Live data from Hacker News

Lichess will no longer cooperate with the USCF and the Saint Louis Chess Club

lichess.org

71–80 of 160 posts

Re: Lichess will no longer cooperate with the USCF and the Saint Louis Chess Club

#71
post #52
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? There are like... a thousand things that could have done better here, and which were still being done long after the complaints. Ban the people. Completely totally remove the people who are assaulting underage girls from any event and any association. Don't "provide an escort", wtf. Ban them .

We know from painful experience that some accusations are baseless. there are people who will allege harm just to get rid of an opponent they do not want to play against. As such it is really hard to figure out what of the thousands of things they can do are really the right thing to do.

"Some accusations have at some point been baseless" is utterly irrelevant. Are these accusations baseless? Multiple ones, from multiple people, about the same person, over years? No, they're not. Done. End of story.

That would be like arguing: some logical statements are false, therefore the truth of logical statements is unknowable. Lol, no, it just depends on the statement.

(Nowhere in this article, by the way, did anyone allege harm to "get rid of an opponent they do not want to play against".)

Re: Lichess will no longer cooperate with the USCF and the Saint Louis Chess Club

#72

One thing I'm really struggling with for all these kind of issues is do we really want to create another legal system? That's basically what every organization is being pushed into at this rate. From Universities to chess Leagues they are assembling what amounts to their own judges, juries, and prosecutors. If someone is committing sexual assault why does their seem to be this avoidance of the existing legal system a…

If that's the way you want to approach it, which does have some value, the starting question is "why isn't the legal system sufficient or able to address this?" Which is a many-layered question but let's go. The needs of a small organization are different from an entire state. Transgressions can be disruptive or destructive to organization-scale relationships without rising to criminality. And the the traditional fem…

> A famous quote on this is that from a woman's perspective rape isn't illegal it's regulated.

"Regulated" in the sense that the average prison term for [edit: federal cases of, see reply for closest approximation I could find for non-federal average sentence] sexual abuse is 17 years?

their average sentence was 211 months - https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...

Re: Lichess will no longer cooperate with the USCF and the Saint Louis Chess Club

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is challenging that.

Apologies then, as I interpreted the OP's comment to state that since this man hasn't been convicted in a court of law, Lichess should not behave this way.

That conclusion doesn’t even follow your interpretation though.

He can think Lichess is wrong for disassociating. That doesnt challenge supposed first amendment rights. Keep in mind the lichess dev doesnt have first amendment rights. He’s french.

Re: Lichess will no longer cooperate with the USCF and the Saint Louis Chess Club

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legal system has a much higher bar to put people in prison for crimes. Organizations have a much lower bar for deciding not to associate with people. Their goal is to protect their members. Also, there are lots of things that are problematic but not crimes. "Sexual misconduct" could mean sexual harassment, which isn't a crime but shouldn't be allowed in organization.

But Lichess has neither the means nor interest in uncovering the truth. So why active as a judge?

> But Lichess has neither the means nor interest in uncovering the truth.

I don't see how that follows at all? Obviously they have interest. As for means, what more do you want? We have a public accusation from a victim in her own words under her own name. Maybe you choose not to believe her, but that's absolutely admissible as evidence. Why doesn't it count here?

The subtext to all of this pontification is clearly not about whether or not private organizations can police their own members. Clearly they can. You don't need to be convicted in court to be fired for stealing soda from your work fridge. This is no different.

What's bugging people in this thread is the same culture war fight we always get into: you tend to disbelieve sexual assault accusations from women, and Lichess tends to believe the accuser. And so sides are drawn up and strawman arguments are prepared. But it's just culture war.

Re: Lichess will no longer cooperate with the USCF and the Saint Louis Chess Club

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't believe anyone wants to create a new legal system, but the reality is the vast majority of sexual assault cases aren't resolved in court due to existing social issues If by existing social issues, you mean lack of evidence, statute of limitations, then sure. For instance, I see zero evidence that anything occurred here. There may be evidence, but the point of the justice system is to publicly disclose it an…

> To be honest, that’s effectively what led to the US revolution — lack of due process, ability to redress grievances and representation No it wasn’t

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip...

There’s a whole lot in there about lack of representation, lack of due process (ie trial by jury) and representation (like the whole list of complaints are these 3 things)

Re: Lichess will no longer cooperate with the USCF and the Saint Louis Chess Club

#77
post #4

I want to address this more generally. I'm not taking issue with any of the claims, I don't know what is true or isn't. The thing I wonder after reading this is how many organizations struggle to deal with these types of situations. Employers, schools, universities, clubs all seem to now have to have a process to address these things. And yet they seem to fumble it regularly, in every direction. The results are all o…

> And yet they seem to fumble it regularly, in every direction. The results are all over the map, ignore the issue, too strict, knee jerk in about every way, sometimes every way...

> It occurs to me that none of these organization naturally have a good mechanism for dealing with these things

Can there even be a good mechanism to deal with these things, when most often there isn't any evidence and it's a "he said she said" situation? That's a fundamental problem with these situations that's intrinsically hard to solve.

One reasonable course of action is to say "we'll see if evidence accumulates, and if there's multiple independent complaints then we'll assume it's true". Which is pretty much what they did here, and now they're facing flak for that, as being on the "ignoring the issue" side of the fence. Another is to say "zero tolerance, any complaint and you're out". And that has obvious problems of being weaponized, and would end up on the "too strict, knee jerk" side of things.

Men and women are both incredibly complex and varied, and organizations having to judges of characters and relationships with limited evidence is going to be inevitably fraught with peril.

Re: Lichess will no longer cooperate with the USCF and the Saint Louis Chess Club

#78

[flagged]

Lichess is in the convenient position of having a lot of negotiating power over other organizations because of its ascendancy, which means that since it apparently has a sense of ethics it can assert those ethics on the more-despicable organizations that don't. We are lucky to have them in that position.

Re: Lichess will no longer cooperate with the USCF and the Saint Louis Chess Club

#80
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense that the legal system and individuals' freedom of association would have different thresholds for deciding to act. Suppose we say that the legal system needs to have 95% probability of guilt to render a guilty verdict, and its associated consequences such as imprisonment and/or restitution. A high threshold makes sense for such systems ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio ). Suppose, fo…

no it's not. it subverts the principle that someone is innocent until proven guilty. with so many associations becoming mandatory (eg: i can't do my job without a google account) we can no longer allow any organization to reject people based on their own judgement. at least for the larger ones that don't have trivial alternatives.

Innocent until proven guilty is primarily a legal principle in the United States and doesn’t really apply to the court of public opinion. And in fact for many of the good reasons presented by the person to whom you’re responding, really shouldn’t apply to the court of public opinion or the principle of freedom of association.
Post reply on HN