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I Violated a Code of Conduct

fast.ai

741–750 of 971 posts

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#741
post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're useless for their stated purpose, but they're quite useful for their real purpose: as a punishment tool used by social justice sadists which are parasitizing projects conferences and organizations.

Doesn't even have to be social justice sadists. They're ripe for arbitrary enforcement and likewise can be used by people with power to direct the enforcement people against anyone they don't like. Depending how cynical you want to be that's arguably the point of them.

The fact that they're social justice types is an historical detail, in the 50s it was the McCarthy red scare types for instance.

Overall it's the same kind of people, authoritarian/social dominants; see https://theauthoritarians.org/

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [CoC are] a way to assure newcomers that your project wasn't going to allow racist trolling on the mailing list. The implication being that every project without an established code of conduct is awash with racism? Exhausting vigilance about conspiracies indeed .

Did you skip over the word 'assure'? The implication is that other projects aren't performing that particular assurance. Problems such as a plague of racist jokes aren't omnipresent, but they show up often enough in the world that a little signpost at the front door about expectations can help with first impressions and understanding the community.

If this were a signpost along the lines of "employees must wash hands", then there would be no problem. Of course employees should wash their hands.

The problem is the weaponization against random people for obscure reasons. The blog poster here didn't make a presentation full of racist jokes, it's not even clear what they did.

Lawful evil anti-social people exist in the world, we shouldn't let them bully people just because they're waving a rainbow flag while doing so.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#743
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of division over political correctness, but I would not suggest that it is the cause , any more than a cough is the cause of a cold. There is something that is driving us apart on many, many issues, and political correctness just happens to be one of the more prominent ones. And HN is pretty friendly to discussion of big-media-tech censorship in general. It's when a post veers too far into conspiracy o…

> There is something that is driving us apart I must say I am too curious not to ask, this quite cryptic. What would you say is driving us apart?

I was cryptic in part because it is not completely clear. It's difficult even to pin down when we started on this path.

That said, one surprisingly important influence seems to be the rise of image posts + eternal scrolling. It's the ideal method for delivering a continuous stream of entertaining "the other side is bad" outrage content.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#744
post #371
post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 out of positions of power long ago, so that aforementioned people could run their own little Stasi It sounds like you include yourself in this group of people who care about building inclusive human communities? Generalizing…

All I can say is I've only seen and heard code of conducts be used for bullying and to exclude people from communities without any wrongdoing. Examples include the various Stack Overflow Monica incidents, the post we've just read, and a meatspace event I've been to. I think CoCs, while a great ideal, unfortunately tend to attract power-tripping, virtue-signalling bullies who seek to enforce it for the greater bad.

Technically, the Monica incident didn't involve a CoC; that was a pretext (well, post-text). The people who made the decision were just out of touch, and pattern-matched the information they had available to the “powerful, respected individual is hurting people who can't fight back” story – not realising that they'd caused that story, with Monica as the one who got hurt.

I'm still not sure why they doubled down on it, breaking long-standing traditions of how-moderation-is-done in the biggest possible way (defaming in the press) but (at least) some of the people involved (e.g. Sara Chipps, the face of the Big Bad… the person who introduced Jon Skeet to Stack Overflow) weren't sadistic abusers, so I'd prefer to assume ignorance than malice. (There might've been more than a little over-correcting for “we mustn't let ourselves defend the ones in the wrong, even if we like them”, but that's just speculation on my part.)

And that situation was complicated. A lot of people were telling themselves they were doing the right thing, but ended up hurting innocent bystanders all the more, e.g. whoever released that poorly-redacted list of which moderators were LGBTQ+ (presumably to try to get back at Stack Exchange in some way or other). We still don't know who that was, which is as it should be; you don't talk about moderation decisions on Stack Exchange unless their target is part of the conversation (and even then, only usually if they bring it up).

The whole thing goes to show (at least, to me) how important it is not to act how the story says you should; you might have the story wrong.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#746
post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why should rules exist? We should just operate on intuitive feelings of what is or isn't acceptable all the time." Why NOT formalize rules to some extent? Having a hidden set of implicit mores is far worse. In fact, you can easily read this post as a pro-COC argument. After all, the author is able to make a really strong case that he didn't really infringe on any part of the COC, and that the COC was poorly construc…

> If someone's threatening you or sexually assaulting you you're going to go the police, not report them for a code of conduct violation. I think they're right on point with this. Law is incredibly complex and you're likely to end up with a very shitty sub-implementation of the law when building a code of conduct, be it in itself or the application & litigation procedure. "Be nice to each other & follow the local off…

Worked briefly at a place where male developers were actively harassing female employees. Not extreme, but clearly unwanted behavior.

