In the past many societies had a rule where if you falsely accused someone, once it had been found you falsely accused them, you would suffer the same penalties that they would have suffered. Maybe it is time to bring back those rules for CoC complaints.
Public Apology to Jeremy Howard
81–90 of 288 posts
Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard
#82An interesting thing to think about is if they would apologize if this wasn't published in a blog and discussed online. Let's say Jeremy just walked away quietly in disgust and didn't say anything publicly. What would have they done? I would guess that they would have chucked it under "We did a great job enforcing the code of conduct. Problem solved".
Well, if nobody tells you you're being a shit, humans rarely realize it on their own, squeaky wheels get the grease.
I think the question is specifically regarding, what if a less famous person encountered this issue
Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard
#83I'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 participate here on HN, and there is effectively a CoC: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
One of the irritating things about these CoC discussions is that the codes, really, are acting in a metonymic fashion. Codes of behaviour are, of course, common place all throughout the world. When people complain about Codes of Conduct in software, they’re broadly complaining about a particular movement that’s pushed codes of particular conduct, enforced with particular mechanisms (and they would often argue biases). The HN guidelines don’t fall under that umbrella.
Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't mean this as an attack, but I'm guessing you haven't been harassed/given unwanted attention at a conference. It's easy to see codes of conduct as draconian or unnecessary if you can't empathize with the people they're designed to protect. I'm not saying the CoC system is perfect or that there aren't false positives, but your statement here is _dramatically_ privileged.
> I don't mean this as an attack, You actually do mean this as an attack - you quite literally accused me of being "_dramatically_ privileged" Maybe you meant it as an attack and maybe you didn't. If there was a HN CoC, maybe I'm the kind of asshole that would try to accuse you of abuse. See how easy it is to abuse the system?
Er, how is saying that someone is "_dramatically_ privileged" an attack? It's a judgment-neutral observation. When I say that sshd runs a privileged process, I don't mean to say that sshd is morally bad (or whatever), just that it needs to be more careful than less-privileged code and that it can do things more easily than less-privileged code can. It's the same meaning of "privileged" here.
(And yes, you could bring up to the moderators that this is an attack, but you could do that in the absence of any written rules, too, and if the moderators are the sort of people who would agree with that argument, then neither having nor not having written rules would save this forum.)
Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard
#85I'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…
It's better to follow 10 commandments than any code of conduct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments
Details of how one worships and how one interacts with one's parents are rarely ever relevant in the context of a conference.
What I am saying is that even if all conference attendees agreed that the ten commandments were at the root of their ethical behavior (consider, for example, a conference among sects of Christianity that are focused on those commandments), Even then it would be useful for the conference to have specific statements about whether (for example) sexist language was permitted or not permitted during talks.
Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
How else would you codify what is and what isn't acceptable behaviour? Is it just arbitrary? Do you just depend on more people enforcing their views out to stop harassment? If so, then why not codify it?
As this whole debacles shows codifying doesn't remove arbitrary standards. Human social interactions are far too complex to codify in a concise way without massive edge cases. So all too often it just gives people a tool with which to better force their own arbitrary standards onto others.
As this blog post [1] lays out, this seems like a case where the CoC was poorly authored exactly for this reason. But this isn't a reason to not have a CoC, it just means this particular one was not done well.
Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think it’s possible to empathize with people who are harassed, or experience harassment, and oppose codes of conduct? Assume that empathy includes caring about protecting people.
Sounds like "I empathize with them but I don't care about protecting them"
Thanks. I edited to clarify empathy includes caring about protecting them.
Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard
#88They say "Because of the missteps of this committee, we have asked the NumFOCUS Board of Directors to take over the work of the committee", yet the 7-person board of directors overlaps with the 4-person code of conduct committee. Board of Directors: https://numfocus.org/community/people CoC Committee: https://numfocus.org/code-of-conduct#persons-responsible
It's just Andy Terrel who's in both, right? That's not a huge amount of overlap. Enough to potentially cause a problem, but 6 members of the board being different (and a whole lot of public backlash) should probably be enough to resolve this.
The 'overlapping person/people' (Andy Terrel in this case) should recuse themselves. Even then, it is no guarantee of impartial results, given that the committee reports to the board.
Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if nobody tells you you're being a shit, humans rarely realize it on their own, squeaky wheels get the grease.
I think the question is specifically regarding, what if a less famous person encountered this issue
Another question is, how many less famous people have already encountered this issue?
Re: Public Apology to Jeremy Howard
#90I'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…
It's better to follow 10 commandments than any code of conduct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments
The first four of them seem like fairly clear discrimination.