Cancel We The Web? (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#201

Post by sneak » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 9:35 AM UTC

ggm wrote: post #2

Well worth reading. Lucid, clear. Didnt make me like Stallman more, but articulated some of the issues well. On the whole, I think the cancel/trigger thing has got out of hand. People need to be accountable for what they say, not what people believe they think.

> People need to be accountable for what they say, not what people believe they think.

I disagree. What people believe what someone thinks, even if incorrect, is a legitimate basis for someone's choice of free association.

It's entirely legitimate for someone to avoid someone else (including fire them) on the basis of false beliefs about that person, due to failing to spend enough time understanding the nuance of the situation or person.

I would never hire rms, for example, because he is a drama llama, and I find constantly creating controversy (intentionally or otherwise) to be mostly unproductive, even if all of the things he is saying are accurate and correct and true.

Freedom of association does not require fairness or due process. Our time and attention is our own, to allocate unfairly, incorrectly, or on any other unscientific, inaccurate basis we feel is best.

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#202

Post by sneak » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 9:36 AM UTC

ggm wrote: post #10

chrisco255 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nadine's point was that people should not be unduly punished for making intellectual arguments for or against anything. "Being punished for what they say" is precisely what happened to Stallman.

No, I don't agree. He was partly punished for what people THOUGHT he had said, and for past transgressions, and in large part for what people were TOLD he had said. Not for what he actually said.

He wasn't punished, he was fired.

You're allowed to revoke consent to an interaction or business relationship at any time. It's not a punishment to anyone else to say "this situation (employing rms) isn't for me and I don't want to be in it any longer".

Firing isn't punitive.

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#203

Post by bill_mon » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 9:41 AM UTC

mckirk wrote: post #198

bill_mon wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you're inventing more personality for Mr X. He doesn't like Microsoft and doesn't hide it. He thinks Santa Claus is for children and doesn't hide it. He's not the problem here.

He is, though, because his opinion on Santa Claus should be completely irrelevant to his interactions with his co-workers. But if he prioritizes being hostile by correcting and insulting people over being humble and accepting that others might believe differently, he is being toxic -- he's poisonous to be around. There are different ways to stand by one's beliefs. One is to keep them to yourself and let them guide yo…

I can agree. But this means that we can never talk about anything other than specific, technical issues at work. We can never reveal any opinion or outside fact about anything. I suppose that's a solution.

In this scenario, our guy wouldn't accept that others might believe differently, because he'd never know, because they never say. Fine by me.

> being wrong (i.e., of a different opinion than you)

That's not what wrong means. Opinions are personal and subjective and can't be wrong or right. Religious ideas a not opinions, they are fact claims about the universe.

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#204

Post by amanzi » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 10:14 AM UTC

What a great post - I wish I had read it when the controversy happened because it sums up my views on the issue in a perfectly articulate manner.

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#205

Post by dTal » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 10:29 AM UTC

DubiousPusher wrote: post #88

klodolph wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that this is just an attempt at explaining away toxic behavior without taking responsibility for it. People in the OSS community can, at times, glorify toxic behavior. I know people who take it as a badge of honor to "speak the truth", "speak directly", or "have no filter". Speaking directly and speaking the truth are good ideals to have, but if you really want to PROVE that you speak the truth and don't fear…

That may be but there is something to the OP's point. The big 5 personality test which is the only personality test rally taken seriously in clinical psychology, has an aspect called agreeableness. Having high or low agreeableness has a tremendous correlation with all kinds of outcomes. It's highly tied to success in corporate, church, and government settings. It's very likely that to be set enough to go against the…

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

--George Bernard Shaw

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#206

Post by yellowapple » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 10:58 AM UTC

r3trohack3r wrote: post #6

A different take: Microsoft, Oracle, et. al. waged a war against OSS in the 90s. They went as far as using mental illness as a weapon against the community (equating participation in the commons as an equivalent to mental illness). It’s not a coincidence the class of human that weathered the storm looks like Stallman, Linus, ESR, et. al. That’s what it took. The toxicity in these communities is a result of what was l…

A different take on your different take: it might not be coincidental that said current wave of villification coincides with large technology corporations (ostensibly) embracing "open source". The causality is unclear - it could be some nefarious attempt by corporate interests to weaponize public sentiment against "obstacles" to said corporate interests, or it could simply be corporate interests becoming more 21w/illing to dip their toes in "open source" as its more fanatical figures get pushed out - but the correlation is plain as day.

What's especially concerning to me is that such an alignment with corporate interests has somehow managed to successfully brand itself as "leftist" here in the US, both among right-wingers and among people who sincerely believe themselves to be advancing leftist causes by aligning with these large corporations against people with fairly strong anticapitalist leanings. Like with the FOSS movement, I strongly suspect that the ownership class is engaging in its own form of EEE against leftism: paying lip-service to it to appear to "embrace" it, while intending to "extend" it with things outright antithetical to workers' rights (like, you know, celebrating when large corporations terminate employees as long as it's for the "right" reasons, or celebrating when workers are prevented from acquiring arms and ammunition) until it's weak and fragmented enough to "extinguish".

We're approaching a new age of wealth consolidation, be that wealth in the form of real estate, money, intellectual property, you name it. A new gilded age, with all the monopolism that entails.

