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Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

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Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

#241

Post by dang »

camdenlock wrote: post #228
civodul wrote: post #28

As co-maintainer of GNU Guix, I want to point out that the views expressed in Richard Stallman's message are his and not those of the Guix maintainers. In particular, by writing that codes of conduct are "punitive spirit", RMS shows a misunderstanding of how these texts came into existence. More importantly, by writing that he disagrees with "making diversity a goal", RMS seems to deny the role we free software peopl…

What you've written here sounds like the preaching of a religious person. We must correct our "biases, conscious or not"? What evidence do you have that all of us are laboring under the weight of some kind of original sin of "bias"? Can any one of us investigate these claims scientifically, or must we appeal to an authority in your belief system to get answers? Your virtue signaling is unimpressive. Please take it el…

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Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

#242

Post by favorited »

camdenlock wrote: post #228
civodul wrote: post #28

As co-maintainer of GNU Guix, I want to point out that the views expressed in Richard Stallman's message are his and not those of the Guix maintainers. In particular, by writing that codes of conduct are "punitive spirit", RMS shows a misunderstanding of how these texts came into existence. More importantly, by writing that he disagrees with "making diversity a goal", RMS seems to deny the role we free software peopl…

What you've written here sounds like the preaching of a religious person. We must correct our "biases, conscious or not"? What evidence do you have that all of us are laboring under the weight of some kind of original sin of "bias"? Can any one of us investigate these claims scientifically, or must we appeal to an authority in your belief system to get answers? Your virtue signaling is unimpressive. Please take it el…

Wait, do you not think you have any biases?

Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

#243

Post by x220 »

tomjen3 wrote: post #150
x220 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love to promote this whenever I can. This method has a fantastic reward given the time it takes to learn and practice it and has made my in-person communication a lot better whenever I use it.

I have heard about it, but always sorta wrote it of because while I can learn it, most other people wouldn't. I do wonder though, how does it work when only one side practice it? Do the user get the suckers payout?

I've used it unilaterally several times and it made things better than not using it.

Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

#244

Post by nonce42 »

ve55 wrote: post #215
civodul wrote: post #28

As co-maintainer of GNU Guix, I want to point out that the views expressed in Richard Stallman's message are his and not those of the Guix maintainers. In particular, by writing that codes of conduct are "punitive spirit", RMS shows a misunderstanding of how these texts came into existence. More importantly, by writing that he disagrees with "making diversity a goal", RMS seems to deny the role we free software peopl…

>correcting the biases, conscious or not, that have led to the poor diversity of our communities What you're missing is a proof that the only reason a community is not 'diverse' is due to 'biases' within the community. You will find this is a very hard thing to prove as a general concept. Reminds me of the following paragraph: >For the record, here is a small sample of other communities where black people are strongl…

> Swimmers (2%)

The low rate of black swimmers isn't just an interesting quirk, but the consequence of historical actions to keep blacks out. For instance, public pools in New York City used to be kept deliberately cold on the theory that this discouraged black participants (source: The Power Broker).

Lack of swimming skills has deadly consequences; black children drown in swimming pools at 5.5 times the rate of white children. Source: CDC https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6319a2.htm

Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

#245

Post by bitL »

yebyen wrote: post #210
bitL wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the code was indeed garbage, and it cost a lot of time (super precious asset) and brain power (a precious asset) to evaluate and reject? Such a reaction would be understandable even if hurtful. No wonder people leaning towards the Asperger/autistic spectrum of brutal honesty would state that; such is their nature. What would you propose for addressing it? Ghosting? Silent blacklisting? English-style "there is…

I honestly have long agreed with your premise, but I have to say I can't bring myself to agree with your whole statement. I see it more often each passing year, that someone who behaves a certain way is "charitably" accused of having some disorder, or "being on the spectrum." I do not accept this. And you can do better than "this code is fucking garbage." Even "this code is poorly done, try harder" is much better. It…

I don't believe SDD would work for these reasons:

1) people that start a serious open source product must be self-assured and innately isolated from any external community/pressure in order to avoid distractions from their goal. Shame has likely 0 effect, or negative (i.e. the person/group doing the shaming would get banned from any future interaction). It takes a certain type of person that is likely "very thorny" to the outside world unless persuaded by desired qualities in other people that want to interact.

2) those projects often start as angry reactions to what is happening in the outside "meatspace" (corruption, vendor lock-in, "voluntary" censorship, you-can-buy-everyone, selling underwhelming/dangerous stuff for a lot of money etc.); doing things differently when they start working inevitably invokes feelings of superiority over people that "just don't get it"/"noobs" and it's difficult to resist temptation of showing off. Or external people are viewed as "conformists to old ways" that would prevent better things from happening in order not to disrupt current status quo they benefit from, hence interacting with them is not desirable (and arguably dangerous until project really makes it)

3) having to wade through a lot of new issues daily and cherry pick the ones that are worth examining is time consuming and tiring. After doing this for a while it likely leads to anger and telling off someone is a way to vent

4) popular free/open source projects that made it are often targeted by people trying to subvert them for their hidden agendas; any original developer intelligent enough can be at least disturbed if not outraged by that; harsh reactions following. "How would you punish those subverters?" is a better question than to penalize a developer that was easily provoked to an angry outburst by those poking at their weak areas (and that's often trivial with honest technical folks)

5) priority of creators is often getting things done as fast as they could; "unnecessary social talk" is often viewed as a waste of effort/time, and honestly it often is, unfortunately. If they decide that at some point "talking nice" is leading to being more efficient, they would do work on it, but not before they perceive it that way.

