I Violated a Code of Conduct • Hacker News Board

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#791

Post by retrac » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

magicalhippo wrote: post #528

csnover wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

My aunt had a nervous laughter. I learned that when I was five, and I had just got a bike and trying to learn how to ride it. My aunt was visiting and I wanted to show off, lost control and hit the asphalt with quite some speed. Hands and knee were all scratched up and hurt like hell and there she was, standing, laughing out loud. I recall thinking how mean that was. While cleaning my wounds my mom explained the situ…

Yes. Long ago on my university campus, a deranged man had cornered a woman on the street while screaming incoherent profanities. She was standing there with her mouth over her hand laughing, nearly hysterically. It's a classic fear response.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#792

Post by finnthehuman » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

wrsh07 wrote: post #737

finnthehuman wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You inadvertently gave away the game. We can all agree that everyone has the right to be arbitrary and capricious. Codes of conduct are a formalization of expectations and rules for behavior. The are often tied (explicitly or implicitly) to an adjudication and enforcement process much more complicated than the person in charge just saying "get the fuck out". However when someone brings up the idea of improving that b…

I think in your cynicism you've totally lost all meaning and purpose of the code of conduct It's not a piece of legalese with which you can bludgeon people to get your way (I mean it can be, but that is not and should not be the point) When an organization has a code of conduct, it makes clear how I can complain about actions or events that occur under their jurisdiction. This is important because if you have high fr…

Oh, I think you underestimate my cynicism. I think some people adopted a piece of legalese without caring about the exact bounds and effects of implementing the terms of that legalese. It was vaguely in the direction of "stopping the bad stuff from happening" and was written with serious-sounding words so they just sort of assumed everything would work out fine. This blog post and HN thread are proof it has not.

>The code of conduct should be cheerfully received by everyone

I never cheerfully receive process. Process is valuable, process is important to have, but god-oh-god is it ever a massive pain in the ass.

Designing, drafting, implementing and refining process is HARD. I professionally maintain what I'll brazenly call "actually important" process so I don't get why everyone is so squeamish around the idea of maintaining the CoC process. (Well, I suspect that they're worried it will be corrupted by those nogoodnicks that they inartfully adopted this process to get rid of instead of growing some spine and just tossing them out on their ass in the first place.)

>legalese with which you can bludgeon people to get your way (I mean it can be, but that is not and should not be the point)

Understanding that this _will_ happen is just another part of designing process.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#793

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:40 PM UTC

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #618

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #44

There are two categories of rules: ones that are designed to be followed, and ones that are designed to bludgeon people with. Much like how a lot of knife law enforcement is mostly about having a convenient excuse for the police to harass minorities for being at the wrong place and the wrong time, a lot of Code of Conducts seem to me to be mostly about having a convenient excuse to punish and exclude people for havin…

> I'm just glad that this example of the phenomenon was over technical disagreement rather than politics, that makes it much more illustrative. And how exactly are you drawing that conclusion? You think that people at JupyterCon were genuinely outraged over a presenter expressing his opinion that he likes Jupyter notebooks? I would imagine that liking Jupyter would be an acceptable opinion at a Jupyter convention. Je…

[deleted]

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#794

Post by akiselev » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:40 PM UTC

sk2020 wrote: post #770

bccdee wrote: 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…

Pretend-legal agreements that are overly broad, capriciously enforced and written by out-of-touch culture “warriors” are a bad joke that should be regarded with contempt. Let the attorneys do their job, and devs, or the pop-dev-blogger entourage, should do theirs.

> Pretend-legal agreements that are overly broad, capriciously enforced and written by out-of-touch culture “warriors” are a bad joke that should be regarded with contempt

> Let the attorneys do their job

The foundation of labor law in this country was built thanks to out-of-touch culture “warriors” and their lawyers going back to the early 1900s.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#795

Post by jawarner » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:40 PM UTC

goatinaboat wrote: post #382

moron4hire wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 doin…

> The word “unsafe” doesn’t mean anything any more

An alternate possibility is that you don't understand what people mean when they say they feel unsafe. Do you feel you have invested effort into empathizing with these concerns, or would you say your are more dismissive?

