Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Violated a Code of Conduct

fast.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 971 posts

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#381

Post by tptacek »

defen wrote: post #372
tptacek wrote: post #7

This 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…

I disagree. I think we should generalize more, beyond codes of conduct: If you are building an adjudication process for resolving non-criminal personal conflicts (whether that be a Code of Conduct, an HR department, a Title IX proceeding, a professional organization, or something else), you should take a look at Anglo-derived common law and the safeguards against abuse that have been evolved over the centuries. That…

Your premise is that, rather than free association, every group of people owes a kind of due process to everyone else, presumptive of their right to associate. Sorry, I disagree: people can decide they don't want to associate with you or me for reasons we don't find justifiable. I can throw a party and not invite you simply for writing this comment; I can start a project and not allow you to contribute. You can relate to the rest of the world that I did that, and let them decide what that means to them.

We've gone out of our way to encode into law the exceptions to that rule. We can talk all we want about "anglo-derived common law" in those cases.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#382

Post by goatinaboat »

moron4hire wrote: post #252
barumi wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't have to be that way. They really have, because that's the sole reason they exist. It's like arguing that a oppressive totalitarian regime doesn't have to oppress their citizens. > (...) they can be tools to communicate to good-faith actors that they will be welcome and safe. CoCs aren't welcoming letters. CoCs are designed with the express purpose of letting you know that you will be punished if you do o…

> Either that's already implied, A very large group of people have stated many times that that is not the case. They do not feel safe. It's continued assertions that bludgeoning people is the sole reason CoCs exist that make those people feel like they are being completely ignored. > or means nothing if you don't plan to act on it That is literally what I said. "And they are meaningless if the leadership is not train…

A very large group of people have stated many times that that is not the case. They do not feel safe

But what does that even mean in the context of an open source project? How is anyone actually “unsafe” from someone who may be on another continent and have no idea where they live? The word “unsafe” doesn’t mean anything any more, it’s just used to silence debate. “I feel unsafe so you should merge my PR without doing any code review” is what they mean.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#383

Post by FeepingCreature »

hodgesrm wrote: post #338
ekianjo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You are missing an important point though: with machine learning, you can make sure all social media will be optimized naturally to put the maximum amount of people's hair on fire, all the time. Outrage create clicks, replies, and with recommendations engines it's served t…

> Whatever manual interventions we had to make use of outrage before are like kids' play compared to the systems which automate this nowadays. I think you need to cite evidence for that view. There's a long history of terrible violence based on manipulation of religious animosity that predates the Internet. The Reformation movement in Germany triggered religious conflicts--incited by various secular powers--that last…

I'd guess it's more that in that time, the amount of incrimination and accusation you could have in a society before you had a civil war on your hands was lower. So you had more civil wars, but it also pushed people to stay quiet more. I think the reason we have so much criticism nowadays is how relatively limited the consequences are.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#384

Post by ScottBurson »

csnover wrote: post #380
newscracker wrote: post #184

After reading the entire post, I feel really bad for him, and I hope he gets the time off and the support necessary to recover from this incident. I also feel quite angry with how he has been treated. So please let me vent it out here as politely as I’m able to. I can imagine something like this or worse happening on social media groups, but an ostentatious “committee” that listens only to one side and never gives th…

> And the chuckling in the call when someone has already said they’re not in a proper emotional state is just bullying. I can’t speak to who this person was or why they did this, but I did just want to mention that there is at least one good faith explanation that isn’t straight up bullying. When I am in uncomfortable situations, I have a nervous chuckle. If I were in this call, giving this feedback to this person, I…

Then it seems to me that you're not the sort of person who should be on such a phone call, unless you can get this habit under control.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#385

Post by jbirer »

The person who is making this CoC complaint is clearly a narcissist who is unable to cope with criticism. There needs to be some sort of pushback against people who are attempting to initiate a mob lynching against people that they feel don't have a right to challenge them.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#386

Post by waterhouse »

closeparen wrote: post #353
taneq wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core problem with the self-esteem movement is that they try to promote high self-esteem disconnected from any true achievement or worth . High self-esteem certainly correlates with healthy, successful people (of course healthy successful people have good self esteem!) but trying to artificially inflate peoples' self esteem to create health and success is driving the causation backwards. Self esteem devoid of any…

Earlier this year I had the occasion to do some reading on self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-love. I think this critique is a bit divorced from what the psychologists are actually saying. For starters, the "movement" is definitely aware of your dichotomy. The terms of art are contingent and non-contingent . It considers contingent self-esteem to be fragile because real lives contain setbacks. Its position is bas…

> divorced from what the psychologists are actually saying

Let me throw out the possibility that what the psychologists are saying, and the nth-hand version that teachers pick up and teach to the kids, may differ on key details. I don't think it's even rare for high-minded ideas to be garbled by the time they trickle down into classrooms. Feynman had amusing/dismaying stories about what made it into science textbooks, for example (and textbooks are theoretically written by the experts): https://rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#387

Post by pindab0ter »

barumi wrote: post #249
gwbas1c wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, CoCs are meant to clearly state that bigotry is unacceptable. If you don't understand why it's necessary at times to clearly state what bigotry is, and why it's unacceptable, than you need to learn a bit more about diversity topics. They (CoC)s shouldn't be used to play power games. It's totally appropriate to call out situations where a CoC is used incorrectly.

> No, CoCs are meant to clearly state that bigotry is unacceptable. Oh really? This discussion is about someone that was persecuted and punished for violating a CoC. Do you see any bigotry involved in this story?

This discussion is about someone being punished by a committee for something that wasn’t in the CoC, as you can read in the article.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#388

Post by dragonwriter »

Animats wrote: post #370
lmm wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while that's very evident in this case this is actually what CoCs or written rules in general are for. Of course when you don't have a committee or a CoC however is in charge can still treat people arbitrarily, in fact much more so than when you actually have agreed on conduct and have a process to resolve things. > There's a good piece called the Tyranny of Structurelessness about radical feminist movements, where…

There's a good piece called the Tyranny of Structurelessness about radical feminist movements That's from 1970: "The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do something more specific. At this point they usually foundered because most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed their tasks." That's not jus…

> Black Lives Matter is hitting this now. This is the agenda of Black Lives Matter.

Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation LLC, the organization you link, isn't the central organization of the movement, and certainly isn't the central policy organization of the movement. That's the Movement For Black Lives (M4BL). Here's their platform page: https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#390

Post by flak48 »

csnover wrote: post #380
newscracker wrote: post #184

After reading the entire post, I feel really bad for him, and I hope he gets the time off and the support necessary to recover from this incident. I also feel quite angry with how he has been treated. So please let me vent it out here as politely as I’m able to. I can imagine something like this or worse happening on social media groups, but an ostentatious “committee” that listens only to one side and never gives th…

> And the chuckling in the call when someone has already said they’re not in a proper emotional state is just bullying. I can’t speak to who this person was or why they did this, but I did just want to mention that there is at least one good faith explanation that isn’t straight up bullying. When I am in uncomfortable situations, I have a nervous chuckle. If I were in this call, giving this feedback to this person, I…

If that were the case it would be super ironic that they were trying to nitpick on Jeremy's behaviour (if we can even call it that) when they couldn't get their shit together themselves.

Especially when the CoC requires vague things like 'be kind'

Post reply on HN