6) Many junior developers think that they are entitled to some coding celebrity's special attention instead of taking the hard way, improving themselves and then contributing when they are finally able to.

Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

#246

Post by Nickersf »

LiterallyDoge wrote: post #29

Is it really this complicated to treat other people with respect?

Respect is earned not given. Treating others with common decency is expected in a professional environment, and that's a two way street where both parties need to have a common understanding of what decency is. Finding that commonality becomes harder the more "diverse" the community involved is. People's cultural, religious and political beliefs clash and have for thousands of years, and no we're not going to be the generation to solve those issues. There are fundamental differences in how women socialize versus men. This stuff isn't as easy as "be kind to each other". Your "kindness" might be rude to me, and my "kindness" might be rude to you. Therefore I argue that the moment you start enforcing social justice you've kicked productivity in the nuts and stifle productivity for everyone involved. Instead you're going to spend your time checking off boxes about people's immutable physical traits and filling quotas of identity groups within an organization and everyone loses. The employee, the consumer, even the bystander.

Maybe 10% of women in software is just fine. Maybe women aren't being shooed away, and are just choosing other things to spend their time on. Maybe forcing women to go into STEM and SE is wrong. Maybe leaving people to make their own professional choices and not punishing people for some ideological virtue is the good thing to do.

Respect implies holding someone in high regard, as special. Or to refrain from interfering with. It's fair that in this context it's the latter that's primarily being referred to. That means respect comes with hard work that can be shown and proven. A strong track record. Being the best, having what it takes to rise out from the others. No everyone deserves respect because, frankly most people aren't special or rock star material. I'm not. If I was you'd know.

Kindly, your local reactionary.

Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

#247

Post by hueving »

mcguire wrote: post #157
defgeneric wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> correcting the biases, conscious or not This insipid attitude was destructive when it first appeared during the academic "culture wars" of the 1980s. It's also extremely authoritarian--everyone is already guilty, not merely of incorrect conscious thoughts, but also unconscious thoughts!

Please do not take a harsh tone towards other participants, and especially don't make personal attacks against them. Go out of your way to show that you are criticizing a statement, not a person. Please avoid statements about the presumed typical desires, capabilities or actions of some demographic group. They can offend people in that group, and they are always off-topic in GNU Project discussions.

A person wasn't even mentioned ...

Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

#248

Post by ljm »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #37
civodul wrote: post #28

As co-maintainer of GNU Guix, I want to point out that the views expressed in Richard Stallman's message are his and not those of the Guix maintainers. In particular, by writing that codes of conduct are "punitive spirit", RMS shows a misunderstanding of how these texts came into existence. More importantly, by writing that he disagrees with "making diversity a goal", RMS seems to deny the role we free software peopl…

Stallman’s guidelines fully support correcting biases. Making diversity a goal is identity politics, which is a very different thing than correcting biases.

I'm not sure diversity is a measurable goal (you can never be too diverse, and there are so many ways to be diverse beyond sexuality, gender, skin colour, etc.) but diversity in and of itself has nothing to do with identity politics.

Similarly so, what sense does it make to 'correct' a bias? More often than not that means trading one bias for another, not becoming purely unbiased.

Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

#249

Post by umvi »

phoe-krk wrote: post #5

A code of conduct states rules, with punishments for anyone that violates them. It is the heavy-handed way of teaching people to behave differently, and since it only comes into action when people do something against the rules, it doesn't try to teach people to do better than what the rules require. To be sure, the appointed maintainer(s) of a GNU package can, if necessary, tell a contributor to go away; but we do n…

The most terrifying thing about CoCs for me is their seeming ability to extend outside of the project and into the personal lives of the contributors. Expressing the wrong political/religious view on social media could attract a mob to hound you off of an arbitrary project you contribute to. For example, simply stating that you support Trump on Twitter could be sufficient to make people feel unwelcome according to some CoCs and get you kicked out.

Re: Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

#250

Post by hueving »

whiddershins wrote: post #189
TotempaaltJ wrote: post #8

> Rather than trying to have the last word, look for the times when there is no need to reply, perhaps because you already made the relevant point clear enough. If you know something about the game of Go, this analogy might clarify that: when the opponent's move is not strong enough to require a direct response, it is advantageous to give it none and instead move elsewhere. I love this analogy of why not responding m…

I was very influenced when I read Paul Graham’s assertion that comment quality tends to be inversely proportional to reply depth. I can’t find the reference but I really took that to heart, and try as hard as I can to avoid replying to a reply to one of my comments, here and elsewhere. The exception would be if I was very unclear originally, or if someone asks something specific that only I can answer. What’s interes…

That's a good pointer maybe for debate threads but it's not a good way to have a real conversation.
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