I Violated a Code of Conduct • Hacker News Board

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#801

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

jawarner wrote: post #768

tomp wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you believe that genetics cause women to perform worse in technical roles, that will be reflected in your social behavior. Can you expand on this, explain the connection? In particular, why the former (belief) would influence the latter (behavior)? I firmly believe, based on overwhelming evidence, that genetics makes most people perform terribly in technical roles. Fortunately, there are a few bright, above-aver…

> Can you expand on this, explain the connection? In particular, why the former (belief) would influence the latter (behavior)? It's not universally the case, to be sure. If you voice your belief that women are intellectually inferior, you will likely make them feel excluded. In general, there is a relationship between a person's beliefs and behaviors which I regard as self-evident. > Edit: answer to your second ques…

> People tend to act in accordance with their beliefs.

Professionals tend to act professionally. Just because most people are horny & sexual doesn't mean that they need to hump each other at work or at conferences. I expect professional behavior regardless of your personal beliefs. Now, personally I'd prefer people to also look professional (fully clothed, no religious symbols, ...) so I wouldn't necessarily disagree with such rules, but they're usually (as evidenced by this very OP) applied inconsistently, politically.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#802

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:48 PM UTC

I have only ever heard very awful things about some of the key figures of numfocus - especially Travis Oliphant and Peter Wang.

The stories of bullying, religious discrimination (or turning a blind eye to religious discrimination) and general unprofessional and poor behavior are staggering.

Considering how Anaconda took money from In-Q-Tel and mostly functions as a consultant to big banks, it’s a really sad chapter of Python history considering some of the amazing technical achievements the engineers have produced (conda, numba, pyarrow, dask, etc.).

The Python data and numerical ecosystem would be much healthier if Travis and Peter would just step down from their variety of positions and leave the community in peace.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#803

Post by raxxorrax » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:49 PM UTC

akiselev wrote: post #794

sk2020 wrote: post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most certainly not equivalent. COCs are welcomed by corporations because it could be a door into exercising power over content that is worth pursuing. If it was really about labor laws, you would see union busters instead of open arms.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#804

Post by btilly » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

MauranKilom wrote: post #669

btilly wrote: post #183

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…

Your argument as stated also applies to e.g. unions, police, workers' councils or any other place where individuals are elected to "protect" the group. And it is undeniable that these have overall improved the situations of these groups. The argument is flawed in that it does not consider the upsides of instituting them. This does not mean that CoCs are unequivocally the best solution. But fully ignoring their benefi…

It can apply to those situations, but the fact that in those cases the people most likely to be affected have a voice in who gets chosen is an incentive to good behavior that is missing in this case.

If you're running a conference, you APPOINT who will be deciding whether the CoC has been violated. If you appoint people who are not trusted by activists, you will face criticism from said activists. If you appoint people who are trusted by activists, you've appointed people who likely got ahead by getting activists fired up in the past. What they did in the past they will do in the future, and you've just given them the platform on which they will do it.

That's a catch-22 for the organizer, and a set of perverse incentives that makes it easy for the people I don't want to see in that position to get in that position.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#805

Post by jpeloquin » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

I looked for an independent primary source on on these events and wasn't able to find one. However, it may be of interest that the conference program lists the talk title as "Creating delightful libraries and books with nbdev and fastdoc" [0], whereas the delivered talk has the title of "I Like Notebooks" and is a direct response to Joel's talk. The conference organizers, or others, may have expected a different keynote and felt deceived by the change in topic. Note also that, according to Jeremy's blog post, the version of the talk posted on YouTube is not the version that was presented at the conference. As third parties we have very little information.

I'm also uncertain if the investigative committee actually intended to impose any consequences. Jeremy expressed concern that the situation may prevent his talk from being available, but I don't see any talks posted on the JupyterCon site yet. The only definite action is the decision that a code of conduct violation had occurred and the notification thereof. The notification clearly caused Jeremy Howard significant distress, which should have been avoided. However this may have been unintentional on the part of the conference organizers. For all we know, the situation has also caused them similar distress. Hopefully the involved parties can still find some remediation despite the incident blowing up on social media.

