported goals of codes of conduct to be laudable. But this kind of thing becomes inevitable when SJWs aka political correctness police get power through trying to enforce codes of conduct. It isn't that sometimes proponents of…
In a post decrying the consequences of his actions, the author condemns those who criticise the same.
Cancel culture is specifically about “cancelling” people over completely asinine comments regardless of whether anyone was actually offended.
I don’t understand why the author defends the principals by which he was abused. You’d think he’d see some fundamental flaw in there.
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I'm not sure it's possible to ban criticism without also banning opinions. If you give a presentation on how some new tool or technique is good, you're implicitly implying that the existing alternatives aren't as good. Many presentations will even explicitly call out weaknesses in existing things (criticising them!) in order to illustrate why some new thing is worthwhile. If you talk about how your research fills in…
It feels like a serious stretch to talk about “implicitly implying” criticism of other options. If I say I love Chips Ahoy, I’m not “implicitly implying” criticism of Oreos. I think you may have accidentally encountered a slippery slope.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I support codes of conduct but this is EXACTLY the thing that opponents point to when they oppose them. Why don't you come to to the dark side and oppose codes of conduct then? I consider the purported goals of codes of conduct to be laudable. But this kind of thing becomes inevitable when SJWs aka political correctness police get power through trying to enforce codes of conduct. It isn't that sometimes proponents of…
Because this isn't a case of a codes of conduct being universally bad, but rather a case of one instance of it being bad. A GOOD code of conduct will be specific and lay out what is acceptable without vagueness.
I organize a local tech meetup. A lot of our organizing and out-of-band socializing happens through a separate, very large, local tech community Slack group. A few years ago, CoCs were all the rage and there was a push for all communities to adopt one. As a consequence, I've done a lot of my own thinking on CoCs [0]. As an event or community organizer, a lot will depend on how you think of your CoC. You can either th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I support codes of conduct but this is EXACTLY the thing that opponents point to when they oppose them. Why don't you come to to the dark side and oppose codes of conduct then? I consider the purported goals of codes of conduct to be laudable. But this kind of thing becomes inevitable when SJWs aka political correctness police get power through trying to enforce codes of conduct. It isn't that sometimes proponents of…
It, seemingly, isn't inevitable - I can count on one, _maybe_ two hands the number of unfair incidents I've heard since I started hearing people trumpeting the dark side view that 100% absolutely all power is put into service of evil, always.
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So like every other CoC, except with significantly less fear? (being branded a "dickhead" is something you can shrug off; being branded a bigot far less so).
I'd say it's more fear? If I don't get any hint as to what kind of behavior the individual maintainers consider dickheadish, I have to worry about that with every interaction. If you have a CoC with even very vague and subjective rules, I at least know what kind of stuff you care about and then at worst I can be extra careful around that. (Sure, I can shrug off the judgement, but being blocked from their repo is stil…
But knowing what's in the CoC doesn't actually tell you what kind of stuff the maintainer cares about. The maintainers will still block you if they consider you dickheadish, they'll just find a reading of their CoC that lets them declare you a racist (or whatever) first.
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Except it wasn't harassment -- guess what? People can say you're wrong. Check your ego at the door if you give a public talk. They shouldn't say "he's a fucking idiot" but saying "I feel that got X,Y, and Z wrong and here's why:" is not a fucking CoC violation. I support codes of conduct and always will but this is where things went topsy-turvy, do not try to roll your own and try to be specific.
I'm not saying it was harassment, I'm using an extreme example to make the point that "the supposedly aggrieved party says it was fine" shouldn't by itself be considered sufficient evidence that the CoC wasn't broken and that action shouldn't be taken.