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Public Apology to Jeremy Howard

numfocus.org

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Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard

#221

Post by geofft »

GiorgioG wrote: post #136
geofft wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but then it's at most a false claim. It's still not an attack. If I say ping is privileged and you say you're on a distro with unprivileged ping, I haven't in any way denounced ping.

> it's at most a false claim In your opinion. As the recipient of said 'claim' I took it as an attack. Maybe I'm an overly sensitive person, maybe it's the end of a long week and I'm just feeling cranky, either way it offended me. So in this fictional world I feel that I have been attacked, and the HN CoC frowns upon members hurting other members' feelings. What should be done?

Fair enough - I think that in this fictional world where the CoC frowns on hurting others' feelings, you'd have a valid complaint, and I think that such a CoC would quickly break apart a community (especially an open community, where anyone can show up and then proclaim their feelings have been hurt).

I think the NumFOCUS CoC doesn't say that though (although it's ambiguous because it includes "Be kind" in the normative text, and I'd agree that's a problem), and other CoCs are more interested in the objective (or, at least, more objective) question of whether a personal attack actually happened than the question of whether a participant felt attacked. The Contributor Covenant, for instance, prohibits "Trolling, insulting or derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks," to which 'I'm sorry you felt insulted, but this was not an insult' would be an adequate defense.

It does appear that the relevant sections of the NumFOCUS CoC aren't unique to them, though I can't tell exactly where they came from, and you have convinced me that this is a problem. (Geez, this is license proliferation all over again.) Thank you!

Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard

#223

Post by luckylion »

notsuoh wrote: post #110
phkahler wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst thing is when nobody is actually offended or hurt, and someone says your behavior could be considered offensive or insulting or whatever and takes action based on that. That's just someone wanting to exert their power for the wrong reasons.

You don't get to be the arbiter of who is "actually offended." I agree that there are people who take any amount of power and want to expert it for the wrong reasons, but that isn't an indictment against CoCs, it's an indictment of bad behavior.

That bad behavior is enabled by CoCs though, isn't it? If you leave room for abuse, you'll get abuse.

Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard

#224

Post by IshKebab »

gojomo wrote: post #208
btilly wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. You will also note that the word "sorry" is entirely missing. And the list of things that they failed to "acknowledge" includes their not telling him what rule he was accused of violating, what action of his violated the rule, having literally laughed at him, and having violated their own code of conduct. They also offer nothing in the way of amends. Or do anything to suggest that there will be consequences to t…

This seems nitpicky. Saying "we apologize" multiple times is the same as "we're sorry". They've said their communications were in error in the way they described the complaints, the status of the investigation, and their charged language. They've kicked the whole thing up to the responsible organizational Board of Directors for more action - which is to say, completely removed the group that made the errors from next…

I don't think it is nitpicky. It definitely reads at least partly like an "I'm sorry you feel that I have offended you" apology and "We ... issue a public apology to Jeremy Howard..." is a weirdly evasive way of putting it. I get that it is hard to admit fault and apologise but here's what they should have said:

> We, the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct Enforcement Committee, would like to publicly apologise to Jeremy Howard for our handling of the JupyterCon 2020 reports. We did not give Jeremy a chance to defend himself before concluding that he had violated our CoC, and for that, and the stress it has caused, we are sorry.

I'm available to hire for public apology writing. :-)

Still, to be fair I don't think I've actually ever seen a public apology that was actually a full genuine public apology. This is probably the best anyone could hope for.

Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard

#225

Post by pstuart »

wk_end wrote: post #176
pstuart wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is a pseudo anonymous message board, thus not as restrictive. But in any activity where people are "collaborating", especially in shared space (like a conference) there are more concerns to be addressed. The programming world historically has been the domain of white men, and these CoCs are often a response to the fact that things have changed. Any talk about "CoCs are bad" or "CoCs are just for people to arbitrar…

I don't really disagree with any of that, but it's also exactly what I'm talking about above. Given that you posted both the original reply and this one, I think you're kind of guilty of the old Motte & Bailey [1]. Just for the record: I'm privileged (and generally pretty polite/non-offensive I hope), I've rarely needed to deal with any of the issues addressed by CoCs, and I've also never really dealt with any of the…

That was tl;dr to decipher your accusation. Could you clarify please? I ask not to debate but to understand and correct future communications.

The (intended) gist of my comments is to push back against the tactic of "look a stupid rule or stupid enforcement of rules; this is why we need to get rid of rules."

Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard

#226

Post by btilly »

gojomo wrote: post #208
btilly wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. You will also note that the word "sorry" is entirely missing. And the list of things that they failed to "acknowledge" includes their not telling him what rule he was accused of violating, what action of his violated the rule, having literally laughed at him, and having violated their own code of conduct. They also offer nothing in the way of amends. Or do anything to suggest that there will be consequences to t…

This seems nitpicky. Saying "we apologize" multiple times is the same as "we're sorry". They've said their communications were in error in the way they described the complaints, the status of the investigation, and their charged language. They've kicked the whole thing up to the responsible organizational Board of Directors for more action - which is to say, completely removed the group that made the errors from next…

Saying "we apologize" multiple times is the same as "we're sorry".

The difference is that the first indicates that "we" want you to feel better, while the second indicates empathy. When I'm on the receiving end, my gut reaction is almost exactly opposite.

Second, their claim is that this is a miscommunication appears to be a CYA lie. The recipient has shared sufficient details of what actually happened that either he is lying, or they are. An apology that asks the recipient to swallow a lie is not much of an apology.

You think that this is a good apology. I think that it is a terrible one. Here is what an apology that I call good would look like:

We, the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct Enforcement Committee, issue a public apology to Jeremy Howard for our handling of the JupyterCon 2020 reports. We did poorly on multiple levels. Therefore we have requested our board of directors to take over the investigation of those reports, and to separately investigate our mishandling of the situation.

We deeply regret the pain and anguish that we caused, and we are sorry for it.

Incidentally doing this would have been free to them. Everyone knows that they screwed up. At this point the board would be remiss to NOT investigate, so asking the board to do what it has to do anyways costs them nothing. And they wouldn't have said something that sounds like a lie.

Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard

#227

Post by ookdatnog »

GiorgioG wrote: post #3

I'm going to get downvoted for this, but: I'm against code of conducts because they're worse than the problems they try to solve. edit: In my opinion, code of conducts become a distraction and a cause for worry to anyone contributing to these projects because someone inevitably gets their feelings hurt and points to some well-intentioned rule in the CoC to get the 'offender' shamed/removed even if no harm was intende…

Yet you are here, on HN, a forum with a code of conduct (they're called guidelines but the commenting rules constitute a CoC), and this CoC is enforced firmly.

I don't mean this in a snarky "get outta here" way, but: why are you here? Why not any other forum, tech-related or otherwise? Why not 4chan? Whatever the reason is, is the answer not quite likely to be at least in part made possible by the CoC and its strict enforcement?

Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard

#228

Post by mundo »

gojomo wrote: post #208
btilly wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. You will also note that the word "sorry" is entirely missing. And the list of things that they failed to "acknowledge" includes their not telling him what rule he was accused of violating, what action of his violated the rule, having literally laughed at him, and having violated their own code of conduct. They also offer nothing in the way of amends. Or do anything to suggest that there will be consequences to t…

This seems nitpicky. Saying "we apologize" multiple times is the same as "we're sorry". They've said their communications were in error in the way they described the complaints, the status of the investigation, and their charged language. They've kicked the whole thing up to the responsible organizational Board of Directors for more action - which is to say, completely removed the group that made the errors from next…

They did apologize, but not for the stuff Howard complained about.

A: You kicked in my front door, walked in unannounced, and stole my TV!

B: I apologize unreservedly. I should have announced myself.

Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard

#229

Post by franga2000 »

chowned wrote: post #214
dsq wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have violated the CoC by presuming to use the honorific "sir", thus promoting gender opression!

We can criticize this specific instance of CoC enforcement without making fun of legitimate gender issues in technology.

Not OP, but I don't think they were making fun of the legitimate issues. There have been plenty of instances of pronoun-related overreactions in and outside the tech sector - see the recent-ish StackOverflow mess for an example. There are obviously many issues, but there are also many overblown non-issues and I don't see much harm in making fun of those.

Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard

#230

Post by hintymad »

akiselev wrote: post #146
jf- wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NumFOCUS found I violated their Code of Conduct (CoC) at JupyterCon because my talk was not “kind”, because I said Joel Grus was “wrong” regarding his opinion that Jupyter Notebook is not a good software development environment Wow.

Don't leave out the best part (the very next sentence) > Joel (who I greatly respect, and consider an asset to the data science community) was not involved in NumFOCUS’s action, was not told about it, and did not support it.

Wow! Feelings! Feelings! Feelings! Since when have people become like this?
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