My main take-aways are that (1) small technical organizations are often poor at community management and investigating potential misconduct, and (2) the public internet is worse, with a tendency to devolve into public shaming.

[0] https://cfp.jupytercon.com/2020/schedule/general-sessions/

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#806

Post by ThrustVectoring » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:50 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…

> You think that people at JupyterCon were genuinely outraged over a presenter expressing his opinion that he likes Jupyter notebooks?

We're on the same page here, what I'm saying is that the context makes this situation much more obviously pretextual. I'm not going to speculate on the actual reasoning behind it, though, it's likely no more informative than pissing off someone influential somehow at some point.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#807

Post by throwaway894345 » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #516

julianmarq wrote: post #495

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.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but is the idea that--apart from a CoC--people might venture into a community thinking racist jokes are okay?

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#808

Post by btilly » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

fdw wrote: post #526

ALittleLight wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people know what is or isn't acceptable through common sense. A racist or sexual assaulter isn't going to think "Wait, does this violate the code of conduct?" Every conference doesn't need to go to the trouble of working out some flawless unambiguous list of rules and every attendee doesn't need to read them. If someone is causing a problem eject, ban, or call the police. No CoC needed.

While I agree that a CoC should be no surprise to anyone with common sense, it still makes sense to me to have them: First, there are people without common sense. Sooner or later someone will not adhere to the unwritten rules and ask "Who's going to stop me?". Even if you can eject/ban them, it will be quite a mess, as you now seem to enforce completely intransparent and artificial rules. People will (rightly) ask yo…

People will (rightly) ask you to state the rules before you enforce them.

Having a CoC doesn't mean that you get this benefit.

In the case in point, the rules being enforced from the CoC were not stated. After being ruled in violation, it was not made clear WHAT rule was violated. And certainly no rule in the actual CoC was violated.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#809

Post by vorpalhex » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:52 PM UTC

elric wrote: post #444

brigandish wrote: post #347

I've never seen a CoC used to help protect a community, only to protect certain already powerful members within a community and give them a tool with which to beat others. Lately I've been actively avoiding giving my time to open source projects that have CoC's like the Contributor Covenant[1], mainly because - if my experience is anything to go by - they are a strong signal that the kind of people I wish to avoid wi…

I've been wondering about this. Obviously there's a demand for CoCs coming from somewhere, or there wouldn't be a supply of them. What is driving this demand? Is this demand driven by good intentions? By a genuine desire to improve diversity? To attract those who might otherwise feel less safe? Is this demand driven by a "fear of being left out" because big names in tech are setting an example? Is this demand entirel…

I have seen it demanded basically as lipservice to an odd idea of justice. "Well, it's very easy to add, and there are some good ones, and X,Y and Z have it, and only a monster wouldn't adopt one!"

And then you start listing some of the issues that arise with these and defenders quickly respond that the problems are edge cases and usually the conversationd devolves from there.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#810

Post by liuliu » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 3:53 PM UTC

SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #728

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…

> Having a hidden set of implicit mores is far worse. In every arena I've operated this is always the case. Military, Big Company and on the streets. Not saying it's right, but it's extremely common (in my experience) > Rules shouldn't be implicit in professional environments. Totally agree. But again, everywhere I've been there are at least 2 sets of rules. Maybe I am jaded by conforming to the 'It is what it is' me…

It is hard. Without a common background (raised with similar upbringing, same religions), your implicit rules can diverge greatly with the others. Not to mention born in different era will play a big role in this. Some people simply don't grow with the changing time.

That's why it is more favorable in today's environment to have explicit rules like CoC. At least it brings people to the same understanding quicker.

It does carry risk though. When living in a world with more explicit rules, people tend to treat anything not in the rule to be OK, and ignore most implicit rules. That will rush more rules to be explicit, also, written poorly without broader debates and discussions during these rushes.