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#207

Post by mckirk » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 11:23 AM UTC

bill_mon wrote: post #203

mckirk wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is, though, because his opinion on Santa Claus should be completely irrelevant to his interactions with his co-workers. But if he prioritizes being hostile by correcting and insulting people over being humble and accepting that others might believe differently, he is being toxic -- he's poisonous to be around. There are different ways to stand by one's beliefs. One is to keep them to yourself and let them guide yo…

I can agree. But this means that we can never talk about anything other than specific, technical issues at work. We can never reveal any opinion or outside fact about anything. I suppose that's a solution. In this scenario, our guy wouldn't accept that others might believe differently, because he'd never know, because they never say. Fine by me. > being wrong (i.e., of a different opinion than you) That's not what wr…

I think the agreed-upon way of handling this is revealing personal opinions on difficult subjects very carefully to gauge the reactions, and only proceeding if doing so wouldn't disturb the peace more than what the discussion would be worth. There are of course a ton of potentially difficult subjects, as the ever expanding "Culture War" Wikipedia article shows[1].

But after thinking about it for a bit, this approach of "tread carefully and don't disturb others" is still problematic. Because, where do you draw the line about things that you should or should not speak up against? My intuitive example would have been an anti-vaxxer at work, that I probably would have felt the need to criticize and correct, because their opinion might kill my grandma. But then, militant atheists might also feel like they have to criticize believers, given the huge number of people killed in the name of one god or another.

I think a fundamental factor here is the level of confidence in one's belief that is warranted. Challenging others (especially publicly) on what they believe should only be seen as a sensible thing to do when the confidence in your opinion that leads to to that criticism is warranted. For things like vaccinations, we thankfully have scientific evidence that would indicate that anyone who outright believes they are ineffectual or "give people autism" is, in all likelihood, simply wrong. On the other hand, a belief in god ultimately can't ever be shown as wrong[2], so being very confident in your belief that there is no god still doesn't justify putting down others for believing the opposite.

> That's not what wrong means.

Yes sorry, that was meant fairly tongue-in-cheek, because I assumed that for a person like our Mr. X, the distinction between "of a different opinion" and "wrong" would be very blurry.

> Religious ideas are not opinions, they are fact claims about the universe.

Isn't that just a really wide-spanning opinion though? Maybe we're using the word differently and mean the same?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war

2: Unless we talk about ridiculous stuff like creationism, which would at least be very hard to defend if you simultaneously want to use the scientific method for anything.

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#208

Post by AdmiralGinge » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 11:45 AM UTC

prvc wrote: post #46

seebs wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fascinating take, but I don't think it's particularly related to what actually happened. I wasn't toxic because of some Microsoft FUD, I was toxic because I was a teenager with low empathy who hadn't learned things yet. I grew out of it. Lots of people in open source were never particularly toxic, and there's no reason they should have been. Even granting the existence of the external stress (and it really w…

>I was toxic because I was a teenager with low empathy who hadn't learned things yet. I grew out of it. Participation in political mobs can serve as a surrogate replacement for empathy. A change in political allegiance is far easier to enact in an individual than a change in personality.

That's very succinctly summed up something I often struggle to articulate.

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#209

Post by bill_mon » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 11:53 AM UTC

mckirk wrote: post #207

bill_mon wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can agree. But this means that we can never talk about anything other than specific, technical issues at work. We can never reveal any opinion or outside fact about anything. I suppose that's a solution. In this scenario, our guy wouldn't accept that others might believe differently, because he'd never know, because they never say. Fine by me. > being wrong (i.e., of a different opinion than you) That's not what wr…

I think the agreed-upon way of handling this is revealing personal opinions on difficult subjects very carefully to gauge the reactions, and only proceeding if doing so wouldn't disturb the peace more than what the discussion would be worth. There are of course a ton of potentially difficult subjects, as the ever expanding "Culture War" Wikipedia article shows[1]. But after thinking about it for a bit, this approach…

Treading carefully is probably our best bet, but it's very difficult and error prone.

There are no militant atheists, in any reasonable sense of the word. If mentioning facts about the world is seen as criticism of religious people, that's a big problem. We know vaccines work, because our best research shows that. It's not controversial and we should be free to mention it. Huge parts of many religious text are factually incorrect, we know that from enormous amounts of research -- this is also not controversial and we should be free to talk about it.

> Isn't that just a really wide-spanning opinion though? Maybe we're using the word differently and mean the same?

In that case everything is opinion and we have no real knowledge of anything.

Thanks!

Re: Cancel We The Web? (2020)

#210

Post by strogonoff » Mon, Mar 22, 2021, 12:28 PM UTC

tablespoon wrote: post #99

smsm42 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, she is the character that needs to be ignored. That's the proper way to deal with trolls - not feeding them, not fighting them but starving them of attention they so desperately crave.

> Nope, she is the character that needs to be ignored. That's the proper way to deal with trolls - not feeding them, not fighting them but starving them of attention they so desperately crave. That solution to trolling has never worked and never will. The reason is that it requires near complete agreement and coordination between uncoordinated individuals, which is impossible for any but the smallest groups. There's…

The very uncoordinated cooperation you’re talking about happens a lot in the other direction these days, and is perfectly possible in this direction as well. The problem is that “free” ad-based social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) feeds on user engagement, and the more of their users feed the troll the higher their ad revenue.

While not feeding the troll is perfectly reasonable and there’s enough people with sufficient common sense, we all are quite vulnerable to letting GUI patterns slip past our logical thinking and speak directly to system 1. The GUI is powerful in this way, and arguably it’s never really neutral. In case of “free” social media, it promotes action, it makes the “like” action the most effortless, it feeds likes into recommendations, and so on. Not feeding the troll goes against everything it stands for.

I’ll probably never shut up about it, but I believe making social media paid rather than ad-driven is what has the power to address this issue in the most reasonable way. Paid social media should be normalized.