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#796

Post by izacus » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:40 PM UTC

whack wrote: post #211

echelon wrote: post #6

We'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…

Some relevant statements from the author on this topic: > Code of Conducts can be a useful tool, when thoughtfully created and thoughtfully enforced, to address sexism, racism, and harassment, all of which have been problems at tech conferences. Given the diversity issues in the tech industry, it is important that we continue the work of making conferences more inclusive, particularly to those from marginalized backg…

> You wouldn't advocate scrapping the entire criminal justice system, just because one innocent person was convicted. A little more nuance is useful here as well.

The entire western criminal justice system is FOUNDED on the idea that it should let guilty go free if that avoids convicting the innocent. Criminal justice system which convicts innocent people is by its own foundational definition something that needs to be scrapped and reworked.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#797

Post by vorpalhex » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:44 PM UTC

wrsh07 wrote: post #737

finnthehuman wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You inadvertently gave away the game. We can all agree that everyone has the right to be arbitrary and capricious. Codes of conduct are a formalization of expectations and rules for behavior. The are often tied (explicitly or implicitly) to an adjudication and enforcement process much more complicated than the person in charge just saying "get the fuck out". However when someone brings up the idea of improving that b…

I think in your cynicism you've totally lost all meaning and purpose of the code of conduct It's not a piece of legalese with which you can bludgeon people to get your way (I mean it can be, but that is not and should not be the point) When an organization has a code of conduct, it makes clear how I can complain about actions or events that occur under their jurisdiction. This is important because if you have high fr…

I think many of the people who write CoCs are oblivious to the fact that people lie, or may just be unreliable witnesses. Nor are the creators of a CoC trained or able to run an adjucation process.

If you punish anyone who has a report filed against them without evaluating those reports or requesting any proof, then you will quickly be left with a small pool of very manipulative people looking to game the system.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#798

Post by btilly » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:44 PM UTC

Huggernaut wrote: post #555

btilly wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even in the worst straw-person SJW interpretation of CoCs would this be the intended outcome. Why do you say that? I absolutely think this is intended by some of the people involved. Any political movement that is trying to gain power by creating taboos needs high profile examples to scare people into following their agenda. Incidents like these therefore become something to brag about. It is a basic power play.…

What exactly about this incident would scare someone into following the "SJW Agenda", when you can't even guarantee that following the "SJW Agenda" in the CoC would actually protect you?

The fact that you will be held to the standards of the most easily offended member of your audience will be motivation to try to figure out what might offend that member and proactively try to cater to their wishes.

You might not know exactly what you have to do to succeed, but you will be certain that failing to hit any checklist item on the SJW agenda is going to get you into trouble. And therefore you have a good reason to proactively try to meet that agenda.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#799

Post by throwaway894345 » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:46 PM UTC

wrsh07 wrote: post #757

jeltz wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. I have never seen it happen in my 10 years in open source.

If you've never seen racist trolling on GitHub, maybe it's because you're not looking rather than that it doesn't happen The laziest of Google searches quickly found people being racist on GitHub (... to a GitHub employee! With their own, non anonymous accounts!): https://www.tinykat.cafe/on-all-that-fuckery (This incident also made it to hn iirc, but maybe you didn't read it that day)

I don't think anyone was suggesting that it literally has never happened, so much as that it's very, very rare. Moreover, that kind of behavior would get you banned irrespective of any CoC, so the question remains: what does a CoC add here?

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#800

Post by akiselev » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:46 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #765

mcv wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

You'll never be able to completely encode everything. Someone takes offense at criticism or a joke that the vast majority would think was completely inoffensive or someone who cursed once, etc. At that point, you have two choices. Tell them "Welp, no." or at least mildly tap the speaker etc. on the wrist. (Or, I suppose, just lie and tell the person you'll take care of it and then don't.)

> You'll never be able to completely encode everything.

No resilient human system expects everything to be completely encoded in a written statement - it's entirely unreasonable, akin to asking one prove that unicorns don't exist.

The devil is in the implementation details and how the CoC is wielded.