20 years professional work, first time Ive ever seen that.

Noped out of there as fast I could.

Now, As a white male, I’ve seen it going the other way much more lately. Walk into a place where it’s all about diversity and tolerance, but failing, because hiring for diversity means passing on experience. Or frankly interest in doing the job.

So spent months cleaning up messes. The entire time everyone is bashing white males, unless non-binary.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No true scotsman.

I don't think that fits here.

It does.

According to Wikipedia, No true Scotsman, or appeal to purity, is an informal fallacy in which one attempts to protect a universal generalization from counterexamples by changing the definition in an ad hoc fashion to exclude the counterexample.[1][2] Rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any new specific objective rule or criterion: "no true Scotsman would do such a thing"; i.e., those who perform that action are not part of our group and thus criticism of that action is not criticism of the group.

Now, with this definition in mind, let's review the context of this discussion:

> Using CoC's to backstab people is not going to end well.

> But that's their only usecase, isn't it?

> 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.

So there was a debate about whether CoCs can be used as a weapon. gwbas1c rejected the idea that CoCs could be used as a weapon. barumi referenced OP article as a counter-example, to demonstrate an instance where a CoC was used as a weapon. pindab0ter then resorted to a "no true scotsman" fallacy to reject this counter-example. According to pindab0ter, this was not a "true" example of someone utilizing a CoC for attacking people, because the victim feels like they did not violate the CoC to an extent where such an attack was justified. This line of reasoning can be used to exclude all examples of people using a CoC as a weapon. After all, if someone feels like they violated a CoC and deserved their punishment, then they wouldn't characterize the situation as an "attack" in the first place.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#748
post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rebuilt? Why? Do you read the code of conduct when you attend a conference? Personally, I haven't even read the code of conduct for my job, and certainly wouldn't read one if I was speaking at or attending a conference. The CoCs are completely unnecessary and, as shown in this example, arbitrarily enforced. In the blog post I read that their CoC prohibits threats and assaults. Consider how silly that is. If someone's…

Have you read all the laws in your country? Are you aware that there are probably thousands of examples where they've been arbitrarily enforced and put innocent people in prison (or even executed them)? Many of them are just a matter of common sense and yet there's an entire apparatus around them. Does that mean they're silly and useless? I've never organised a conference, but people who have told me that there's a l…

Elections hand book is thousands of of rules.

Usually one or more deaths behind each of those rules.

Stupid rules come about because someone somewhere got screwed over.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#749
post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rebuilt? Why? Do you read the code of conduct when you attend a conference? Personally, I haven't even read the code of conduct for my job, and certainly wouldn't read one if I was speaking at or attending a conference. The CoCs are completely unnecessary and, as shown in this example, arbitrarily enforced. In the blog post I read that their CoC prohibits threats and assaults. Consider how silly that is. If someone's…

"Why should rules exist? We should just operate on intuitive feelings of what is or isn't acceptable all the time." Why NOT formalize rules to some extent? Having a hidden set of implicit mores is far worse. In fact, you can easily read this post as a pro-COC argument. After all, the author is able to make a really strong case that he didn't really infringe on any part of the COC, and that the COC was poorly construc…

[deleted]

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#750

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…

Rebuilt? Why? Do you read the code of conduct when you attend a conference? Personally, I haven't even read the code of conduct for my job, and certainly wouldn't read one if I was speaking at or attending a conference. The CoCs are completely unnecessary and, as shown in this example, arbitrarily enforced. In the blog post I read that their CoC prohibits threats and assaults. Consider how silly that is. If someone's…

> "The CoCs are completely unnecessary and, as shown in this example, arbitrarily enforced."

The whole point of CoCs is to avoid this arbitrary enforcement. The problem in this particular case seems to be that they ignored their own CoC and picked on someone who didn't violate their CoC, while the committee did violate the CoC.

That situation is indistinguishable from not having a CoC at all. If you've got a CoC, it needs to be clear, and you need to be consistent about how you enforce it.

It has been shown plenty of times that if you don't have a CoC, there will be some people who think that racist or sexist jokes, sexual harassment, etc., are okay. They are not, and a CoC can help to make that clear. But you have to take your own CoC seriously and follow it, and not use it as an arbitrary excuse to harass people, like what seems to have happened here.

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